Moral Lives of Animals

The Moral Lives of Animals / Dale Peterson
New York: Bloomsbury, c2011.
342 p.

I received this from the publisher, but haven't quite finished reading it yet. However, since I received it, promising to post about this week, it is now my moral obligation to do so!

It's a serious look at how we both define morality, and see (or expect to see) it in other species, focusing on mammals. Peterson discusses our human tendency to see the world from the viewpoint of our being the central species, the obviously superior one. I've only read just about half of the book so far and already have five or six excerpts marked; he is an engaging writer who has a casual though serious, scientific style, which is very readable and very absorbing -- so much so that I haven't been able to skim any of it...I want to read slowly and absorb all the facets of his argument.

Here is something he says early on, which sets the tone for the rest of the discussion:

Words project thought. The structure and habits of our language are flags, reasonable indicators of the structure and habits of our thinking, including our ordinarily invisible presumptions and prejudices: the distorted lens of our own mind. And in the case of our usual thinking about animals, the common habit of creating one thought island for people, the island of who and whom, and a second thought island, that of it and that, to contain that vast world made up of all animals and all things, suggests an astonishing conceptual divide that simply fails to reflect reality. The reality is this: We are far, far more closely related to any animal than we are to any object. And to mammals, that special group of animals who are primarily the focus of this book, we are a good deal more closely related than we ordinarily admit.

The book is divided up into four sections, looking at where morality comes from; what it is, exactly (broken up into Rules & Attachments); and where it is going. So far, his discussion of where it comes from and how to define and describe what it is, has provided much food for thought. Peterson uses great examples and analogies to explain his points, and there are tons of fun details. He has studied primates worldwide, and is a good friend of Jane Goodall. There are wonderful stories of his observations of varied groups of primates, as well as mention of the environmental destruction which threatens their habitats -- another example of how human desires always 'win' over the needs of non-human animals. Each chapter begins with a quote from Moby Dick, as the author uses that book to illustrate the varied attitudes that humans hold toward the animal world.

I am really enjoying this book; it is thoughtful yet not at all dry. The writing is lively and friendly, welcoming the reader in without trying to prove that the writer is far more clever or righteous than you are. There are chapters to come on the topics of communication, sex, compassion and kindness, and more... and I am sure I will find much to consider. I'll have to post again with my final thoughts on this book once I have finished and digested all the points he is making. At this stage in my reading, I would recommend this to any thoughtful reader who is interested in thinking about how morality may not be simply a human attribute, but one that other living beings share and experience.

Into that Darkness

Into that Darkness / Steven Price
Thomas Allan, c2011.
273 p.

Steven Price had no idea that his novel about the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in Victoria, B.C. would be released shortly after the disaster in Japan. He started writing it seven years ago and it was released just a week or so after the earthquake and tsunami. He is quick to point out that is is unnerving timing, in an interview with his hometown paper.

This book takes the idea of a shattering disaster, and investigates what would happen to those in the midst of such a tragedy. What would the human cost and human reaction be? It turns out that the world quickly turns to chaos and self-interest, with the landscape of the novel nearly apocalyptic. There seems to be little order, no outside assistance, and hordes of marauding criminals.

The main characters are Arthur Lear, an old man, a former painter who has lost his artistic edge; Anna Mercia, a younger mother with two children, who runs a cafe downtown, and her son Marcus, home from school on the day of the tragedy. Anna Mercia and Marcus are trapped in the rubble, while Arthur is one of the rescuing team who pulls Marcus out of the wreckage (they think Anna Mercia is dead) and ends up taking charge of him. Marcus is convinced his mother isn't dead, and drags a reluctant Arthur into a search for her. She is indeed alive and after locating her all three continue their quest to find her missing daughter. This takes them all across the wild west that Victoria has become, encountering murderers, brigands and the odd person just trying to help somehow (these generally seem to be doctors and nurses).

The book was certainly exciting. The description of the earthquake itself, the simple moment when everything was unbalanced and the street rose up like a wave, that was stunning. The aftermath was pretty graphic in parts, and felt as alarming and grimy in the writing as the participants must have found it. Price also uses the situation to discuss the larger questions in life; what is human nature made of? Why would a God let this happen? How much do we owe to our fellow human beings? It was an intriguing premise, and the story held together for his purposes.

There was some thoughtful writing in it, as suits a poet's first novel. For example:

He had little time for those who would suggest men should not seek answers.
But an answer is only ever the edge of an outer question. And all of us keep
moving outward.

He told me a question doesn't have to be something you ask. It's a way of looking at the world.

However, in the end I seemed to have the same problem with this book as I do with others that are similarly post-apocalyptic in feel. I just couldn't feel truly engaged with the situation. It seemed so improbable that chaos and self-interest would immediately come to the fore, with men organizing themselves into roving gangs, and the patriarchal viewpoint unquestioningly restored, with women seen primarily as adjuncts to the action, with sexual violence hinted at. Even though Anna Mercia was a strong character she still faces gender specific dangers.

In other books like these, I have struggled to suspend disbelief. In this book I ultimately found it harder because unless such an earthquake had also paralyzed most of the continent, there would have been instantaneous assistance flown in. Here we have a world isolated from any outside help. So, read it if you like disaster stories. It is certainly evocative of the scale of destruction that we've just seen in Japan. But if you're going to continually question why nobody is coming to assist the city, well, it might not be worth your time to puzzle through it. If you can let the niggling details slide and simply appreciate the deeper philosophical themes and the ideas of human nature vs. wider nature, then you will find the writing deep and rewarding.

Steven Price holds degrees from the University of Victoria and the University of Virginia. His first collection of poetry, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books 2006), was shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (BC Book Awards), won the Gerald Lampert Award (League of Canadian Poets) and was named a Globe & Mail Best Book for 2006. He lives and writes in Victoria, British Columbia.

photo credit: Esi Edugyan

The Rose Garden

The Rose Garden / Susanna Kearsley
London: Allison & Busby, c2011.
476 p.

If you are already a fan of Susanna Kearsley you are going to love this one. If you aren't yet, read this and you will be! I've read all of her novels and this one is one of my new favourites. Her style is comparable to Mary Stewart, or even Barbara Michaels, and she is so very good at the gothic/romance/time travel kind of book.

In The Rose Garden, Eva Ward is newly alone; her older sister has just died of cancer and she is taking her ashes to be scattered in Cornwall, at a place they spent all their summer holidays as children and where they were happy. So Eva gives up her life in L.A. and returns to stay with her friends at Trelowarth House in Cornwall. There she renews her relationships with Mark, now owner of the house and master gardener, Susan his sister who is trying to start a tearoom to bring in tourists, their stepmother Claire, a warm and lovely woman, and their friend Oliver, from the village. The pain she struggles with, trying to accept her sister's loss, is soothed by the presence of these people who had also known her.

But then Eva experiences hallucinations, of extra paths in the wood and of strange men in strange dress walking through her doorway. And they keep getting more realistic. She believes she is going crazy. After much research and consideration of the facts she realizes that she is in fact travelling through time to an earlier era when others lived in Trelowarth. The travel seems to be tied to the house itself, and one of the characters explains that it is on a ley line, one of the paths of earth energy.

Eva must then decide which life she is more attached to; her present life as an orphaned, bereft woman working in web design, or the life she is beginning to build in 1715 with the handsome smuggler Daniel Butler and his household. And even if she wants to stay in 1715, she seems to have no control over when and how she shifts between times. How will this ever work out?

I admit, my idea of a solution didn't pan out. But the twist at the end was fantastic. No, more than that, it was FANTASTIC. I am not often surprised by the twists and turns of storylines, having the usual ability to come up with possibilities before I get to them. This one caught me by surprise, and yet once I had read it, I realized I'd missed all the clues dropped earlier. It made perfect sense (something I like in a story -- I really don't enjoy plots that make me wonder why on earth someone doesn't do the something that is obvious). The writing is wonderful, warm and inviting and the romance is nicely set up. Supporting characters all get their time on stage and their own romances, and there are no anachronisms in the plotline -- Kearsley carefully discusses the issues of whether past actions by Eva are able to change her present. I really, really enjoyed this fun read on my long weekend and only regret that I can read so much faster than she can write ;)

In a blurb on the book, the Toronto Star is quoted as saying "Kearsley may be Canada's best practitioner of the genre." I disagree. There is no "may" about it. She IS the best, and has just proved it once again.

Light Lifting

Light Lifting / Alexander MacLeod
Toronto: Biblioasis, c2010.
224 p.

I don't know what more I can possibly say about this book of short stories. It's been a unanimous praise-fest everywhere I have heard any talk of it. So I can only add my agreement to that.

This first collection by the son of novelist Alastair MacLeod is strong and assured, and truly gripping. There are a variety of stories in the collection, but each is complete in itself and includes great characters. I enjoyed the fact that each story did not have the same narrator -- not actually the same person, but the same kind of person, which I've found tiring at times in some short story collections. But in this there are the heart of the stories characters like young families, teens, athletes, blue-collar workers, and so on: a wider view of humanity which made the stories feel open rather than enclosed within a myopic perspective.
That said, I did have some favourites.

I really liked the title story, Light Lifting, in its portrayal of Robbie, a summer student working construction with the guys who do this all the time. The student is a nice kid and a hard worker and doesn't seem to mind the cumulative weight of the light lifting he does, ferrying bricks. He's stuck it out longer than any other student though, so they are fond of him. The narrator, watching Robbie, says at one point:

What did a kid like that do when he went home? You could spend all this time working with a guy and still be totally different inside. I thought about how we were all stuck, all of us put in our places. I thought about how your life could be like a brick and how hard it was to move it once you got settled into the same place for a couple years.

I also found the final story, The Number Three, extremely powerful, and very moving. I really dislike sentimentality in fiction, or authors using the easy excuse of tragedy to give their story its meaning. MacLeod avoids any of that in this story, despite its being a deep tragedy; the main character is a man who in a moment of distraction caused a car accident that killed his wife and teenage son. He is swimming through the miasma of grief and guilt, and as the one year anniversary of the accident arrives he takes action that is heart-breaking and yet true to the feel of the story. The situation isn't resolved, but the seed of a hope of resolution is sown. Beautiful writing.

This was certainly worthy of its Giller nomination this year, and provided me with some rewarding hours of reading.


Other voices:

Kerry at Pickle Me This talks about reading it with her book club: We loved this book. We felt a bit sorry for every other book we’ve read lately, which seemed unfairly compared to this one.

KevinfromCanada says: he is a talent not just to be appreciated with this collection, but to be watched in the future.

Deanna at Tragic Right Hip says: Light Lifting needs to be shared, discussed, and celebrated -- it's that good.

Mark at Free Range Reading says: the craftsmanship behind each piece is absolutely off the charts, and any close reading will reveal the time and patience it must have taken MacLeod to put these stories together.

Bill Gaston's Order of Good Cheer

The Order of Good Cheer / Bill Gaston
Toronto: Anansi, c2008.
388 p.

Another book I picked up as part of my Canadian Book Challenge... deciding that I should read some male authors new to me wasn't as difficult as the first part of my challenge, reading female authors new to me. That is simply because I read far more women than men, so there is a huge pool to choose from here. Still, one of the reasons I read more women is they have a more immediate appeal so it's been a game of reading first chapters of many books to find one that keeps my interest.

Bill Gaston's book caught my interest immediately, and I ended up really enjoying this read. It was partly the gorgeous cover and partly the historical content that convinced me to pick it up, but the writing was appealing from the start. It's set partially in modern-day Prince Rupert, a small town in Northern B.C., and partially in Nova Scotia in 1606/1607. In this era, Champlain and his compatriots were trying to create a settlement in the new world for France. The group is made up of nobles and a mishmash of working men -- soldiers, carpenters, cook, surgeon, priest and so on. Often with two timelines like this, I have problems flipping from one era to another. But, I read this book over a couple of weeks so each time the era changed, I put it down until my next chance to read a bit. I found this worked very well.

Champlain is the main character, sort of, in his part of the book. Really there are a few men amongst the group who take a central role. The carpenter Lucien begins a clandestine relationship with a Mi'qmah girl (it is strictly forbidden to fraternize with the local savages); the priest struggles with the point of his being there at all; Champlain himself tries to forestall the reappearance of scurvy which carried off many of the men who had been there the previous winter before reinforcements came from France. And to counteract the boredom and bad feelings and fear of disease, he decides that the best route is to party. He creates the Order of Good Cheer (this is based in historical fact) and each night a different person is responsible for creating entertainment. This gets them through the dark days despite difficulty and despair.

Meanwhile, in present day B.C., Andy is having a bit of a midlife crisis. Never married, he has remained in his hometown and works at the local mill, a job that both pays well and allows him hours of reading time. He's known as the "clever" person in town, and has to hold himself back from contributing too much information at the wrong time, in order to remain well liked and not mocked. He is in a bit of a lather because his high school girlfriend Laura, who had left to go to Toronto after graduation eighteen years before and broken up with him, is returning home to look after her mother. What will she think of him? How can he ease the reunion? At the same time, his best friend Drew is going through hard times; his marriage is breaking up, his son doesn't really speak to him, and his drinking habit is becoming more than just a casual habit. Andy is currently reading Champlain's memoirs, and is inspired to cheer up everyone and create a gathering which encompasses all the characters we've met throughout his story. It incorporates his mother and her friends, Laura (of course), Drew and his soon-to-be exwife and his son, a Chinese woman who is in town to inspect the fish plant, and a few native friends who bring the food. It's a crazy party that goes in all directions, but seems to tie up loose ends and bring a sense of closure to Andy's story.

The writing was mesmerizing; especially in Champlain's sections the vast natural landscape is evoked strongly. The sense that they are a tiny settlement isolated in a huge unknowable space is very present, as is the comparison of their lives with those of the native groups who come and go around them. But in Andy's part of the story, the natural world is also vast and isolates his community to some degree as well. I thought there were many parallels between these two men, and while Gaston does not belabour the point or draw obvious comparisons, the two stories complement one another. While it is a bit long, I did enjoy the writing itself and the arc of each story.

I appreciated the struggle of these two men to make sense of their lives and surroundings, their determination to make the best of things and do something to improve morale in their own circles. Each person in the story had their own particular life, their own particular struggles, but coming together in community made a difference to them. And I think that that idea is still a good one, and a useful one, as we all face our own difficulties. This book was altogether an unexpected find and a serendipitous one. I thought it was a great read.

Four Letters of Love

Four Letters of Love / Niall Williams
London: Picador, c1997.
342 p.

I've had this on my shelf for a long time; in fact, it is on my "20 Books To Read This Year List" which I made in an effort to clear some space on my overloaded shelves. I kept this book so long because I wanted to read it, and there were some good bits in it, but as a whole I have to admit it didn't really do anything for me.

Here's the storyline: Isabel and Nicholas live separate lives in Ireland. Nicholas is an only child whose dysfunctional family includes a father who thinks he is called by God to wander the countrysides and paint and a mother who locks herself in her room once her husband disappears. Isabel is an Island girl, a clever one, and heads to school on the mainland once she outgrows the small island school run by her father. She gets into all kinds of mischief and ends up convincing herself that she is in love with a lumpish kind of fellow she meets while in boarding school, while Nicholas gets himself a job as a government clerk until the moment when both of his parents are dead. They still haven't met by this time, by the way.

Their two stories run parallel and then finally meet as Nicholas decides to reclaim his father's one painting still known to be in existence, a painting that was given as a prize in a poetry contest that had been won by Isabel's father. So off he goes to the island where he meets the family (Isabel is back in Dublin by this time, having been married the day previous to his arrival). And he falls in love with her in one brief meeting, returning to the family to write her four letters, the four letters of LOVE I suppose. But there is no resolution, Isabel doesn't come and Nicholas doesn't recover from his infatuation.

Did I mention that Isabel has a twin brother Sean who has been in a strange coma since childhood, and Nicholas' arrival mysteriously restores him to full speech, movement and awareness? And that the painting mystically spreads itself out into the air of the schoolroom as Nicholas and Sean walk by? And that I wasn't sure if I was reading an Irish novel or some South American magical realism kind of novel? It was all too much for me, and I failed to really grasp the point of all this to-ing and fro-ing between Isabel and Nicholas. If you build it up there should be something for the reader in the end. At least I thought so.

If you like dreamy, meandering Irish novels with eccentric characters you might like this. It all felt a little too suffocating for me, though. At least it's one more book off my shelf and passed on to unsuspecting others ;) It just wasn't the book for me at this time. Everyone else -- and I mean everyone -- seems to love it, so don't trust my opinion... you'll have to try this one for yourself and see what you think.

Rilla of Ingleside

Rilla of Ingleside / LM Montgomery
Toronto: Seal Bantam, 1985, c1921.
277 p.

This is the last in my Anne of Green Gables series reread. I have always enjoyed this book, though the cover of my edition is not so hot. (I've been finding that my series has a strange set of covers!) Still, for some reason, I like this book. I'm not quite sure why, as Rilla herself is probably my least favourite of the Blythe children (except for Shirley -- I've never understood him, he feels like a changeling).

There are some issues for me, rereading this as an adult -- why does Rilla lisp like a little girl, especially in regards to Ken Ford? How come Rilla gets engaged secretly, raises an orphaned baby essentially on her own -- learning to finally like children -- and is happily a homebody who just wants to join the Auxiliary and take care of things, so unlike many of LMM's heroines? And what about Nan and Diana -- where is their book, the story of two modern, educated women?

Even so, this is a great read. It is different from the others; the small town gossip and funny incidents are leavened by the sudden upheaval of international events taking over everyone's lives with the arrival of World War I. I think it is one of her strongest books, due to the grappling with hard facts that the characters must experience. It is one of the only books written contemporaneously with WWI which shows the conditions of the home front, and it is marvellous at showing how life and its little dramas continue even during wartime. And it reveals how a generation lost their youth, both boys by joining up and girls by working to support war efforts as well as taking over the missing men's duties. Normal youthful escapades are subsumed under a focus on war-related activity.

This book concludes the sweeping panorama of Anne Shirley's life, unless you count the newly restored collection of short stories, The Blythes are Quoted, in which we get a glimpse into the life of the family after the war and its depredations. I've reviewed that book previously, so if you're interested, you can read about its status as a kind of sequel in my original review, when it was newly released in an edition restored by Benjamin Lefebvre. He has also just restored a new version of Rilla with all the darker bits put back in...but unfortunately I couldn't get my hands on it in time to read it as well as this familiar old one which I've just finished. I'll still get myself a copy, as it includes editorial notes, poems by LMM and many other wonderful additions.

In any case, Rilla of Ingleside takes us on a difficult journey, with two sections in particular still making me weep after all these rereads. How can a book about war not make a person cry? I wish the story had turned out a little more happily for all concerned, but it never gets overly sentimental. The practicality of Susan Baker, in the kitchen, and Mary Vance, in the town, counteracts any tendency toward sentimentality. We see the children of Ingleside and Rainbow Valley growing up, maturing, making life choices and becoming adults. It is almost a melancholy feeling, seeing Anne becoming the older generation, and getting the impression that she is fading, fading, and will be lost to us. At the same time, society itself is growing up in a way, faced with the horrors of war and the necessary adjustments both during the war years and afterward.

I think this is a very good book that deserves to be read by people who are not necessarily LMM fans; there is much to learn about Canada at a pivotal point in history, seasoned with humour and pathos.

*A 5 Hankie Read

Marthe Jocelyn's Scribbling Women

Scribbling Women: true tales from astonishing lives / Marthe Jocelyn

Toronto: Tundra Books, c2011.

198 p.

This post is part of a blog tour for Marthe Jocelyn's latest book. Today is the final and fifth day of the tour, which has been going on all of this week. A list of all the participating blogs can be found at Tundra Books -- check out all the posts for many perspectives on this book and various interviews and special features by the bloggers involved.

To summarize this book quickly, it is a collection of eleven biographies of women who wrote, sometimes for publication and sometimes simply in private. The key connecting factor is that their writing was saved for future generations -- us -- to be able to read and feel that perhaps we now know a little more about the women of our collective past. It is aimed at middle grade/high school readers, and the level of detail and writing style are perfectly matched to this audience. I'd easily give it to any girl I know; actually, for that matter, any boy as well, because why should girls be the only ones to be interested in women's lives? I think opening our eyes to other lives and other ways of living is vital for both genders, at all ages.

The title comes from a dismissive comment made by Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1855, at a time when many women were making their meagre livings by writing for papers and magazines -- he refers to them as a horde of scribbling women, interfering with the potential popularity of his own works. As another blogger suggested earlier in the week, perhaps it was sour grapes?

In any case, this book is a delight to read. Jocelyn explores the lives of women of many cultures and many eras. It is organized chronologically, which works well, and begins in distant Japan with Sei Shonagon, famous list maker. It moves through women who were journal keepers, letter writers, journalists, a slave making a record of her life, adventurers and writers of fiction and facts. Although I found all of the very different women's stories fascinating, I was most engaged personally by Isabella Beeton's story. Isabella (1836-1865) was an amazingly energetic woman, who grew up in a very unconventional setting -- a very large blended family whose stepfather moved them all in to his workplace at the Epsom Racetrack. They lived in the racetrack buildings, offices and halls. At a fairly young age she married and became the business equal of her husband, a magazine publisher who did alright in business but better once Isabella came along. She industriously wrote pieces for all of his papers. She also solicited and edited pieces and eventually created her masterpiece, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. She edited this collection of columns from the magazine pieces they had published, and created a book the likes of which had never been seen before, a true compendium of household wisdom for new household managers (ie: young, unprepared newly married women). It included cooking advice from very basic on up, recipes for serving invalids, cleaning and household maintenance advice and much more. It was also a bestseller. Isabella was a genius at the modern advice offered to writers to "repurpose your content"! She used. rewrote and reused much of her work to profit from it in multiple ways. Sadly, she met the fate of many women of the era, clever and industrious and successful as they might be. She died of puerperal fever after giving birth to a fourth son, at the young age of 28.

There are thrilling lives outlined in this book, with just enough information given to whet the appetite. It won't overwhelm younger readers, and will hopefully inspire older readers to search out more information on many of these intriguing women. I really enjoyed reading this and found it illuminating both for the factual lives of these women and for the recognition of lesser known lives. The respect given to women's daily life shines through in Jocelyn's writing and is much appreciated.

I also had the chance to talk to Marthe about her own life as a "Scribbling Woman" -- the conversation follows:

ME: Something I found very appealing about your book was the wide variety of women you highlighted. There are both women who wrote in personal forms like letters or journals, and women who made their living by their words. This made me wonder, what inspired you to make a career as a "Scribbling Woman"? Can you give us a sense of how your career developed?

MJ: From when I was about 25 until I was a little past 40, I had a small business designing and making toys and children's clothing. Choosing fabrics and combining odd patterns was part of that, as well as creating characters whose facial expressions changed with the tilt of a needle and thread. This was all background for when I had my own daughters and began to read them the stories I'd loved a kid, alongside the many brilliant new ones published in the intervening years. I was re-hooked on children's books, with the tickle of a thought that I might be able to write one. (That's a common thought, by the way, amongst people who become parents, but the truth is that children's books are VERY hard to write!) My toys were seen by an art director at Dutton who thought that the 'handmade' style would translate to illustration. I submitted a version of my collaged picture book, Hannah and the Seven Dresses, at about the same time I began work on a chapter book called The Invisible Day. The idea for that one came in response to my daughter's wish to walk to school alone in New York City. "Ha ha!" I said. "You'd have to be invisible!" And ping! That teeny idea grew into a story. Both books were bought by Dutton eventually, and I was on my way...

ME: I especially enjoyed the story of Isabella Beeton, who was a real powerhouse, equal to her husband in his publishing business. Did you come to have favourites among the women you profiled, or are all the women included some of your favourites among all the subjects you must have researched originally? How did you go about researching all of these varied lives?

MJ: The one question I dreaded most on this blog tour was that I'd likely be asked to choose a favourite. But, as you suggest, these eleven were all favourites, winnowed out of a field of about forty considerations. I didn't necessarily 'like' all these women, or want them as friends, but something about their stories I already knew of the more renowned women - Nellie Bly, Harriet Jacobs, Isabella Beeton - but as soon as my radar was turned on to receive signals about obscure women writers, I began to get recommendations from friends and friends-of-friends for possible subjects. I also made a point of seeking out odd documents in historical societies and places that might have been ignored by most other children's writers so far.

ME: I think you created a really great mix of women's lives in this book - have you ever considered creating a second volume with more of the women you have looked at during your research?

MJ: YES, I'd love to do a follow-up volume. I have many more women & girls deserving attention.

ME: I have a particular interest in both letter writing and journaling. Considering that some of the Scribbling Women in this book were journalers, and that your teen novel "Mable Riley" is a fictional diary set in our own town of Stratford, I am guessing that you find journals interesting as well. Do you keep a journal, and if so, how important is it to a writer to have such a resource?

MJ: I have kept a diary at a couple of points in my life, both times when starting a new chapter - moving to a new place - but each time I soon felt self-conscious and lost interest, finding that it took too long to put into words the fleeting and intangible sensations I was having. Point-form lists of impressions were more lasting for me, even re-reading later. What I could see from a train window, for instance, or the foods offered for breakfast in a foreign city. Maybe that's why Sei Shonagon's lists appealed to me so much, in her collection called The Pillow Book. Even her list headings are evocative: Repulsive things, Elegant things, Things that make me happy, Things that cannot be compared... I do keep a "writer's notebook" which is a little different from a personal journal. It contains lists - from shopping lists and to-do lists to the 'impression' lists I mentioned before, as well as snatches of overheard conversation, the occasional drawing, notes scribbled down when I attend talks by other writers, and random snatches of stories I'm working on. So, it's a record of sorts, but mostly of the disarray of my own thoughts.

ME: You've written many different kinds of books, from picture books to juvenile and teen novels to nonfiction books such as this one, and they are all equally impressive. How do you approach each kind of writing project -- is there a difference in how you create each kind of book?

MJ: Yes, every book is different of course, even within the same genre. And as you say, I like to try many types of books, usually more than one at a time. It is hard to work on one thing for more than two or three hours a day because the brain gets tired. I find if I have a novel unfolding alongside a picture book where I'm working on illustrations, I can go back and forth easily, mulling one subconsciously while working on the other and doubling my work day.

ME: Do you have any specific writing 'rituals' that you are superstitious about, or that help you get your writing done, besides having more than one project underway at a time?

MJ: I'm not really superstitious - except of course believing that if I don't write then nothing will get written. I often try to set a daily word count or a number of hours or a certain section to finish, just so it feels like a do-able amount and not a whole book! I tend to drink tea while I work, but I know it's just tea and not a magic potion...

ME: Well, I'm not sure I can totally agree with the idea that tea isn't a magical potion! It is certainly one of the necessities of my bookish days as well.

You conclude this book by making a Sei Shonagon inspired list of Things I Want To Learn More About (which, as a librarian & research addict, I loved!) Is this kind of curiosity vital to being a writer? Or are there other traits or habits that you think are essential for writers to have?

MJ: Hmm, I think curiosity IS essential, especially for a non-fiction writer. And I think we have to be good listeners, not always concerned with telling our own story but caring more about hearing what other stories are unfolding around us.

ME: I love the idea of listening to the other stories unfolding around us. That is kind of what we do as readers as well, don't you think? Thanks, Marthe, for answering a few questions and giving us a glimpse of your own writing life.

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Marthe Jocelyn is a Stratford based writer and illustrator whose latest book is on "tour" of many blogs this week. Don't forget to check out Tundra's great contest to win a copy of each of Marthe's 28 books -- just leave a comment on this post or on any other Scribbling Women post that's been part of the tour. (details here)

I can personally recommend Earthly Astonishments, Mable Riley, and Folly... three of her teen novels that I really, really enjoyed! And her picture books are great fun as well :)

Don't forget to follow the blog tour on to the next stop, at The Nervous Marigold.