Enthusiasms
Pickle Me This Digest for March: PLUS a Return to Analogue, Anastasia Krupnik, Rereading Manawaka, Art, Reading Recommendations and More
Winter Stations: every winter in Toronto, Woodbine Beach’s dramatic backdrop is transformed into the world’s coolest (and chilliest!) gallery space when the Winter Stations installations take over the beach’s lifeguard stations. We visited on opening day last month, which is generally a good idea because these outdoor installations don’t always weather the elements well, but that’s part of the point, the way that the beach (the art, the world, etc.) is ever in flux. I don’t know if it ever would have occurred to me to hit the beach in February before Winter Stations, but now it’s one of my seasonal highlights, and this year’s stations do not disappoint. On now until March 30. (Pictured above: “Peak,” by the University of Waterloo School of Architecture and the Department of Architectural Engineering)
Lucky in production: that feeling when your beloved friend’s bestselling novel is turned into a star-studded Apple TV series. Yawn. JUST KIDDING, no yawns, and they’ve got freaking Annette Bening, which is important because I’ve only heard of movie stars who were famous before 1995, except for Anya Taylor-Joy, whom I know from The Queen’s Gambit, and she’s playing the eponymous role. I’m so thrilled for my pal Marissa Stapley, and can’t wait to see her story brought to life. (Um, and if you haven’t read Reese’s Pick Marissa’s tea-spilling conversation with Emily Gould about what it actually means to have your book life-changingly endorsed by a celebrity book club, check it out now.)
NCC comms: I’ve been a monthly supporter of the Nature Conservancy of Canada since 2021, and it’s one of my most prized commitments. Since 1962, the organization has contributed to the conservation of more than 15M hectares, coast to coast to coast, which is a mission to get behind, but whoever is doing their donor communications now is knocking it out of the park. I can say in all sincerity that theirs are the only Halloween and Valentines marketing emails I’ve received, ever, that I was grateful and even moved to read. Even without the fact of them saving the world, these messages themselves are worth donating for.
Elana Herzog: As a fan of loud prints, wallpaper, and people who make art from domestic things, I was very excited to go see the Elana Herzog Exhibit at Koffler Arts on Shaw Street north of Queen. The show is fascinating, textiles installed on sheetrock that get built into the walls at the gallery. Herzog (who was born in Toronto, and is based in Brooklyn) is blurring all the lines—between synthetic and natural, now and forever, preservation and decay, art and artifact, and more. If you’ve ever wondered about the geometry of fitted sheets, this is a show for you. (Read the Toronto Star article where I learned about the show, which is on now until May 11.)
Chatelaine: And speaking of the domestic, my Spring 2025 issue of Chatelaine Magazine arrived, very timely with its emphasis on Canadian brands and a two page spread of exceptional Canadian spring books (which, I will say, as someone who has worked for 15 years promoting Canadian books, is never ever hard to come up with. Canadian books are every kind of book.) Pick up the latest Chatelaine on your newsstand or, even better, subscribe!
Kazoo: Another periodical warming my heart is Kazoo (“a magazine for girls who aren’t afraid to make some noise”), to which we’ve been subscribing since supporting their Kickstarter in 2016 (and when we finally age out, I’m going to be so sad). As Kazoo Editor Erin Bried—on a break from protesting her local Tesla dealership in Brooklyn, amongst making other good trouble—recently wrote to Canadian subscribers, “Kazoo is the only magazine of its kind, and together, we're creating a movement to raise strong, confident girls… In other words, we're the very thing Trump fears the most. What's more, we're also a small, independently owned, 100% subscriber-funded print magazine. We can't do what we do without you, and like everyone who'll be harmed by Trump's reckless policies, we're just hoping to make it through these next four years with our business—and democracy—intact.” She’s currently offering Canadians 25% off all items in the Kazoo shop right now with the special code OCANADA (and she said it would be okay if I shared it with you here!).
Michelle Nijhuis: My next enthusiasm also comes courtesy of Kazoo, which did a fun thing in 2021 and included a list of books by parents of the magazine’s subscribers in their email newsletter. One of them was my just-released second novel, along with the book Beloved Beasts, by Michelle Nijhuis, a fascinating and most surprising history of the American conservation movement and the unlikely alliances that underlined it. Stories of people who reach across difference to work together are the stories we need right now. You should read Nijhuis’s recent column on attending the National Wolf Conversation, and you can also sign up for her newsletter.
And one more neat thing: Textile artist Joyce Wieland’s “Barren Ground” has been installed at my local TTC station since 1977 (albeit at a remote exit—I don’t see it often, but when I do, it’s a treat). “Barren Ground” was recently removed for restoration and to be part of a retrospective that’s on now in Montreal and arriving at the Art Gallery of Ontario in June. I was relieved to learn the piece will eventually be returned to its home, and also LOVED the fun video below about the process.
A Return to Analogue
I remember the friction of pulling that tag off the shelf, its plastic a perfect fit inside my palm, and how it felt like I was holding a key to something vital. I would carry the tag to the counter where it would be traded in, more often than not, for the 1988 Lily Tomlin/Bette Midler vehicle Big Business on VHS, a video my sister and I rented from our local corner store so many times that when I watched it again more than 30 years later, I knew the whole thing by heart.
Video rental was such a big deal for the first 20-some years of my life, its high stakes made clear by the FBI warnings that preceded every film, the responsibility to be-kind-please-rewind, and the sinister curtains behind which the dirty movies were kept, not to mention how a certain title’s availability or otherwise would have the power to make or break one’s sleepover party.
I could chart the course of my life by video stores, from the pre-chain hometown joints, to Bay Street Video (which lives on!) during my university years, to our local video store in Japan where we’d pray for subtitles, and then the Queen Video locations we frequented back in Toronto until the last one closed in 2019—although it wasn’t very frequent by then because we didn’t have a DVD player any longer.
But at the end of January, we bought another one, part of a grander plan to combat the overwhelm (at which we’ve not always been successful, I’ve got to say; sheesh, it’s been a time) by cutting ties to corporate entities where possible and focusing on tangible finite things. Streaming services never once delivered the satisfaction I’d received from bringing my plastic tag up to the counter, and they also made my children wrangey and frustrated as there was never anything they wanted to watch enough but always something to suggest they should not give up trying.
So we went back to DVDS, and I want to tell you about the joy of heading to the library DVDs shelf with my 11-year-old daughter for the very first time, about what it felt like to recall the sweet serendipity of this kind of selection and to have her experience it for herself. At dinner the night before, her dad and I had been remembering the 1986 movie Flight of the Navigator, and there it was on the shelf. She also borrowed a collection of Pixar shorts and Inside Out 2, and we felt so lucky and excited at finding these—for free, even. We’re currently #850 of 1125 on the library holds list for the DVD copy of the Wicked movie. We’ve got time and are happy to wait.
Our local secondhand/overstock bookstore has an entire basement full of tapes, CDs, records, VHS, and DVDS, and more, and I’d never been there before a couple of weeks ago when I went to scratch my new DVD itch, and descending those stairs was like arriving back in time (it didn’t help that the walls are the same shade of orange as the High Fidelity poster). We got Four Weddings and a Funeral because my Paddington-watching children have never known floppy-haired Hugh Grant, and Midsomer Murders, and the first season of Glee. There were no Velcro tags in the place, but I could almost imagine them, especially when I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of flipping media all around me as customers were shuffling and riffling, almost paradise (and yes, I picked up a copy of Footloose while I was there).
-Check out “I don’t want to live in a world without video stores” from the West End Phoenix
Rereading Anastasia
My family is reading The Iliad aloud (turns out we’re Homer completists; after reading Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey a few years back, it only seemed natural) but nobody is enjoying it. It’s as boring, bloody, and stagnate as the Trojan War, and then when my kids found out the horse wasn’t even in it, they were furious. I’m not ready to give up on The Iliad yet, however, and so we’re interspersing its books with lighter and more satisfying fare, which most recently was Lois Lowry’s novel Anastasia Krupnik, the first title in her series about the quirky daughter of a poet and a painter growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Read the rest)
February Essay: “In the Air Tonight”
My Manawaka Reread Continues
Recommended Reads
“But progress is still possible, and it takes courage, and grit, and the work of it is hard and often unrewarding. And yet.” (Read the Rest)
“This is a really beautiful book, so rich, honest, and generous.” (Read the rest)
“27 years before she won the Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr released her debut novel, Moon Honey, a book that begins with a young white couple, Carmen and Griffin, having sex under a pool table in Griffin’s parents’ basement…” (Read the rest)
“What struck me most about Slow Horses—in addition to it being quite gripping—was its prescience.” (Read the rest)
“This is a deeply thoughtful and considered book that needs to be understood more than it needs to be agreed with or dismissed altogether.” (Read the rest)
Thank you so much for the shoutout Kerry! And I love that you found Beloved Beasts via Kazoo — I never knew that they published a list of books by parents, how great. Kazoo is THE BEST. My kiddo and I had a shared sad moment when we agreed that the time had come to let her subscription lapse ... I may resubscribe when she leaves for college!
As a library worker, I'm so glad you're finding the joy in browsing DVDs at the library!