Enthusiasms

Pickle Me This Digest for April: PLUS New Book News, Believing in Seeds, Rhubarb Cookies, and Pitbull

Kerry Clare

Apr 14, 2025

I’ve got book news! Scroll down for the full story…

Fix the News: It has been A TIME, and what’s helped me through is Fix the News, reporting stories of stories of progress and making inspiring change in their own right. I became a paid subscriber in January, and it’s been like a lighthouse in my inbox each week reminding me that the world is not only terrible. The week that USAID programs were cancelled, however, which will lead to suffering worldwide, the newsletter never arrived, and I was losing it. Things were so bad, I figured, that the people at Fix the News had packed it in. And then the newsletter came a week later, and it turned out they’d taken that week off because they were having a baby, which is the opposite of having no hope, and I’m so grateful for the work they do. Check it out here!

DTM Studio: I met Danielle Taschereau Mamers when she attended my book launch in 2023 and created a live-illustration of the event that I will treasure forever. Her newsletter that arrived in my inbox last month and it’s an invitation to create a zine of one’s own, just the kind of creative challenge I’d like to take on. I haven’t created my own six-idea zine yet, but it’s going to happen. And I think you should sign up for the DTM Studio Newsletter too—and also hire her to capture your next event!
Anna Jones’ chewy rhubarb and stem ginger cookies: Rhubarb season is here (I found some in Kensington Market!), an official sign of spring. I might like the idea of rhubarb more than I actually like rhubarb, and so I’m always looking for new ways to use it, and this recipe doesn’t disappoint. Even though I never figured out what stem ginger was, and used grated fresh ginger instead (which I always have on hand now I’ve learned that I can store it in the freezer).
Chicken Soup for the Soul on American Hysteria: You’re Wrong About’s Sarah Marshall stops by the American Hysteria podcast for a conversation about ‘90s publishing sensation Chicken Soup for the Soul, whose tales I found uplifting and inspiring tales as a teen. (I remember one about how I should never give up or stop being true to myself because someone met a woman once whose son had never done so, and he turned out to be Billy Joel.) Seems the history of the franchise is weirder than we ever knew, rife with prosperity gospel madness and New Age weirdness. Listen here!

Coco Ferme: As I mentioned last time, we’ve replaced streaming services with a DVD player, which means I’ve lately been doing up-to-date things like watching White Lotus Season 1 on a DVD borrowed from the library. We also borrowed the 2023 Quebec movie Coco Ferme, which my children were initially skeptical about (“Subtitles! What are we, European??” they said, with all the disdain of a JD Vance) but the movie was sweet, fun, and beautiful, featuring enough underage drinking that the sweetness was palatable. Toronto Library card-holders, borrow your copy here!

Hypothetical Baby on Play Me: In addition to being an actor, playwright, podcaster, and audiobook director, Rachel Cairns is an abortion enthusiast (like me!), and I adored her one-woman-show Hypothetical Baby when I saw it at the Tarragon Theatre in late 2023. The show recently enjoyed a run at at the Factory Theatre, and here’s good news if you missed it: you can now listen to the show at the CBC PlayME podcast! You can listen here or find CBC PlayME wherever you get your podcasts.
“Timber,” by Pitbull: Always late to the party, I only found out about Pitbull in March, when we were driving home from the Royal Botanical Gardens, and “Timber” came up on our Spotify playlist. “What brand new release is this that must be currently roaring up the pop charts, hence right now appearing on my radar?” I asked. But it turns out that “Timber” came out in 2013, and to make up for tardiness, I’m listening to it incessantly, which makes me so happy. (I need a choral version!) I cannot get enough and the video is absolutely ridiculous.
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New Book News!

The hardest working shirt in my drawer is the House of Anansi 45th anniversary tee that I’ve been wearing since 2012, including through an entire pregnancy, which means it’s stretched and misshapen and these days mainly gets worn to bed, but it’s a great shirt, and now that I’m a House of Anansi author (hooray!), I’m awfully glad that I held onto it. I’ve always been partial to House of Anansi, especially since they moved their office into a former pickle factory, which absolutely on par with my sensibilities.

Definitely Thriving, my fourth novel (!), will arrive in the North America in March 17. It’s a novel I started writing in 2021 when the world was bleak and scary and I was desperate for a diversion. It’s an ode to friendship, community, and unsuitable attachments, in addition to being a tribute to Barbara Pym, with my protagonist, Clemence Lathbury, imagined as a modern day Pym heroine. The story begins when Clemence blows up her marriage and returns to her hometown determined to redeem herself by building a sensible life from scratch. Not for her will be the scrapes and schemes of a Bridget Jones-era heroine, instead she resolves to be a stalwart, one of the excellent women of Pym’s mid-century novels. But no woman is an island, and soon Clemence is tied up in all kinds of neighbourhood shenanigans, and drama ensues. There’s a book shop, a church jumble sale, and a one-eyed cat named Bailey who is actually a real cat belonging to my friend Erin. I’m so excited for readers to meet Clemence and her people (and the cat).

If you’ve been paying attention, you will know I struggled a lot after the publication of my previous novel, and that this whole newsletter/podcast project was born out of my desire to climb out of the creative low in which I’d found myself at that point. I’m interested in what it will be like now to head into publication with the new awareness I’ve acquired since working through some of these issues (who knew that my literary success does not actually hedge on making everybody love me, or that loving me is actually an unreasonable thing to ask of everybody) and avoiding the trap of imagining that now that I’ve got no expectations, this is the moment where all the success I’ve been hoping for will finally unfold.

All along I’ve been looking for redemption. It took me ten years after completing my Creative Writing Masters Degree to finally publish my first novel—and here, I imagined, was the moment where the magic would begin. But that novel was not a success. And then I got a second chance—aha, my heroic sophomore book! But that book didn’t do well either, and neither did my next book, and I started to understand that maybe the story wasn’t going to go like that. That in publishing there’s never a happy-ever-after (alas, the one good thing about never having achieved great success is that at least no one expects the impossible task of replicating it! Phew!). I even started to wonder what the point was in publishing books after all, because it certainly wasn’t doing anything like making me happy or feel good about myself. When I wasn’t sure I’d be able to publish another novel, I started to consider a possible upside to not having my self-esteem decimated every couple of years.

But oooh boy, I’m back for more. And I’m even grateful and lucky to be able to say that, I know, and I’m looking forward to sharing this novel with you, and I’m also anticipating an interesting experiment in releasing a book and not losing my mind.

Is it possible? I will keep you posted!

I Don’t Believe in Seeds

I don’t believe in seeds. I just can’t fathom the fact of what happens when you plant them, no matter how many times I’ve watched the miracle happen, which it always does, and it’s still never not blown my mind. That new life is possible, how this can turn into that, the ordinary miracle. I still don’t believe it, I can’t. I mean, not so much that I don’t sow seeds every single spring, because I do, the most hopeful gesture I ever enact... (Read the rest)

#WinterofStrout Update

I was going to talk about how my #WinterofStrout had gone on so long that it was finally spring, but now there’s a blizzard outside, so I guess I don’t have to... (Read the rest)

25 Years of Dar Williams; or I am the One Who Will Remember Everything

In the 1990s, interesting culture circulated via scenes, and zines, underground movements, and pre-internet online communities, and I didn’t know about any of it. Everything I learned about culture in the 1990s I learned from the movie Reality Bites and from pop-culture phenomena my best friend brought home to us from her all-girls summer camp, so I only knew about Lisa Loeb, smoking, the Gap, Ani DiFranco, and flared jeans, and imagined that was enough to built a life upon. Until the internet arrived in 1997 or so, expanding my universe infinitely, though not quite at the start when the internet was still fundamentally unorganized, the only really worthwhile thing I could think of to do there was to log onto random chat rooms and start talking to strangers... (Read the rest)