Enthusiasms: PLUS Crowded Rooms Full of Happy People Doing Inconsequential Things
Pickle Me This Digest for February
This month I can’t stop enthusing about MUSIC, especially after attending another Soundcrowd Concert, and hearing my all-time-favourite song (obviously, “I Want It That Way.” 1999 was the best year, and I’m taking no questions) performed in large-scale a capella. Soundcrowd is like Pitch Perfect, but without the fat jokes and anti-Asian racism. Their next show is coming up in May. There is no joy like it.
Although there IS the joy of Singing Mamas, a life-changing force in my world lately. My friend Kate Keenan, whose voice you might know as the audio-book narrator of my novel Asking for a Friend, is midway through her training as an arts therapist, and has started a women’s singing group in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood (and there’s another group in The Junction!). The group is geared to postpartum mothers, but all women of all ages (and non-binary people who feel comfortable in women-centred spaces) are welcome, and the mix of new moms and babies and women of all ages who otherwise have little to do with babies is magical, but it’s the singing and the connection that’s really doing it for me, the way we don’t have song-sheets but learn by listening and repeating, and end up watching each other, and messing up together, and making the most fantastic noise, and it’s one of the nicest things that have ever happened to me. Drop in and try it out!
I’m not that into Brit-pop (we didn’t really have Blur in Canada except for “Woo Hoo” on Big Shiny Tunes 2; while I’m a What’s the Story Morning Glory fan, Definitely Maybe is mostly too brash for my “I Want It That Way” tastes) but the BANDSPLAIN PODCAST’S Oasis episode at over six hours long WAS STILL NOT NEARLY LONG ENOUGH. I loved it so much and it was so funny, which was partly Liam and Noel Gallagher, but mostly Yasi Salek and Rob Harvilla who took us on the journey. What a ride.
Not music, but there might as well be a choir of angels singing at the sight Desserts and Skirts’ new batwing ravens top in pink, which I am obsessed with and pretty much wear every day. (Desserts and Skirts is based in Toronto, and Nicole is the best.)
Also not music, instead falafels, but my whole family is SMITTEN with Deb’s falafel recipe, which is as easy to make as it is perfect (and just requires chickpeas to soak the night before, but that is ALL, no faffing). It’s as simple and easy as she says.
Emergency Pancake Tuesday took place on February 3 this year after I’d realized Shrove Tuesday 2025 does not come around until March, and three days into this February had already felt about 300 years long. Getting through February is all about searching for occasions and finding the light. We will also be celebrating Actual Pancake Tuesday on the 4th of March, and maybe even another one before that, who knows. I recommend Chatelaine’s Banana Oat Pancakes, which I’ve been making since 2008.
We found (greenhouse grown) Ontario strawberries in the middle of winter! “It’s good, if perhaps retro, to write someone a love letter. But it’s a little more unconventional to request one—in fact, to request a lot of them.” Read the ever-inspiring Jen Knoch’s essay here.
Announcing new literary prize, “The Award.” (The book that won is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.)
And of course, water slides. I will only stop enthusing about water slides when my knees give out, which, based on my most recent visit to Fallsview Waterpark, is not so very far in my future.
My teenager was waiting at the bottom of the slide to take this photo of me, and I hadn’t even asked her to do that. She is the best, but maybe she was also plotting to get me to buy her a phone with a better camera. Regardless, I love this photo, and I also love her. “The book is an amalgamation of things not because I wanted it to be, but because it was impossible to write about myself without first talking in some length about mayflies and leafminers and car manuals.” A cool interview about a cool book, Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, by Amal Alhomsi.
Speaking of cool, Shawna Lemay (who blogs at Transactions With Beauty and makes the world more beautiful both online and off) is selling prints of her still-lifes on her Ko-Fi shop. See below where it says “1 sold”? THAT WAS ME. You should buy one too—I think this is a very neat way for Shawna to monetize the magic she makes through her online work, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to support her.
And on the subject of beauty, The Art Gallery of Ontario’s “Blue Sky Therapy” is such a neat idea, featuring five artworks from their collection whose skies are BLUE BLUE BLUE. I can actually see spots of blue in the sky from where I sit right now at my kitchen table, and it has mercifully been a fairly sunny February here in Toronto, but blue sky therapy is the kind of the therapy that one can never over-do. Get yours here!
Gathering in Crowded Rooms With Happy People Taking Part in Activities of Little Consequence
This newsletter is coming to you without caveats or apologies for enthusing at a moment when so many things in the world are terrible, for the simple reason that enthusing is one of my deliberate non-reactive responses to “all this,” along with another of my great pleasures lately: gathering in crowded rooms with happy people taking part in activities of little consequence.
Gathering in crowded rooms with happy people taking part in activities of little consequence, to me, is not just an antidote to our precarious current moment, but also to the last five years, during which crowded rooms and crowds in general have often felt threatening, sometimes enough to put me off people in general, contempt breeding contempt. But I can’t have that, because it only turns me into a monster, a mirror image of the forces I rise against, so instead, I am reacquainting myself with community and connection, all the while also bringing a fresh awareness of boundaries that I didn’t used to have, which previously made things like community and connection into an awful kind of trap. (Other people are not required to love me. WHO KNEW? And I don’t have to love everyone: ALSO TOTALLY FINE. WHAAA?)
All this is not to denigrate gatherings of people taking part in activities of GREAT consequence (for example, we have an election coming up on Ontario at the end of this month; make sure you’re registered to vote!) but I actually think these inconsequential activities matter just as much. (It matters too for me not to be gathering in rooms crowded with angry people. Rage is not the fuel I need right now, and this world has enough of it already.)
So I’ve been working hard at showing up, at gatherings large and small. I’ve been inviting my neighbours for dinner and reaching out and making plans with friends I haven’t seen in too long. I’ve been making an effort to get out into the world, and be with people, even anonymously (sitting with a book and a cup of tea in a crowded cafe) to repair the tears in my own sense of the social fabric, which can’t help but go some way towards repairing that sense in others, even though I’m not even responsible for that. I’m really only responsible for me, and knowing that makes the entire project so much easier.
I want to live in a world where I trust people, where I welcome people, where I can have thoughtful disagreements with people, where I learn from people, where I am content to let people think otherwise, where I can be wrong, where other people can be wrong, where there is room enough for all kinds of different voices in all kinds of different keys.
Often literally—I’ve been in rooms singing along with strangers in a variety of different contexts lately, and I love this, that we’re making harmony, which is pretty much our job here as beings on this planet earth. But in more abstract ways as well—even riding the subway, I look around and consider what a miracle this arrangement is, all of us together, strangers in a tin can hurtling through the darkness, minding each other’s business, even ignoring each other, which is an undervalued part of city life, if you ask me.
You be you, and I’ll be me, which is also a kind of mercy.
My Story on the ABORSH Podcast
Thank you, Rachel Cairns, for making my abortion story part of Season Two of the Aborsh Podcast. You can listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
How I’m Taking Care
Following that man’s first presidency on Twitter wrecked me. I’m not doing that again, and have written a list of all the things I’m doing differently this time around to preserve my mental health. It might also be useful to you? (Read the list here!)
JUST ONE SPACE LEFT for my 2025 Manuscript Consultations
I feel lucky to have been able to pay my bills these last few years by working with writers on their works in progress. I have one space left this year for July, so if you’ve been on the fence, now is the time to GO FOR IT (and then I can stop posting about wanting to fill these spots and we’ll all be happy). Learn more/sign up here.
What people are saying: “Kerry Clare is the sunshine of the literary world. My initial consultations with her were professional, positive and friendly. I love her energy. The enthusiasm Kerry showed for my manuscript was in stark contrast to other consultants I have dealt with on my journey. It was clear she had spent significant time with my words, characters, plot and writing style. Kerry’s feedback was practical and purposeful and she left me with an attainable road map to move forward. If my book ever gets published, there will be a huge shout out to Kerry Clare because I would not have been able to iron out the kinks—and a few canyon sized holes—without her.” —E. Brooks
Talking Politics
I’m so proud to have published these two unabashedly political novels, grateful for every instance in which those novels have been received in that context, and still a little bit disappointed that it hasn’t happened more often, because making these issues and ideas—about consent, and power, and reproductive rights—accessible to readers was huge part of why I wrote these books in the first place. It’s disappointing to me that “politics” is so often seen as siloed, male, serious and tidy, dry and impersonal, detached from our bodies, our families, the hamster wheels of our everyday lives. (Read the rest)
Olive Kitteridge and #WinterofStrout
I love a reading project, the way these books give shape, structure, and context to my own ordinary experiences. My #WinterofStrout began with her debut novel, Amy & Isabelle, which I read in December and completely enjoyed, impressed by how Elizabeth Strout was Elizabeth Strout right out of the gate, fully formed, and thinking about that line from Lucy Barton about how everyone has just one story, really, and they keep telling it over and over, and that Strout’s for certain is mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters. Although this was less apparent in her second novel, Abide With Me, which read on Christmas Eve, this one a story about a father, a widower, whose troubled daughter would grow up to be Bob Burgess’s friend, social worker friend Katherine Caskey, who shows up in later Strout novels. Abide With Me is a novel about marriage, faith, despair, about the failures of community, about the unknowability of others’ experiences (which perhaps is Strout’s actual one story). About the spots of goodness that save us, the miracle of that in a world where so much is otherwise. And then it was time for Olive Kitteridge… (Read the rest!)
Recommended Reads:
Waterslides are the best. (Also the best is that I commented "waterslides are the best" on a different post unrelated to waterslides this morning because I had too many open tabs and I thought I was commenting on yours, and the author still liked it, lolll!)
So glad my piece was a source of enthusiasm, and thank you for sharing it, along with all these other buoying things. May we all find such satisfaction in showing up!