Lorri Neilsen Glenn's Lit Wish List: Four Books Worth a Second Look are books she hopes readers will buy, love and revisit, as she did in compiling this list. That's the brilliance of books, not only that they can be used as many times as the reader likes, but that with each use the contents may appear as both hauntingly familiar and entirely new. With this list, Lorri rediscovered some Can Lit treasures full of wit and wisdom just by scouring her bookshelf.
First, let's put Lorri Neilsen Glenn's latest book at the top of the pile and ask her a few questions about Threading Light: Explorations in Poetry and Loss (Hagios Press, 2011).
"The act of reading this volume forces us to look closely and listen intently. Such attention, such awareness slows the clock, 'calls forth our humanity,' engenders empathy, offers joy. . . . Threading Light is a conversation and an offering, a gift to share."
—Mary Jo Anderson, The Chronicle Herald
Julie Wilson: Is Threading Light more scholarly meditation than personal memoir? Or does it operate in equal parts?
Lorri Neilsen Glenn: Poetry and philosophy have always been bedfellows, I think. This book began in a two-year symposium with Don McKay, Jan Zwicky, and Tim Lilburn. What fascinated me at the time—and still does—is the poetry/grief/loss relationship. Poetry—writing it, reading it at funerals and state occasions, or in times of catastrophe, revolution, and upheaval—is often a response to loss. So, what is that about? I read as much as I could—philosophers, poets, theologians, psychologists, memoirists, fiction writers—you name it. I drew upon my own experiences and as I wrote, I saw how those stories bumped up against the insights of others. Scholarship is only close study, just as memoir is, and every writer I know, in whatever genre, looks closely at phenomena, meditates on things. This book is a fusion of ideas and forms. I call it a bricolage. Others call it creative nonfiction.
JW: Have you been carrying Threading Light with you long?
LNG: A couple of the essays in the book were written twenty years ago and I’d been carrying them around, yes. They wanted something from me, and I didn’t know what it was. Then prose poems joined them, along with reflections on philosophers and theologians. The themes I interweave in the book (light/dark, grief/joy) have always held me in thrall: I had a traumatic loss when I was a very young woman, and loss became the sore tooth I went to as a writer. My losses are miniscule in the big picture, but I needed to immerse myself in them in order to see how universal they are. Writing poetry helps me do that.
JW: Did you have a reader in mind as you constructed Threading Light? A conversation of sorts?
LNG: I love that you’ve used that word. The book is a conversation with other poets, with myself, with thinkers and doers and activists and inspiring people on the page, across the country, and across decades and generations. And across the dimensions of the human heart. It’s a book you can read in short bits—brief meditations, an anecdote, a poem—although readers have said they’ve devoured it in a day. A friend said she avoided it for weeks: her own losses were too great. Then wished she’d read the book sooner. It’s heartening, not dreary. But it is intimate. Reviewers such as Mojo Anderson have called it a necessary read, if only because loss—our own and others’—is a topic we tend to avoid. We’re great at changing the channel, and at removing ourselves. Compassion fatigue, some call it. The meditation practice of tonglen asks us to recognize and to breathe in others’ suffering, then breathe out healing, comfort, compassion. I’m told Threading Light accomplishes a similar effect.
JW: With loss and grief as its throughlines, talk about how the specificity of your anecdotes carries universal appeal.
LNG: It’s only relatively recently that we’ve used the word ‘catastrophe’ as a synonym for disaster. It means a sudden turn. So when we are faced with a stillborn birth, a job loss, a marriage break-up, a quashed dream, a traffic accident—that abrupt turn forces us to abandon business as usual. We can be thrown into chaos, but in chaos, we have an opportunity to get to the good stuff, to ask bigger questions. Why am I here? What’s important? Is there something to learn? I just finished a short video on creativity and catastrophe for an Australian university that helped me think about our universal responses to loss—global, environmental, personal. Do I share the grief of a tsunami victim whose entire village and family have been washed away? The horrors of war, of rape, of abuse? No, I don’t. But as humans, we recognize that gut-empty awareness of being raw, exposed to the world, vulnerable. Angry. Numb. Bereft. It’s the same music, but different notes and tonal dimensions. And then, what happens? That’s what I’ve been thinking about lately. What is resilience made of? What does it look like?
But I veered from your question, didn’t I? All our stories of loss—mine included—are threads in a larger fabric. A Holocaust survivor, a young Afghan woman, a bullied gay teen—each person’s story tugs, and can connect—if I stay open. What’s important is not to turn away—from others’ stories or from our own—but to pay close attention. In this way, I think we can be pushed beyond ego into something larger than us. And paradoxically, that’s also where we find a measure of joy and healing. For me, that’s where compassion begins: with fierce attention.
JW: Thanks, Lorri, for this, and for your Lit Wish List.
If you don't have a copy of Threading Light, perhaps you'll now take a first look. If you do, surely it's worth a second . . . or third!
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Now for Lorri Neilsen Glenn's Lit Wish List: Four Books Worth a Second Look. Which books do you think are worth a second look? Leave your suggestions in the comments.
Exploded View
Jean McKay
D & M, 2001
No one writes knock-your-socks off prose like Jean McKay.
A girl fills her underpants with crabapples, a macaroon wraps itself around a tire tread like a limpet, a woman weeding her garden hears the “white worm of soul” in the drawn-out anguish of a small child’s cry.
Few have a wit as dry, an eye or ear as sharp as McKay’s. Acerbic, quirky, fresh, and full of heart, these prose gems make the world new.
The Truth about Stories
Thomas King
House of Anansi Press, 2003
The truth about stories is that’s all we are.
Didion said we tell ourselves stories in order to live. King takes that further, shows us how Western Eurocentric stories have shaped (and limited) our worlds. Forget hierarchies: from a First Nations’ perspective, it’s turtles all the way down.
Wisdom, hilarity, and bite, these CBC lectures-turned-book have transformed how I teach writing and research.
Language in Her Eye: Writing and Gender
Edited by Libby Sheier, Sarah Sheard and Eleanor Wachtel
ECW Press, 1990
I plucked this from my shelf to re-read it shortly after Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA.com) was organized in the summer of 2012. Surely, I thought, essays published by Canadian women authors over two decades ago would be stale by now.
They are not.
The book crackles with insight, humour, anger, authority, and grit.
And why, you might wonder, are these issues still fresh? You wouldn’t be alone.
The Stubborn Particulars of Grace
Bronwen Wallace
M & S, 1987
When I first began writing poetry in the late 90s, someone handed me this book. Ten pages in, I was hooked. The rhythms, narrative and conceptual sweeps, the candor, the revelations about domestic life: for me, Wallace is to poetry what Shields and Laurence are to fiction. Deceptively colloquial, these poems speak their politics slant, but they never posture; they effortlessly connect the gritty and messy here-and-now with the what-could-be. This is one of the poetry collections I re-read when I can.
Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s works of critically-acclaimed creative nonfiction, poetry and scholarship include Threading Light: Explorations in Poetry and Loss (Hagios Press, 2011), Lost Gospels (Brick Books), and Knowing her Place (Caddo Gap Press), among several others. An anthology of poetry and prose about mothers of the 1950s is forthcoming with Guernica Editions. Her work has earned top awards from The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, CV2, Grain, among other journals. A strong advocate for the arts in all walks of life (and former Halifax Poet Laureate), Lorri teaches writing (memoir, creative nonfiction, poetry) nationally and internationally and lives and works in Nova Scotia.
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