Told with deadpan humour and insightful lyricism, Ceilidh Michelle's Vagabond is an observant and at times shimmering narrative suspended between a traumatic past and an as yet unimagined future. Coursing through it is the story of an emergent writer just beginning to find sanctuary in her own creative instincts.
Here, Michelle shares seven of her favourite reads.
*****
Summer of My Amazing Luck, by Miriam Toews
Miriam Toews has such a way of transcribing loneliness and ferocity into words, it’s almost as if she carries it for you a little bit. During the bleakest of my seasons Toews’ books have taught me that you can be desperately achingly broken and still laugh, and that women are strong and can find each other in their sadness and hang on. I chose Toews’ first book though because I think in her great canon of work this first book sometimes gets forgotten. The Summer of My Amazing Luck is so weirdly cozy, this story of young moms on welfare trying to keep their heads above water, and the wonderful weirdos who wind up around you as you’re trying to make sense of life.
*
Motherhood, by Sheila Heti
The further I move into my thirties the more I rely on this book for validation. Women have to make so many hard decisions in their lives, their bodies are such battlegrounds, and sometimes it seems that everyone gets to make decisions about a woman’s body except the woman in question. Motherhood is a quiet, introspective rumination around the question: Do I reproduce or don’t I? Heti’s writing career, her Jewishness, and her romantic relationship are all factors and the more personal she gets the more relatable this book becomes.
*
The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, by Heather O’Neill
O’Neill just put out a new book that I’m dying to read; until then I keep living in The Girl Who Was Saturday Night because of its cinematic ecstasy and fashionable pleasure. O’Neill has taught me so, so much. She taught me how to be vivid and stylish and whimsical, how to incorporate the trauma of life into the beauty of literature. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night is like a cool, wild series of experiences in Montreal, before the condos and internet cut the soul out of the world. This book is like a pink-glass window into the seedy neon heart of 80s Montreal and captures the exact feeling of being a young person rich with possibility and deluded by the idea that the monsters of life are only paintings on the wallpaper.
*
Waking Up in My Own Backyard: Explorations in Southwest Nova Scotia, by Sandra Phinney
This book is a real gem for all you homesick Maritimers out there. I love Sandra Phinney for gifting the world this book comprising community wanderings, curiosity, and a determination to take a good long look at the people around you. Phinney has such an endearing down-home way of writing but she marries this perfectly with a sharp journalistic eye. This book is just such a transporting medium into community involvement, and is a nice alternative to telling people off on the internet as a means of communication. Excellent slice of life. Especially poignant these days.
*
Paris Stories, by Mavis Gallant
My god, yes. Who is as pure and gorgeous, as clean and transcendent as Mavis Gallant? Paris Stories has prose that cut to the bone and make me shake my head in sheer amazement. I have never been to Paris but Gallant has imbued my spirit with that of a true flâneuse and I am both ruined and in awe every time I return to her work. In these spastic, burnt-out times I just want to curl up in the world of Mavis Gallant. Even in the conflict and loneliness of Paris Stories, there’s also something tangible and fervent and real: “A woman can always get some practical use from a torn-up life ... She likes mending and patching it, making sure the edges are straight. She spreads the last shred out and takes its measure: 'What can I do with this remnant? How long does it need to last?”
*
This is the Colour I Love You Best, by Gillian Sze
I found this chapbook shoved between the cushions of a rancid futon in some boy’s pungent loft. I had been living in Montreal for about three or four months at this point. This little chapbook was so bittersweet and spoke to my little twenty-year-old heart in all sorts of cloying, overwrought ways that probably don’t hold up anymore. The book is out of print, as is that version of myself. After my poetry professor at Concordia was fired for being a creep, Gillian Sze took over the workshop. I remember being completely bowled over, blinking and stuttering in her shadow. Years before I’d tried to meet her the ‘Zine Fair but she had chosen that fateful moment to take a bathroom break. Anyway, she wound up giving me a C Minus. My poetry was garbage and I drank too much coffee and kept having panic attacks in the stairwell so I did not usually go to the windowless basement class to have my stanzas crucified by indifferent peers. Oh well. This is the Colour I love you Best, Gillian.
*
Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club, by Megan Gail Coles
Confession: I have not read this one yet BUT as authors we were both at the same book fair and Megan Gail Coles was reading an excerpt from this very book. I went and listened to her read a portion of Small Game Hunting and have been meaning to read this book ever since. I remember the effervescence of the narration, the colours of the prose, the humour and grit of the excerpt I heard. People often confuse Nova Scotians with Newfoundlanders, and I would just like to make explicitly clear that we are not the same and actually there’s a lotta land between the two places. We, as collective groups, do both have “funny accents” (apparently), but these accents are vastly different (at least they are to me). I will add that living by the sea in small communities does give a body a certain appreciation for eccentricities and slow living, and so even though Coles and I have both wound up in Montreal, I feel an affinity for this Iris, and the public library says my copy of Small Game Hunting will be available tomorrow.
*
A captivating memoir of living on the streets along California’s Highway 1, for fans of Mistakes to Run With and Nearly Normal.
At twenty-one, Ceilidh Michelle was homeless, drifting through countercultural communities along California’s coast, from Venice Beach to Slab City to Big Sur. This restless and turbulent time began when she was sleeping on her sister’s couch in Vancouver and decided to become a yoga disciple in California. Denied entry at the US border in Washington state, and stuck overnight in the Greyhound station, her already shaky pilgrimage began to take another direction, away from the inward sanctuary of an ashram and toward the sea and light and noise of Venice Beach, and eventually up Highway 1 to the desert.
Having spent much of her youth outrunning family turmoil, the peripatetic lifestyle once key to Michelle’s survival is now a habit she can’t or won’t break—unless it breaks her first. Sleeping in parking lots, camping out in abandoned beach cottages and mansions, she finds community, easy and fraught, with fellow travellers: musicians, veterans, ex-cons, addicts, drug dealers, artists and con artists. Still, dreams and fleeting notions of home fuel and shadow every encounter, haunting the places she stays, offering moments of both grace and violence.