Ryan Turner

Having finished the manuscript for Woman Walking in the early fall, the last quarter of this year presented an unprecedented (within the last few years of writing anyway) opportunity to focus solely on reading. I do read intermittently when in the midst of writing a book, but all roads – and all sentences – tend to lead me back to writing. This year, because many of the books I do read come from the library and risk being forgotten, I decided to note the titles of every completed book. I’ve also decided to list them below not as notches on a belt, but in hopes that others may come across titles they don’t recognize, or only partially recognize, amongst titles they’ve enjoyed, and as a result, be a bit more likely to pick those books off the shelves of a library or book store. Perhaps I’ll draw attention to a few that I’ve especially enjoyed with **, though it’s been a particularly great year for reading and on my first time through I put ** next to nearly every one.

Here they are in the order they were read (though a few were for a second time):

Aleksander Hemon’s article, The Aquarium, in the June 13th edition of The New Yorker is well worth the couple of dollars it might cost for the magazine: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/06/13/110613fa_fact_hemon. E had read it and recommended it to me and a few days had passed. Then one afternoon she came down the stairs and saw this intense and far-away look on my face. “You’ve just read it, haven’t you?”

I’ve also just finished reading Great House by Nicole Krauss. I couldn’t get through two pages without wanting to go back and read the whole thing aloud. Novels like Great House and Summertime have me enamoured with first person.

I’m working my way through the Orange Prize longlist. I’d read Kathleen Winter’s wonderful first novel, Annabel, long ago, and last week I finished Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. There’s a scene near the end between the doctor and “the deathless man” that is absolutely astonishing. And now I’m almost through Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, which is incredibly different from the Obreht novel but just as powerful. Egan managed to do something that I’ve always been curious about, that is writing each section from the perspective of a different character and never repeating (unless she repeats in the last sections…I’ve yet to reach them). Each section explores some brief moment in the life of a character who is somehow connected to a character who has come before, but it’s never the same event. It’s not like twelve perspectives on a car crash. Each section wanders off into a completely different time and space, and it’s a wonder she can pull it off at all. Next up, I’m thinking, will be Nicole Krauss. It’s the summer of contemporary American Lit.

An interesting (and sad) op-ed in Friday’s New York Times about the end of Hemingway’s life: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/opinion/02hotchner.html

I bike the few blocks up to Nordre-Frihavnsgade in Osterbro to the bakery and then onto the little corner grocer for red wine. Strangely the bottle of Spanish wine costs less than a cappuccino.

Our first day on bikes we went to Sankt Hans Torv, a square in Norrebro full of outdoor cafes encircling a granite monument that’s also a fountain. On the way along Norrebrogade we veered off into Assistens Cemetery which reminded me a bit of the cemetery across from where I once lived near the Kingsway in Toronto except this one is much older with cast-iron gates and grand monuments of stone and trimmed hedges at each burial site. Weeping elms and weeping willows. Hans Christian Andersen was there somewhere but we found Soren Kierkegaard instead.

To the north, we stopped for a drink on Jaegersborggade, a side street that looks more residential but has been taken over by small shops for everything from antiques to pastel bowls and cutting boards made of African bamboo. The street was covered with young people sitting on picnic tables and front stoops as though the owners had awoken one morning to find cafes had sprouted up without their knowledge, a dozen people standing in their kitchens, eating chocolate-centered croissants, filling the space at their front doors.

Now back on our own apartment balcony, the rain is falling. I’m reading the last few pages of Jane Jacobs’ incredible The Death and Life of Great American Cities. A blanket around me. When I first came out, I noticed a woman set a sleeping baby into a black pram on an opposite balcony, and every so often now a man comes out and rocks it back and forth as he watches the sky.

We’ve met two Danes through a friend, and they’ve graciously lent us their bicycles, a power adaptor (ours is useless) and a hairdryer for E. It turns out they too have a conservative government looking to get tough on foreign policy. E mentioned the fighter jets and they laughed. “Yes, our government is buying those too.” I was curious to know what language they spoke when they visited Norway or Sweden. “Can everyone speak Dutch and Norwegian and Swedish and French and German or do you all just rely on English?” They said that they speak Danish in Sweden and the Swedes answer in Swedish. They couldn’t necessarily speak Swedish, but they knew enough to understand. As we were leaving they joked that we were probably heading for a war over arctic sovereignty. “Maybe they’ll find oil in Greenland.” We laughed. It sounded like the butt of a joke on South Park: The Canadian-Danish war.

I’m in Copenhagen and the first bit of sun is peeking over the adjacent rooftops and streaming into the little balcony of the apartment we’ve rented. The balcony faces a courtyard full of trees, a gazebo of roses, a wooden play area for children. Last night at sunset Leonard Cohen was filling the space from one of the hundreds of open windows. The song would end and then two songs later be playing again. Dance me to the End of Love.

Six times an hour the train passes. There’s the sound of a door opening as a woman comes out on this Wednesday morning to water her flower box. I don’t think it’s possible to stand at any place in this city and not see a dozen bikes. There’s a covered parking lot for them as you enter the building. A mother passes the courtyard with three children, each carrying his or her bicycle helmet. As I sit here, I wonder where beautiful things come from. At my feet are purpling hydrangeas that E photographed with her Diana. Then there are pansies and earthenware flower pots stacked beside an antique-looking tin watering can. Next are twin lanterns with white candles inside that are made for hanging, an assortment of beach-stolen rocks, more earthenware but this time planted with herbs maybe and then an old tin dustpan which looks somehow as though it belongs. I’ve never been a connoisseur of objects. Apart from my books I’ve always tended toward the ascetic (or simple austerity, if you like), but as I grow older I start to see the difference between clutter and plasticine excess and then the objects that might matter, their variety giving life to a space like the personality of a well-chosen word.

Yesterday I printed out the entire double-spaced manuscript to pass off to my final reader before officially passing it along. It’s sitting on the table in my office, and I catch myself stopping in the hallway sometimes just to admire its heft. I notice that a central part of my writing has to do with the physical. I like to use inanimate objects as focal points or as a means of conveying a hint of the people to which they belong. As a result I notice how some of my characters are almost anachronistic in the way their lives revolve around the construction or reparation (the in-depth knowledge) of objects in an age when our relationship with such things is so rapidly changing. A quotation from the book I’ve been writing can serve as an example: “He thought of email. There was nothing sensual about email. You couldn’t rip it or fold it or burn it. You couldn’t hold it up to the sun to see through the envelope. You couldn’t smell it. The medium itself held no memory.” Writers are often asked the question, how will technology shape the future of literature? And when this question is posed, what is intended is a discussion of medium, but I can’t help but think of content. If a book is set in the present, how much less is at the author’s disposal? Instead of the scratch of the record, the fold of the paper, the smell of another person, will we not continue to move along the path of the implosion of the physical world into a singularity (the tap of a finger on a smart phone, for example)? This doesn’t need to be read as a devolution. But it will mark a steep decline in the very things – literally - which the author can use to create his or her imaginative world. In the short term, I don’t see the medium affecting the way writers write. It will perhaps be the quickly-changing landscape of the content of the world that will force this writer at least to rethink the way inside his characters (either that or write perpetually of the past).

On Sunday, May 22nd, I’ll be reading at Obsolete Records on Agricola as part of the Long Live the Queen music festival. It’s at 1pm. Come on out.

I’ll be discussing various aspects of fiction with my Hungry Minds fiction workshop cohorts: Shandi Mitchell, Sue Goyette, Sheree Fitch, Stephen Kimber, Stephens Gerard Malone, Valerie Compton and Donna Morrissey. It’s happening at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia this coming Thursday at 7pm. Only $5 at the door.