8th Meet Round up & 9th Book Pick
8th Book: And Then She Fell (2023)
9th Book: The Honeyman Festival (1970)
Thank you so much for giving your time and energy to this group. We keep showing up for each other, ourselves, and the writers and artists, despite whatever else is happening, like shortly after giving birth or packing to go on a cross-continent flight in a few hours. :O)
Our last meeting was hybrid in Toronto. Magda/I was there for a writing workshop in which I met Erin Soros, one of Alicia Elliott’s close friends, who was really moved that we were discussing her book.
The timing to have our meeting in Toronto, with wine, snacks, and roti with Daniela, Anabela, and Claudia, and I meeting in person for the first time as a group was magic. We stayed up until 12am? 12:30am?! after the meeting. I hope one day we can all be in a space together, including Meaghan, Florencia, and Emilie who joined us from across Canada, as well as those we missed. We need a benefactor, some rich dude that needs to play a feminist card.
We all loved the book and talked at length about our gratitude for Elliott’s Indigenous world-building, including its relationship to white supremacy and surveillance, misogyny, post-partum depression and psychosis, motherhood, the silo of academia, and the writing life of a mother.
We agreed that Elliott has not gotten enough recognition for the novel’s precise play with form and temporality, and how it’s obviously linked to her being an Indigenous woman. She, herself, recognizes her bowdlerization, in the hilarious scene in which the protagonist, Alice, is trying to shelter from the others of the dinner, considers that the “heavier books could work as weapons.” Infinite Jest pops out at her, but ultimately she drops the book and it does nothing (unlike what it has done in the lit world). White men will never help her, nor does she need them to save her.
And also how funny she is! Her cinematic and serrated take down of academia was hilarious—made evident during the spectacular dinner party in which white academia literally eats itself. We gave this scene a lot of our time.
Anabela recently found that Alicia Elliott was nominated for the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
Florencia reflected later:
On the matter of genre, I would definitely put this novel in the Indigenous Futurism category, as a narrative that seeks to explore how life might be understood, narrated, bent, stretched, if lived and explained by the principles Indigenous cosmologies hold true. I think it explores not so much time travel as we understand it in western sci-fi but rather the interconnection of timelines and the possibility of trans temporal care, which I find is a fascinating notion. I love how this creates an opening in relation to the question of who catches you when you fall and what does catching itself mean. Those last few chapters were such a beautiful reparative moment in that regard.
I found myself thinking back about Magda's comment on her lack of motherly nets and realized that the novel is showing us how sometimes the catcher and this netting is not weaved from past lives and relations (particularly if there's historical and intergenerational trauma to be healed, as we mentioned during our conversation) but in relation with and towards future ones. And that’s the beauty in the interconnections the story explores, no? Who cares for, who gives care and how this is a reciprocal relation, which in many Indigenous cosmologies goes well beyond human relations, of course, back and forth seven generations, etc.
As I read those last chapters, my mind kept going to this brilliant dialogue between Kite and Riel Bellow, which explores notions of time, listening, and dream-worlds, articulating (Suzanne) Kite's work (in performance art and new media) as attempts to build tools that can attune to frequencies and experiences that humans have lost touch with.
Flor’s reflections and annotations on the book shows how our Canadian lit landscape is obviously white, and how much of our education of literature is the same way. And thus obfuscates the complex work being done. Indeed, situating And Then She Fell within Indigenous Futures, Elliott's structure makes much more sense. The genre and context of And then She Fell is clear when Kite says:
"I was thinking about time in a spiral. If it’s a two-dimensional spiral, it becomes a circle. You could collapse a spiral so tightly that it instead becomes a sphere. If you draw a line through that circle or if you cross th ough the light cone, you will hit all the points in history. You start to line up certain points and pass over them repeatedly, and then history starts to become the same. You might miss something the first time, so maybe you will be lucky enough to go around a second time or even an infinite number of times."
I misread the meaning of eternal in the Kite interview when they say, "death is eternal." I took it to mean that we are alive for a finite amount of time but death can be forever; in the sense, that if our memory is passed on then we are eternal in some way—as the book sets up an homage to ancestors that have lived and have yet to live.
There was so much more discussed, if you want to share anything outside our email thread, to archive here, please do. xx
We will meet Monday 15 April 2024 at 8PM EST to discuss The Honeyman Festival, with an art work, TBD. (Anyone?) Email me if you need the e-pub.
The Honeyman Festival (1970) by Marian Engel (184 pgs.)
House of Anansi Press re-issued The Honeyman Festival in 2014, as part of A List. A List was launched to mark their forty-fifth anniversary; a series of new editions of classic Anansi titles. I couldn’t find even one review online, even though Marian Engel is a widely-known Canadian author.
“First published in 1970, The Honeyman Festival chronicles one night in the life of Minn Burge, a woman in her mid-thirties who is torn between affection for her family and the need for a life in which impulse and intelligence can once again find play.
Pregnant with her fourth child, and unable to take refuge in facile resolutions, Minn interrogates her life with a razor-edge passion in which many readers will find they too are involved.”