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This Week In My Classes: Elegiac

Rohan Maitzen26 Comments

When I posted about the new term back in September, I closed by saying that I anticipated “some coming changes that I will also want to write about, when the time is right.” I think it’s time now, because now it’s finally settled: I will be retiring at the end of this academic year, which means that next term, Winter 2027, will be my last teaching term at Dalhousie.

It was a very difficult decision to make, one that preoccupied me for much of the summer. Local people will know that King’s (where I am technically employed, though I do all my work at Dalhousie–it’s complicated, nobody really understands!) is in some financial difficulty, a situation that is common for Canadian higher ed institutions at this point but perhaps particularly tricky for a small rather niche place like King’s to address. As part of the college’s efforts to retrench (a word I will never hear without thinking of Sir Walter Elliot!) they put together an early retirement package and gave eligible faculty and staff to the end of August to apply for it. Without that offer, I would probably not have thought to retire quite so early, but I knew I wouldn’t have persisted for many more years, so the question boiled down to “if soon anyway, then why not now?” This doesn’t mean that it was simple to answer! But the things that made it complicated–the things that are going to be very hard when this year is up–are always going to be difficult for me. At some point, I’m just going to have to face them, work through them, and see what lies beyond. There’s something to be said for doing that before I get much older.

So I submitted my application at the end of August; last week it was approved by King’s, and I signed off officially on the plan on Friday. When I’m done, at the end of June 2027, I will be 60 and will have been doing this job for 32 years. I had the great good fortune to get the offer before I had even completed my Ph.D., which I was happily able to wrap up expeditiously at that point. It is fair to say, then, that this job has defined my adult life–for better and for worse. The prospect of not doing it anymore is disorienting: I have feelings about it! Be warned that some of those feelings will no doubt show themselves in my posts this year, especially my posts about my classes. It is just so strange and sad to think of the things I won’t do again, like lead discussions of The Moonstone (why is it that The Moonstone is the novel I feel the most regret–at the moment, anyway–about never teaching again? I think it’s that I have always had so much fun with it) or introduce students to the delights of David Copperfield or surprise first-year students into enjoying poetry. (OK, that last one probably reflects some wishful thinking on my part, but maybe it did sometimes happen?) I might have put in for different classes this year if I’d known they would be my last ones, but on the bright side, I did assign Middlemarch for the 19th-century fiction class. I’m really glad about that.

Feelings, so many feelings. So much has happened in the rest of my life while I kept on going to work; sometimes going to work, and especially being in the classroom, was the one thing that kept me going. The scariest thought for me now is: can I really do without it? How often have I written here about my summer slumps, for instance? How many times did I experience the therapeutic benefits of having to get outside my own head for a while and be fully in the moment? Where else will I find the same sense of purpose, the same satisfaction of a job well done, the same rewards that you get from knowing you have helped or inspired a student, working with them on ideas and enthusiasms and skills they will carry forward with them into the life they are making?

I know, I know: there are other ways, other roles, other opportunities. I have heard all the advice about having something to “retire to” and I get it, and I have ideas, although it seems a bit much to be expected to have that future all figured out now, while I am still working full time at my regular gig! I also know there are plenty of things about work that I won’t miss, from tedious administrative duties to the worsening crisis that AI has created for the kind of teaching and learning my career has been dedicated to. It has not been a good few years in higher ed–it’s been a bad couple of decades, really, but recently the imperative to “do more with less” has gotten us to what feels like a tipping point, such that it is getting increasingly difficult to do anything at all. And yet, and yet.

I know too that a professorial career like the one I have had–already elusive when I was hired here in the mid 1990s (something we had some personal experience with, as my ex-husband had a much longer road to his tenure-track position)–has become a kind of mirage, something that far too many brilliant and exceptionally qualified people will never have, in this era of exploitation and precarity. It should not be this way. It’s not that senior people who don’t retire are the problem, either: most of my colleagues who have already retired have just never been replaced. The Dalhousie Calendar is full of courses we will never put on again. I think probably “my” classes will be taught again–though possibly only on an ad hoc basis by folks on part-time contracts. I suppose it’s also possible that the department will be able to add up all the recent departures to finally make a successful case for at least one new full-time position, but would 19th-century fiction be a priority? It’s easy to make fun of job ads that seem like shopping lists, but if you get to hire only one person where you once had three or four or five, how do you make the most of the opportunity?

Anyway, this is going to be a year of reflections for me; an elegiac tone seems inevitable! I am actually curious to look back through my teaching posts, which cover almost twenty years now, and see what patterns and shifts and insights emerge: endings always give shape and meaning to what has come before. I am not done yet, though! This week and next we are working through North and South, and then we start Middlemarch and I am going to really “giv’er” this time. After that comes Jude the Obscure; it’s good I still have next term to go after that, since that would be a real downer of a conclusion. Part of my retirement negotiation was for a lighter load next term, so I’ll have just one more class to go after Christmas, which will be my Honours seminar on women and detective fiction. It’s not necessarily what I would have chosen as my swan song, but one of our texts will be Gaudy Night, one of my personal top ten novels, and I expect that its inquiry into the values and compromises of the academic life will be particularly resonant as my own experiment with that draws to its end.

Art (and Other) Adventures III

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

I hope you didn’t think I’d abandoned my art adventures! It’s just that July and August were mostly so drearily hot and humid that I lost a lot of energy, sometimes for going out, and other times for reporting back. But I have in fact crossed off nearly all the galleries on my summer bingo card. A couple of them turned out to be closed for the summer, but I happened across others that I hadn’t originally known about or planned to go to, like the little one at Fisherman’s Cove (an outing that was also on my bingo card). I may fit one or two more in before classes begin for me next Wednesday: I see 14 Bells is actually open weekends, for instance, unlike a lot of the others on my list.

I continued to find it a hit or miss experience; I continued to find myself more drawn to watercolours; and I continued to puzzle sometimes over what makes paintings that (to my amateur eye) seem to display little technical skill worth framing and displaying. I’m not going to call out any specific examples. I do know something about modern art in a kind of general way, not just from visiting major galleries and from reading but also from watching the Great Courses art history videos; I understand that a lot of it is conceptual rather than what I might think of as pictorial, or aims to provoke ideas or reactions besides “that’s beautiful.” I understand some similar things about contemporary ‘classical’ music–but I still usually hate listening to it, and while ‘hate’ is too strong a word, some of the art I have seen is similarly unappealing. I don’t think this makes me reactionary exactly. I have very positive reactions to some abstract art! I think that for me, seeing something I recognize as artistry makes a difference, maybe.

Anyway! I took away from these outings a better sense of just how much artistic activity there is in this region, and how intensely local most of it is. I made more notes of artists whose work I did like: at the Secord Gallery on Quinpool Street, I lingered over the work of Kelly Mitchelmore; at 1274 Hollis I really enjoyed the paintings by Heather Crout and Helene Martin. In the small gallery at Fisherman’s Cove I was very drawn to Edward Wedler’s work–and was particularly interested that he does a lot of his painting en plein air. I bought a small print of one of his paintings and had a brief chat with him too, as he was on duty at the counter the day I was there. At Argyle Fine Art, I found Adele Webster’s paintings beautiful and calming: they are acrylic on board yet have something of the translucency I like in watercolour. I saw a lot of paintings at the Teichert Gallery, where you can pull out their many racks to take a look–but the process is a bit annoying and noisy, so I found it hard to be attentive or contemplative!

I wondered before if I would come to love the Nova Scotia landscape more through looking at it more often through an artist’s eyes. Maybe, a little? I was rereading some sections of The Mill on the Floss recently trying to choose a passage (for a purpose I will say more about in another post) and lingered over this beautiful bit:

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it,—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home scene? These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows,—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass to-day might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

I no longer consider Vancouver my home, but I feel things deep inside whenever I fly in and finally see the mountains, or walk along the streets or beaches and in the parks, that I never feel here.

I made a point of seeing more of the local scenery myself this summer by going on outings that did not require me to drive on the highways. (I just don’t see how, if you’re doing something for fun, you can be expected to do it in a way that you find genuinely and not unreasonably stressful!) One was to Fisherman’s Cove: I’d been there before long ago and remembered it being charming, which it is, sort of. The village itself is charming, and the colourful row of little shops is sweet too, except that what they sell is just so unrelentingly cheesy and touristy. The same is true of Peggy’s Cove, which I finally (after 31 years of living in Halifax!) visited in person. Peggy’s Cove is a spectacular site, and I really enjoyed my expedition there, including the funny and informative commentary from the guide on the bus tour I took–but it really does look just like the photos, which makes it weirdly anticlimactic, and I can’t see any need to ever go back there. Just in terms of value for money, I give the edge to my trip to Georges Island in Halifax harbour. For a fraction of what it cost to go to Peggy’s Cove and a fraction of the time it took to trek out by ferry and bus to Fisherman’s Cove, I got a delightful boat trip there and back, including a loop around the island before docking there, and an interesting time poking around the fortifications and enjoying the view of the city from there.

As you can tell, I made a concerted effort to have a better (richer, more interesting, less depressed) summer than I often have. (I did have work to do too, including a TLS review that will be out in the next issue, and another writing project I will say more about in a bit, as well as the usual preparation for the fall, an MA thesis to read, and bits of ongoing advising work.) On the whole, the effort was successful: it was a better summer. Still, the very phrase ‘concerted effort’ is a bit of a tell, right? I also worked hard to maintain the ‘social connections’ that my therapist is always reminding me are essential to our wellbeing. I was always happy to spend time with my friends–but again, ‘worked hard’ says something about the realities. People are busy with their own things in the summer, whether those are family things or travels or cottages: this is how it always is. Now they’re coming back and asking how my summer was and that says something too. I am working on being OK with that. I understand that social connection is a good thing, but maybe (and I have pointed this out to my therapist!) if someone just is alone a lot, it would be helpful not to constantly frame that as a problem but to work with them on approaching alone time as itself a good thing. I just finished Robert Coplan’s The Joy of Solitude and now I’m reading Solitude: The Science and Power of Being Alone by Netta Weinstein, Heather Hansen, and Thuy-vy T. Nguyen. Both books are really interesting on the research around solitude (including the need not to conflate it with loneliness)–and both books offer a potential counter-narrative to the familiar rhetoric around the current “epidemic of loneliness” or isolation that we hear so much about. There’s a chapter in the latter called “Can We Get Better at Being Alone?” and the answer, encouragingly, is yes.

Art Adventures I

Rohan Maitzen14 Comments

As I have written about here before, I don’t typically enjoy summer all that much. Although I’m not sure how much that has to do with the season itself as opposed to the change in – or absence of – routines and structure and sociability that comes with the break from the teaching term, I did find this discussion of “Summer SAD” interesting (the segment starts about 20 minutes in). It’s definitely true that the expectation that you are having a wonderful time simply because it is summer can make it harder to be honest about how you are actually doing.

The expert advice in that discussion is to get out and do “fun” summertime things, but I don’t swim or bike or hike, and NS’s beaches (like most of its destinations!) are hard to get to without driving on highways, which I hate. So in the spirit of what they call “behavioural activation,” I decided to devise a summer activity list for myself that better reflects my actual interests and preference, including a list of local art galleries to visit. One of the main themes of the painting class I took in April and May was that aspiring artists need to look at a lot of art. Halifax does not have a major gallery on the scale of MOMA or the National Gallery or the Tate or MFA; our biggest, the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, is (sorry) not a very rich or inspiring space, though over the years I have had some good visits there. But the city has quite a smattering of small galleries showcasing local artists, most of which I have never checked out. I put their names, and a few other ideas for outings and experiments, on a kind of ‘bingo’ card in my bullet journal. I don’t have a prize picked out for crossing them all off: while gamifying my plans will (I hope) help me actually do the things, the reward should be the experiences themselves.

That’s a lot of preamble – sorry! The main point is that, just as “Poetry Serendipity” has encouraged me to take more chances in the library in an extremely risk-free way, “Art Adventures” will hopefully encourage me to look around at more visual art, moving on from what I don’t like, enjoying what I do like, and not overthinking it. Since I am trying my hand at painting, but not at poetry, though, I am curious about what I might learn from what I see. As we talked about in the painting class, the possibilities are really infinite; figuring out what you actually want your own art to do or be like is easily as overwhelming as trying to master any of the technical stuff.

I have been to two galleries from my list so far. One, the Craig Gallery at Alderney Landing, was a bit chaotic when I was there as one exhibition was literally ending (people were taking down and packing up the paintings as I wandered around). I did see some paintings I liked, but it wasn’t really possible to absorb much, so I’ll have to go back, though I guess I won’t see any of those same ones again.

I had better luck this morning at the Prow Gallery on Lower Water Street. It’s a bigger space and there was quite a lot to look at, including some works in wood, or combining wood and fabrics or threads. I really liked “Mollusk,” by Douglas Drdul: there’s something so satisfyingly glossy and tactile about it, and the wood grain is so beautiful and used so ingeniously to create the look of the shell. If I lived with it, I know I would be constantly running my hands over it. (I was very good in the gallery and obeyed the signs saying no touching!)

I was mostly interested in the paintings, of course and here’s one thing I learned from them about my own taste or aesthetic. Quite a lot of the paintings were done in acrylics and were what I would call very highly finished (I don’t know the right vocabulary for this). They were perfectly smooth all over; the lines of the pictures or designs were also smooth and clear. You could not discern any brushwork; for some of them, even quite close up they could almost have been glossy prints, not originals. I’ll use this one as an example, not to call it out but because I actually think in some ways it is really lovely. Here’s another one: I really loved how the artist did the water and reflections. Despite their clear technical excellence, none of the paintings with these qualities really spoke to me, for lack of a better way to put it: I would not pick them for my wall. There’s something too smooth about them, not painterly enough.

The one artist whose works really did appeal to me was, as it happens, also the only one who had any watercolours on exhibit there. His name is David Lidbetter, and when I got home I looked him up and found his own website, where you can see more of his work, including a lot of oils but also more watercolours and others using mixed media. I’m going to be grasping for vocabulary here, and my previous experience with studying art has not led me to think there is necessarily a good set of terms ready to hand. What I like about Lidbetter’s paintings is that they are not completely abstract (I react much like Olivia to art that just looks like a big mess) but they are also clearly not attempted copies of reality but ideas about it, or impressions of it. They feel like looking through someone’s eyes, rather than just seeing what someone saw – does that even make sense, as a distinction? Something about the other paintings feels too fixed to me, too static; I like how Lidbetter’s evoke scenes without getting too literal about them. I particularly liked both “Northern Lake” and “Fading Light,” which are quite minimalist.

The painting at the top of this post is one of my own, from last year, of Black Rock Beach in winter. It remains a personal favourite, for its simplicity and minimalism. Simplicity is hard to paint, it turns out. Getting an even wash for the sky, for example – I was pretty happy with the way that turned out here, with the lighter glow near the horizon. Stopping before you do too much is also really hard, and, with watercolours, usually irreparable. This is not a very accomplished painting, and yet I haven’t done one since that I have been quite as satisfied with. I don’t know what to make of that, especially as I have been taking more classes and practicing diligently. It is possible that the effort I have been putting in has worked against me by making me more self-conscious.

This Week (Not) In My Classes

Rohan Maitzen4 Comments

It has been very quiet here lately, for reasons that may seem counterintuitive: I have had very little going on, because (long story short) the faculty at Dalhousie has been locked out by the administration since August 20, and while I am not in the union (I’m a member of the joint King’s – Dalhousie faculty) I have been instructed to do no Dal-specific work while the labour dispute continues. You’d think that this would mean I have all kinds of time to read books and write about them here, and yet what has happened instead is that the weird limbo of this situation has prolonged my usual summer doldrums and overwhelmed me with inertia. At this point I can hardly imagine summoning up the energy to stand up in front of keen young people and sustain a lively discussion—and yet at the same time there is nothing I want more to do, especially because if we were in classes this week we would be wrapping up our work on Austen’s Persuasion, my favourite of her novels. The two sides are at the bargaining table again this evening: who knows, maybe by the time I press ‘post’ there will be news of a deal.

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I have done some reading since O, the Brave Music, but nothing that really stuck except William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, which is as good as everyone said it was, bleak but somehow not depressing. I have just started Frans G. Bengtsson’s The Long Ships, which I am enjoying even though it is not at all what I expected: for no good reason, I suppose, I thought it would be more like Dorothy Dunnett’s novels, or Hild, but it is not nearly so dense or expository but is rather more like a chronicle, with a faintly antique cadence as if it is being told rather than written / read. Maxell’s novel deserves its own post but is not going to get one—score one for inertia!—but when I finish The Long Ships, I resolve to write it up properly! In between I have been rereading Robert B. Parker and Dick Francis, most recently The Edge, which is one of my favourite of Francis’s novels and also helps to sustain my dream of one day taking a cross-country train trip.

I have also been continuing my read-through of Woolf’s diaries. I am into 1923 now. 1922 seemed like a slow year and then she published Jacob’s Room and read Ulysses, both of which events generated a lot of interesting material. I am fascinated by her self-doubt: we meet great writers of the past when that greatness is assured, and also when their writer’s identity is established, but Woolf is not so sure on either count, and is hypersensitive—as George Eliot was—to criticism, especially when she felt her work was misunderstood, not just unappreciated. Jacob’s Room is significant because it is the first novel that, to her, really feels like her own voice: “There’s no doubt in my mind,” she says, “that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice; & that interests me so that I feel I can go ahead without praise.” I am always fascinated and inspired by accounts of artists of any kind who find their métier and know it; I still think often of Mary Delany, and when I reread that post I also reflect on the expanding confidence I felt at the time and wonder where it went and how to recover it. Well, as Molly Peacock tells us in her wonderful book, Mary Delany was 72 when she discovered and fulfilled her own artistic purpose, so I will try to think of myself as “only” 58 and take heart, again, from her story.

Another paradox around my lack of posting is that for whatever reason, this is the writing I like doing the most. All summer I have been struggling to get something, anything done on a couple of other projects, and while I did meet a couple of small reviewing deadlines and submit something to a CFP for a special issue of a journal (I won’t know for a while if anything comes of that), my larger plans keep fizzling out because I can’t shake the feeling that they are futile: even if I completed exactly what I imagine they could be, the odds that they would find a publisher or an audience seem so slim. When nobody is asking for something and there’s no extrinsic need or reward for it, you really have to believe in it to actually do it. Perhaps my lack of conviction is a sign that these are not in fact the right projects for me . . . but then what is? These have not been good years for trusting myself, partly because of the legacy of my failed promotion bid. Oh wait, that’s where that surge of optimism and confidence went! and in fact that’s exactly right: I’ve been struggling to rebuild ever since, and I was making some progress when COVID hit and then all the hard personal stuff of the last few years. At some point, of course, explanations shade into excuses—and I have in fact been getting lots of other things done, and would be getting more done if I were back in my classes now, as I should be and hope to be soon. Teaching is almost always restorative for me, and this term—when it finally starts—should be especially so as due to an administrate release I have just one class, 19th-Century Fiction from Austen to Dickens.

Cross your fingers that a fair deal is struck soon, not just so that I can get out of this dreary purposeless limbo but so that I don’t have to cut Cranford from our reading list because we don’t have enough time for it. And whatever happens with the negotiations, I will try to stop malingering.

Meet Fred!

Rohan Maitzen8 Comments

I had barely recovered from my jet lag after my recent trip to Vancouver when I got caught up in another big distraction: I have adopted a cat! Her name is Fred, short for Winifred (she happily acknowledges either Winifred Holtby or Winifred Burkle as her namesake—or both), she’s approximately two years old, she’s tiny, she’s sweet, and she’s a bit of a pest in the wee hours of the morning.

I had thought for a long time about getting a cat. I had one growing up, an elegant Siamese named Bothwell—I was in a big Mary, Queen of Scots phase when he joined the household. (Maybe Fred should consider herself lucky?) He was a great companion: loyal, eccentric, and independent, so basically a lot like me. During my marriage having a cat wasn’t an option, as my ex-husband is allergic; so too is my daughter, but only to some cats, and she encouraged me to take a chance. (So far, so good: she has visited Fred a few times and even held her, without any noticeable reaction.) I am extremely good at overthinking things, and I also don’t much like making decisions when I can’t clearly foresee the outcome, which is obviously the case when taking on a pet that is going to have her own personality and needs. I just could not get the pro / con list to be decisive either way! Then while I was away I missed out on an opportunity to adopt what sounded like the perfect cat for me, a ragdoll in sudden need of re-homing. My disappointment at not getting her clarified that I did want a cat in my life, and after an unsuccessful visit to a local shelter where the cat I went to meet first threw up at my feet then hid so I really could not get to know him, I got lucky with some help from Cat Rescue Maritimes . . . and here I am, and here we are.

I admit I do feel somewhat overwhelmed at the moment, both at the change to my routines and by my new responsibilities. Also, pet stores have a bewildering array of options now, and the online cat-care debates are already making me crazy. The sleep deprivation definitely adds to this! (Don’t worry: I have set up an appointment with a vet and will try to follow only evidence-based advice rather than random Redditors’.) But Fred is a sweet and incredibly affectionate and trusting little cat. I was cautioned that she would probably just hide somewhere for the first few days, but she immediately explored all the available space, spent a lot of time watching out the windows, then settled on her favorite places to nap. She loves to be held and stroked and purrs like mad when you scritch her head and around her ears—just what Bothwell liked best too. I’m hopeful that we will get better at our nighttime routines. I mean, if she can sleep in this position, surely she can also figure out how to sleep more or less when I do, right? RIGHT?! 🙂

Novel Readings 2024: Part I

Rohan Maitzen23 Comments

In my year-end post last year I remarked that the final months of 2023 had been “frantic.” The reason, as I’ve since explained, is that near the end of that year my husband and I separated, one consequence of which was that we both moved out of the house we’d lived in for over 20 years—which in turn meant I dove headlong into “downsizing,” some of it as rapidly as we could manage together before he moved to North Carolina last December, and the rest on my own, before I moved into my new apartment in February. Yes, that’s a short timeline for changes this big!

As a result of all of this, in 2024 my relationship to books and reading was unusual in a couple of ways. In the first place, as I moved into a 1-bedroom apartment, I had to confront a significant reduction in shelf and storage space, which meant, one way or another, getting rid of a lot of books. I know many folks online who are really dedicated book collectors—by which I don’t at all mean that they don’t also read their books, but they have extensive and cherished libraries. I have never had quite that relationship with books, more for practical reasons than principled ones, but I have always loved owning books and feel, as I know so many of us do, that my book shelves are in some ways an expression of my self. I also have many books that mean a lot to me for personal reasons, ones inscribed by my mother or my grandmother, for example, or ones that I picked out on my travels, or ones that I have reread so often I can’t imagine who I would be without them. Still, I always tried to be reasonable about how much room I actually had on my shelves (no teetering stacks on the floor for me!), and I regularly rounded up a bag or two to donate to the big book sale that raises money for the symphony, or some nice volumes to trade in at Agricola Street Books, both of which are great ways to maintain what I like to think of as the circle of (bookish) life.

Still, this kind of incidental and largely voluntary pruning is nothing compared to the process I went through before I moved, which was often both logistically and emotionally overwhelming, especially at first. It got a lot easier as it went along, and in some ways it even started to feel good as the burden (literal and metaphorical) lifted. It involved admitting that there were books on my shelves I was never going to read again, and some I was never going to read at all, however good they might actually be (sorry, Europe Central, which took up the space of 2 or 3 other books for over a decade). It involved confronting the truth about dictionaries, desk encyclopedias, the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, and the rest of our fine “reference” collection: nobody wants them anymore, including me, so their covers came off and their pages went into recycling. It meant carting bags of aging paperback mysteries to the Salvation Army and around 15 boxes of good quality fiction and non-fiction to the book sale depot. Hardest of all, it meant facing Owen’s books, which was particularly poignant for me because so many of them are ones I picked out for him over the years, for birthdays and Christmases. Most of his chess books went to the Dalhousie Chess Club, where he was a regular during his student years, though I kept Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, his first and favorite book about the game. I kept all of his beloved Calvin and Hobbes collection, and many others that speak to me of the child he was and the young man he became—more than I needed to, maybe, but unlike my own books, his can never be replaced. 

In the end I brought around 22 boxes of books with me to my apartment. I still sometimes look for a title only to realize I let it go, but mostly I think I did well: I cleared a lot of space mentally as well as physically. And in fact I cleared enough shelf space that I have room now for more books! I find pruning easier after all of this: my attachment to (most) books is just lighter. Sometimes I even put a book in the ‘donate’ pile as soon as I finish it! I don’t think of those purchases as wasted money. I want bookstores to thrive and authors to make money, after all. My wise sister pointed out once that a paperback is about the same price as a bottle of wine, and we don’t think we’ve wasted that money just because we can drink the bottle up in a single dinner party! And I still keep plenty: any that really hit hard, any that aren’t readily available, any that come with extra sentimental attachments, any that I think I’ll read again, or that I might want to write about.

So I started 2024 by clearing out a lot of books. The other change since the separation has been to my reading time. I don’t quite understand why, but there seem to be a lot more hours in the day now that I live alone! I have wasted an awful lot of them watching TV, and many of them idly scrolling online, and plenty also just moping or mourning. I think (though this may be just making excuses) that I should not be too hard on myself about these bad habits, as the past few years have been pretty tough and we are all entitled to our coping strategies. I make intermittent resolutions to do better, to use my time better; I have made some of these for 2025. (Yes, blogging regularly again is one of them. We’ll see.) However! I have had more time for reading, and I have sometimes taken advantage of it. I have especially enjoyed taking time to read in the mornings. For many years—around two decades, really—mornings were my least favorite time of the day, what with all the kid stuff (breakfasts, lunches, getting dressed, remembering backpacks and permission slips and other forms, trying to get out the door on time) on top of bracing for my own work days, with the non-trivial (for me) anxiety of driving in winter weather adding a nice additional layer of stress from November through April. Things were simpler once the kids were older then out of the house, but I never felt like it was a good time for relaxing: I still had to get off to work, for one thing. Now, between habitually waking up early and living easy walking distance to work, even on weekdays I can afford to get in some peaceful reading while I have my tea and toast. We used to end most days in front of the TV; I still do that, especially on days when I’ve read a lot for work, but other days I can settle into my reading chair, put on some quiet music, and there’s nothing and nobody to interrupt me.

The combination of chaos and quiet time over this time of significant personal change has meant that overall 2024 was neither a particularly good or a particularly bad year for reading. I don’t think that in total I read a lot more books than usual, though I have never kept count, so I can’t be sure. I read a lot in some months and hardly anything in others. Since this post (which I realize is probably not of much interest—sorry!—I’m trying to recover my willingness to just sit down and write what’s on my  mind) has already gone on long enough, I’ll do my usual year-end review of highlights and low points in my next one.

This Term (and My Classes)

Rohan Maitzen15 Comments

cassatThis term is the first one since I began posting about ‘this week in my classes’ in 2007 that I haven’t posted at all about my classes. What’s up with that, you might wonder? Well, more likely you hadn’t noticed or wondered, but I’ve certainly been aware of it and pondering what, if anything, to do about it.

There is at least one very dull pragmatic reason why I haven’t been blogging very often, about anything: along with my chronic shoulder pain, which (despite my best efforts to address it through ergonomic adjustments and to improve it through physiotherapy) persists and is notably exacerbated by computer use, particularly lots of mousing, I have also developed lower back pain that is also clearly related to sitting at my desk. I am working on solutions for this, but in the meantime I have been trying to spend less time at my computer. That said, one of the odd features of my back pain is that it gets better when I’m very absorbed in something. To me, this suggests that posture and ergonomics are only part of the picture and that stress may be another part of it. Often, for me, it’s precisely blogging that has this distracting effect—mysteriously (ha!) it doesn’t work out that way when I’m grading online exams or wrangling Brightspace settings. So there are definitely other factors at play in my blogging slump.

millonflossIt certainly isn’t anything to do with this term’s classes. At least from my perspective, both of them—Mystery & Detective Fiction and The Victorian ‘Woman Question’—have gone very well. Of course there have been the occasional sessions that dragged a bit, and we had an unusually high number of snow days that created a lot of logistical headaches, but in general discussion was both substantive and lively. I continue to try to wean myself from my lecture notes. This gets easier and easier in the mystery class, as I am pretty confident now both about how I want to frame the course and readings in terms of ‘big picture’ issues and about the specific readings. (I mix in new options quite regularly, because for various reasons I have been teaching the course basically every year for ages, so this definitely keeps it fresh and interesting for me: I just finished reading Dorothy B. Hughes’s The Expendable Man and I’m 90% certain I’m putting it on the reading list for next year, for one!) The ‘woman question’ class is a seminar, so I don’t lecture there anyway; I so looked forward to our class meetings all term, both because the readings are all favorites of mine and because we always had such good conversations about them. The only slight exception was with the excerpts from Aurora Leigh, from which I learned both that assigning excerpts is a bad idea (something I already believed but overrode, for practical reasons)—when it comes to long texts, do or do not, there is no try!—and that narrative poetry is hard, or at least it takes a different kind of preparation and attention than fiction, and that if I’m going to assign any of Aurora Leigh I need to take that into account.

Anyway, it’s true that these are courses I have taught and thus blogged about with some regularity, but that doesn’t usually stop me from reporting back and reflecting on how things are going. To the contrary, really, as I still believe what I said after my first year of blogging about my teaching, which is that

taking this extra step each week not only helped me identify the purpose, or, if writing retrospectively, the result of each class, but it made each week more interesting by giving me an opportunity to make connections or articulate puzzles or just express pleasure and appreciation in ways that went beyond what I had time for in class

I have become a better teacher because I kept this up: I learned so much from it, about myself, about teaching, and also about the subjects I teach, from writing to contemporary fiction.

succulentSo what’s my problem this term? I think it is rooted in my uncertainty about how to address some big changes that have taken place in my personal life. When I wrote up my year-end post for Novel Readings in December, I remarked that the last months of 2023 were particularly frantic, “about which more, perhaps, some other time,” I said then. Novel Readings has never been—or at least has never been intended as—a really confessional or intimate blog, though over the years I have certainly written about some personal things. The most personal it got was in the immediate aftermath of Owen’s death: I felt compelled, in ways I still can’t really understand, to write about it, maybe because finding words for what had happened and what I was feeling seemed essential to coping with it, to giving that experience a shape that I could live with. (I have since read a lot about the importance to trauma recovery of developing a “bearable narrative,” which seems on point, if not altogether sufficient to what I was and often still am seeking when I try to find words to express my grief.) I was always very conscious, though, that I didn’t have the right to speak for other people or to violate other people’s privacy, including Owen’s, in those posts. In a more general way, I would say that the value of Novel Readings to me, and also of all social media, lies in its authenticity: I don’t have to reveal everything about myself and my life, but what I do talk about should (I believe) honestly reflect who I am and what is going on with me, if only so that any interactions I have with other people are similarly authentic and thus meaningful. Yes, we all “curate” our social media presence—and a blog is essentially long-form social media, right?—but then, we do the same IRL, picking and choosing what we share, and the relationships that matter the most are the ones in which we are most fully ourselves.

Smith BeautifulIn my current circumstances, this principle, if that’s what it is, runs up against the principle that I shouldn’t talk about other people’s business here: it feels wrong not to acknowledge that my life has changed significantly, but I have felt—rightly, I think—constrained from going into any detail that might cross the line, which has also meant I have felt constrained from talking about some of my recent reading as frankly and completely as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t address how something like, say, Maggie Smith’s You Could Make This Place Beautiful resonates, or doesn’t, with my new circumstances—which, in a nutshell, are that my husband and I separated shortly before Christmas and I have since moved into my own apartment. The first part of this term, then, was a chaotic combination of “downsizing” (and what a euphemism that is for the hard physical and emotional labor of clearing out a house you’ve lived in for over 20 years!), packing, and moving, all while also, of course, carrying on with my classes and other work. Even setting aside the inhibitions I felt about breaking this news or integrating it into any reflections on my reading and teaching, no wonder I didn’t have much time or energy for ‘extras’ like blogging, right?

divorceObviously I have reached a point at which it seems fine and reasonable to say what has been going on, though I don’t expect I will ever consider Novel Readings an appropriate place to talk about how or why things have unfolded in this way, or even how I feel about it all! That’s nobody’s business but ours, by which I mean mine and my (truly excellent) therapist’s. 😉 Seriously, though, I do believe we bring our whole selves to our reading, so what I want to work on is how to acknowledge how my new reality sometimes does affect my engagement with books. I can say already that nothing about Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce, which I just read for my book club, seems relevant or resonant at all in that way (though I did enjoy it on its own terms)—though there were moments in The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith that definitely struck a chord.

Sorry if this seems like a long way around to nothing in particular. Writing is thinking, or so those of us for whom words really matter usually believe, and I guess I needed to figure some things out—while also (I hope) breaking the habit of not writing here as fully and frankly as I can. With the term now wrapping up, I am looking forward to turning my attention back to some larger projects I was making decent headway on last summer, before things went . . . the way they went! And I am planning to get back into the blogging habit, because I enjoy it and it is good for me in so many ways, including but not exclusively as a writer. A new chair, some exercise classes, and perhaps (sigh) more physiotherapy will hopefully resolve the physical obstacles, leaving only the psychological ones to be overcome. In the meantime, I still have exams and final essays coming in, so if Novel Readings stays a bit quiet for a while, that will be why.

Marching

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Roots March 2023March was a rough month. For one thing, I had more academic integrity hearings stemming from a single assignment than I’ve ever had in one term. It was an exceptionally disheartening experience, especially given the lengths I have gone to in my introductory class to reduce the risk for students of just trying to do the work for themselves: this is the class in which I’m using specifications grading, meaning there is really no risk involved. As I plaintively reminded the class as it became clear just how widespread the problem was, the class is designed to make it safe to be wrong, safe to be confused, safe to be learning. But if you don’t actually do your own writing, you strip the whole process of its meaning. Plus (as I pointed out to many students in the actual hearings), if your uncertainty leads you to copying other people’s writing, you will never build your own skills and your own confidence: you will never find out that you can in fact do the work, and get better at it.

I’ve written here before about plagiarism and my overall attitude remains the same. I’m just crushingly disappointed that things went so badly this term, despite my considerable efforts to educate and support students so that they would make better choices. It was incredibly demoralizing that so many students clearly saw the course as a means to an end, hoping to get the credit for it without engaging in the process. It has also been predictably destabilizing seeing or even just suspecting that students are using ChatGPT to do “their” work. (Literally the only good news about this is that the bots are pretty unreliable about any but the most widely familiar literary works, and even with them they can produce real howlers.) One consequence is that I am reconsidering specifications grading, even though I remain convinced that it is pedagogically sound and also ethically preferable to traditional approaches to writing assessment.  At the very least, if I use it again next year, I’m going to have to rethink the kind and number of components I require: with as many moving parts as my current course design includes, it is just overwhelming trying to scrutinize submissions as closely as it turns out we need to. Next year the class will be in person rather than online, which may make a difference: for one thing, I can do some in-class writing that will both give me a baseline indication of how the students’ own voices sound and, maybe, give them the hands-on experience they need to believe they can actually do the work themselves. English 1015 Academic Integrity Explainer

So that was a dreary part of the past month or so that took up an enormous amount of my time and energy. That’s one reason I didn’t get much good reading done: I was too tired and sad and distracted to concentrate. I did finish a few books, though, and a couple of them were excellent. An unexpected highlight was Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure, which I quoted from in my last post. Ruth Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness was not for me: it seemed to be aiming for some of the same effects as Anthony Doerr’s Cloud-Cuckoo Land, but I found Doerr’s novel much more engaging. Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind was gripping and thought-provoking, if unpleasantly unsettling: I didn’t think much about its genre when I picked it up at the store, but it is as much horror as dystopian fiction. I appreciated the slow but steady increase in tension and the imaginative creepiness of details like the flamingos. I was disappointed in the ending, though. Like The Road, it never specifies its calamity, which frustrated me more in this case because it focuses so much more, at least initially, on the question of what happened: in The Road, we are always already in the aftermath, and it hardly matters any more how we got there. The author interview that follows Leave the World Behind clarifies that the novel’s open-endedness is deliberate, but given how strenuously Alam avoids telling us either what happened (the cause) or what happens after (the effects), I found the little proleptic teasers about the characters’ futures annoying.  So, for me, it was good (I did appreciate reading a genuine page-turner, given my own general malaise) but not great.

pineiroEasily the best novel I read in March was Claudia Piñeiro’s Elena Knows. This was recommended to me last year when I was (as I so often am) casting about for new ideas for my two mystery fiction courses. I started it then but had to abandon it, as a novel about suicide and a mother’s grief was not an experience I could bear. I kept it on my mental TBR, though, and I’m glad I tried again, because it really is exceptional: slight but fierce and complex, with its overlapping interests in disability, ageism, misogyny, and autonomy. I think it would be a really interesting book to read in my course on Women & Detective Fiction, even though in many ways it is not really a mystery. It is certainly about a crime – or, crimes, if you think socially and systemically – and there is an investigation, even if there isn’t a detective, or evidence, or any of the other conventional elements.

I also read Jo Baker’s The Midnight News and quite enjoyed it, but this one was for a review, so I will save more detailed comments for that purpose. I will say that I admire Baker’s versatility: like Sarah Moss, she clearly likes to try new things. There’s a snarky comment in Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary about Sarah Waters always writing the same book. I bristled, because Waters is one of my favorite novelists and that seems unfair and reductive! But there is a grain of truth in it: she is drawn to similar problems and scenarios in all of her books, and her recent novels do all have a fairly similar tone. I think that’s fine! She’s really good at what she does. But Longbourn and The Body Lies and A Country Road, A Tree are completely different books, as are Signs for Lost Children, Cold Earth, and Ghost Wall: I don’t think you would necessarily recognize them as being by the same authors. ghost-wall

March was rough for me emotionally, and April has its challenges as well. There are some bright spots to look forward to, though, notably Maddie’s graduation recital. She began her music degree in 2019: it has been a strange and often very difficult four years of university for her, between COVID and online learning and the particularly disruptive effects of lockdowns for the performing arts. She has accomplished so much, in spite of all that and everything else. Her 3rd-year recital was a triumph, and it is an understatement to say that I am looking forward to this year’s longer program.

Corridor

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

Heart Rock November 22It has been quiet around here. I’m not really sure why that is. I’ve been busy at work, but that has never stopped me before. When this term began, I intended to make posting about my teaching routine again. When I kept that up, in the old days, it didn’t matter if I felt I had something in particular to say when I started: eventually I would discover what I had to say, because (as I’ve been trying to convince my first-year students) that’s how writing works. My reading hasn’t been going very well, but I used to write about it anyway.

One challenge for me right now, something not directly related to my blogging or teaching or reading and yet maybe essential to them, or to me, to what I can do, is that I am still in what I imagined a year ago (a whole year ago!) as the corridor:

One way I suppose I could think about where I am right now is precisely in a corridor between two blocks, one of them my previous life, which included Owen, and the other my future life, which will go on without him. In a literal sense, of course, I am already in that new life, but it doesn’t feel that way yet: I feel disoriented, adrift, unsettled.

Then, when I was still (to an extent that I didn’t really understand) in the first shock of my loss, I felt the passing of time, and especially the coming of spring, as an offense against my grief. Spring is here again, officially anyway, and though on the surface my life appears much as it did before Owen died, I still have not figured out “how to incorporate his death into my understanding of my life”; although my life continues, I cannot understand or experience it yet as continuous. “Superficially ‘fine,'” as Denise Riley puts it, sixteen months after her own son’s death,

as my daily air of cheerfulness carries me around with an unseen crater blown into my head, the truth is that my thoughts are turned constantly to life and to death; all that I can attentively hold.

Two years after, two and a half years after, three years after, she is still writing her shock: “The severance of a child’s life makes a cut through your own”; “No time at all. No time.” The corridor, it turns out, is long, longer than I could have known, or was willing to know (she tried to tell me) — and now that so much actual time has passed I feel self-conscious, even a bit defensive, that I haven’t emerged from it yet.

It’s not that anybody has said or even implied that I should be “over it” by now, but — rightly, understandably — for most people the urgency of my loss is over, the tide of sympathy and care has receded, new demands and crises and losses have come up. Life goes on, and “how are you doing,” while still a kind question, and sincere, becomes perfunctory, a question I answer in the same spirit, superficially, because what else, really, can I do? If sometimes I’m just going through the motions, well, at least that means I’m moving, and how else can I get to the other end of this corridor, whatever it means, wherever it leads? If I look straight ahead, it’s not so bad, either, although sometimes that’s actually the worst. “There’s no denying,” C. S. Lewis comments in A Grief Observed, “that in some sense ‘I feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness.” He’s wise about the complexity of that reaction:

We don’t really want grief, in its first agonies, to be prolonged: nobody could. But we want something else of which grief is a frequent symptom, and then we confuse the symptom with the thing itself.

Lewis talks of recurrences and cycles, like Riley seeking to articulate the temporal disruption and disorientation of grief. “Am I going in circles,” he asks, “or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it?

How often  — will it be for always? — how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, ‘I never realized my loss until this moment’? The same leg is cut off time after time. The first plunge of the knife into the flesh is felt again and again. a_grief_observed

When people say “it takes time,” they aren’t thinking about the knife, about the craters. “What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor,” George Eliot says in The Mill on the Floss. At least a corridor connects, rather than severs. Maybe it also shelters, protects, directs.

One book I did finish recently is Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. If it sounds like a discouraging read, well, it is, but it also isn’t, because amidst the real talk and the cynicism there is also sincerity, even conviction. I loved this little passage, which helped me understand why I keep this up (why I want to keep this up):

I do not know who I am writing for, or for what time, or to what purpose. But there is a deep longing in me — and that’s not a lie, not a fraud — to make these words for you. These ephemeral connections are the substance of victory, to belong to a constellation of meanings, to alleviate a specific, miniscule cosmic loneliness. It seems like such a small satisfaction to expend your life on. It isn’t. “You ask, why send my scribbles,” Ovid, in his exile, asked. “Because I want to be with you somehow.” Somehow, anyhow.

I also read a book of poems by Linda Pastan. I especially loved “The Bookstall” (“For life is continuous / as long as they wait / to be read”). Her poem “Yahrzeit Candle” begins “On the second birthday / of your death / nothing / much / has changed.” I’m not there yet. I don’t want to be there. It seems impossibly far off, which is both good and bad, but time passes.

Cold Trees Feb 2 23

Recently

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

PPP Blues“Start where you are and see where it takes you” is the wise advice from blogger extraordinaire Kerry Clare for those times when you want to write but don’t know quite what you want to say, so here I am, trying to break through the inertia of not blogging by just blogging.

Sometimes I look back through the Novel Readings archive and wonder at how much blogging I did in periods of my life when I was much busier than I typically am now, when I had two small children who needed attention and care of all kinds, drop-offs and pick-ups at school and daycare, swimming lessons and library visits, homework and piano lessons and chess club, highly particularized meals (allergies, aversions) necessitating frequent shopping and endless packing up of safe snacks, appointments with doctors and dentists and orthodontists; in those years the demands of teaching, too, were greater, because I didn’t have an archive of materials to fall back on, or years of experience to give me trust in myself, belief that if I just showed up I could probably actually do just fine. I took on more then, more committee assignments and supervisions and all the rest of it; I say no a lot more now, partly because after my failed promotion bid I “quiet quit” (a term I hadn’t heard of back then!)—not completely, of course, and I try to still be a good department citizen especially, but it was a good reminder that (another catch-phrase I didn’t know then) the university will not love you back.

Somehow those crazy busy years were also my peak blogging years. Busy people get more done, they say, but I realize now, too, that blogging fed me—gave me nourishment, intellectual and eventually social—in ways my busyness, my business, wasn’t otherwise doing. I came to feel part of something, something I could reach beyond the constraints of my schedule, my remote location, myself. I enjoyed advocating for something I believed in; I could feel parts of myself expanding that had become cramped and anxious after the hard slog through graduate school and which I had not had, or made, time for in the intense early years of my job here, which were equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and exhausting. Then came Open Letters, which I also somehow made time for in spite of, on top of, everything else (a mistake, perhaps, professionally speaking, but one I can’t regret).

woolf-by-bellThere’s so much emptiness in my life now. It’s not just Owen’s death, although every day I confront the ongoing ache and mystery of his absence. Some of it is the ongoing isolation of our COVID-cautious lifestyle: especially as most of the rest of the world seems to be moving on, it feels worse than it did when we were all in it together. Being back on campus and teaching in person helps with that, but it’s not the same as it was: I’m in my office a lot, but mostly with the door closed, because masks are required in classrooms but not hallways and I like to take my own mask off while I work. It’s winter, so the outdoor visits that sustained me through summer and fall are less appealing, as are my long solo walks in the park, when I was alone but, somehow, never lonely. (I often think of Marianne Moore’s line “the cure for loneliness is solitude.”) I could be busier at / with work than I am. I will be, soon, as assignments start coming in, but even so I don’t expect to be even as busy with teaching as I was last term, just because of the nature of my classes this term, the easy familiarity of one and the high degree of automation in the other. There is other work I could be doing, even a writing commitment I should be doing. I can’t seem to summon up much urgency or energy for it, though, or for the book idea I still sort of believe is worth pursuing. I’m not even reading much. I can’t seem to concentrate on most books I try; I don’t seem to like many of them, and it bothers me, worrying that it’s me, not them, that’s the problem.

“Start where you are and see where it takes you.” I’m not in a great place, I guess, though things aren’t really so bad: another word for emptiness is spaciousness, and maybe that’s what I need right now. There are ways, I realize, in which it is a luxury, a privilege. Something I’ve heard a lot since Owen died was that grieving people should be kind to themselves, so I have been trying not to judge what I’m doing or not doing, or how much I’m doing, or just how I’m doing.

LittTwo things I did recently: a review of Emma Donoghue’s Haven for Canadian Notes and Queries, and a review of Toby Litt’s A Writer’s Diary for The TLS. My editor at the TLS thought of me for Litt’s book because it’s a novel that began as a blog, or at any rate as a Substack (which I realize is not exactly a blog, but Litt also has a WordPress blog). The novel was initially released one day at a time, like a real diary, but has now been released in bound book form: that change in form was really interesting to me, not least because (like many long-time bloggers, I expect) I have often wondered if there is a book here somewhere, and if so, how radical the transformation would have to be for it to succeed in another form. My conclusion about Litt’s experiment:

I wish he had resisted the temptation to republish A Writer’s Diary as a conventional book. He could instead have accepted the ephemerality that is a blog’s most defining quality, letting the posts scroll away as they first appeared, one day at a time.