A Story About Crabs

A story I wrote about crabs can be found in Issue Two of Dragnet Magazine right here. The setting is loosely based around the Peixaria Portugal fish store on Ossington, which may be the smelliest spot in Toronto. Sadly,  my story does not feature scratch and sniff technology. Something to think about for the next issue, eh?

A Wing and a Prayer

It's been a while since I've be truly excited for a film adaptation of a book. When I was younger, books-to-movies used to make me crazy; I love books and movies in equal measure, so the chance to have both, one after the other, could send me into a tizzy. (It's only now, at age 25, that I've started to realize my emotional attachments to art and media might be a touch freakish.) Sometimes the book to movie transition is smooth; other times, not so much.

I crossed my fingers for the Owen Meany movie. I swallowed that book up when I was 12, in the sixth grade, while my peers were still reading the Babysitter's Club Little Sister series, and felt so adult. An Owen Meany movie couldn't fail, right? And then I met "Simon Birch".

I basically peed my pants over The Virgin Suicides. I'd read the book in the fall of my grade 10 year, knowing that Sofia Coppola's movie was already in the pipeline. The book made me cry. I watched the movie on a Christmas eve. They both hit me, in different ways, equally hard.

Which brings me to this year's model: Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin. The movie is premiering at Cannes. The book I wasn't expecting to like nearly as much as I did.

I came away from Kevin's final page legitimately terrified of having kids. Granted, 'having kids' is a scary notion on its own, but this was different: what if my kid is horrible? What if they do something horrible? What if I don't love them.

Shriver's novel is oftentimes overwrought, repetitive and insincere. I've never read another book, though, that so thoroughly engrossed me in motherhood. I'm not a mother, won't be for a while, but I came away from this book thinking like a mother. Feeling like a mother, probably, too. I bought my mom a copy to read after I did. I expected her to feel as affected as I had been, but it didn't quite pan out that way. She found it more unsettling than affecting, which I suppose marks the difference between a real mom and a maybe-future-mom.

A few clips from the movie were released this week. It took me two days to finally watch them. I was hoping for Virgin Suicides but expecting another Simon Birch. I'm a fan of SWINTON, and I'd die for John C. Reilly, but I just wasn't buying them in the roles. When I finally bit down and watched the clips (what if I don't love them), I realized that my fears had been misplaced.

The movie, at least, looks good.

We Need to Talk About Kevin clip 3 by Flixgr

My future kids might still turn out to be mass murderers, though.

lusting

On a day like today--a day where I'm nursing a sprained muscle in my knee and reek of Tiger Balm and have next to nothing to do at work but can't even walk away from my desk because of the pain--these were so needed. Self portraits of Alex (of Oli & Alex) recreating romance novel covers. Me love.

way cool?

I have a soft spot for Clarissa Explains It All, as I have for all the mid-90s Nickelodeon shows I used to watch at my grandparent's place in Florida on March Breaks. Clarissa Darling was infinitely more likable than Sabrina Spellman-- she was bratty, sneaky, smart, opinionated, and brash. The show ended in 1994, but apparently a pilot for a spin-off was shot (!!!)...

...and it sucks. Clarissa Now lacks everything good, funny, and neon about the original show, so it's no surprise that every station passed and it's been languishing in a black plastic VHS case ever since. What irks me even more is that Clarissa, like every "independent" teenaged female character to follow in her wake, dreams of being a journalist. I, too, grew up wanting to be a journalist, and now I know who to blame for planting that seed of ambition in my head: the teen girls of TV. Caitlin Ryan. Harriet the Spy. Rory Gilmore. Sabrina Spellman, again. I had to go all the way to first year journalism at King's College in Halifax, all the way to age 19, before I realized that I was better at making up stories than telling truths.

It 's just too damn easy to make your young heroine a journalist--and, in this day and age, when newspapers are shuttering down and MJ degrees are suddenly as worthless as my MFA, it also seems inappropriate. Clarissa Darling might've had a shot at success back in 1995, but she'd be languishing in the publishing world today. She'd probably be writing a blog instead.

Ain't It Pretty

I first read Donald Barthelme--Sixty Stories, it was--on the suggestion of Sheila Heti, in the middle of a summer mentorship. I was supposed to be reading every day, writing every moment, and yet I felt disconnected from the whole experience. It should be noted that this was the summer of 2009; my summer of garbage strikes, wet skies, low 20s, and 5am barista shifts. It was not the best summer of my life. I read the books and I wrote the stories, but in the end his short story collection was the only thing that stuck. Barthelme writes short and sweet and weird; some of his stories just breeze past and others punch you in the gut. "I Bought A Little City" is a gut puncher, and a good one. Listen to a reading below.

If I could buy a little city it would probably be Truro, Nova Scotia. Just because.

Audio: Urban Planning: newyorker.com