Literary Musings

To once and future Proustians – on the 100th anniversary of the death of Marcel Proust . . .

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Photo of Marcel Proust in 1900 by Otto Wegener

A recent surge in Proust references, responding to the 100th anniversary of the writer’s death on 18th November 2022 has given me a moment to reflect on all the Proust studies I have led – and all the wonderful minds (more than 70!) that have joined along the way. Some have stayed for the whole two-and-a-half-years/seven volumes, some for just parts of that, some returning to revisit, some expanding into other literary realms. All of you have moved the discussion forward, giving me so much richness in my own grappling with our Marcel. Along the way I have peeled back layers in my own mind about the mind and memory, prejudice, the aquarium of social relationships, social power, the space between sleep and waking, the unknowable, multiple self, the unfathomable beloved . . . and I have become more attentive to the wonder of the world (and hawthorns).

I am currently running two Proust cycles. The Proust 5s are in the agonising pages of The Captive, we are at the Verdurins’ and Morel has just finished playing Vinteuil’s unknown Septet . . . Proust 6 have just started The Guermantes Way and we are alive to the sound of the fire, the stimulus of a soldier’s life in Doncieres. I am hoping to host a Salon special with Lucy Raitz whose new translation of Swann in Love as a standalone novella has just been published. She is a friend of Salonista and facilitator Keith Fosbrook and we are lucky to have that connection! 

My dear friend Sheila, who curates the wonderful Swimming by the Book posted this loveliness to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the passing of Marcel Proust, while current Proustians (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline, et al) alerted me to the following (thanks Kaye, Sue, Caroline…) 

Please see below a piece on Proust being best left to ‘snobs’ – you will giggle, i think.

The Guardian had this lovely piece which includes: 

Although Marcel – after four years I can call him that – and I are separated by a century and by nationality, class, sexuality and sensibility, and despite regularly finding him exasperatingly obsessive and neurotic, I did come to regard him as a friend, though not one I could open my heart to fully. He watched me too sharply for that. I was in awe of his unending desire and unmatched capacity to recreate each moment, each fluctuation of existence – I just wouldn’t trust him once I’d left the room.

The reading pleasure was not to do with the narrative, which despite being at times, mind-meltingly slow, did eventually form an intricate pattern, nor the fascinating and often hilariously repellant characters, it was the sudden moments of what I can only call “satori”, the Japanese word for a sudden jolt out of the mundane surface into a the bright clarity of awareness of being.

. . . As it is read aloud, every moment hangs in the air, an extraordinary architecture of light, always in flux but always precise . . .

Patti Miller, The Guardian

And for those with access to The Times online, there is this view on the centenary.

I hope that wherever you are, life is full of orangeade and hawthornes, madeleines and humming memories. I leave you with this last reflection from Nabokov on reading and re-reading. 

See you in the pages…

Good Readers and Good Writers

Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is—a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed)—a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.

Vladimir Nabokov, 1948

N.B. The complete essay is gorgeous, and it’s hard to just choose one passage or line!

The search for Utopia

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Photo by Matt Palmer on Unsplash

In troubled times we all hope for better things. The current state of the world and its problems – global warming, pandemics, political extremism, economic crises to name just a few – lead many of us to speculate with dread about a dystopian future.

So, could there be a better time to reflect on the concept of Utopia, the perfect and ideal state?  Seductive but unobtainable, what did Thomas More, the originator of Utopia (literally ‘no place’) really mean when he wrote his most famous work, published in 1516? How much have things changed over the centuries? How much can they change when the fundamentals of human nature and motivation remain the same?

Vivien Kogut’s four-week exploration of Thomas More’s Utopia will discuss society, power and freedom. Subjects of relevance in the sixteenth century remain just as topical in today’s world: social inequality, individual freedom, the motivation of politicians, how to limit power.

Ultimately the study will consider whether a more egalitarian society is viable, what would an ideal world look like and where we are today.

Vivien Kogut’s Thomas More’s Utopia (part of a series on The Renaissance through texts and objects) begins on 18 October 2022.

Remembering Javier Marias

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Writer, translator and journalist

Photo: Javier Marias, Wikimedia Commons

20 September 1951 – 11 September 2022

I had the wonderful opportunity to study two of the works of Javier Marías in Valencia in the years before the pandemic. Veteran Salonista Robin Tottenham hosted our gatherings on her lovely terrace overlooking Valencia’s glorious Mercado Centrale; Salonistas Keith Fosbrook and Ellie Ferguson had been emphatic in their urging me to dive into the works of Marías—and I am so glad that I did.

At first, I struggled to get a grip on his aesthetic vision. With his works, I often felt that I was a voyeur observing the lives of contemporary people struggling in spaces of passion and betrayal—his characters felt like people I had come to know, the entanglements dramatic but recognisably arising from all-too-common blindspots in human behaviour. But the work of studying Marías with a committed group paid off: I came to understand that what Marías offers is an acute understanding of how human consciousness is revealed in all the forces that press upon our fragile integrity: desire, history, injustice, guilt, betrayal…and how we employ narrative to give a shape to what has happened—even when we cannot shape what has happened into coherence. 

I think this quote from a Guardian article on Marías in 2013 gives a sense of his profound probing: 

“As a columnist I write as citizen and maybe have too many opinions” – he has published a whole book of just his football articles – “but writing as a novelist is different. I don’t like the journalistic kind of novel which is now rather fashionable. If a book or film takes a good subject from the everyday press – say domestic murders in Spain, which are a historic disgrace – everyone will applaud, but it is easy applause. Who will say it is bad? People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes’. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable. You find this in Proust, who is one of the cruellest authors in the history of literature. He says terrible things, but in such a way that you know that you have experienced those thoughts too.”

Nicholas Wroe, The Guardian, 22 February 2013

We have lost a wonderful writer and philosopher in the death of Javier Marías. I hope to re-visit the works I have read and expand my knowledge of his writings in the coming year. I am grateful to Robin, Ellie and Keith who inspired the Marías studies—and I look forward to more. 

“Marías also wrote movingly about old age, and cast an unflinching eye on male-female relationships. The novels often begin with a shocking scene – an unexplained suicide, the sudden death in bed of a lover, a complex love triangle – plunging reader and narrator into the plot-to-be.

The main characters are often translators or interpreters – or, latterly, spies – people who have renounced their own voices, but who are also, in a sense, interpreters of people, which is, of course, precisely what any good novelist aspires to be. In Your Face Tomorrow, the narrator, Deza, is recruited to become exactly that, “an interpreter of people”, whose job it is to write detailed reports on the people he has seen only in videos or via a two-way mirror.”

Margaret Julla Costa, The Guardian, Obituary 15 September 2022

Why read The Secret Agent in 2022?

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“Nobody looked at him. He passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”

― Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent

With so many books available in a multiplicity of forms, and the impossibility of reading everything we might be attracted to, why pick up The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad?

Conrad has long been admired and loved by readers and we may wish to see for ourselves why this is so. For me, he has an unusual and arresting literary style, a penetrating, realistic (some say pessimistic) view of human behaviour and experience, offering analysis on both individual and socio-political levels. He has outstanding, sometimes complex, narrative powers and a persuasive empathetic understanding.

On a less general level, some features of Conrad’s writing serve to define his sensibility as modern and of clear relevance to our twenty-first century preoccupations. Globalisation was getting into its stride as he wrote his tales, and they are saturated with issues which still concern us today. His profound confrontation of terrorism, racism, colonialism, alienation and the power of international capitalism often appears startlingly prescient. From his writer’s desk, he reflected on the rapidly changing world of his time, drawing on his early experiences on board the ships which facilitated the development of intercontinental communications.

Living at a time of such rapid innovations, he was profoundly aware of flux and change in human life. A child of the nineteenth century, he was stunned by the discovery of entropy, and the concomitant view of our earth as a planet which will eventually wind down and die rather than being preternaturally favoured by a benevolent divine being. In Conrad’s lifetime the so-called ‘Death of God’, trumpeted by Nietzsche, was still a fledgling idea, jostling to establish itself. In adopting the positivist stance of his time and a non-religious viewpoint, Conrad faces towards the twentieth century. He lived when the times they were a-changing, and this is reflected in his creative response to developments in the novelistic arts. Some critics, rather patronisingly, think of him (along with Henry James) as forming a bridge between realism and modernism, condescendingly suggesting that he is neither one thing nor the other. They seem to regret that he cannot be pigeon-holed more precisely!

Finally, there are also some very specific reasons for reading this book now. A terrorist action is at its heart, and many contemporary readers – made shockingly aware of terrorism in our own century – have turned for enlightenment to Conrad’s novel. Whether they have found it, I cannot say, but the instinct of turning to literature in the hope of gaining some understanding of such a disturbing phenomenon seems to me to be a good one. I am also convinced by my reading of both this book and Under Western Eyes that Joseph Conrad, if magically resurrected today, would instantly recognise Putin’s strategy and sense an astonishing continuity in Russia’s current foreign policy.

But, we are talking about a work of the imagination and we can never be sure where it may lead us. The central character in Conrad’s novel is a refugee/immigrant, trying to forge an identity for himself in a strange country. This is, of course, rather like Conrad himself, but current preoccupations may mean that the themes of immigration and identity strike us more strongly than any others. Who knows? The only way to find out is to read this extraordinary book . . .

Keith Fosbrook will facilitate a five-week study of The Secret Agent starting on 4 October.

On Reading and Writing Together

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I never saw a moor,
I never saw the sea,
Yet I know how the heather looks
And what a wave must be.

Emily Dickinson

Photo by Tim Marshall on Unsplash

We’re all writers. Take a moment and think about the writing you do each day — a caption for your Instagram photo, a text to a friend, a work e-mail. See, you’re already writing to tell stories, build relationships, and plan your future.

Expressive writing helps you channel what you already know how to do. You have permission to discard the rules, play with words, and discover new and powerful insights through its imaginative process. And it’s good for you, like yoga for your mind. In fact, a robust body of peer-reviewed research proves it (benefits like enhancing mood and improving physical health, setting life goals, reducing PTSD symptoms, easing stress, and sparking creativity). 

And what better way to spark our writing than reading poetry out loud together?  First we hear it – its tempo, rhythm and cadences; then we see it – its images in the mind’s eye; finally we sense its possible meanings – metaphors full of delicious ambiguity. We don’t need to come to any conclusions as long as something stirs within us.

Whatever we discover through our reading and writing, sharing it with others is to engage, to connect, to be heard, and to hear.  We loiter in the gaps as well.  There’s no perfect communication, but as we linger in each other’s metaphors, in the meaning we make between the words, we share connection. This sharing makes us feel better. We know we are not alone.

Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies, including Trees and Us beginning on 26 April.

Paying Attention: Virginia Woolf’s ‘Kew Gardens’

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I’ve been thinking a lot about close reading, the kind we do at LitSalon, not the lazy before-bed turning of pages or the rushed speed read of the latest bestseller. The world rushes past us, dips and dodges like a butterfly, but we often fail to notice the markings on its wings. For me, attentive reading can be my moment of watching the butterfly, attending to it. 

In Kew Gardens Virginia Woolf is paying attention to moments where the human and natural worlds intermingle.  The “zig-zag flights” of butterflies are not unlike the random movements of people through the gardens, all the while a snail slogs linearly toward its goal.  We readers are given the opportunity to pause and relish the details — flashes of colour and snatches of conversations — for example, eavesdropping on a married couple contemplating past lovers:

“How the dragonfly kept circling round us: how clearly I see the dragonfly and her shoe with the square silver buckle at the toe. All the time I spoke I saw her shoe and when it moved impatiently I knew without looking up what she was going to say: the whole of her seemed to be in her shoe. And my love, my desire, were in the dragonfly.”

Photo by Bob Brewer on Unsplash

Woolf’s painterly style invites us to contemplate the words visually, and in these moments at Kew Gardens are distilled a thousand dreams — the human and natural worlds collide in an image where dragonflies contain passions and people are the garden:

“Yellow and black, pink and snow white, shapes of all these colours, men, women, and children were spotted for a second upon the horizon, and then, seeing the breadth of yellow that lay upon the grass, they wavered and sought shade beneath the trees, dissolving like drops of water in the yellow and green atmosphere, staining it faintly with red and blue.”

At LitSalon, we practise and celebrate slow reading as a communal act as well as individual activity. Committing to a study is committing to close reading, collaborative meaning-making, and the idea that great thinkers and beautiful words deserve our close attention, our time together. Noticing these fine details is the opposite of scrolling through Twitter, rushing past the rose garden.  And great words open up opportunities for conversations we wouldn’t normally have these days.

Yes, it can be hard to make the time for slow reading, but whenever I do, I’m always grateful. And I feel better, ecstatic even.  Indeed, it’s not a new idea that reading can increase our well-being and restore our zest for living. In his article The Reading Cure, Blake Morrison writes:

“Plato said that the muses gave us the arts not for “mindless pleasure” but “as an aid to bringing our soul-circuit, when it has got out of tune, into order and harmony with itself”. It’s no coincidence that Apollo is the god of both poetry and healing; nor that hospitals or health sanctuaries in ancient Greece were invariably situated next to theatres, most famously at Epidaurus, where dramatic performances were considered part of the cure. When Odysseus is wounded by a boar, his companions use incantations to stop the bleeding.”

Blake Morrison, The Guardian, January 2008

It seems to me that now, more than ever, we can use the kind of healing that comes with careful reading, and that we can benefit from making the time to pay attention. Revisiting the words together expands our understanding, increases empathy, and reduces loneliness — we share assumptions and learn from each other’s reactions. We connect.

Alison Cable is a facilitator at the London Literary Salon, she is currently leading a series of Writing for Wellbeing studies.

Returning to Paris, October 2021

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Every visit to Paris is an encounter with the inexhaustible ideal of style. Even though I once lived here, I find myself tipsy with the sights and smells and sheer beauty of it all, even before I sip the crisp Pouilly-Fumé that somehow tastes better in Paris. 

Here, life is lived on the streets in the most swirling and satisfying ways. In this city I am always hungry: the smells of coffee and patisseries surround me as I run along the Canal Saint Martin; on rue Montorgueil we are torn between multiple bistros for dinner, our mouths watering with the possibilities of fresh fish and autumn’s mushroom bounty.

We visit the newly reopened le Musée Carnavalet — the city’s oldest museum, dedicated to celebrating the history of this illuminated city. The current retrospective exposition of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson reminds us how his work is so embedded in the history and vision of Paris that my friend, who thought she was not familiar with his work, kept murmuring, ‘I know this picture . . .’ With his images in my mind, I am thinking about how an artist can shape our idea of a place — Paris becomes the time-misted, complicated, fleeting glimpses that Cartier-Bresson captured: the days of liberation, the children on Paris streets whose poverty does not diminish their intense play, the women walking as though they aren’t being watched, knowing very well they are watched . . . All his images catch moments of motion and hold them frozen in time: I am aware of a tilting skirt, a leaping man, a glance across a room. None of these movements may be remarkable in themselves, but by being captured in the instant they become eternal. In this and many other ways, our visit to the Carnavalet has me thinking about Proust’s explorations. Finding on the rue de Sevigne the entrance to the building that was home to Mme Sevigne, the 17th century journalist beloved by Marcel’s grandmother, is only the start of the threads of connection to Proust. 


Reflecting on the Belle Époque in the Musee Carnavalet

Travelling is different in these pandemic days. Each café requires proof of our vaccinated status; I find this is reassuring. I wonder if I am also newly alive to the allure of foreign spaces and unknown faces. The months of enclosure have made me hungry – and Paris feeds the senses voluptuously. 

Reading Virginia Woolf in St Ives

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Photograph: Janet Minichiello

Having just wrapped an incredible study of The Years in St Ives, I am inspired. We encountered a new book (for me and for the Salon). We were a tentative group — some knew some, some knew none — and all were in the wild and constantly changing weather of St Ives.

Our meeting space was in the wonderful Porthmeor Studios, with windows of stained glass made from the sands of the sea below us. This special space was renovated to honour the rich history of artists and fishermen who have worked and created here for centuries. Now the walls also hold the words of Woolf and the thoughts she inspired in us.

To be together after months of isolation and multiple postponements, to be in the surging air and seas of Cornwall, to face and grapple with Woolf’s contemplation of fragmentation, of breakdown (social, political and domestic), of ‘obdurate language’, to find our way through to our own shared epiphanies in the face of her shards: this is what is so deeply satisfying about these retreats. 

Photographs: Janet Minichiello

In The Years, Woolf tries to use fact to find truth in the expanse of fiction, but this is an uneven attempt from a writer who sings so beautifully the realm of interiority. She experiments — and finds a play between — the snapshots of nature at seasonal moments, the movement between light and shadows, between what we say and what we mean. Setting the work to span the twilight of the Victorian era to the ‘Present Moment’ (unspecified, but most agree 1932), we move with a London family through meals, parties, deaths, war and structural change. There are moments of pure lyric flight and moments interrupted — profound thoughts uncompleted, intense connections unrealised, desires frustrated. For the better part of a week, twelve of us lived with this work, the discussions not stopping after the sessions, but seeping into our dinners, walks and swims. 

It was an incredible experience to be with a group of hungry minds in a beautiful place, as we dug deeply into the complexity and richness of Woolf’s vision. And then there were moments of hilarity: was that an orgasm on the train? Do we need to comment on the stain on the wall? And what’s the fuss about lavatory vs. bath? There were moments of discomfort as we worked to situate the antisemitism that Woolf portrays — is this her own, or her reflecting a difficult world, or the struggle for the artist against the press to speak politically? 

Together, we came to some extraordinary understandings. And then there were rainbows, and Sheila sang . . .

For anyone who fancies joining our next trip to St Ives, we are beginning to plan for Spring 2022. In the meantime, a new study of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway begins on 11 October and there are still places left!

Literature for stressful times . . .

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As September slides in under summer’s fading shadow, I find returning to the depths of literature offers a delicious slowing down after the shifting and frantic days of  this summer with its overwhelming world news. I look for a way to balance the fears and dread of global and local upheavals with a space for hope, inspiration and celebration of the human creative spirit.

One Salonista put it succinctly: “. . . I look forward to seeing you and reading the book which helps me to think deeply rather than be frightened by the daily news.”

Immersion in literature is not to escape, but to find a perspective that is wide enough to hold the chaos of living, to help give context – historical, global – to the individual subjective self that must absorb and flow through the experience of being awake in this world, at this moment.

This autumn’s Salon Studies offer a sumptuous feast to support, expand and sometimes soothe the troubled mind. We have expanded our offerings to give choices in length of courses and cost, approach, focus, genre and historical perspective.  In our recent facilitators’ meeting, we discussed developing studies that connect and build on one another – studies which can stand alone but are also linked thematically,  developing ideas and understanding of particular strands of literature.

The coming study of Ulysses (starting January 2022, as we approach the centenary of its first publication) offers an opportunity for this kind of interconnected study: this huge book that is both the peak of modernist literature and one of the great unread books, is interwoven with other great works. Joyce used Homer’s Odyssey – often humorously – as a reference point and scaffold upon which to weave his tale of a scruffy and sensitive modern hero who echoes Odysseus in unexpected ways. Ulysses also repeatedly echoes Shakespeare’s Hamlet both thematically and in exploring the perennial question of the relationship between the artist and their vision. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man may be seen as the prequel to Ulysses – giving the reader background to Stephen Dedalus and his struggles, as well as introducing us to Joyce’s experiments in language and style.

We will be offering studies of The Odyssey, Hamlet (soliloquies) and Portrait this autumn. If you are joining the Centenary Study of Ulysses, any or all of these courses would be valuable but, of course, you don’t need to be preparing for Ulysses to enjoy these extraordinary works!

See you in the pages…

Toby Brothers,
Salon Director

Indigenous Peoples in Canada: A Reflection on Art and Self-Reflection

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LLS facilitator Julie Sutherland lives and teaches in Canada. Please note, some of the details in this reflective piece are distressing.

Photograph: First Nations Women, Act On Climate March

How can art teach us? How can it help us unfurl into a more exposed, humane and empathetic version of ourselves? This short piece provides a brief summary of Indigenous Peoples (known in the United States as Native Americans) and considers how art may offer us insight into the lives of the first human inhabitants of the lands to which my ancestors came.

When I say ‘Indigenous Peoples’, I am referring to the first human inhabitants of the lands now called Canada, many of whom have lived on, and in relationship with, these lands since time immemorial. Pre-European contact, ‘North America’ was home to as many as 112 million Indigenous People. However, within a century of Christopher Columbus having arrived on these lands, that number was reduced by as much as 90% – a sobering result of violent displacement, disease and what Canada has now formally recognized as genocide. Officially, Canada recognizes three distinct groups of Indigenous Peoples: First Nations (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Indians’ by white settlers); Inuit (originally, and now offensively, called ‘Eskimos’ by white settlers); and Métis (individuals of mixed Indigenous and European ancestry). Indigenous Peoples are resilient. Today, they are the youngest and fastest-growing population in Canada.

The Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, which is located on the traditional and unceded lands of the Coast Salish peoples, is popularly referred to as ‘the poorest postal code in Canada’. While this isn’t quite accurate, a stroll down East Hastings Street reveals more heartbreak than the average middle class resident of any ‘Western’ country would usually encounter in a lifetime of strolling through their own neighbourhoods. Indigenous Peoples comprise less than 5% of the population in Canada; Vancouver’s DTES has the highest Indigenous population in the city, at 31%.

An extremely high number (over 50%) of the street-based survival sex workers (those who trade in sex out of dire need) in the DTES identify as Indigenous. Between 1978 and 2001, at least 65 women, many of them sex workers, disappeared from this neighbourhood. In a jailcell confession, Robert ‘Willie’ Pickton, a pig farmer and serial killer from a nearby suburb, claimed he had killed nearly 50 women in the neighbourhood, though he was only officially charged with the murder of 26. In 2007, a jury found him guilty on six counts of second-degree murder and he is now serving a life sentence in prison. An official inquiry in the matter identified ineptitude by police and prejudice against racialized peoples as two of several explanations for the delay in apprehending Robert Pickton. The case was a turning point in the nation’s recognition of the tragic issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls not just in Vancouver but also across Canada.

Sarah de Vries was one of the 33 women whose remains or DNA were found on Robert Pickton’s pig farm. Sarah was a poet and artist of mixed-race descent, including First Nations, who lived in Vancouver. She was last seen April 12, 1998. In one of her poems, she asked, ‘Will they remember me when I’m gone / or would their lives just carry on?’

We remember. Sarah was a daughter, a sister, a mother. Her disappearance broke their hearts, and mine. I lived in Vancouver’s DTES and worked for many years for different organizations that aimed to support the lives of survival sex workers in the area. I spent hundreds of hours on the streets with these women, and in safe houses, hearing their stories. I also heard the remarks of others who, not understanding or knowing these women, said hurtful, hateful things about how these women brought this on themselves, how they deserved no better than disease, rape, death. How ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’. I watched cars go by, hurtling raw eggs and bags of human excrement at the women’s bodies, heads, hearts. I saw them held at knifepoint. I looked at photos of their children and visited them in hospital when they gave birth. I saw them ‘tweaking’, overdosing, dying. I also saw them singing, laughing, living.

Reading another of Sarah’s poems presents an opportunity for us to understand ways in which art – and in this case, poetry – can, however disturbing, help readers to learn, reflect, grow and change. It demonstrates how poetry can expose us to new perspectives and encourage us to think about ourselves in relation to the world around us.

Woman’s body found beaten beyond recognition
You sip your coffee
Taking a drag of your smoke
Turning the page
Taking a bite of your toast
Just another day
Just another death
Just one more thing you so easily forget
You and your soft, sheltered life
Just go on and on
For nobody special from your world is gone
Just another day
Just another death
Just another Hastings Street whore
Sentenced to death

Sarah de Vries, (used with the kind permission of Maggie de Vries)

A poem like Sarah’s may conjure up many negative emotions. We may react in myriad ways. An easy, and understandable, reaction might be defensiveness. How dare she tell us we don’t care? Who is she to attack us anyway? If this is our experience, we might try to reflect on it. Why have we reacted defensively? Is it because there might be some truth to what she says? Have we ever written someone off because of our preconceived notions of their identities?

Such an awareness may lead us to consider our own positions vis-à-vis Sarah’s and try to see ourselves from her point of view. Can she help us to reflect on our own apathy? If we conclude we are not personally apathetic, can she lead us to contemplate apathy (or worse, active racism, sexism, etc.) at systemic and structural levels – perhaps at the levels of media, healthcare, justice, child welfare and education? How can we find more out about lives such as Sarah’s? What else can we read? Who can we listen to? Who can help us shed our prejudices and inspire us to work toward a more equitable, just, caring society?

The self-reflection that creative writing can inspire may be a compelling reason for engaging with ‘off-putting’ art. Critics of this kind of reading may say compositions like Sarah’s fall into the genre of ‘misery lit’ or ‘misery porn’, that is, writing in which central characters endure great hardship. They may say we as readers are merely revelling in the horrors of others. But, in fact, there is a well established body of research that has found that reading all kinds of literature has transformative power. If the studies don’t convince you, look into your heart. Has it changed because of the art you’ve encountered? Has it made you reflect? Has it made you grow? Keep reading.

Copies of Julie Sutherland’s forthcoming book: Bright Poems for Dark Days: An Anthology for Hope (to be published in November, available in Canada, the UK, the US and Australia) can now be pre-ordered. See here for more information.

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