lousy smarch weather

Welcome to Haunts and Hobbies, a monthly dispatch from yours truly that I will largely be using to document stuff I'm up to and also wax digressive about topics that don't fit neatly into any of the other stuff I'm doing.  

This month I had the distinct pleasure of collaborating with my beloved friend and fellow Gemini femme (femmini? Is that anything?) Zena Sharman on the launch of her debut memoir Staying Power: On Queerness, Inheritances, and the Families We Choose. We did four events together, in Vancouver, Victoria, Duncan, and Nanaimo, and every single one was special and unique and heartwarming. Zena always made a point of reminding audiences of the importance of supporting public libraries and independent bookstores, so in that spirit I want to specifically shout out the Vancouver Public Library, Iron Dog Books in Vancouver, Munro’s Books in Victoria, Volume One Bookstore in Duncan, and Windowseat Books in Nanaimo. Honestly, if all I ever had to do was talk to cool smart people I love about books in front of attentive queer audiences in libraries and independent bookstores I would be happy and fulfilled forever. Someone please make this into a job! And then give that job to me! 

I also got to meet various podcast listeners and even sign a few copies of my own books, Clever Girl: Jurassic Park and A Sentimental Education, which is always a delight. Neither of them are new books anymore, and new books are often the only ones that get attention. But I love these two little brain babies of mine (gross) and it always gives me a lovely tender feeling when someone is willing to take a chance on one of them!

Over in podcast world, here's what came out this month:

Looking for some fun stuff to do in April? If you're Vancouver-based, here are a couple of recs:  

• Fat Joke, a stand-up comedy and storytelling show about fatphobia and fat joy, is coming back to Vancouver. I missed it the first time around, so I'm stoked to finally see it! It's playing at the Presentation House Theatre in North Van from April 16 to 18. Get your tickets here!
• My pal Daniel Zomparelli is launching his debut novel Super Castle Fun Park on Thursday, April 23rd at Iron Dog Books! The launch will be hosted by Dina Del Bucchia, and when Dina and Daniel get together you are guaranteed a rowdy good time. Reserve your spot here. I will tragically be missing this launch because I'll be away at Disneyland, so please go in my stead if you can.

I finally finished Robin Hobb’s Fool’s Errand this month. It was a slow read for me, not because I didn’t enjoy it but because I found it intensely devastating and I don’t have a lot of room in my life for intense devastation over and above my daily doses of working within a crumbling postsecondary sector, supporting my community through illness and crisis, and bearing witness to endless atrocities! In the end I was very glad that I made myself push through the hard bits because it resolved so beautifully, in a way that was ultimately very nourishing and perfect for living through a period of crisis and change. This was my first ever Robin Hobb, and it was much for Tolkien-esque (read: slow and thick with detail) than I'm used to in contemporary fantasy, but the result (for me, at least) was that I became intensely invested in the protagonist's interiority. Hence the devastation.

Immediately after finishing Fool’s Errand I gobbled down Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett in a few sittings. Agnes Aubert’s Mystical Cat Shelter, which I shall henceforth be calling AAMCS because I'm lazy, is like Howl’s Moving Castle meets Sarah Beth Durst’s The Spell Shop but with way more cats. Reading these two books back-to-back, I arrived at the following takeaway: coziness is much more gratifying, at a narrative level, when it feels earned. AAMCS falls into the general category of low-stakes cozy fantasy: the character arcs tend to be something like lonely-to-less-lonely or sad-to-less sad, there are casual gestures to inclusivity that sometimes feel tokenistic because they’re there mostly for vibe, and the setting is more about creating fun scenes than really sinking into the texture and complexity of the place. AAMCS is supposedly set in a fantasy version of 1920s Montreal but it's more like a fantasy setting with the vibe of Montreal (beautiful old stone buildings, lots of French bakeries, some light bilingualism, one scene unnecessarily set at a winter festival) and some shared street names. It’s a 1920s with gay marriage, trap-neuter-return cat shelters, and absolutely no concerns about women running businesses. And that’s all well and good: as soon as you add magic to a historical setting, I truly believe you have carte blanche (light bilingualism!) to change that setting however you want, and why not change it to make it more inclusive, to argue against the purported inevitability of certain social injustices? But the result is a setting with very little texture or specificity, and characters that move through that setting like they’re spending the day at the ren faire rather than really living in a place. 

I couldn't help but contrast this low-stakes coziness with the final scene of Fool’s Errand, where an exhausted and grieving Fitz is welcomed into a friend’s home to sit in front of a fire with a cat in his lap and a cup of tea by his side. The visceral relief I felt reading this scene—at last, at last, he is warm, he is loved, he is offered a moment of physical comfort and tenderness—moved me to tears. I can still feel that scene in my chest. I finished reading AAMCS last night and I had to struggle just now to remember what happens in the final scene. All of which is to say: I guess I get out of books what I put into them, and reading something a little more harrowing, while it often takes me a while, is also more emotionally satisfying. Huge if true. 

Lest you think I’m ragging on coziness, the other thing I’ve been doing this month is rewatching Parks and Recreation while replaying Wytchwood. This is an absolutely perfect pairing for an “everything is stressful oh my god oh my god” time. Parks and Rec makes a great rewatch because the characters grow in such satisfying and earned ways across the seasons, and for the most part the jokes have aged well. I do hate the recurring bit about how fat the residents of Pawnee are and how they all have diabetes, because those jokes are fatphobic and ableist and unsupported by basically any actual fat people on the screen; like, if you’re going to make us the butts of all your jokes, at least give us some fucking work, y’know? But I could watch Amy Poehler and Nick Offerman as Leslie and Ron for a million hours. And Wytchwood is exactly what I want in a cozy game: good writing, beautiful to look at, but a very simple mechanic of gathering ingredients and crafting things. If you have any recommendations for cozy resource-management-style Switch games I am always here for them. Other favourites include Spiritfarer, Tiny Bookshop, Cozy Grove, Cult of the Lamb, A Short Hike, Unpacking, Gris, A Night in the Woods, and of course Stardew Valley.

That's it! That's my newsletter! I mostly wrote it for me but I hope you enjoyed it as well! See you next month! This is a lot of exclamation marks! But I'm not getting rid of any of them!!!!!!!!