Pleasures, 2022
by Sarah Tolmie
I taught Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century dream vision poem upon which a shocking amount of my life’s work to date is based, for the first time in a decade in 2022. Reading a poem as complex as Piers with the view to teaching it tends to eclipse much other reading for pleasure. And it’s worth saying here — and everywhere in our hard-book-hating-world — that re-reading Langland’s magnum opus, on which he (probably) spent an erratic lifetime in the later Middle Ages, remains a pleasure. Re-reading it after multiple go-rounds (it’s a circular poem) is actually a supreme pleasure: it’s the kind of work, as one critic put it, “that should never be read for the first time.” The fact remains: Piers Plowman is the most gripping, bizarre, immersive and cognitively real book/experience (one that is so fucked up that it feels like your life) that I read this year. This will be true, I can almost guarantee, any year that I read it.
Closer to the contemporary world, I discovered Shirley Jackson. This is as belated a claim as Columbus’s discovery of America, I realize. Shirley was already there. Oh yes. I’d just like to add my voice to the thousands of living writers who are in awe at her mastery, particularly at the novella length. We Have Always Lived in the Castle was a revelation to me. It certainly showed me the lineage of all the spooky spunky YA heroines with which our age is littered, and was a wonderful riposte to Welty’s Why I Live at the P.O., a story I have always felt was overrated.
Three books by people I actually know were influential on me this year. One is the collected works of the Caribbean-Canadian poet Pamela Mordecai, A Fierce Green Place, which came out in 2022 with New Directions. It should be on every best-of list this year. In fact, it’s weird that it isn’t. She has hitherto published mostly with small presses. We have a lot of shit-hot Caribbean writers in Canada, especially women, and I think that Pam gets drowned out by some of the bigger names (Dionne Brand, Olive Senior, and so on) when, in fact, she’s better than any of them.
Helen Marshall’s collection The Gold Leaf Executions, which was due out in October but was delayed by her publisher and should be out soon, was a work I read as an ARC. It spans about the last decade of her career as a short story writer and it is terrific. It was also a work that hit me, personally, at exactly the right time: I have never really written fiction set today, nor anything autobiographical (though I do so all the time as a poet, now that I think about it). Several of Helen’s protagonists in Executions are medievalists, editors, and/or itinerant learned people generally (which designations reflect my background as well as hers) and suddenly I felt that it was okay to do that kind of reveal; I set straight-off writing a new collection of short fiction, Sacraments for the Unfit, which Timmi will be publishing on July 1, 2023.
Also crucial to this just-completed book was my friend Tanis MacDonald’s hilarious memoir Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female. This book, typical of everything of hers I have ever read, is both hard-hitting and a total scream; it takes a sardonic poke at rugged, male, outdoorsy memoirs of the hill-walking-and-existential-musing type. I recommend all three of these very different books wholeheartedly to all.
I am watching the new episodes of His Dark Materials with great happiness. I feared that The Golden Compass would become a CGI action nightmare but so far, so good. There are some casting decisions that I can’t get behind (I don’t need to see Lin-Manuel Miranda ever again, frankly) and they have had to dumb it down for people who haven’t read Milton, but aside from these inevitable problems, it’s great; the young leads are doing a great job carrying the can on what is, after all, a superb story.
Our family Christmas re-watch this year, controversially, is the 1966-7 Soviet War and Peace. This remains one of the best movies (film series, I guess, really, though it feels more unified than that) I have ever seen, and the single best book-to-cinema adaptation. While being interestingly stylized in itself, and of its own moment, it is absolutely note-perfect to Tolstoy’s original, a feat all the more remarkable given its completely morally unacceptable status to the regime. My husband’s family is Ukrainian and nobody is feeling anything less than loathing for Putin and his oligarchy right now, but at the same time we decided that boycotting great works of art of the past because of insane contemporary wars makes no sense. This great Russian-language Soviet showpiece was directed by, and stars, a Ukrainian (Sergei Bondarchuk), after all. Best we can do in the moment.
Merry Christmas under all this snow, and best wishes to all for 2023!
Sacraments for the Unfit, which Aqueduct will be releasing in 2023, will be Sarah Tolmie’s sixth book with Aqueduct Press. Others include The Stone Boatmen, nominated for the Crawford Award in 2015, and The Little Animals, winner of the Special Citation at the Philip K Dick Awards in 2020. In addition to publishing short fiction, novellas and novels with Aqueduct, she has released two novellas with Tor.com, The Fourth Island and All the Horses of Iceland; the latter was listed as one of the top fantasy books of 2022 by The New York Times. She has also written three volumes of poetry for McGill-Queen’s University Press; the second one, The Art of Dying, was a finalist for the 2019 Griffin Prize for Poetry. In her other life, she is a Professor of English at the University of Waterloo. Her website is sarahtolmie.ca.
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