Published on March 30, 2006
published in Poets & Writers magazine, March/April 2006
MOUNTAINS thick with tropical vegetation rise behind the coastal town of Parati, Brazil; the bay spreads before it, dotted with fishing boats. Along the old wooden docks, fishermen, shirtless and shoeless, prepare their nets with quick, strong hands. In streets paved with oversized cobblestones, women serve doces, sweets like maracujá (passion fruit) tarts made with condensed milk. Parati—which, until the 1970s, was accessible only by boat—lies equidistant from Brazil’s major cities, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, and is home to the last of Brazilian royalty. it is known throughout Brazil as somewhere special, a retreat and an oasis…. Continue reading about Festa Literaria Internacional de Parati (PDF format).
in Brazil, Events, Features, Poets & Writers, Travel and Who I Write For.
Published on February 22, 2006
Joelle Hann writes about her family roots in curry, pomegranate martinis, and the etymology of “asafoetida”–an apparently stinky ingredient that the French call “Devil’s Shit”, and which holds the secret to vegetarian Indian cooking.
My mother was born in New Delhi, India, on midsummer night’s eve—-June 24—-1940. World War II was raging in the Western world, and India was not far from declaring its independence from Britain. Her parents worked for the Lord and Lady Viceroy to India, and had been living in India for some time, her mother as the seamstress, and her father, a Rolls Royce engineer, as the chauffeur.
Although they were servants, my grandparents had servants themselves. My mother had an ayah, or nannie, to tend to her, and no doubt the ayah took my mother along on visits to the Viceroy’s kitchen when she went looking for snacks, gossip, and companionship. It was in the steamy subcontinental kitchen that my mother acquired her love for the pungent aromas of Indian cooking, and, as an adult with a family of her own, she frequently recreated the meals she remembered so fondly from childhood. (My mother and my grandparents were eventually evacuated from India by the British Army in 1946).
Continue reading ‘My Mother & Making Curry’
in Essays, Features, Food, Relationships and The Paupered Chef.
Published on December 15, 2004
Artist and writer, Kim White, has been blogging about fables recently and asked me to submit a story I wrote a few years ago.
Bill Reid’s “Raven”
She writes, paraphrasing me (!),
“This blog focuses on fables, but when Joelle Hann submitted, “The Sun Rises and Sets on You,” a modern update on the Haida myth, “Raven Steals the Light,” I couldn’t resist putting it up on the site. Joelle recasts the old man as a disgruntled, out-of-work banker holding the light of the world hostage in his shoe. New York City and all of its inhabitants toil away in darkness, while he refuses to let go of his treasure. The Rasco tricks him out of his little bit of wealth and scatters it to the wind. Joelle says she wrote this years ago, but given our current financial crisis, her retelling of this ancient folktale seems prescient.
Continue reading ‘The Sun Rises and Sets on You’
in Fiction.
Published on January 11, 2000
I can’t resist a challenge, and as I meet the challenge of living in New York, I become more and more settled here. I live in Brooklyn now, in an old Italian house, in a Dominican neighborhood. I’ve got an authentic New York State driver’s license, a dot.com job, a boyfriend, and a new immigration visa.Of course, it’s at this time that I’ve also begun to be wracked with homesickness. I ache to see the west coast. I yearn for long summer nights, late salmon barbecues on the beach, ocean kayaking and the smell of budlea, lilac and pine sweet on the night air. It could be the time of year: Canada is gorgeous in the summer. Or, perhaps it is time to go home?
It started a few weeks ago, when, sick in bed with a cold, I snuggled down with The New Yorker to read Jonathan Raban’s article, “Sailing into the Sublime, the Infidelity of Travel.” I opened it up, excited to see my part of the world represented. After my initial elation, and to my own astonishment, on opening up the magazine, I burst into jealous tears. It became intolerable that anyone else could be sailing up the west coast of Canada. It seemed especially unfair that miserable me-sick, and too poor as a recent graduate student to buy a ticket west-had to suffer the smelly, roasting, concrete-jungle summer in New York while this Englishman enjoyed himself on my islands.
I mopped up my tears, and took a look at what he had to say.
Continue reading ‘Infidelity’
in Essays and Travel.
Published on March 11, 1999
One hot and dusty August, I drove to California. It was 1994, I drove alone, not quite happy but willing to pretend otherwise. Why was I doing this? Where was I really going? What did it all mean? Acres of trellised vines lined the highway; the sun’s strength made the vineyards of Marin County quiver. My destination: Napa Valley Writer’s Festival. Ahead of me a long line of cars snaked through the fields, their drivers came to taste the local wines. I sang along to Iris Dement with the window rolled down.
I attended two dozen or more readings in less than a week. Each night I drove to another vineyard, gathered with other young poets, marveled at the estates (my favorite was the Franciscan Monastery), and drank the free wine. Still, the readings, given by distinguished American poets, bored me. I couldn’t shake my need to act 16, drive fast and blast music, shifting into 5th gear on the highway above San Francisco, as the hot wind blew though my hair. I spent much of my time at readings doodling on a tablet of yellow legal paper. I ached to find a something other than what I was hearing–but what? California seemed dry. In in a county spilling with wine, I didn’t feel intoxicated.
Continue reading ‘Reading Brenda Hillman’
in Essays.
Published on June 16, 1997
Sleeping Weather by Cary Fagan Published by Porcupine’s Quill
Leon Stone, Cary Fagan’s leading man in Sleeping Weather, is a Toronto character who’s spent some time in Kingston penetentiary and who urgently wants an explanation for his childhood. Fagan gives him lots of emotional snarls to untangle: a daughter he’d clearly die for, a forgiving marriage (which he feels undeserving of), a business that eerily mimics his father’s, and a new neighbour named Vasily who reminds Leon (reluctantly) of himself. As Leon moves through his daily joys and trials, the contrast between his adult satisfaction in marriage and his devastation as a son grows starker.
Continue reading ‘Sleeping Weather, by Cary Fagan (book)’
in Books and Quill & Quire.
Published on November 16, 1996
Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing by Joanne ArnottPublished by Press Gang
Joanne Arnott in Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing writes with great effort, feeling her way toward expression and sense without giving her life away as if it were in the “miscellaneous” box at a garage sale. Arnott begins and ends with her story of being held hostage and beaten by a man she met on her way to university. The meaning of “hostage” (but not “victim”) is questioned over and over in the book as Arnott remembers growing up female, Métis and abused. She approaches herself respectfully. The essays blur seminar-style information and fiction-style narrative; but straight fiction might have allowed her more intensity. Also, the title of this book undermines Arnott’s seriousness with an unnecessary play on words. And while I loved the shape and feel of the cover, the image seemed wrong; at first glance it made me skeptical of the contents.
Geist Magazine, Issue #21
in Books and Geist.
Published on April 16, 1996
Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality by Donna Laframboise Published by Penguin
If you watch TV or read the popular press, you probably know more about the rebellion against feminism than you do about feminism itself. Nay-sayers to the women’s movement have been popular since Camille Paglia, queen of provocation, cleared the way in 1990. Most of these books that promise to throw a wrench in the works of social change, including Toronto Star columnist Donna Laframboise’s The Princess at the Window, are being issued by big houses (Kate Fillion’s recent and much-excerpted Lip Service from HarperCollins; Katie Roiphe’s Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism from Little, Brown; Wendy Dennis’s Hot and Bothered: Sex and Love in the 90s from Key Porter) perhaps because they promise high sales due to their controversy. These books are quintessential pop-psychology, café talk dressed up as exposé and inquiry, the sort of stuff pop-culture loves. Their writing masquerades as intelligent rumination on the nature of things (in this case feminism) for those of us who don’t have the time or attention spans to read the real thing.
Continue reading ‘Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality’
in Books and Quill & Quire.
Published on January 16, 1996
Lonesome Monsters by Bud OsbornPublished by Anvil
Speaking of jarring but effective writing, Bud Osborn’s Lonesome Monsters (Anvil) successfully dramatizes the harsher side of urban life. This book, though it doesn’t break new ground in form or content, depicts the Main-and-Hastingses of North America in unpretentious and straightforward poems. The modesty with which each poem is constructed underscores the sadness and despair that their characters feel. Osborn’s sense of humour and his portraits of violence, exploitation and heartache, easy to overdo, survive my distaste for melodrama and even survive the text’s unflattering typeface. Apparently Osborn’s been writing for twenty-five years. Where has he been all this time?
Geist Magazine, Issue #22
in Books and Geist.
Published on November 16, 1995
Self By Yann MartelPublished by Knopf Canada
Yann Martel’s novel Self (Knopf), seems aptly titled for a book that depicts a character growing from childhood into adulthood. Martel’s first book, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, kept me on my couch for chapter after chapter with tears in my eyes. Self displays Martel’s breadth of knowledge, his skill at prose and his lovely imagination. In spite of this, it has been resting at the bottom of my bedside reading pile with a bookmark stuck in about a third of the way through for at least a month now. Continue reading ‘Self by Yann Martel’
in Books and Geist.
Published on November 16, 1995
My Messy Bedroom by Josey VogelsPublished by Véhicule Press
I like good deals but sometimes a good tip will serve the same purpose. I was happy to find in Josey Vogels’s My Messy Bedroom (Véhicule Press) an intriguing tip on buying bras. In the chapter called “Booby Trap” she answers the question I’ve always had: how do you find a bra that does the job it’s supposed to? My mother tended to shoo me into the teen section and leave me there while she stood on the sidelines with her handbag. The bargain aisles of Eaton’s and the Bay haven’t taught me much about how a bra should fit or what it should feel like when it’s doing its job. The chapter’s opening sentence gives the store’s coordinates: “Thee Lingerie Shoppe on Hamilton Street in Regina” and the next time I’m in Saskatchewan I plan to drop by. Vogels’s chatter in favour of well-fitted bras is worth reading too, and helped banish the sugar-high feeling I got from reading her “fun” journalistic prose.
Geist Magazine, Issue #21
in Books and Geist.
Published on May 16, 1994
Tokyo Cowboy by Kathy Garneau (a film review)
Canada Post hired me in January, and at first I worked at a station in my own neighbourhood, meaning I left my house at 6:48 a.m. to arrive at 6:52 a.m. Life seemed fair; I could have been posted in the suburbs. It lasted only two weeks, but back in those days, feeling optimistic, I went to see Tokyo Cowboy, Kathy Garneau’s first feature film, in which one of the characters is a postie in full regalia—blue jacket, grey pants and navy blue satchel, embodying all that I had yet to become: fully uniformed, excellent at sorting his mail and familiar with all the houses and occupants on his walk. I realized that posties symbolize Canada to me almost as much as those relentless Mounties do. Maybe it’s the corporate logo you see everywhere, or maybe their reputation for friendliness, or their omnipresence (ever counted how many post office trucks you see in a day?), or perhaps the distances they travel and the weather (not to mention the dogs) they negotiate to deliver the mail.
Continue reading ‘Tokyo Cowboy’
in Essays, Film and Geist.
