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Chapter One

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It happens that I am going through a period of great unhappiness
and loss just now. All my life I've heard people speak of finding
themselves in acute pain, bankrupt in spirit and body, but I've
never understood what they meant. To lose. To have lost. I believed
these visitations of darkness lasted only a few minutes or hours
and that these saddened people, in between bouts, were occupied, as
we all were, with the useful monotony of happiness. But happiness
is not what I thought. Happiness is the lucky pane of glass you
carry in your head. It takes all your cunning just to hang on to
it, and once it's smashed you have to move into a different sort of
life.

In my new life -- the summer of the year 2000 -- I am attempting to
"count my blessings." Everyone I know advises me to take up this
repellent strategy, as though they really believe a dramatic loss
can be replaced by the renewed appreciation of all one has been
given. I have a husband, Tom, who loves me and is faithful to me
and is very decent looking as well, tallish, thin, and losing his
hair nicely. We live in a house with a paid-up mortgage, and our
house is set in the prosperous rolling hills of Ontario, only an
hour's drive north of Toronto. Two of our three daughters, Natalie,
fifteen, and Christine, sixteen, live at home. They are intelligent
and lively and attractive and loving, though they too have shared
in the loss, as has Tom.

And I have my writing.

"You have your writing!" friends say. A murmuring chorus: But
you have your writing, Reta. No one is crude enough to suggest
that my sorrow will eventually become material for my writing, but
probably they think it.

And it's true. There is a curious and faintly distasteful
comfort, at the age of forty-three, forty-four in September, in
contemplating what I have managed to write and publish during those
impossibly childish and sunlit days before I understood the meaning
of grief. "My Writing": this is a very small poultice to hold up
against my damaged self, but better, I have been persuaded, than no
comfort at all.

It's June, the first year of the new century, and here's what I've
written so far in my life. I'm not including my old schoolgirl
sonnets from the seventies -- Satin-slippered April, you glide
through time / And lubricate spring days, de dum, de dum -- and my
dozen or so fawning book reviews from the early eighties. I am
posting this list not on the screen but on my consciousness, a far
safer computer tool and easier to access:

1. A translation and introduction to Danielle Westerman's book of
poetry, Isolation, April 1981, one month before our daughter
Norah was born, a home birth naturally; a midwife; you could almost
hear the guitars plinking in the background, except we did not
feast on the placenta as some of our friends were doing at the
time. My French came from my Québécoise mother, and my
acquaintance with Danielle from the University of Toronto, where
she taught French civilization in my student days. She was a poor
teacher, hesitant and in awe, I think, of the tanned, healthy
students sitting in her classroom, taking notes worshipfully and
stretching their small suburban notion of what the word
civilization might mean. She was already a recognized writer
of kinetic, tough-corded prose, both beguiling and dangerous. Her
manner was to take the reader by surprise. In the middle of a
flattened rambling paragraph, deceived by warm stretches of
reflection, you came upon hard cartilage.

I am a little uneasy about claiming Isolation as my own
writing, but Dr. Westerman, doing one of her hurrying,
over-the-head gestures, insisted that translation, especially of
poetry, is a creative act. Writing and translating are convivial,
she said, not oppositional, and not at all hierarchical. Of course,
she would say that. My introduction to Isolation was
certainly creative, though, since I had no idea what I was talking
about.

I hauled it out recently and, while I read it, experienced the
Burrowing of the Palpable Worm of Shame, as my friend Lynn Kelly
calls it. Pretension is what I see now. The part about art
transmuting the despair of life to the "merely frangible," and
poetry's attempt to "repair the gap between ought and naught" --
what on earth did I mean? Too much Derrida might be the problem. I
was into all that pretty heavily in the early eighties.

2. After that came "The Brightness of a Star," a short story that
appeared in An Anthology of Young Ontario Voices (Pink Onion
Press, 1985). It's hard to believe that I qualified as "a young
voice" in 1985, but, in fact, I was only twenty-nine, mother of
Norah, aged four, her sister Christine, aged two, and about to give
birth to Natalie -- in a hospital this time. Three daughters, and
not even thirty. "How did you find the time?" people used to
chorus, and in that query I often registered a hint of blame: was I
neglecting my darling sprogs for my writing career? Well, no. I
never thought in terms of career. I dabbled in writing. It was my
macramé, my knitting. Not long after, however, I did start to
get serious and joined a local "writers' workshop" for women, which
met every second week, for two hours, where we drank coffee and had
a good time and deeply appreciated each other's company, and that
led to:

3. "Icon," a short story, rather Jamesian, 1986. Gwen Reidman, the
only published author in the workshop group, was our leader. The
Glenmar Collective (an acronym of our first names -- not very
original) was what we called ourselves. One day Gwen said, moving a
muffin to her mouth, that she…

Excerpted from UNLESS © Copyright 2002 by Carol Shields.
Reprinted with permission by Fourth Estate, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.