Susan Glickman
Born to Canadians living in Baltimore, MD, Susan Glickman convinced her parents to move home to Montreal at the age of one and a half. But that initial sense of being from somewhere never left her. She has lived in England, the United States, and Greece and extensively travelled across Europe, Asia, and America before settling in Toronto. Glickman's love for travel is matched by her love for books. She has worked in bookstores, in publishing, and as an English professor at the University of Toronto. Known for her lithe, rich poetry and brilliant literary criticism, Susan Glickman is the author of five highly regarded poetry collections, including Running in Prospect Cemetery: New & Selected Poems. Her critical study, The Picturesque and the Sublime: Poetics of the Canadian Landscape, won both the Gabrielle Roy Prize and the Raymond Klibansky Prize. Susan Glickman has been described as one of the finest of Canadian authors. She is a confident, gifted writer whose poetry and fiction exemplify beauty, insight, and power.

From the Introduction
In June of 2017, I began putting together a selection of my essays and reviews. Because I had blithely binned some of these pieces just three years prior-when I gave my musician son my office to turn into his music studio and moved myself into a smaller space, recycling 25 bags of paper in the process-I spent that summer sleuthing out lost work on the internet and at the library, retyping some essays and photocopying others. Eventually I had over 500 pages of prose, including teaching notes, online interviews, and letters written in answer to high school and university students' questions about my books.
Even I was surprised to discover how much fugitive prose I had written since the early 1980s, when I finished a doctorate on Shakespeare's dramaturgy and started teaching at the University of Toronto. I'd never published anything on my thesis topic, having recognized belatedly-when my first book of poetry came out in 1983 and the English Department insisted that 'it didn't count as a publication'-that I would have to establish expertise in a different area to find a job that rewarded creative work. So instead of seeking further employment as a Renaissance scholar I got a post-doctoral fellowship, which became The Picturesque and the Sublime: A Poetics of the Canadian Landscape (1998). During those years of study, I read and wrote about as much Canadian poetry as I could. Many of the critical pieces included here were written then.
After I dropped out of academia for a few years to have children, those doors swung shut behind me and I never got my 'career' back. But I had already got in the habit of writing essays and kept on doing so through six more volumes of poetry, four novels, and three children's books. Sometimes people invited me to write stuff; other times I needed to figure something out for myself by working it through on paper. The word 'essay', as first used by Michel de Montaigne, means 'an attempt', and that's what these are.
...
I am writing this introduction in July 2020, the summer of Covid-19. The only such summer, I hope, but we never know what the future holds. In the midst of a pandemic, this gathering of belle-lettres seems superfluous, but I keep reminding myself that the plague was raging in Paris in 1580, the year Montaigne's Essays were first published, and that Shakespeare just kept on writing whenever rampant infection closed the theatres in London, confident that they would eventually reopen. The example of these masters persuades me that there will again be a time when writing about poetry will not seem frivolous to everyone except poets.
Or maybe that time is actually now, when we are in suspended animation and the future and past swirl around us in a quantum rather than linear moment. An eerie quiet has fallen over my normally bustling neighbourhood. The weather is beautiful because the dwindling of the city's traffic has left the air fresh and the sky blue, day after day. Although essential workers never left their jobs, many other people have become unemployed or are struggling to work remotely. Children who lost their last three months of school are enduring a summer of limited activity, unable to play with each other. My life, however, is unchanged. Since I left the university in 1996, I have not had an office to go to; I have worked contract to contract, teaching creative writing, editing books, and taking art classes. What I once saw as insecurity I now recognize as freedom.
A contranym, perhaps? Read 'Let' and you will see what I mean.
[Continued in Artful Flight...]
-Susan Glickman, Toronto, July 2020





November 8th
I went to the drug store to buy some not-tested-on-animals shampoo and they were already playing Christmas carols. A day or two ago, the shelves were full of discounted jack-o'-lantern napkins and vampire fangs and fake blood. Obviously, smart people should buy their seasonal supplies the day after each holiday and stick them in the attic until they need them. Most packaged Hallowe'en candy wouldn't taste any different a year later anyway, it's so full of chemicals.
My dad says that when he was a kid, everyone on his street started the night's trick-or-treating at one particular house because the lady who lived there made homemade caramel apples and they ran out quickly. Another house on his street offered popcorn balls, and his mother (my Grandma Elizabeth, who I never met because she died before I was born) liked to bake cookies or fudge. Those kinds of treats are worth going door to door for, IMHO. But these days, everyone is so worried about kids getting poisoned or finding needles in apples that they won't let their neighbours make anything tasty.
What a world, what a world! to quote the Wicked Witch of the West, which is who I went as this year.
This is not as much of a weird segue as you might think because we had a Hallowe'en theme at our house this year. We all went as characters from the Wizard of Oz. It was my mother's idea. When she was growing up, that movie was on tv every year during the winter holiday and her family watched it ritually, so now she makes us do the same thing.
In case you haven't already noticed, my parents are very into "togetherness." (This is one of the reasons I spend so much time at Victoria Lee's house, by the way: her parents leave us alone. They are too busy with their careers to play board games with a couple of twelve-year-olds.) But to be fair, my mother doesn't dress Libby and me in matching outfits anymore. This time we decided to do it all by ourselves!
Libby went as Dorothy in a blue gingham dress and white apron and red slippers, with her hair in pigtails, and Baxter walked beside her wheelchair with a sign on his back saying "Toto." My dad dressed completely in grey so that if anyone asked him who he was, he could say "The Tin Man." Unfortunately, I don't know if anyone asked him. Vicky and I left the others behind right away because they were too slow (probably because everyone on the street had to stop and pat Baxter).
Vicky was dressed as Madame Curie, her idol. She borrowed a lab coat from her mother and embroidered "Marie" on the pocket. It wasn't until it got dark outside and she started to give off an eerie greenish glow that I realized how good her costume was. She'd dribbled fluorescent paint all over her lab coat to represent the fact that Madame Curie was exposed to unprotected radioactivity and eventually died from it. She also had glow-in-the-dark gloves on her hands. Most of the people whose houses we visited got the reference, and gave Vicky extra candy for being clever. Sometimes I don't give that girl enough credit!
The reason we got separated from my father and sister so quickly was that we couldn't wait to see the haunted house around the corner where a bunch of actors live. Those guys are super creative; they do something amazing every year with props like flying bats and smoke machines and it's a real highlight of Hallowe'en. Even the mums and dads in the neighbourhood have to go check them out; they pretend it's to see whether the special effects are too scary for little kids but really, they want to get in on thefun themselves. This year there was a guy dressed as a mummy standing on the roof moaning and another one lying in a wooden coffin in the front yard who kept popping up and scaring everyone. It was way cool.
Anyhow, when we left the haunted house we didn't see Dad and Libby, so we went on without them. We came back two hours later, our pillowcases bulging with seriously unhealthy treats. This is our ritual: we pour all the candy onto the living room carpet and sort it into piles and then do a comparative count of what each of us has (12 Crunchy Bars, 10 Mars Bars, 4 Coffee Crisps, 6 boxes of Smarties, and so on) so we can trade stuff. I hate jelly beans and lollypops and Vicky's allergic to peanuts; we make a perfect team in this way, as in so many others.
Still, we felt terrible when we found out what had happened to Dad and Libby. They didn't make it very far, just up one side of the street and down the other, because Libby started shivering and spacing out, and Baxter started getting alert and nervous like he does when she is about to have a seizure, so my father took them home. And she did have a seizure, a really bad one, but Dad said he was glad we kept on enjoying ourselves because, realistically, there was nothing we could have done to help anyway. Mum turned out the porch light even though it was only seven p.m. so that no more trick-or-treaters would ring the doorbell, and the two of them put Libby to bed and sat with her.
And that was that.
November 20
The school said Libby has to stay home for a while because she's having too many seizures. She's really upset, because she loves school. Also, because she's too exhausted to eat and can't be trusted to swallow properly anymore, she had to go into the hospital for a couple of days to get a tube put into her stomach. And even though the gastric tube was supposed to take away our worry about making sure she gets enough to eat, it hasn't. Because dripping stuff into a hole in your stomach doesn't seem like eating, does it? And we feel terrible sitting down to dinner when she can't join us.
She's also back on a catheter, which is humiliating. And because she's stuck in bed most of the time now, my parents bought her a new mattress that's supposed to redistribute her body weight so she doesn't get bed sores, which are much much worse than they sound, believe me. People--especially paralyzed ones like Libby--can die from them. So Mum is vigilant about turning her every two hours when she's lying down, which Libby hates. We all hate it, actually, because it means that nobody gets to sleep through the night. Even though my parents take turns moving her and they don't ask me to help, we all seem to wake up anyway.
All of which means things are majorly tense around here. Forgive me if I don't write much today. It's too hard to be funny or eloquent. I'm even too tired to be sassy, which is usually my default mode.



The early part of the winter of 1837, a year never to be forgotten in the annals of Canadian history, was very severe….
The morning of the seventh was so intensely cold that everything liquid froze in the house. The wood that had been drawn for the fire was green, and it ignited too slowly to satisfy the shivering impatience of women and children; I vented mine in audibly grumbling over the wretched fire, at which I in vain endeavoured to thaw frozen bread, and to dress crying children….
After dressing, I found the air so keen that I could not venture out without some risk to my nose, and my husband kindly volunteered to go in my stead.
I had hired a young Irish girl the day before. Her friends were only just located in our vicinity, and she had never seen a stove until she came to our house. After Moodie left, I suffered the fire to die away in the Franklin stove in the parlour, and went into the kitchen to prepare bread for the oven.
The girl, who was a good-natured creature, had heard me complain bitterly of the cold, and the impossibility of getting the green wood to burn, and she thought that she would see if she could not make a good fire for me and the children, against my work was done. Without saying one word about her intention, she slipped out through a door that opened from the parlour into the garden, ran round to the wood-yard, filled her lap with cedar chips, and, not knowing the nature of the stove, filled it entirely with the light wood.
Before I had the least idea of my danger I was aroused from the completion of my task by the crackling and roaring of a large fire, and a suffocating smell of burning soot. I looked up at the kitchen cooking-stove. All was right there. I knew I had left no fire in the parlour stove; but not being able to account for the smoke and smell of burning, I opened the door, and to my dismay found the stove red-hot, from the front plate to the topmost pipe that let out the smoke through the roof.
My first impulse was to plunge a blanket, snatched from the servant’s bed, which stood in the kitchen, into cold water. This I thrust into the stove, and upon it I threw water, until all was cool below. I then ran up to the loft, and by exhausting all the water in the house, even to that contained in the boilers upon the fire, contrived to cool down the pipes which passed through the loft. I then sent the girl out of doors to look at the roof, which, as a very deep fall of snow had taken place the day before, I hoped would be completely covered, and safe from all danger of fire.
She quickly returned, stamping and tearing her hair, and making a variety of uncouth outcries, from which I gathered that the roof was in flames.