Long version: When I was in high school, I was a High Fidelity sort of music freak. In my Vancouver bedroom, I learned about music through reading, following my favourite critics in Spin and Rolling Stone (without knowing it, this is how I learned about journalism, too). Pre-internet, I couldn’t step into a built-in community of music fans, but I had a few friends with similar obsessions, and all our money went to concert tickets and albums (yes, albums. I am 153 years old, if you’re wondering). I remember cutting class to be the first to buy REM’s Life’s Rich Pageant at Black Swan Records on Fourth Ave. A great day, but I still don’t really understand Chaucer.

So I probably read about Lone Justice — “college radio” darlings —  before I heard them. When I did, I couldn’t believe Maria McKee’s voice; the category “cow punk” didn’t really do justice to that fierce twang that sounded different from anything else around. And the most unusual song on the 1986 album Lone Justice was You Are the Light, a sparse ballad with McKee’s heartbreak tossed over an electric guitar — oh, my teenage sadness had been waiting for this! I listened to the song non-stop during my graduation year of high school (on my Walkman — again: 153), waiting anxiously for my life to begin on the other side of that summer.

To my surprise, You Are the Light became central to my new book Everybody Has Everything. It’s about a childless couple that suddenly inherits their friends’ 2 year-old son after an accident. This boy, whose father has died and whose mother is in a coma, often asks to hear a song his mother sang to him. But his new parents don’t know that this unidentified song is, of course, You Are the Light (the sound of love and longing…).

When we were finsihing the book, I hit the Internet and nervously approached the songwriter, bassist and mandolin man Marvin Etzioni, to see if he’d let us use it. From LA, he called me back in Toronto immediately. It turned out that he was working on an album with a new version of the song, 25 years after I first  heard it. Not only did he give permission to quote the song, he let us use it in this book trailer. I feel incredibly lucky to have encountered an artist who operates with such generousity of spirit. My book wouldn’t be the same without this song, one that I still sing to my own children. Badly.

Marvin Etzioni’s new album, Marvin Country, is out now (get it here). Marvin’s enlisted some of my favourite singers to join him on his beautiful songs: Lucinda Williams, Jon Doe and — my inner teen fan is hyperventilating — Maria McKee. You Are the Light is reinvented with the Dixie Hummingbirds, and that’s the song — to take us full circle — in the Everybody Has Everything book trailer (by Loading Doc Productions).

Anyway, a while ago I read that Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running* to figure out the connection between writers and running, because I have a feeling that a lot of writers run. (I have no scientific evidence of this, though Carrie Snyder writes often about her own running on her lovely blog.) I liked what he wrote about writers requiring a healthy body to stave off the inherently unhealthy life of writing:

“For me, writing a novel is like climbing a steep mountain, struggling up the face of a cliff, reaching the summit after a long and arduous ordeal. You overcome your limitations, or you don’t, one of the other. I always keep that inner image with me as I write.”

Maybe that’s why I started running more this past year, as my novel was wrapping up – staving off the storytelling toxins.

One weird thing about the race: Around 4 km, there was one of those water stops, where a line of cheering volunteers waits with cups of Gatorade and water. I grabbed a cup of water, still jogging, feeling pretty tired by this point, planning the big-dramatic-take-a-sip-throw-it-down-because-I’m-so-competitive-I-can’t-possibly-stop gesture (like a real runner! Me!). Now, as far as I can tell, the function of the water-givers is to 1) hydrate runners and 2) yell: “Good job! Keep going!” But I am about 80 per cent sure that the guy I took the cup from shouted after me, very sarcastically: “You’re welcome!”

I’ve been thinking about this ever since.

(*What We Talk About When We Talk About Over-referenced Titles. Enough with this little quip. Really, leave Raymond Carver alone.)

So I’ve been on an Ann Beattie kick for a couple of months, just like I was for most of my 20s. One of my favourite books then was the bleak love story Chilly Scenes of Winter. I have a dog-eared, 70s paperback with a cover that’s so awful I will now declare it beautiful (check it out: literal snow!).

On the cover of her recent collection, The New Yorker Stories, Jonathan Lethem pimps: “Ann Beattie’s lifework defines what the short story can do, the extent of human life it can encompass.” But is she as adored or canonized as she should be? Beattie alludes to this in a fascinating (and funny) Paris Review interview at the end of the collection, describing how she picked up an anthology of American women’s writing and checked the index to find only one mention of her name (this is like an old-fashioned version of self-Googling).

Her short stories are unbearably good. I had forgotten the attention to the tiniest detail; her delicate, often hilarious touch. She knows exactly how much light to shed on each moment, never hanging around too long.

Beattie says that women always want to talk to her about the paragraph below. They keep copies of it in their wallets “where they used to have pictures of their husbands and children.” These are the final lines from the 1979 story “The Burning House” — a husband speaking to his wife in what must be the last days of their marriage. Be prepared for a chill…:

“…But your whole life you’ve made one mistake – you’ve surrounded yourself with men. Let me tell you something. All men – if they’re crazy, like Tucker, if they’re gay as the Queen of the May, like Reddy Fox, even if they’re just six years old – I’m going to tell you something about them. Men think they’re Spider-Man and Buck Rogers and Superman. You know what we all feel inside that you don’t feel? That we’re going to the stars.”

He takes my hand. “I’m looking down on all of this from space,” he whispers. “I’m already gone.”

(in The New Yorker Stories, 2010. Scribner)

Obviously, I think about this, and then I think about it again, then I become paralyzed and I can’t think about it anymore, or do much of anything but stare into space, feminine-ly.

I attended a panel last year at IFOA, hosted by Susan Swan, and the troubling idea that subject matter deemed “female” is ascribed less value led a (very cool) male writer to say something like: “When women write about the domestic, it’s chick lit. When a man does, it’s edgy and radical and he ends up on the cover of Time.” (This is such a major misquote that I’m not going to name the writer here).

Wolitzer also considers how many women write shorter books, and such writing often gets dismissed as “spare” — as if the ladies just don’t have it in them to write long and hard (ahem):

“Yet does the marketplace subtly and paradoxically seem to whisper in some men’s ears, “Sure, buddy, run on as long as you like, just sit down and type out all your ideas about America” — what might in some extreme cases be titled “The Big Baggy Book of Me”? Do women reflexively edit themselves (or let themselves be edited) more severely, creating tight and shapely novels that readers and book groups will find approachable? Or do they simply not fetishize book length one way or the other? (And for that matter, would most long-form men say they were just letting content seek form?)”

I have a book coming out soon that’s about marriage and parenting and urban life (well, it’s about death, really, but what isn’t?). Male characters are key to these subjects, as in the real world, and half the book is from a male perspective. I think it’s spare, which was the point; I don’t think it was a subconscious damping down. The truth is that the endless debates over male and female writing become meaningless in a room with the door closed and the cursor blinking. At this moment, shaped by everything that came before, I couldn’t have written any other book.

I am no early adopter. Let’s just say I stuck with the really long phone cord rather than springing for a newfangled “cordless phone” for about four years after this was an acceptable choice. In 2008, I responded to a text with: “Hey, this is my first text!” My friend texted back: “Welcome to 2004.” He’s a wry texter.

Nonetheless, here I am on the cutting edge of social media, blogging (this is still a thing! I checked!). I won’t try to make it seem accidental when clearly, I have a book coming out. Yes, I am tap dancing like a fiend on every platform available, hoping it will help that poor, innocent book to somehow, somewhere find some readers (it’s not its fault its mother is sleepy and behind the times; don’t blame the book). The book is called Everybody Has Everything, by the way, and now I’ll shut up about it.

Anyway, I’m wary of electronic noise, but there’s such good stuff out there these days that I’m self-inviting to the party. Not sure what will happen here, but I’m thinking this space should be positive, and probably mostly about writing, which means reading. So I’m going to write a bit about that sometime soon. Tomorrow. I’m even looking forward to it. Thanks for tuning in.

PS: Check out this William Kurelek painting which sort of describes how I’m feeling about this endeavour, but is also just so astounding that everyone must now look upon it in awe (and there’s a great piece in Canadian Art about him this month):