#6 New news and old news
#6. Old News and New News
I've moved my newsletter from Substack to Buttondown after listening to Platformer's Casey Newton explain on the podcast Hard Fork what he unearthed when examining Substack's Actual Nazi problem. It seemed like the right thing to do. My long-time collaborator, the brilliant Chris Joseph, helped me make the move. Chris himself has recently moved to Berlin and is available to do cool stuff for money.
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I've been working on a short story that gives an alternative ending to my most recent novel, Forest Green. Forest Green is based on the life of my uncle who was a logger in the forests of British Columbia for most of his life. He was a drinker, and he vanished from my mother's life when they were in their sixties. Unlike in the novel, my mother did not manage to reunite with her brother, and she found out that he had died because a mutual friend spotted his death notice in the newspaper. My brother-in-law Clyde took my mother to the funeral and wake which took place in an old skid row hotel in New Westminster, the kind of place my father would have called a dump ('skid row' is of course a logging term from back in the day - read the novel for more of that type of thing). Anyway, my mother had a riotous time at Art's wake in the hotel bar; Art's friends treated her like a visiting celebrity and made her feel truly welcome. So 'A Bottle of Scotch and a Bouquet of Flowers' tells a version of that story.
Coincidentally, my sister Phyllis sent me a surprise package in the post: my parents' annual Christmas letters from 1971 when I was a kid through to my mother's last letter in 2005 when her eyesight was going. The annual Christmas letter was a much-mocked tradition that seems to have all but died out now, along with the Christmas card. My parents' letters (my mother wrote most of them, but my father took it on for couple of years during his all too brief post-retirement pre-health decline period) mainly consist of upbeat travel and family news. She depicts me as a happy and busy teenager when I mostly remember shouting at her, sulking, and listening to Joy Division. Of course over a period of 34 years there is inevitable sadness, as the letters track my father's lengthy illness. No Christmas letter in 2002, the year he died, but 2003 sees a return to form from my mother who truly believed in seeing the bright side of things. My parents were aged 40 and 45 when I was born, and I was 40 and then 45 when they died, a weird coincidence that I've been dwelling on of late - I don't think it means anything, but still, it's January. This new short story, as well as Forest Green, and now these Christmas letters, are part of how I keep my parents alive or, more accurately, how I curate my memory.
Anyway, here's a picture of my parents in London without me in 1972.
Speaking of dead parents, the book I'm reading right now is Martha Baillie's There is No Blue, a memoir of Martha's struggle to support her schizophrenic sister in the aftermath of the death of their mother. Grim but beautifully written and compelling, published in the UK by Granta, Coach House in Canada. A great book to read if you are hibernating.
Here's to January finally ending in a couple of days.
Thank you for reading, and please share this newsletter with anyone you think might like it. My website is www.katepullinger.com