Once More With Feeling - Softcover

Cook, Méira

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1487002963 ISBN 13: 9781487002961

Publisher: House of Anansi Press, 2018

Synopsis

After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire ― to make his wife happy ― leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city.

Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of this city that is bisected by railway lines and rivers, and connected by boulevards and back alleys, through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit ― this place of memory and amnesia, longing and belonging.

Featuring a cast of eclectic characters, Once More With Feeling is about a community, about a family, and about the way time makes fond fools of us all. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.

About this title

About the Author:

Méira Cook is the award-winning author of the novels The House on Sugarbush Road, which won the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and Nightwatching, which won the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. She has also published five poetry collections, most recently Monologue Dogs, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Lansdowne Prize for Poetry and for the 2016 McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award. She has won the CBC Poetry Prize and the inaugural Walrus Poetry Prize. She has served as Writer in Residence at the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, and the Winnipeg Public Library. Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, she now lives in Winnipeg.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

From “Pizza Chicken Dentist”

Down at the Mission folks were idling on the sidewalk, smoking and waiting for the metal shutters at the kitchen counter to clatter up so that lunch could finally be served. “Folks,” was what Miss Leonard called the men spinning on their worn-down rubber heels in the weak iodine sunlight of early spring. Miss Leonard volunteered all her free time to the Mission and consequently had a proprietary attitude. She called everyone folks: the old timers sipping coffee and playing checkers in the dining room, the born-agains who came for breakfast and stayed for Christ, the teenage boys with their wire hanger shoulder blades angling through their “Born to Rock” T-shirts.

Sometimes a woman would sidle or shuffle or strut into the Mission, her gait keeping pace with her disposition; the coin tosses of bravado or despondency that saw her through her days. Singly, or in spindly little groups, the women would wait in line at the lunch counter, their hunger for food or companionship rendering them bold. And they were folks, too.

Five or six men were idling outside the Mission when Annunciata arrived, a thin brown girl clutching at the balloon-string of her occasional buoyancy. The snow had finally rotted away, winter rushing through the gutters and gurgling down the drains. A couple of the men were smoking, coaxing a last puff from their burnt-down cigarettes, holding each breath until their eyes bulged. The Mission opened its doors to the city’s jobless, the street people, the panhandlers, the squeegee kids, the homeless ones, although once, when Annunciata had wondered aloud at these poor doorstep ghosts, the Senior Admin. had corrected her.

“We don’t say homeless here, Anna. We say ‘persons experiencing homelessness.’” Senior Admin. was a stocky girl with a permanent furrow above her brow. A little asterisk in the arid homelessness of her face, although what it bore witness to, Annunciata couldn’t exactly say.

“Experiencing homelessness” was meant to convey the temporariness of the condition, the vagrant hope that poverty was merely a refugee camp on the way to permanent citizenship. A waystation.

“Morning, Isaac, Donny, Bodo,” Annunciata called, stepping through the men who obligingly allowed her passage, sucking back their smoke and paddling at the air in front of them. “Morning, Nachos and Mr. Wilson.” Weary of being told what not to call the Mission people, Annunciata had decided to learn as many names as she could and use them accordingly.

“Morning Mr. . . Um.” His name wasn’t really Um but the old fellow was uncooperative when asked, and Mr. Um was the best she could do. Annunciata thought that perhaps he was secretive about his name because it was the only thing he owned. On the other hand, maybe he’d just forgotten it―drink did that to a fellow, and crack, and the dog-eyed loneliness that eats its own paws. His eyes were yellowish and his few remaining teeth were grayish. He never smiled and seldom spoke, but when he was hungry he rapped out a shave and a shoeshine on the metal shutters of the kitchen window, and when he was feeling perky he did a soft shoe shuffle in the dust.

Annunciata stopped to watch and applaud. “Bravo!” she clapped. Mr. Um made jazz hands and blew her a purposeful kiss. He had a heavy, stumbling gait but a perfect pitch for imaginary music. “Nice weather we’re having,” Annunciata replied.

“Pizza, chicken,” he confided. Something like that. But Annunciata thought he said “pizza,” and then some other kind of food. Possibly chicken. It was going on nine and she had to hustle to report for kitchen duty. So did.

“Heavens, child, I’m glad we’re not waiting for you to make any big announcements,” said Miss Leonard when Annunciata came into the kitchen shrugging off her jacket and tying an apron around her waist. She meant the miracle of the Lord’s birth which, if she was an angel, Annunciata would have been in charge of. Sometimes Miss Leonard said, “Hallelujah, young lady!” and sometimes just, “Hurry, you!” but it was always to do with Annunciata being half a minute behindhand and two thousand years too late.

About this edition

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1487002963
• ISBN 13: 9781487002961
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304