"Melody"

Lisa Moore is a born-and-based Newfoundland writer who emerged in the early 1990s, around the same time as I did. I first knew (of) her as a member of the Burning Rock Collective, whom I hosted at the Malcolm Lowry Room in the mid-1990s. The BRC were a group of younger Newfoundland writers who wrote with a decidedly urban inflection, in contrast to prevailing stereotypes that, despite the best efforts of the CBC, have almost been forgotten. The BRC were touring the country powered by a Canada Council Explorations grant.

In 1998 Moore and I had pieces in Hal Niedzviecki's Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada, which came out with M&S and is prolly no longer in print. I enjoyed Moore's "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom" and vowed to read more -- more Moore -- but my memory being what it is, I can no longer be certain that I did. My memory, yes, but I have read so many books over the years -- great books that I have no recollection of to not-so-great books that continue to haunt me. Indeed, what does that say about me and my maker -- that I am cursed to remember the least of my reading? Is she, my maker, asking me to look deeper into my pain? In an effort to erase it? Refocus its energies? (These are the kinds of questions I have been asking myself of late.)

Yesterday, while returning from coffee with another Newfie (Cornerbrook's Glenn Alteen) I noticed a community book dispensary near the field house at Robson Park, and there inside it was a copy of Lisa Moore's Open (Anansi, 2002). I remember when this book came out, and I thought, yes, I'll read it. But after purchasing it, the book sat on my desk for two years until a house sitter told me she read the Concrete Forest anthology while I was away, and had I ever met Lisa Moore? because she loved "Purgatory's Wild Kingdom" and wanted to read more -- more Moore. As a thank you gift I gave her my unread copy of Open.

Open opens with a story called "Melody" that is dreamy lyrical yet lifelong epic, like the opening of Johnson's 1992 Jesus' Son, and I wonder if the stories that follow are, or will be, related. The story, if I had to present it, is open enough that it requires a decision from the reader, or maybe a blindfold and a pin. You don the blindfold and step forward with the pin until you feel it squeeze into something, and that's what you talk about. For me this pin came to rest in Grief. Not today's told-not-shown, runny nose grief-on-the-sleeve, but something more subtle, furtive. Grief not because the narrator's husband died, but because "I had never initiated anything in my life" (23) -- "Melody acted; I was acted upon." (5)