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A lifelong reader of books, always with a book on the go, Susan Olding wrote the collection of essays, Big Reader (Freehand $22.95). From the dissolution of her marriage to the forging of a tentative relationship with her new partner's daughter, from discovering Toronto as a young undergrad to, years later, watching her mother slowly go blind: through every experience, Olding crafts essays about what it means to be human, to be a woman -- and to be a reader.
Olding's debut collection, Pathologies: A Life in Essays, was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear widely in literary journals and anthologies throughout North America, and her work has won a National Magazine Award, the Edna Staebler Prize for the Personal Essay, and other honours. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University. She lives in Victoria.
Photo credit: Helene Cyr
BOOKS
Big Reader (Freehand, 2021) $22.95 9781988298818
Pathologies: A Life in Essays (UTP, 2008) $23.95 978-1551119304
[BCBW 2021]
Big Reader: Essays by Susan Olding
(Freehand Books $22.95)
BCBW 2021 Review by Mary Ann Moore
From the time Susan Olding was a child, she has had a book on the go. She is, as the title of her new book suggests, a big reader.
One of her earliest memories is seeing images of “ordinary garden vegetables with some letters beneath them.” The little girl connected those letters to words. It was an exciting discovery which led Olding to more pleasures later in life: reading as a student, a book store employee, a library haunter, a teacher, and not least, as a writer.
As an adult, writing essays became Olding’s forte. Her debut collection Pathologies: A Life in Essays (Freehand, 2008) was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her work has won a National Magazine Award and other honours.
Olding’s follow-up book, Big Reader: Essays references her love of reading and contains writing that is as intimate as personal letters combined with the lyricism of poetry. She illustrates the beguiling multiplicity of the personal essay form and celebrates the life-enhancing aspects of reading.
The other meaning of ‘Big Reader’ is a machine similar to an old-fashioned microfiche reader that can magnify words onto a screen. Olding writes about her mother being introduced to the huge and awkward machine when her sight was failing. The Big Reader proved to be far removed from the tactile nature of a book in one’s hands. “To lay a page in that device, to see the words taking shape on that big screen, would have stripped a veil from the past and reminded her of all she had lost,” writes Olding.
Olding’s essays are full of this sort of poignant perception. Most of them are preceded by a prose poem, or a “short” as she calls them. For example, in Billy, Olding writes this following short about books: “Carry your treasures home, pile them beside the bed, place them under the living room chairs, set them on every table, on every counter, on every windowsill.”
Olding frequently refers in her essays to one or more books that have influenced her life, such as Anna Karenina, A Rake’s Progress, The Golden Notebook, Oliver Twist, Middlemarch and the poetry of John Keats. There are several more noted in her addendum and include the novels of Indigenous writers Katherena Vermette and Tanya Tagaq, and the poetry of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Michelle Poirier Brown.
Olding’s first essay, In Anna Karenina Furs recalls when she was sixteen, “during the height of second-wave feminism” in the seventies that she defended the married Anna Karenina heroine who fell in love with an army officer in Leo Tolstoy’s novel. Upon reading the book later in life, Olding has now had more life experience with which to connect to Tolstoy’s adultress as she herself has been an ‘adulterous adult’ involved in her own ‘scandal.’ The essay is beautiful and revelatory, ending without the tragedy of Anna Karenina.
Olding is an astute writer and researcher, evident in Library Haunting in which she blends her particular ‘haunting’ with the historical. The title of the essay reflects the title of Virginia Woolf’s story, Street Haunting.
Many of the essays are award winners such as A Different River that won the Edna Staebler Award for the Personal Essay in 2017. Each section of the segmented essay bears the title of a Toronto river, stream or creek including Taddle Creek, which has been covered over on the grounds of the University of Toronto. Metaphors notwithstanding, Olding openly writes about her relationships with a boyfriend and a gay man, intertwining these stories with Toronto’s cholera epidemic in 1832, the works of Oscar Wilde, the casualties of AIDS and her own depression. As Olding says: “Rivers can’t help showing us that everything is connected.”
In Unpacking My Library, Olding describes a move from Vancouver to Vancouver Island in the spring of 2020. She makes note of the writings of George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Mary Rich and upon reflection says: “Essays told stories, essays were concrete and intimate instead of abstract and forbidding, essays made me feel smart instead of stupid. They made me feel, period.”
Olding’s essays offer honesty, intellectual curiosity and impeccable research. Big Reader is a splendid example of how our own life stories are enhanced by and interconnected with the characters we meet in books. 9781988298818
Mary Ann Moore is a poet, writer, writing mentor and avid reader who lives in Nanaimo. She’s writes a blog at apoetsnanaimo.ca
Olding's debut collection, Pathologies: A Life in Essays, was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear widely in literary journals and anthologies throughout North America, and her work has won a National Magazine Award, the Edna Staebler Prize for the Personal Essay, and other honours. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia and is currently pursuing a doctorate in Cultural Studies at Queen's University. She lives in Victoria.
Photo credit: Helene Cyr
BOOKS
Big Reader (Freehand, 2021) $22.95 9781988298818
Pathologies: A Life in Essays (UTP, 2008) $23.95 978-1551119304
[BCBW 2021]
Big Reader: Essays by Susan Olding
(Freehand Books $22.95)
BCBW 2021 Review by Mary Ann Moore
From the time Susan Olding was a child, she has had a book on the go. She is, as the title of her new book suggests, a big reader.
One of her earliest memories is seeing images of “ordinary garden vegetables with some letters beneath them.” The little girl connected those letters to words. It was an exciting discovery which led Olding to more pleasures later in life: reading as a student, a book store employee, a library haunter, a teacher, and not least, as a writer.
As an adult, writing essays became Olding’s forte. Her debut collection Pathologies: A Life in Essays (Freehand, 2008) was selected by 49th Shelf and Amazon.ca as one of 100 Canadian books to read in a lifetime. Her work has won a National Magazine Award and other honours.
Olding’s follow-up book, Big Reader: Essays references her love of reading and contains writing that is as intimate as personal letters combined with the lyricism of poetry. She illustrates the beguiling multiplicity of the personal essay form and celebrates the life-enhancing aspects of reading.
The other meaning of ‘Big Reader’ is a machine similar to an old-fashioned microfiche reader that can magnify words onto a screen. Olding writes about her mother being introduced to the huge and awkward machine when her sight was failing. The Big Reader proved to be far removed from the tactile nature of a book in one’s hands. “To lay a page in that device, to see the words taking shape on that big screen, would have stripped a veil from the past and reminded her of all she had lost,” writes Olding.
Olding’s essays are full of this sort of poignant perception. Most of them are preceded by a prose poem, or a “short” as she calls them. For example, in Billy, Olding writes this following short about books: “Carry your treasures home, pile them beside the bed, place them under the living room chairs, set them on every table, on every counter, on every windowsill.”
Olding frequently refers in her essays to one or more books that have influenced her life, such as Anna Karenina, A Rake’s Progress, The Golden Notebook, Oliver Twist, Middlemarch and the poetry of John Keats. There are several more noted in her addendum and include the novels of Indigenous writers Katherena Vermette and Tanya Tagaq, and the poetry of Billy-Ray Belcourt and Michelle Poirier Brown.
Olding’s first essay, In Anna Karenina Furs recalls when she was sixteen, “during the height of second-wave feminism” in the seventies that she defended the married Anna Karenina heroine who fell in love with an army officer in Leo Tolstoy’s novel. Upon reading the book later in life, Olding has now had more life experience with which to connect to Tolstoy’s adultress as she herself has been an ‘adulterous adult’ involved in her own ‘scandal.’ The essay is beautiful and revelatory, ending without the tragedy of Anna Karenina.
Olding is an astute writer and researcher, evident in Library Haunting in which she blends her particular ‘haunting’ with the historical. The title of the essay reflects the title of Virginia Woolf’s story, Street Haunting.
Many of the essays are award winners such as A Different River that won the Edna Staebler Award for the Personal Essay in 2017. Each section of the segmented essay bears the title of a Toronto river, stream or creek including Taddle Creek, which has been covered over on the grounds of the University of Toronto. Metaphors notwithstanding, Olding openly writes about her relationships with a boyfriend and a gay man, intertwining these stories with Toronto’s cholera epidemic in 1832, the works of Oscar Wilde, the casualties of AIDS and her own depression. As Olding says: “Rivers can’t help showing us that everything is connected.”
In Unpacking My Library, Olding describes a move from Vancouver to Vancouver Island in the spring of 2020. She makes note of the writings of George Orwell, Joan Didion, James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Mary Rich and upon reflection says: “Essays told stories, essays were concrete and intimate instead of abstract and forbidding, essays made me feel smart instead of stupid. They made me feel, period.”
Olding’s essays offer honesty, intellectual curiosity and impeccable research. Big Reader is a splendid example of how our own life stories are enhanced by and interconnected with the characters we meet in books. 9781988298818
Mary Ann Moore is a poet, writer, writing mentor and avid reader who lives in Nanaimo. She’s writes a blog at apoetsnanaimo.ca
