I’ve always loved the news. I remember, at nine years old, sitting in the basement of our home in Morden, Manitoba, fascinated by my stepfather’s furniture-sized TV. Like many kids, I found the world mysterious and terrifying. But the nightly newscast, delivered in the lulling baritone of Peter Mansbridge, distilled that world into manageable, understandable pieces that both soothed and fed my curiosity. Like: someone out there knows the score, and now I’m going to know the score too.
When we moved to Oregon, my family subscribed to the local newspaper. I’d come home from school, flip the front section to the back, tear into a bag of chips, and start with the op-ed pages, then work through the headlines. Part of this was probably my fascination with a new country and my awakening to a larger society. But it quickly gelled into the comfort of a ritual: you get home, you grab some food, and you learn what’s been happening out there. It was a day-to-day drama, like a sitcom or a book series, with the undergirded urgency of the stakes being real. As a college student in Portland, I read the alt weeklies in a beautifully dim pizza shack that no longer exists, or over spicy ramen along with the daily paper I’d bring home from campus at night. There was something about the assuredness of the world’s continued presence, like the way the father in Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness is always checking his pulse as if to confirm it still exists.
