Lisa Moore
Lisa Moore is the acclaimed author of the novels Caught, February, and Alligator. Caught was a finalist for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Scotiabank Giller Prize and is now a major CBC television series starring Allan Hawco. February won CBC’s Canada Reads competition, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year and a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. Alligator was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and the Caribbean region), and was a national bestseller. Her story collection Open was a finalist for the Scotia Bank Giller Prize and a national bestseller. Her most recent work is a collection of short stories called Something for Everyone. Lisa lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.












The man is holding up a tiny, delicate glass bottle. It’s shaped like a bottle but it appears to be liquid fire. It is pulsing like it is a heart, and the heart is flushing with blood that is not blood but white, boiling light with a yellow halo.
The man dips the little vessel into a vat and there’s a hiss and a cloud of smoke and he lifts the glass heart out of the vat and it’s a perfect bottle for a love potion. [166-67]

Great Expectations

Orlando, Florida. I’m here with a conference of twenty thousand librarians from all over North America, two weeks after the Pulse massacre. It’s very early; I’m jogging around two big, olive-coloured ponds and not a breath of wind, an empty eight-lane highway between the ponds and I’m on the median.
A lizard skitters over the curb and across the highway. It goes in fast-forward but there are glitches. Stops. Goes, stops. Darts. A jellied quivering. The long thin body is still, but the legs. You can’t even see the legs in the bald light. Just a blur of motion.
There are squiggles of fluorescent spray-paint here and there on the sidewalk in pink, orange, and lime. They’re construction directives, targets for jackhammers, indicating the location of water or sewage pipes beneath the concrete, positions for embedded spigots, underground tunnels for workers and who knows what else — bog people, muskets, cannonballs, arrowheads. I took two planes to get here.
Orlando was retrieved from the swamp by a wily entrepreneur who set up dummy companies to purchase the land cheap. A hundred thousand people work in the theme parks here, vomiting in their oversized cartoon-costume heads because you aren’t allowed to vomit in a theme park. It’s hot in those cartoon heads. You aren’t even allowed to die of heat prostration.
People who die on the parks’ premises are secreted away, whisked from the grounds in unmarked cars and why not? Why not have a zone that death can’t in infiltrate? It costs fabulously to squeeze into these crowds, to belong.
Of course you offer life without death.
You offer furry animals that speak.
When I’m coming around the second pond the sprayers come on and shuffle out sheets of recollected water, the sign says. Water that I don’t want to touch my bare skin because who knows.
It’s not true that the wily entrepreneur is cryogenically preserved. That’s an urban legend. People say just his head in a murky aquarium: mouth open, the lower lip looking grey and nibbled, deteriorating despite the formaldehyde, like he’s developed a cold sore, and a five o’clock shadow, because hair still grows in death. Sometimes the head burps and a wobbling bubble escapes a corner of the mouth. A fold-encrusted eyelid utters. But that is just the underwater air infiltration.
This place is where the GoFundMe stage-four cancer children come to fulfill a bucket list. The parks around here specialize in reconstituting hearts — break ’em, put ’em back together. The white beluga in the aquarium will do it for you, all by itself. Defibrillate your soul. The ghostly mammal emerges from the murk, tail dragging because of a low-grade fugue.

Orlando, Florida. I’m here with a conference of twenty thousand librarians from all over North America, two weeks after the Pulse massacre. It’s very early; I’m jogging around two big, olive-coloured ponds and not a breath of wind, an empty eight-lane highway between the ponds and I’m on the median.
A lizard skitters over the curb and across the highway. It goes in fast-forward but there are glitches. Stops. Goes, stops. Darts. A jellied quivering. The long thin body is still, but the legs. You can’t even see the legs in the bald light. Just a blur of motion.
There are squiggles of fluorescent spray-paint here and there on the sidewalk in pink, orange, and lime. They’re construction directives, targets for jackhammers, indicating the location of water or sewage pipes beneath the concrete, positions for embedded spigots, underground tunnels for workers and who knows what else — bog people, muskets, cannonballs, arrowheads. I took two planes to get here.
Orlando was retrieved from the swamp by a wily entrepreneur who set up dummy companies to purchase the land cheap. A hundred thousand people work in the theme parks here, vomiting in their oversized cartoon-costume heads because you aren’t allowed to vomit in a theme park. It’s hot in those cartoon heads. You aren’t even allowed to die of heat prostration.
People who die on the parks’ premises are secreted away, whisked from the grounds in unmarked cars and why not? Why not have a zone that death can’t in infiltrate? It costs fabulously to squeeze into these crowds, to belong.
Of course you offer life without death.
You offer furry animals that speak.
When I’m coming around the second pond the sprayers come on and shuffle out sheets of recollected water, the sign says. Water that I don’t want to touch my bare skin because who knows.
It’s not true that the wily entrepreneur is cryogenically preserved. That’s an urban legend. People say just his head in a murky aquarium: mouth open, the lower lip looking grey and nibbled, deteriorating despite the formaldehyde, like he’s developed a cold sore, and a five o’clock shadow, because hair still grows in death. Sometimes the head burps and a wobbling bubble escapes a corner of the mouth. A fold-encrusted eyelid utters. But that is just the underwater air infiltration.
This place is where the GoFundMe stage-four cancer children come to fulfill a bucket list. The parks around here specialize in reconstituting hearts — break ’em, put ’em back together. The white beluga in the aquarium will do it for you, all by itself. Defibrillate your soul. The ghostly mammal emerges from the murk, tail dragging because of a low-grade fugue.




Anne of Green Gables Penguin Black Classics Edition



The question of Canadian identity, so far as it affects the creative imagination, is not a “Canadian” question at all, but a regional question. An environment turned outward towards the sea, like so much of Newfoundland, and one turned towards inland seas, like so much of the Maritimes, are an imaginative contrast: anyone who has been conditioned by one in his early years can hardly be conditioned by the other in the same way. Anyone brought up on the urban plain of Southern Ontario or the gentle pays farmland along the south shore of the St. Lawrence may become fascinated by the great sprawling wilderness of Northern Ontario or Ungava, may move their and live with its people and become accepted as one of them, but if he paints or writes about it he will paint or write as an imaginative foreigner. And what can there be in common between an imagination nurtured on the prairies, where it is a centre of consciousness diffusing itself over a vast flat expanse stretching to a remote horizon, and one nurtured in British Columbia, where it is in the midst of gigantic trees and mountains leaping into the sky all around it, and obliterating the horizon everywhere?





Luminous Ink
contributions by Nicole Brossard; Madeleine Thien; Lawrence Hill; Nino Ricci; Heather O'Neill; Eden Robinson; Rawi Hage; Lisa Moore; Rita Wong; Hiromi Goto; George Elliott Clarke; Judith Thompson; Michael Helm; David Chariandy; Richard Van Camp; Marie-Hélène Poitras; Stephen Henighan; Greg Hollingshead; Michael Ondaatje; Lee Maracle; Camilla Gibb; Sheila Fischman; Pascale Quiviger; M.G. Vassanji; Margaret Atwood & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Luminous Ink
contributions by Nicole Brossard; Madeleine Thien; Lawrence Hill; Nino Ricci; Heather O'Neill; Eden Robinson; Rawi Hage; Lisa Moore; Rita Wong; Hiromi Goto; George Elliott Clarke; Judith Thompson; Michael Helm; David Chariandy; Richard Van Camp; Marie-Hélène Poitras; Stephen Henighan; Greg Hollingshead; Michael Ondaatje; Lee Maracle; Camilla Gibb; Sheila Fischman; Pascale Quiviger; M.G. Vassanji; Margaret Atwood & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Us, Now


I started collecting the stories in this anthology with the idea of representing all the geographic regions of Canada. I thought that having writers from regions as far apart as British Columbia and Newfoundland would ensure a diversity of voice. I also wanted a good mix of emerging and established writers. I wanted an anthology that would reflect Canadian experience and innovation in form, the way the prism that hangs in my kitchen window refracts light, sending shimmers of unexpected rainbows over the cupboards, walls, and appliances.
I gathered together the best short story collections and literary magazines I'd read over the last twenty years. I thought of the writers I'd heard read at literary festivals across the country, and writers who had come to Newfoundland to read through the Canada Council.
I was looking for the short fiction that had moved swiftly through me, over those twenty years, whipping me up into an altered state, changing me for good. I wanted the new stuff too, the stories that reflected the twenty-first century, the buzzing paranoia of post-9/11 and the white noise of the information age. I sought dislocation, bomb scares, sexual freedom, aberration, fractured identities, nakedness, awakenings of every sort, redemption, and love.
Sometimes I found myself reading the stories here for a second, third, or fifth time, determined to discover how they worked, but at the very last minute, I always fell in. The stories were like swimming pools, and just when I leaned in close enough, I'd lose my balance, be fully submerged.

Reducing your risk of breast cancer
“There are only two types of women today: women who have breast cancer and women who are afraid they are going to get breast cancer.”
13
The thought of breast cancer probably scares women more than the spectre of any other type of cancer. With menopause the fear often becomes magnified. Most of us know that the risk of developing cancer increases with age, and we are also concerned about hormone replacement therapy and its possible effect on our breasts. As with any other disease, some things encourage cancer and other things discourage it, and our knowledge of factors influencing cancer in general, and breast cancer in particular, is growing steadily. I hope that after you read this chapter you will feel ready to take a proactive approach to reducing your cancer risk. As you will see, there is plenty of action you can take.
Breast cancer statistics
Breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among Canadian women. The Canadian Cancer Society estimated that 22,300 new cases of breast cancer would develop in 2007, representing 30 percent of all cancers. Breast cancer deaths in Canada in 2007 were estimated at 5300, accounting for 17 percent of all cancer deaths in the country (lung cancer tops the list, followed by breast, then colon, cancer). Sadly, 102 Canadian women die every week from breast cancer. But the good news is that the death rate from breast cancer has decreased in all age groups since the mid-1990s. This is largely because more and more women are having mammograms, allowing for earlier detection (more on mammograms later in this chapter).
Most women want to know what their risk of developing this disease is, and what they can do to prevent it. The following table shows you the risk of developing breast cancer by a certain age.
LIFETIME BREAST CANCER RISK
Age Risk
25 years less than 1 in 1000
50 years 1 in 63
75 years 1 in 15
90 years 1 in 9
These numbers mean that by the age of 50, 1 in every 63 women (1.5 percent) will get breast cancer. By the age of 90, 1 in every 9 women will get the disease (11 percent). As you read these numbers, keep in mind that statistical risks can't be applied to you reducing your risk of breast cancer as an individual. They represent the average risk of the entire population of Canadian women. If you have certain risk factors for breast cancer, such as a family history of breast cancer or a poor diet, these numbers underestimate your risk. Conversely, if you have no risk factors at all for the disease, the numbers overestimate your chances of getting breast cancer.
At this point, you’re probably wondering what factors can increase your odds of getting breast cancer. But before we get to that, I want take you through a short pathology (the study of diseases) course. If you understand the cancer process, it might help ease your worry that cancer is an inevitable disease.
Cancer 101
Simply put, cancer is a disease in which abnormal cells grow out of control. When enough of these cells accumulate, a tumour forms. If the cancer cells are able to break away from the tumour, they can circulate throughout the body and take up residence in another organ, a process called metastasis. But let's go back to the earliest steps in cancer development.
Cancer begins at the cellular level. When we are healthy, our body cells divide every day in order to repair damaged tissues, replace old cells, and grow new tissue. Normal cell growth and division is regulated by internal controls. For instance, if you cut yourself, your body will release messenger chemicals to tell cells in the wounded area to quickly divide and make new cells. Certain receptors on your cells receive the messenger chemicals and then trigger specific enzymes to speed up cellular division. When your wound has healed, the delivery of these messenger chemicals is shut off and cellular life returns to normal. Besides the types of controls that take care of healing, healthy cells are also programmed to die at a certain age so that cellular death will be in balance with new cell growth. But sometimes the process can go awry. Cells don’t stop dividing even though your body tells them to. They take on a life of their own and grow in an unregulated fashion. These cells don’t die when they are programmed to. This is what happens in cancer.
WHAT MAKES A CELL CANCEROUS?
Every cell has a genetic blueprint, called deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). The DNA of cells contains genes that program cell reproduction, growth, and repair of all body tissues. Sometimes genes can become damaged, and this damage can result in cancer. In essence, there are three ways in which your genes can become faulty:
• A mutation can occur during normal cell division such that the newly formed cell contains an abnormal gene. This can happen randomly or if the cell is exposed to some other agent.
• Cells might be exposed to an environmental agent, called a carcinogen, that harms the DNA. For instance, cigarette smoking is a carcinogen that promotes the development of lung cancer.
• Flawed genes can be inherited from your parents. However, very few types of cancer are the result of inherited genes. Just because you have one damaged gene does not mean you are destined to get cancer. Many processes must take place before a reducing your risk of breast cancer cancer develops. Your body has what are called tumour suppressor genes, which keep an eye out for damaged DNA and halt it in its tracks. But if these tumour suppressor genes become mutated, cells with abnormal genes can multiply at an uncontrolled rate. It is estimated that in 20 to 40 percent of breast cancer cases, a particular tumour suppressor gene (called p53) is mutated. Several genetic mutations are probably needed for breast cancer to develop. Genes that go on to cause cancer are called oncogenes.
Cancer is not explained by genetics alone. Some people who have a family history of a certain cancer never get that cancer. Experts agree that cancer is the result of an interaction between genes and environmental factors, such as diet. For instance, you might have a mutated gene that predisposes you to breast cancer, but because you eat a low-fat diet high in antioxidant-rich fruits and vegetables, you may never get cancer. On the other hand, if you are regularly exposed to pollutants and eat a poor diet, the risk that any faulty genes you carry will catalyze a cancerous growth is increased.



The Democracy Cookbook

The Democracy Cookbook
