Quoted: Cherie Dimaline’s A Gentle Habit

Cherie Dimaline shares with us the story behind the quote from Charles Bukowski that inspired her debut collection of stories, A Gentle Habit, recently published by Kegedonce Press. In each of the six stories Dimaline highlights the extraordinary ordinariness of life by focusing on the addictions of a diverse group of characters attempting normalcy in an unnatural world.

On paper it all sounds very bad; an Indigenous woman who writes fiction being inspired by one of the ‘old white guys’ of poetry; one known for his misogyny as much as his alcoholism. But as I explained to a friend recently, if you can get past the ignorance and hate in Bukowksi, you reach the beautiful ache, and you’ll never see the mundane in quite the same way.I am fascinated with what we perceive as ‘normal’. I’ve always found it interesting that if you introduce anything into a person’s routine for long enough, it too becomes part of the ‘normal’, no matter how odd or remarkable it truly may be. Like ice skating, or making-out, or writing a story.I read an article in a recent New York Times Book Review about a Ted Hughes biography that spoke about Hughes preoccupation with the occult and destiny pre-writing his life. “Such a perspective also misses a great deal of what makes life life: the accidental, the insignificant, the true proportions of private existence and the turning world. The comparably storm-tossed lives of Eliot and Frost or Yeats do not preclude the momentous ordinary.”And that’s it—the momentous ordinary, the gentle habit in between the pitched highs and stabbing lows. That’s the mumbled spell that builds the true magic, the grassroots stuff that moves tectonic.If you dropped a glass of water on the floor, the liquid would wind and pool and find its way to the cracks. Not as frenetic as spilled mercury, but more hectic than say spaghetti sauce. At quite a normal pace, the water would find the cracks and slip through. That’s what these stories are, what these characters become, the drops that slip through in the normalness of a weekday afternoon. And, perhaps more importantly, the need and momentum that moves them there.* * *Thank you to Cherie Dimaline for sharing some of the inspiration behind A Gentle Habit, and to Allison Brown at Kegedonce Press for connecting us.