With this story from Old Babes in the Wood, I read “Our Cat Goes to Heaven”, from Brick Magazine 2004 (“Puss ‘n Heaven” in Issue 73’s table of contents).

Each has funny moments but, of course, the stories revolve around the loss of a companion, so they are preoccupied with grief.

In the older piece, the cat “was raptured up to heaven” in the opening sentence.

“Morte de Smudgie” begins with this: “Grieving takes strange forms,”

This reminds me of the distinction between an apocalyptic story and a dystopian story: the first cat is caught in action, in the rapturing and the immediate dislocation required to adjust to life elsewhere. The second cat is already gone and the story revolves around those left behind to cope with change.

It’s the same story and a different story, all at once. These matters of definition muddy, the more I think about them. Eventually I find myself looking up the definitions again, suspicious that I’ve misremembered, believing it should be easier to assign stories to one category or another.

One could say that death simplifies things: either someone is alive or someone is dead. But I’m reading Mohawk writer Marie Hess’s novella about residential school in Ontario, and for the first half of the book I thought some of the characters were alive but they weren’t. They were alive for the main character, however, and, so, they were alive for me—until she understands these figures had returned to help her confront her trauma.

Nell is confronting Smudgie’s death by writing a poem modelled on the classic verse about a legendary hero in “Morte de Smudgie”. Smudgie is the star (but, of what exactly, Nell wonders), and the verse excerpts are intentionally overwrought and melodramatic, a Victorian-styled homage to exorcise her grief. Nell’s self-awareness transforms the lyric into something like humour, although other emotions are so close to the surface that giggles are kept in check.

When Tig enters and announces he’s doing to have a drink (a habit now engrained, now that there are no more children in the home)—it’s also a story about marriage, which brings to mind Edward and Sarah in “The Resplendent Quetzal”—readers recognise they are dealing with their loss differently. (Really, Smudgie was Nell’s cat, as she sees it.)

MARM 2023 PLANS

Each week I’ll share links to some online sources, so that anyone with a few minutes can join in the celebrations. Some poetry and flash fiction, some interviews and reviews, some fresh reads and rereads: mostly reading with a little viewing and, in particular, short stories.

Launch (November 1)
Dancing Girls, “Rape Fantasies” (November 3)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Dancing Girls, “Hair Jewellery” (November 10)
Old Babes in the Wood, “First Aid” (November 12)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Dancing Girls, “A Travel Piece” (November 17)
Margaret Atwood’s 84th Birthday (November 18)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Two Scorched Men” (November 19)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 21)
Dancing Girls, “The Resplendent Quetzel” (November 24)
Old Babes in the Wood, “Morte de Smudgie” (November 26)
Wrap-Up (November 29-30)

Both Nell and Tig are dealing with the loss of the past remembrances of Smudgie and his absence in the present-day, but Nell is also existing partly in the future.

As she writes the final lines of the poem, she acknowledges that her thoughts of Smudgie’s companionship and that absence are intertwined with her anticipatory grief surrounding her loss of Tig and his death. (Graeme Gibson’s, MA’s partner’s, dementia diagnosis comes to mind here.)

Musings on time also figures prominently in MA’s essays about writing about futures, In Other Worlds. She writes about the importance of aligning expectations with outcomes, including the misleading marketing of her first two books—The Edible Woman and Surfacing—housed in pink covers with gold scrollwork, silhouettes of men’s and women’s faces leading readers to expect a fine romance inside:

“Having thus misled readers twice—inadvertently—by dint of book covers and the genre categroies implied by them, I would rather not do it again. I would like to have space creatures inside the books on offer at my word-wares book, and I would if I could: they were, after all, my first childhood love. But, being unable to produce them, I don’t want to lead the reader on, thus generating a frantic search within the pages—Where are the Lizard Men if Xenor?—that can only end in disappointment?”

She’s talking about her 2009 novel The Year of the Flood published as the second in the Maddaddam series, which lacks lizard men (fun fact: the website for Madadam was already taken, so she added the extra “d”s). Maddaddam, she writes, is “exploring another kind of ‘other world’—our own planet in a future. (I carefully say a future rather than the future because the future is an unknown: form the moment now, an infinite number of roads lead away to ‘the future’, each heading in a different direction.)”

She’s talking about her view of Maddaddam as being “speculative fiction” (e.g. Jules Verne’s books), and about how that differs from “science fiction” (eg. H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds). The former are things that could really happen but hadn’t happened in the author’s lifetime; the latter are things that couldn’t possibly happen.

When Ursula K. Le Guin reviews the first two Maddaddam books in The Guardian, she positions them as science fiction because she views fiction about things that couldn’t possibly happen as being “fantasy” (e.g. Star Wars and Star Trek) and suggests that MA’s definitions are a response to “literary bigots” who view science fiction as a “genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders”. It’s an “arbitrarily restrictive definition” which “seems designed to protect her novels” from such attacks.

Reading each writer’s thoughts on the definitions made sense independently and, if originally I’d thought I would come out agreeing with one and not the other, that quickly dissipated. I thought that UKLG should have known that MA had already written science fiction into a novel a decade prior and been public about her support of it (but why would UKLG read The Blind Assassin); I thought that MA should have anticipated the passionate pushback from the science-fiction community (but she admired SF and that might have been enough).

By then, I’d worked in a bookstore; I’d been frustrated by the decision to shelve science-fiction and fantasy alphabetically together and I’d participated in discussions about where to house books that defied categorisation. (Sometimes a dissenting voice resulted in a single copy housed in a different section, usually the manager’s opinion prevailed.) I’d been the person on the margins amused by the serious turn such conversations took, and I’d been the person for whom it was super serious, sometimes simultaneously. I’d been raised to view the world as either/or, and it took years to understand that both/and is valid too.

“But surely all draw from the same deep well: these imagined other worlds located somewhere apart from our everyday one: in another time, in another dimension, through a doorway into the spirit world, or on the other side of the threshold that divides the known from the unknown. Science Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Sword and Sorcery Fantasy, and Slipstream Fiction: all of them might be placed under the same large ‘wonder tale’ umbrella.”

MA dedicates In Other Worlds to UKLG. I imagine that, after the two women met and discussed these matters on stage, they became friends and recognised there were as many similarities in their thinking as differences.

They challenge us to participate in conversations that might begin in an uncomfortable place but have the potential to truly open other worlds of understanding.

“Our Cat Goes to Heaven” is a fantasy story; “Morte de Smudgie” is a realist story, but inside Smudgie is a story about a future.

So, each, in its own way, is a wonder tale.

Or, it’s not. You choose.