Illustration by Jeff Kulak

1.
What on earth did she want from him? From them? Approval? She
was embarrassed by how little she knew, or would own, of her own
motivations.

She was also too hot in her heavy wool coat, and damp, wet really,
hair like feathers stuck to her brow. Add frustrated to the list. After a
decade of intense discipline she found herself suddenly wanting to
smoke, to have random sex, or at least to have distracting fantasies
about these things: she had drifted off into trysts on the airplane, at
the hotel, in the rental car below deck.

The ferry entered Active Pass, a moment of transition she always
loved, and she stepped out onto the deck. Turbulent water churned
cutlery, dinner plates, champagne glasses and bottles tossed off of
boats, tumbling and softening them so they foamed up decades later
on beaches, common as periwinkle and sand dollars.

Shorelines sliced through the fog like cream. She scratched notes in a
hand-sized journal. Tiny illuminations like the lit cabins on the treed
shores where some old part of her still longed to live.

2.
Harlequin ducks carved in Thailand or Bangladesh lined the gift
shop shelves. Local books in racks. The clink of teapots, a cash register.
Horn blast. All the old comforts laced with their irritations. She
recalled hearing Aritha Van Herk read a story set on a ferry years ago
when she was a creative writing student at the university. The local. It
was crass in fiction. Stories were supposed to be set in New York, or
London, or at the very least, in a suspended non-descript place that
resembled the interior of an Alice Munro character.

That week someone had stolen her backpack and she found it hours
later stuffed in a garbage bin on campus with nothing but a personal
letter, her diary, and a packet of photographs taken.

That was the sort of thing that happened in Victoria.

3.
There had been a pod of whales on the previous crossing. People
stared out hopefully even after they left the strait. She stood next to
a Kurt Cobain look-a-like on his way to Botanical Beach. He was a
baker he said, lighting a cigarette for her, he liked to bake scones, she
inhaled deeply, but she did not smoke and quickly felt light-headed.

She left the baker to a rack of younger lambs and sunk into a deep
blue chair, thinking of her stolen diary. How numb she had been. Later,
when he chastised her for being so elusive, so withholding in class,
she knew he had taken it.

As painful as it had been, that loss had been a blessing. She had not yet
understood that she had been lying to herself, even in her own diary.

4.
Gulls hung ghost-like in the air. Another horn blasted. The fog refused
to lift. A woman, tall and sweet as meringue, moved past her, so slow
and heavy that she followed her up to the observation deck. Safe up
here, she thought, six stories off the water, but the plywood-covered
window reminded what a rogue wave could do. She considered pushing
the woman against the door and biting the back of her neck, but
her cell phone rang and she was momentarily jolted back to Toronto.

5.
When she lived in Victoria those many years ago, she lived in a house
on Meares. Her flat was on the second floor, a corner unit with a
large south-facing window. She used to listen to soundtracks—The
Mission, Room With a View—far too loud, and Ellen Smythe, author of
several unpublished Harlequins that needed proofreading, was often
up to complain. She was big bosomed, sixtyish (though it occurred to
her that she was probably only 40), short, hair dyed blond, face like
powdered linen, and very, very hungry. She had been there that first,
exhilarating, day, knocking quickly.

A laugh, unexpected, set off car alarms three blocks down. Her landlady
blushed at her standing in a T-shirt and turned without asking
whatever it was she wanted to ask. She went back to her bedroom and
there they were, like hungry, doting parents, urging her back to bed.

6.
He suggests they walk to Cadboro Bay, and so they do. The air was
warm, but it was windy and they were almost sideways, against it.
Everyone talked about the weather in Victoria, but no one mentioned
the persistent wind. He loped ahead of her like a much younger man,
slipping down a trail with too many logs, round and slippery as oil
drums. She was wearing the wrong coat. The wrong shoes. Staying
upright demanded all of her attention. They had two children, he said,
rolling his eyes, and yes, he had published several books since. She
had noticed, she said, waiting for a comment on her own work. He
took his binoculars out from under his jacket.

You see, he said, the Harlequins are there. And they were, chestnut
and slate, the male a slightly off Tao. They roiled in the rockiest point
in the bay; tumbling where the waves crashed and currents shifted
quickly. They mate high in swift mountain streams, he said. They nest
in crevices. From where they stood they could not hear the squeaks
and whistles of joy as they wrenched mussels and barnacles, crabs
and crustaceans.

7.
It would have been better to meet indoors, she thought. Here it was
though he was made of rubber and feathers, drifting on stilts, absolutely
free of any memory of her body, any obligation of mind. And
yet he was the one that started it with her. He, who on one of their
post workshop outings, had slipped his hand between her legs under
the table as he regaled the class with having met Carver. She found
his audacity, his control, thrilling. You have to meet my wife, he said,
brushing her breast with his arm, she will love you.

8.
He asked how she was, and he listened and nodded. He kept his body
at an angle, an elbow between them.

She knew by then that she had been one of many. Everyone knew:
each year a new affair proceeded in a startlingly similar fashion. She
had merely been a sheet of excitement, a shimmer of lubricant they
penetrated each other through. That’s what mentorship looks like for
women, someone said.

The day, drawing to a close around them, felt as turbulent as it was
the day she left well over a decade ago. She had not told anyone she
was applying to another program and this turned out to be a great
convenience.

9.
And how is Di, she asked finally. He pointed to another cluster of
ducks as if he couldn’t quite hear her, and it occurred to her that he
hadn’t told Di that she had contacted him. Triumph is overrated, she
thought. That she had moved so far along in her career, that she had a
partner, that she was happy, successful, none of this shielded her from
the stab of this omission.

He stopped suddenly, facing her directly. Were you always a lesbian,
or did you just not know at the time?

Why, she said, would that be breaking the rules? She stopped herself
from saying something cruel about how she had never cared what he
thought of her. That it had always been about his wife. That Di was
delicious, like trying to find a single strawberry in a bowl of whipped
cream. Surely he must know that.

There will be a small gathering after the reading, he said. Come. He
walked on, binoculars at the ready, sure and quiet, as if he was leaving
a trail of crumbs.

SINA QUEYRAS is the author of MxT and Autobiography of Childhood,
both from Coach House.

One of Book Madam & Associates' online comics.

The words “book” and “fan” don’t really fit. Music and fan, sure. Sports and fan, you bet. But when it comes to books, you’re a reader or a lover, rarely a fan. Maybe it’s because fandom has little place in an industry infamous for its cynicism and curmudgeonly attitude, its scything insults and ivory tower. Or maybe it’s because the word suggests an uncritical appreciation that doesn’t quite match up to the way we feel we should appreciate books. Imagine calling yourself a fan of Borges. It just doesn’t fly. When it comes to books, “fan” falls flat.

Enter Book Madam & Associates, professional book fans. Based in Toronto, with outposts in Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax, BM&A are professional appreciators—not critics or influencers, just people who really, really like books and the publishing industry. They spread their appreciation through blogs, tweets, and occasional podcasts, events, DJ playlists, and online comics clumsily drawn in Microsoft Paint.

Julie Wilson, a.k.a. the Book Madam, describes the group as a bunch of enthusiastic lateral thinkers: “We have a wide range of interests, along with a desire to connect people across those interests.” They’re what you could call enablers, fuelled by the underlying belief that people want to connect to books, but often don’t know how, and that there’s an ever-growing list of media tools that can enable this connection.

Wilson started on the road to professional fandom in 2006 with her blog Seen Reading, which she describes as an “esoteric spy journal.” On the blog, Wilson logged what she saw commuters reading while in transit. Each entry includes the location of the spotting, a description of the reader, the book being read, the passage Wilson imagines the person is reading, and her riff on that excerpt.

An example, from October 7, 2008:

Spadina streetcar: Caucasian female, mid 20s, with short blond hair and black-framed glasses, wearing skinny jeans, pink striped T-shirt, and green cargo jacket.

The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla (House of Anansi Press), page 87:

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you’ve got inside you— Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang—depending on what you’ve got. And right then, right when I’m thinking that—I swear—the clouds break up a bit and even though she’s gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

The muted voice offers gentle guidance from behind an inch of hollow door, all that separates this embarrassing and gymnastic feat from the perfumed cheek of the woman who bore her. She sits defeated on the toilet, applicator in hand, and calls her mother in.

Since 2006, Wilson has logged more than 800 entries: a curly-haired woman wearing a white backpack reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote; a Hispanic teenager reading Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi; a black man in his fifties wearing a forest-green sweater reading A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Recently, Seen Reading went global via Twitter, gathering sightings reported by literary voyeurs in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Singapore, and in spring 2012, Calgary-based Freehand Books will publish a book based on the project.

Wilson sees Seen Reading as “an impressive, open-ended display of anecdotal evidence that proves people still read, still read paper books, still read in public as entertainment.” She’s made influencers of readers who, though they may not know it, are producing culture through the act of reading. Considering the publishing industry’s current troubles, BM&A’s unflagging enthusiasm is heartening. A new returns policy instituted by Indigo Books & Music will soon see Canada’s largest retail book chain sending books back to publishers 45 days after they’ve been ordered, slicing in half the long-standing 90-day returns term. That means some books will have only a month and a half to make an impact on readers, an impossibly small window in a very busy season. Some larger publishers, like McClelland & Stewart, who just released Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, have less to worry about. Others, whose fall lists centre on newer voices, may have more of an uphill battle.

“In all your other relationships you’d practice more care, but publishing you truly can’t ever stop trying,” says Wilson of book marketing today. “You’ll turn that book into whatever you think the reader wants: ‘You want a blonde? I can be a blonde!’” As bricksand-mortar bookshelves disappear, some advocate for a re-emphasis on book criticism as a way to keep the conversation going. The reality, though, is that the space available for book reviews in major media outlets doesn’t allow for the considered criticism the New York Times Magazine’s Sam Anderson refers to as the “ground zero of textuality.”

The idea of a professional fan may not jibe with notions of how we receive books. But in building a book community that explores the manifold ways people interact with books, BM&A is doing readers and the publishing industry a great service, reinvigorating the lives books have off the shelf.

Another way Wilson is accomplishing this is through work with the Canadian Bookshelf project, a government-funded database of Canadian books. Its goal is to build community around Canadian titles through customized portals aimed at the general public, film and television producers, teachers and librarians. Wilson blogs about books and authors, and runs a personal-shopper program that matches readers with books based on five self-submitted descriptors, filling the gap left as more curated independent bookstores disappear. The realm of professional book fan keeps growing.