Shawna Lemay's ​Apples on a Windowsill

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Palimpsest Press, 2024)

​Apples on a Windowsill opens with this epigraph:

​“Still life is the art of the small thing, an art of holding on to the bits and pieces of our lives.” (Sirí Hustvedt)

This is the third in Lemay’s series of essay collections, after Calm Things and The flower can always be changing (Palimpsest Press 2008 and 2018), and continues questions Lemay muses over on her blog, a wonderful exploration of beauty, art and literature: Transactions with Beauty. All three books and Lemay’s various blogs—she’s been blogging for over twenty years—focus on the “art of the small thing.”
 
In Apples on a Windowsill, Lemay teaches us how to be attentive to the beauty in our lives, in ordinary things and their poetry, and in our own ordinariness. She examines the role and philosophies associated with still life painting, and widens her scope to include the memories, objects and relationships that go into it. In her own still life photographs, some of which she includes in the book (which is a delight), she considers what the objects say about people, their level of wealth, the consumer market and how we interact with beauty.
 
This is also a feminist book. There are many references to women artists and writers, and a frustration that even in this time, women are still being erased in art and literature. Lemay is interested in the portrayal of ordinary women through their own portrayal of themselves and how others see them.
 
Lemay not only talks about the erasure of women artists but also their self-empowerment, such as the artist who made her own self-portrait. She reads biographies of women artists because so many women are referred to simply as “daughter of” or “wife of.” As the wife of a still life painter, Lemay could have easily been cast in this role herself. Instead, she shows her connection to her husband’s art and how both of their artistic practices inform each other’s. She portrays a loving and supportive relationship that engages beautifully with art. I think of all the couples I know who are both writers or both work in creative fields, and the various landmines that they have to navigate: financial, ego, romance. It’s tough. I’m glad Lemay took the time to let readers learn more about how her own relationship navigates these subjects.
 
The book is very readable. Connections move from one object to the next, linked by memory, art, and beauty. I saved this book to read and review during the difficult days of January, when winter seems long.
 
I am already excited when Lemay writes of the “poetry of humble things” and later when she gathers together her own thoughts and the thoughts of other writers on an object and links it to the beauty of ordinary things, which comes from the way the light falls. Lemay dwells on the beauty of light throughout the book.
 
When Lemay and her husband, Rob, an artist and still life painter, return to Italy for their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Lemay places objects on a windowsill, as she had done twenty-five years earlier on their honeymoon there. These window moments are a way of seeing that opens up the self. Art creates a hunger for more beauty and more darkness.
 
I begin my reading on a hum drum January day, the world outside my window covered in white, noisy with the sound of snowplows. I covet the beauty and feel hungry for what Lemay describes to take me out of this humdrumness.
 
Lemay has a way with quotes, finding the ones that fit the context of her subject and resonate for me very much. I transcribe her sentences for quotation later in my quote-of-the-week feature on my Substack: “In a good relationship, we guard each others’ dreams, and souls, and solitudes.” The book is also an expression of the relationship the couple has to each other and to their art.
 
She talks about not being well known in Canadian Literature and not minding that, just wanting to do her work. She sees herself as ordinary but also extolls the beauty of the ordinary. To me, she is a rock star. I have loved all her books, followed her blogs, and even sent her a gift of a box/book of whimsy.
 
Lemay suggests that the still life is “the genre of loneliness and quiet” and goes on to say that we all experience still lifes. She worries that it is dangerous to be on the side of beauty as the world ends, but when she writes about the still life, she also discusses the connection between its details and trauma, and notes that loss is experienced through detail, which seems particularly wise to me and familiar, based on my own experience with grief.
 
I love the book as a slow read. I made plans to devote the next few deep-winter weeks at least to the reading of it, while my husband and I read the Book of Delights by Ross Gay together. It is exactly the pairing I needed to cope with the dystopian unbelievable realities I hear about on the news.
 
Lemay talks about how these details can represent the truth of our experiences:

​Once shared, our truth moves out beyond us and resonates into future lives in ways we can only imagine. Sharing these details is worth our persistence and it is worth our bravery.

This is something that is very important to me in my own writing, the act of writing is part of a shared conversation. I write so that kindred misfits do not feel alone.
 
Bruce Springsteen recurs through the book and there is a whole, fascinating chapter which explores how she became fond of his music and how it connects to her life. We get a fascinating glimpse into Lemay’s wildness as a young adult and how she felt she didn’t fit in. Like every other artform, music can lead to enlightenment about the self: “What I learned from steadily listening to Bruce Springsteen’s music […] is that the soul goes on in disrepair, that we go on repairing it, and that is what it is to be human.”
 
I was especially interested in the way Lemay incorporates details of her life. After attempting to be a journalist and deciding that career didn’t fit for her, she realized eventually that as a writer she “reports on the extreme beauty of the world.”
 
Lemay balances being able to look out for moments of beauty and capture them with creating her own still lifes to “make a sliver of beauty appear.”
 
The book incorporates current events. Lemay feels she cannot leave the contemporary out because “still life has something to say about the time and place in which [it is] created.”
 
Another aspect of the book that I love is the way Lemay takes little dives down rabbit holes to discuss the origin and meaning of individual words, such as “errands”: “The word errand derives from the Old English and holds within its meaning, ‘message, mission.’” Or “loophole,” which comes from “the design in a medieval fortress known as an arrowslit or loophole” for launching arrows and “a crack where the light gets into the castle.”
 
There is such wonder in this book. For example, Lemay explains how Egyptians painted still lifes on the interior of tombs, believing they would become real in the afterlife and give the deceased something to sustain themselves.
 
I took a moment to finish my tea. I looked out onto the snow-covered roofs, marveled at the variety of geometric angles on display.
 
There are so many resonances in this book for me, that I can’t help but transcribe numerous sentences to linger over later. I know they will inspire my own writing. The last time I had this feeling was with her latest novel, Everything Affects Everyone (Palimpsest Press, 2021), a book so beloved and right to me that I bought several copies and gave them as gifts to friends.
 
There are feathers in that book too, and angels. The feather is a recurring image in Lemay’s work. For example, Lemay quotes Hélène Cixous’ book Stigmata: Escaping Texts (Routledge, 1998), in which Cixous writes, “There is no artist without castoff feathers” in reference to the Icarus myth. In Apples on a Windowsill, Lemay explores this idea further:

​We inherit the feathers, the clothes, of previous artists. We all begin our creative lives packing our suitcases with secondhand clothes—trying on, in my case the frocks of Virginia Woolf, the black turtlenecks of Clarice Lispector, the kimonos of Georgia O’Keeffe.

​I adore this idea and immediately thought of all the different writers whose castoff feathers I might have tried on already and would like to try on now, including Lemay’s.
 
The still life transcends the ordinary moment to make it extraordinary and magical. Lemay is interested in how people with no art background or training look at art. She reveals the behind-the-scenes aspects of her husband’s art by writing about the tools and methods he uses to create his paintings from her point-of-view as a writer and photographer who has been looking at art and learning about it for thirty years: 

​The magic trick of still life is that it is not really a trick at all.

​In her day job, Lemay works in a library. She looks for beauty and poetic moments in the work and the people she helps.  She is not interested in compartmentalizing her life. She is interested in the history, secretes and stories of objects. “I like listening to the music and silence in things”:

​The still life is sometimes a question. And sometimes it provokes other questions. What are the dreams in the entrails of your tedious day? What is your exceptional reality? Where is the loophole in your daily life? Where is the holy ordinary, the sweet spot? Which way to the transcendent?

​Lemay invites us to be open to the possibility of the marvelous. She makes me rethink the objects around me, their histories and to wonder at the magic these objects may hold, to feel a sense of timelessness, their connection to others, how these “still lifes can drop us into the mystery of being.”
 
But our relationship to beauty is complicated. Are we even allowed to care about beauty amidst all the tragedy and ugliness of the world?
 
Lemay’s interaction with art, whether it is a painting or a book or a song, is personal. She puts the things she loves “magically in conversation with each other,” which makes this reader love them too. There is much more in this book that I could have talked about and praised. It is a thorough and well-written work that I will return to.
 
Apples on a Windowsill is a feast of beauty and light, art and literature, and a book that can help elucidate the self. Like Anik See’s Cabin Fever, the subject of one of my previous reviews, this book invites the reader to slow down, to savour beauty, to engage with the world on one’s own terms. 

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​Amanda Earl (she/her) does creative stuff from the 19th floor of her Chinatown apartment in Ottawa on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples. Her most recent publication is the collaborative poem the suitcase poem with a bunch of poets, published by above/ground press. You can be her client for editing, mentorship, literary event organizations and customized workshops. AmandaEarl.com.