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J a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

Jordan Tannahill The award-winning playwright makes the leap from stage to page p a g e 1 4

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Contents

V o l . 8 4 , N 0 . 1 • J a N u a r y/ F e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

5

Editor’s note

8

Find an early reader for your manuscsript who isn’t afraid to give you the hard truths

Fron tm attE r 6

Building bridges

Family history and futuristic architecture collide in Kerri Sakamoto’s fable-like novel 7

on the border

As Indigo prepares for its U.S. expansion, experts weigh in on the retailer’s potential for success

agony Editor

9

Voices carried

Nadia Hohn remembers diverse-kidlit hero and Groundwood publisher Sheila Barry

pagE 14 Jordan Tannahill finds inspiration in a familial relationship

10 Exhibiting power

Kent Monkman’s artistic alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, finds her voice in a new memoir 11 personal Essay

People who denigrate the performative aspects of The Bachelor miss the point, writes Suzannah Showler FEat ur E s 12 misrepresentation and the truth of Ktunaxa consent

A response from Ktunaxa Nation Council 14 mom’s the word

Provocative artist Jordan Tannahill draws on his relationship with his mother for his debut novel, Liminal

Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

Illustrator Matt James’s The Funeral, plus Hadley Dyer, Heather Smith, and Jillian Tamaki rEV i Ew s 32 Elisabeth de Mariaffi

delivers a terrifying new thriller; Lee Maracle and M. NourbeSe Philip look at systemic racism in Canada; Paige Cooper’s debut story collection is a winner BooK s F or young pE oplE 43 Simpsons-esque graphic novel Sparks!; the latest from Jan Thornhill and David A. Robertson

spr ing pr EV iEw

B ooK m aKing 50 scenic view

23 non-fiction

4

27 Kids books

18 Fiction

A new novel from Michael Ondaatje, plus books from Lynn Crosbie and Sarah Selecky pagE 9 Remembering Sheila Barry

Heather O’Neill, and Bill Gaston get personal; Rachel Giese on modern masculinity

David Chariandy,

A formidable new art book pays homage to Canada’s physical landscape

cover, arden wr ay

pagE 6 Kerri Sakamoto returns with Floating City

Editor’s Note

Artists first A necessary reminder that it’s the creators behind our stories who matter most Back iN NovEmBEr , I attended an afternoon

conference hosted by the Canadian Copyright Institute in a downtown law office with a dizzying but beautiful 53rd-floor view of the Toronto harbour. I was amazed by the turnout of approximately 70 people, representing various cultural industries whose members have been affected by declining royalties. CCI board chair Bill Harnum was also struck by the attendance, quipping that five years ago you couldn’t get people out, let alone fill a room, to talk about copyright. The issue has reached a crisis point, as the numbers demonstrate: licensing revenue for publishers and creators is down 91 per cent since 2012, representing a cumulative loss of $78 million.

The event addressed the federal government’s slow-moving review of the Copyright Act, which began under Heritage Minister Mélanie Joly’s watch in 2017. Marshall Rothstein, former Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, provided insight from a legal perspective, putting copyright law into the context of societal issues involving advancing technology, free expression, and the dissemination of knowledge. Lui Simpson, executive director of international copyright enforcement and trade policy for the Association of American Publishers, offered advice for how the industry could better lobby the government to make changes.

But it was a panel of creators that I really wish Joly had the opportunity to hear from.

Globe and Mail columnist Kate Taylor, playwright Scott White, musician Damhnait Doyle, and author Christine Fischer Guy revealed personal details not just of their shrinking bank balances and opportunities, but how the situation is diminishing their feelings of creative self-worth. It’s a terrible thing to hear from an artist, but a reminder of who matters most, and as the copyright review continues, I hope Joly and other decision makers are listening closely.

PUBLiShEr Alison Jones ajones@quillandquire.com

EditoriAl Editor-iN-chiEf Sue Carter scarter@quillandquire.com

aSSociatE PUBLiShEr Attila Berki aberki@quillandquire.com

rEviEw Editor Steven W. Beattie sbeattie@quillandquire.com

ProdUctioN maNaGEr Alexandra Irving

BookS for YoUNG PEoPLE Editor Shanda Deziel sdeziel@quillandquire.com

NEwSStaNd/coNSUmEr markEtiNG maNaGEr Annie Gabrielian

SENior Editor Conan Tobias ctobias@quillandquire.com EditoriaL aSSociatE Becky Robertson brobertson@quillandquire.com

St. joSEph mEdiA chairmaN Tony Gagliano

Art art dirEctor Erin McPhee emcphee@quillandquire.com

PrESidENt Douglas Kelly

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Sue Carter

scarter@quillandquire.com j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e

5

Voices carried

exhibiting power

Faking it

Nadia Hohn remembers her diverse-kidlit hero, Groundwood publisher Sheila Barry

Cree artist Kent Monkman’s alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, finds her voice

Poet Suzannah Showler defends The Bachelor’s performative aspects

page 9

page 10

page 11

p r of i le

Building bridges Family history and futuristic architecture collide in Kerri Sakamoto’s fable-like novel, Floating City By D o ry C e r n y Kerri SaKamoto credits her friend, the archi-

tect Bruce Kuwabara, with planting the seed of inspiration that bloomed into her third novel, Floating City, out with Knopf Canada in April. Sakamoto had already been working on an early draft of a book that drew on her family’s history when Kuwabara told her the American visionary Buckminster Fuller had once designed a futuristic waterfront develop6

Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

ment called Project Toronto, which included a 20-storey crystal pyramid at the foot of University Avenue and floating pods of housing in the Toronto harbour.

“It seemed like an unlikely thing, Buckminster Fuller in Toronto and this kind of futuristic plan for the city,” says Sakamoto. “So when I started to explore Buckminster Fuller, it opened a whole vista of ideas about urban growth and

skyscrapers and the dawn of that era, and just the city’s architecture and its role in determining how people live, the quality of life, and the use of our resources.”

Rather than scrap the story she had already begun – based on her maternal grandmother’s marriage to a Buddhist priest, and her parents’ experiences of internment during the Second World War – Sakamoto, who lives in Toronto, incorporated Fuller and his ideas. Though Bucky (as he was commonly known) makes only sporadic appearances throughout Floating City, his influence dominates the life of the book’s protagonist, Frankie Hanesaka, who, following humble beginnings and years spent at the Tashme Internment Camp, becomes a hugely successful property developer in Toronto. But the book is more than a typical story of endurance; the figure of the Priest – who in Floating City is the first husband of Frankie’s mother (and possibly Frankie’s real father) – is used to introduce a fable-like quality to the narrative that, along with some of Bucky’s more fantastical scenes, verges on magic realism.

It was this combination of seemingly disparate elements that caught the attention of Sakamoto’s editor, Craig Pyette, who acquired the novel four years ago. “It was the way that Kerri set up those big pieces so that, thematically, they cohere. It took awhile for me to appreciate just how good she was at that,” he says. “I guess I don’t know how much of that is intuitive and how much is deliberate ... she lines these backdrops up so that at the end it all comes down and is brought to bear on the characters and the action of the novel.”

Sakamoto’s 1998 debut, The Electrical Field (which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and the Canada-Japan Literary Award), and its 2003 follow-up, One Hundred Million Hearts, both told stories of Japanese-Canadian history and the fallout

r achel idzerda

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“It had to do a lot with raising kids, because they pull you out into these worlds of imagination” of the internment experience. For her latest, the author wanted to expand the scope of her characters’ experiences while still including those formative elements. “I wanted it to be something different from that kind of more familiar narrative,” she says, adding that bringing Fuller into the mix was the perfect vehicle through which to accomplish that goal. “That’s what kind of opened it up to being a more unorthodox novel, and brought in more ideas than just this limited story of Frankie.”

Despite the omnipresent ethos Fuller brings to the book, family remains an intrinsic theme in Floating City, with Frankie’s complex relationships forming a defining throughline. This is hardly surprising, given Sakamoto’s admission that, thanks to her 10-year-old son and 23-yearold stepson, she feels like she’s “been a recluse over the last while, in a domestic world.” Family preoccupations are part of the reason for the lengthy gap between books. “I was writing but I wasn’t finishing and I’m not a good supermom multi-tasker, so I just got really wrapped up in my family,” she says. But Sakamoto also notes that it was family that ultimately, if ironically, allowed her to move beyond a domestic story to the grander ideas presented in the novel.

“I think it had a lot to do with raising kids, because they pull you out into these worlds of imagination,” she says. “I never thought I would write anything that would have magic realist elements in it, but I think it’s partly to do with having a very adventurous boy who really tugged me out of my comfort zone.”

new s

on the border As Indigo prepares for its American expansion this summer, experts weigh in on the book retailer’s potential for success By C a i t l i n K e l ly indigo BooKS and muSic is a retail behemoth,

a household name in Canada. But as the bookseller plans to open a 30,000-square-foot “cultural department store” next summer inside the Mall at Short Hills – a luxury collection of stores in Short Hills, New Jersey – can it duplicate that success?

“If they were expanding as a pure bookstore, then they would struggle from the get-go,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of retail at New York–based research firm GlobalData.

“However, the fact they also sell homewares and other products, and that those things are nicely curated and designed, gives them a chance.” But, he warns, “they are entering a very crowded market, and it’s critical they differentiate to stand out.”

As some chastened American retailers have learned after expanding into Canada (and vice versa), retailers that are highly successful in their home market have assumed “they have something unique to offer in a foreign market without properly understanding what is already available or what the customer wants,” says Saunders. “It is a very common pitfall.”

The Mall at Short Hills enjoys a wealthy clientele, with average regional household in-

comes of $200,000, offering established luxury brands like Bulgari, Hermes, Prada, and Ferragamo. “It’s the number-one luxury mall in New Jersey and one of the top in the U.S,” says Joan Verdon, retail reporter for The Record and NorthJersey.com. “They’re known for trying to bring in the first U.S. store for new brands, and Indigo fits that model. They’re trying to position themselves with stores that people haven’t heard of.” Verdon gives the example of the White Company, a British clothing retailer that recently opened in the mall.

Indigo might enjoy “a little cachet because it’s a Canadian company,” she adds.

“We feel Indigo is bringing something unique,” says Jamie Cox, general manager of the Mall at Short Hills. “Our goal is to attract retailers that offer exceptional merchandise and experiences, so their brand will certainly resonate with consumers who are looking to explore and purchase something special.”

Saunders suggests that it is not a wise time to push the idea of a department store. “It carries too much baggage associated with downat-heel, old-fashioned retailers like Sears and Macy’s,” he says. “This concept is different, so it is unwise to be associated too heavily with a j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e

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Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

Agony editor

Cruel to be kind Find an early reader for your manuscsript who isn’t afraid to give you the hard truths Dear Agony Editor,

l i B r Ar i A n p i C k s

loan stars Each month, Canadian library staff vote for their favourite upcoming books, via BookNet Canada’s Loan Stars readersadvisory program and the Canadian Urban Libraries Council.

The Girl in the Tower, Katherine Arden (Del Rey/Penguin Random House Canada) No Time to Spare, Ursula K. Le Guin (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt/ Raincoast Books) Enchantress of Numbers, Jennifer Chiaverini (Dutton/PRHC) The Vanishing Season, Joanna Schaffhausen (Minotaur Books/Raincoast) Three Daughters of Eve, Elif Shafak (Bloomsbury/Raincoast) Glass Town, Steven Savile (St. Martin’s Press/Raincoast) We’ll Sleep When We’re Old, Pino Corrias (Atria Books/ Simon & Schuster Canada) They Know Not What They Do, Jussi Valtonen (Oneworld Publications/ Publishers Group Canada)

I’ve told all my friends, family, and co-workers that I’m working on a novel because I wanted them to hold me to it.

But now they’re all asking if they can read it. Even when I say it’s not ready, they’ll say, “So let’s see what you have.” I know I should show it to someone, but how do I know who I should show it to?

How do you pick your first readers?

Signed, Under Pressure Dear Under Pressure, Finding first readers can be stressful. With one shrug of their shoulders and a “meh,” a trusted friend or family member can send a writer spiralling into despair. But here’s a question to consider: do you really want to know what people think? Aspiring writers tend to fall into one of two camps. The first lot holds tight to unrealistic dreams of what it means to be a writer.

They want the glory, the ego stroke, and the liliesonly green-room clause, but they’re not willing to

put up with the hard work, criticism, and editing that goes into writing.

Not good writing, anyway.

If you fall into the first group, I recommend you look for first readers who consider Us Weekly literature. The second category contains those who care what people think. They’re writing to be read, not writing for appearances.

If that’s you, picking first readers could be more of a challenge.

Fellow writers can be helpful, but they might tell you how they’d write your book. Ask avid readers who don’t have an emotional connection to you. Steer clear of friends and family, especially grandparents, unless your grandma is Alice Munro.

Look for acquaintances who aren’t afraid of hurting your feelings or being honest. Not that first readers should be mean, but you’re asking them to do an important job: to give you thoughtful and constructive feedback. Regardless of how tough it may be to hear it, it’s always better to be on the receiving end of criticism before your book is published, rather than after.

The Years, Months, Days, Yan Lianke (Grove Press/PGC)

Brian Francis (brian-francis.com) is the author of Natural Order and Fruit.

He teaches creative writing as part of the International Festival of Authors.

Wild and Beautiful Is the Night, John Miller (Cormorant Books)

Have a question for Brian?

Email info@quillandquire.com

evan munday

sector that’s in terminal decline. They’re dealing with a public that’s jaded and skeptical about shopping.”

And is Indigo, with its café, stationery department, and other attractions, sufficiently different from its key American competitor, Barnes & Noble? Especially given that the 780-store retail chain has closed three in downtown Manhattan in the past five years. There is also the omnipresent threat of online giant Amazon and its brick-and-mortar expansion, which includes a New Jersey location.

“Although Amazon’s [physical] presence isn’t enormous, it is likely to grow, and it has an army of loyal customers who are connected to Amazon through its Prime membership scheme,” says Saunders. “In typical Amazon fashion, it also isn’t all that concerned about how profitable its shops are. As such, it could make for a fearsome competitor. Arguably, Indigo’s proposition is different and more rounded than that found in Amazon’s bookstores. But this underscores the need for it to showcase its expertise outside of books.”

Many American book buyers now prefer to shop local, and to support independent businesses, says Oren Teicher, CEO of the 2,300-member American Booksellers Association, based in White Plains, New York. “The popular presumption that the little guy is losing out to the big guys is not accurate. There are literally millions of American consumers choosing to buy from locally owned businesses because it is a locally owned business.”

As a major retailer operating within a luxury mall, creating powerful local connections by featuring regional authors will be key to Indigo’s success, Teicher says. Another challenge will be ensuring the store is sufficiently staffed by knowledgeable sales associates, most of whom typically earn meager hourly retail wages. The larger the store – and especially one serving affluent and demanding customers – the more staff they’ll need, boosting labour costs. And key in the U.S. where affordable health insurance is essential, few big-box retailers offer that added benefit as an inducement.

“Indigo is going to have to work very hard to stand out,” says Saunders. “Is it a bookstore, a homewares store, a department store, a gift shop? If it is a bookshop foremost, it runs the risk of a lack of interest. If it’s a department store, there are negative connotations. It’s important to determine how they want to be seen as in the minds of consumers. A lack of clarity can be very destructive.”

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Congratulations to Hiro Kanagawa from Playwrights Canada Press

MeM or i al

Voices carried Remembering diverse-kidlit hero and Groundwood publisher Sheila Barry By n a D i a H o H n it waS July 9, 2011, and I was attending a work-

shop on writing for children hosted in the backyard of A Different Booklist bookstore in Toronto. Eight months prior, I had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. The diagnosis was a strange teacher, motivating me to write in increasing volumes. It put a fire under my ass – not only to tell my story, but to get it published.

This was also the day I first met Sheila Barry.

Sheila was then editor-in-chief at Kids Can Press. How she spoke about children’s books resonated with me. Although I had been writing books since I was six, Sheila made me feel that I could be published one day. So I asked for her email address, and she told me to send her what I was working on. It took me another two years to do so. When she offered me a contract for my first picture book at Groundwood Books – where she was now publisher – I thought that she was humouring me. So I questioned my writing colleagues, and they all said Groundwood was their dream publishing company, and that Sheila did not give false hopes. So I went along.

Sheila acquired my story, Malaika’s Costume, about a young Caribbean girl whose mother is working in Canada to send money back home to support her family. Separated but loving, this is not an ideal situation, but – as for many Canadians – it is an immigration story that has played out in my own family many times.

Sheila kept the first-person narrative in Caribbean patois, involved me in illustrator selection,

and gently helped polish the story so it shone through like Malaika’s costume. She was right.

The book did well.

Eventually, I learned from Canadian and American editors, publishers, and reviewers that this process was not typical for the industry. But perhaps this episode illustrates one small example of how Sheila gave space for more voices and stories, and led the way in diversifying Canadian children’s literature.

On Nov. 15, Sheila’s death from breast cancer was a loss I felt to my core. At Groundwood, her task was to honour its commitment to produce diverse books, to create mirrors for children to see themselves in and provide windows into others’ lives, but Sheila’s influence extended further and deeper. Having attended the recent TD Canadian Children’s Book Awards, her impact was felt – from the award-winning and nominated books she worked on, the tributes given by organizations she served such as the Canadian Children’s Book Centre and International Board for Books on Young People, and in the condolences sent from colleagues from Canada and the United States. I saw how much Sheila was missed and loved.

My fear is that the advocacy work she dedicated herself to will regress. She was my diverse kidlit ally, and now I have a renewed fire inside me to continue her legacy of diverse children’s literature. The world’s children need it now more than ever.

Indian Arm is the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Drama In this modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Little Eyolf, two families collide at the uneasy intersection of privilege and birthright.

playwrightscanada.com

j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e

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More deals

exhibiting power Kent Monkman’s artistic alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, finds her voice in a new memoir By s u e C a r t e r Cree artist Kent Monkman’s first solo exhib-

ition, Shame and Prejudice: A Story of Resilience, is a subversive tour through Indigenous history and a play on colonial artistic traditions, travelling back 300 years from life on a contemporary Canadian reserve to the New France fur trade, as witnessed by Monkman’s trickster alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle.

Penguin Random House Canada vicepresident Scott Sellers managed to sneak into the exhibition on the final day of its first stop at University of Toronto’s Art Museum in March 2017, narrowly missing the lineups that would later wind down the staircases and out onto the campus. Sellers was so overwhelmed by Shame and Prejudice – “the scope, the vision, the beauty, the sadness, the anger” – he went straight back to PRHC’s office and sent Monkman an email to let him know how blown away

he was by his work, and to ask if the artist was interested in talking about a book. “I can’t remember an exhibit that has generated that much discussion about art and our history at the same time,” says Sellers.

Within days, Monkman responded, and soon a deal was arranged through his agent, Jackie Kaiser of Westwood Creative Artists.

McClelland & Stewart publisher Jared Bland will edit the untitled Miss Chief Eagle Testickle memoir, a visual and written collaboration between Monkman and his frequent artistic partner, writer and filmmaker Gisèle Gordon, scheduled for fall 2019.

Details are still being worked out, but Sellers says, “I think it’s going to be an amazing visual book and narrative, and generate a lot of discussion, which is what really good books should do.”

Congratulations to OANA AVASILICHIOAEI, winner of the 2017 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD FOR TRANSLATION for READOPOLIS! “Readopolis Readopolis is at times a panorama of Montreal literary terary culture, at times a condemnation of the precarity recarity and banality of cultural ultural economies, at times a rich homage to friends and nd to hope, as well as to the he wonders of the act of reading eading itself.” —Erín Moure Available from BOOKTHUG bookthug.ca

10 Untitled-2 Q u i l l &1Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

2017-11-14 11:18 AM

Bloomsbury U.S. and HarperCollins have acquired Radiant Shimmering Light, the debut novel by Giller Prize– shortlisted author Sarah Selecky. The book follows Lilian Quick, a struggling pet portrait artist whose life changes drastically when she starts working for her motivational guru cousin. The deal was arranged by Samantha Haywood of the Transatlantic Agency.

Edgarland Films has acquired Richard Wagamese’s award-winning 2014 novel, Medicine Walk, the story of a young Ojibway man’s journey with his estranged, dying father. The deal was arranged by John Pearce with Chris Casuccio at Westwood Creative Artists.

La Pastèque has acquired world French rights to graphic novelist Scott Chantler’s forthcoming graphic novel, Bix, a mostly wordless black-and-white graphic biography highlighting the career of 1920s jazz musician Leon Bix Beiderbecke. The deal was arranged

by Samantha Haywood at the Transatlantic Agency.

Doubleday Canada has acquired Canadian rights to Métis poet Greg Scofield’s second memoir, Sitting with Charlotte: Stitching My History Bead

by Bead, described as “an act of reclamation, celebration, and defiance that traces the stories of his female ancestors.” The deal was arranged by Denise Bukowski of the Bukowski Agency.

Goose Lane Editions has acquired world rights to B.C. author’s Philip Huynh’s Toad Poem, a series of linked stories featuring the Vietnamese diaspora. The deal was arranged by Carolyn Swayze at the Carolyn Swayze Literary Agency.

Random House has acquired U.S. rights to Claudia Dey’s novel Heartbreaker, about a mysterious woman who disappears from a small northern town. The deal was arranged by Martha Webb at CookeMcDermid.

Borough Press has acquired U.K. and Commonwealth (excluding Canada) English-language rights in a deal arranged by Suzanne Brandreth at Cooke International, on behalf of Martha Webb at CookeMcDermid.

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p er s on al es s ay

faking it People who denigrate the performative aspects of The Bachelor are missing the point, writes s u z a n n a H s H o w l e r

andrew bat tershill

laSt may, I published Thing is, my second collec-

tion of poems. The project, at least as I thought of it, was to re-imagine the alienated nature of consciousness as a universal condition. I read a bunch of philosophy and learned about linguistic experiments and thought about divination and ghosts. The results were called (in a review in this very magazine) “metaphysical.”

I thought that was flattering and nice.

In January, I have a new book out, and it’s about The Bachelor. As in the reality TV spectacle with the faux floral tokens; and the harem of beach bods; and the competitive pursuit of aggressively hetero matrimony. This book isn’t poetry; it’s non-fiction – a sincere close reading and critical treatment. At 224 pages, Most Dramatic Ever is by far the longest thing I’ve ever written, the greatest number of words I’ve ever spent in one place. The cover looks like a bar of gold: bright and shiny and mercantile.

More than a few people have expressed surprise (and occasionally horror) at what looks, I guess, like a bit of a zag for a wannabe metaphysician-poet (not to mention a feminist).

And I get that. But the truth is, it just didn’t feel that way to me at the time. On the contrary, writing a book about The Bachelor seemed like a totally obvious thing to do.

I’ve always had a restless fascination with what it means for something to be real. In this regard my interests are pretty small-c catholic, arising not so much out of broad-mindedness as grasping, not-too-discerning hunger. (I guess “interest” and “fascination” might be euphemisms for “relentless anxiety.”) If these are the kinds of questions you gnash your teeth over – What even is anything? Why do people believe in stuff? How can any of us ever translate our inalienable subjectivity into collectively agreedupon truths? – let me tell you: The Bachelor isn’t the worst thing to gnaw on.

Here’s a reaction I sometimes get when I out myself as an (unaffiliated) Bachelor scholar: “Come on, aren’t the relationships on that show fake?” And here’s what I always think but never say: that’s a stupid question. Seriously, I don’t even know what that means. Aren’t we all faking it? Isn’t that just what engaging with other humans means?

For most of us, it’s a pretty lousy, low-rent act, the one where we jerk our meat puppets around, hoping to effect gestures that will approximate who we really are. It’s such a shabby, doomed effort, but we do it anyway, which is how you know how badly we crave the intended result: being just a little bit more known by

others, and seeing them a little more clearly in return. We’ll muck up our perfect inner selves over and over, just to get a little closer to a few of the other muck-ups bumbling around nearby.

To be a bit more generous, I think one of the things people are really asking when they tilt in the direction of The Bachelor’s fakeness is something like: that’s not how I come across, right? And that’s fair. I’m inured to it at this point, but I can see how thinking about The Bachelor as a kind of augmented reality – a burlesque of some commonly held fantasies and beliefs – can be a lot to take. Especially given that the show is not exactly a paragon of social responsibility. It might not be a place you are keen to recognize yourself, or your neighbour, or your nation.

People sometimes ask me for a report card attesting to the real-world viability of The Bachelor’s relationships. Proof, maybe, that a bond formed under such artificial conditions is too many standard deviations from the baseline, everyday performance of selfhood to really work. And here’s where things get interesting.

Yes, statistically most of the relationships formed on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette will fail. I think we can safely say that most of the show’s marriage proposals are made, if not insincerely, at least under the influence of a delusion engineered by entertainment professionals. But! Here’s another stat I’ll hit you with: so far, no marriage arising out of the Bachelor franchise has ended in divorce, and all of the married couples have kids. Whether that seems truly disturbing or oddly hopeful I’ll leave to you. Either way, there are actual human beings out there whose existence is the direct provenance of this TV show. That’s some real shit if you ask me.

My interest in the nature of existence – one that has only swelled with more and more worry in the past year – found greater solace roving through The Bachelor’s universe than it did hunkered down in the bespoke, tiny house of verse I’d built specially to shelter and tend those concerns. I don’t mean to denigrate the poetry – it felt rewarding and often necessary, too. I’m only saying that if you’re inclined to assume something about poetry’s high-cultural cruising altitude and The Bachelor’s low-cultural subterranean sink, well, I’m here to tell you it isn’t that simple. Writing a book about The Bachelor was at least as ontologically soothing as writing a book of poems about ontology. suzannah showler’s Most Dramatic Ever: The Bachelor is published by ECW Press. j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 11

essay

Misrepresentation and the truth of Ktunaxa consent A response from Ktunaxa Nation Council

By T r oy s e B a s T i a n

editor’s note: In its October issue, Q&Q ran a personal essay by Angie Abdou about the consultation process she undertook with the Ktunaxa Nation Council to include a Ktunaxa character in her new novel, In Case I Go. Subsequent to its publication, Q&Q has learned that the essay – intended to educate authors on the process through her own experience – has issues that need to be addressed.

Ktunaxa writer Troy Sebastian has written a response, which has been reviewed by the Ktunaxa Nation Council.

We thank them for their valuable time and insight, and also thank Abdou, who has also actively participated in follow-up discussions. Q&Q takes responsibility for the misrepresentations, in particular for suggesting in the headline and subhead that Abdou had “gained permission to use Ktunaxa stories,” which was not the case. In sharing the following essay, we hope to take the first step toward a better relationship with the Ktunaxa Nation.

Angie Abdou’s essAy, Getting To Yes, represents serious

challenges for the Ktunaxa Nation Council.

There are clear problems of misrepresentation by both Abdou and Quill & Quire in this article, which I will address in terms of priority. To be clear, a misrepresentation is defined by the Canadian Oxford Dictionary as “a false or misleading account of the nature of something.”

The misrepresentations are: –The KNC has provided “enthusiastic support” for Abdou’s book.

– The Ktunaxa Elders’ Council approves of the book.

–Abdou “gained permission to use Ktunaxa stories.”

–Abdou had permission to disclose and publish Ktunaxa engagement.

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The primary misrepresentation in the article is that In Case I Go was released “with Ktunaxa Nation Council’s enthusiastic support and with the Ktunaxa elders’ approval.” These assertions are not supported by the facts. The Ktunaxa Nation Council did not provide any formal endorsement of the book. To claim otherwise is a misrepresentation of the outcome of the consultation process undertaken by Ktunaxa Nation Council.

Therein lies the essence of the grievance.

The reason this misrepresentation is of the utmost importance is that it claims approval from the government of the Ktunaxa Nation. Countless outsiders seek approval from Ktunaxa Nation Council on a wide range of issues. Most come from land-based mining and forest companies, the provincial and federal governments and those with many other interests, who endlessly approach and, at times, consult the Ktunaxa Nation Council on the minutiae and the aggregate of their operations.

The Ktunaxa Nation Council has many agreements in place to mitigate, streamline, and focus these processes.

These agreements provide certainty within the Ktunaxa Nation operations while formalizing and establishing relationships with third parties who seek our consent.

While the scale of a novel or a literary article may pale in comparison to that of mining tenures, forest operations, and the like, they are the most readily accessible medium for settlers to access. Anyone can purchase the novel or the magazine where the article was published. It was for this purpose the Nation engaged with the author to ensure the book was written in the right light. The subsequent article erroneously serves as a beacon for how to get permission from the Ktunaxa

eSSay

Nation Council to use our stories: as if the first stake in a literary gold rush.

It is readily apparent to all Ktunaxa the essential and vital role that the Ktunaxa Elders’ Council serves within our formal government structure as well as within the Ktunaxa Nation at large. The Elders’ Council is one of our most precious and sensitive communities. Their knowledge, understanding, and integrity are resources that deserve the highest respect and protection.

What Adbou has done is to vilify our elders as “potentially angry or hostile.” She describes her anticipation of meeting with them as “the most terrifying moment yet.” These statements only serve to illustrate the audience she and her work serve. They connect the dots for readers who objectify Indigenous peoples as an “other:” a fearsome tribe capable of angry hostility especially from the terrifying engagement of Indigenous elders. It is a vilification that does not have the redemption of Ktunaxa voice, authority, or approval, especially when framed within a context of supposed consent. Our elders, government, and nation deserve much better than the casual misrepresentation in Abdou’s article.

The entire story of Abdou’s engagement with Ktunaxa, as represented in the published article, was done without consent of the council. To be clear, Abdou did not seek permission to disclose the internal engagement processes of the Ktunaxa Nation Council. The consultation and engagement processes of the Traditional Knowledge and Language Sector of Ktunaxa Nation Council are not subject for public consumption. Third parties who engage with Ktunaxa Nation respect the value of that engagement because they seek a relationship with our nation. There are consequences for breaching this relationship. All parties that engage Ktunaxa Nation accept that the consultation process serves their interests in the short and long terms and therefore breach of the process is taken seriously. It so rarely happens these days that Abdou’s actions are a stark reminder of a past no Ktunaxa wants to repeat.

In closing, I will leave you with a word on Ktunaxa consent. Many readers may be aware of the recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling on an issue raised by Ktunaxa Nation. Ktunaxa Nation sought Charter of

Rights and Freedoms protection of a sacred area in our territory called Qat’muk from a speculative ski resort proposal. In its ruling, the Supreme Court of Canada found that “where adequate consultation has occurred a development may proceed without the consent of an Indigenous group.”

That conclusion aligns directly within the “Getting to Yes” framework written by Abdou and published by Quill & Quire. In one case, Ktunaxa Nation faces a provincial government approving a project without Ktunaxa consent, and the other, an author who claims, upon consultation, Ktunaxa Nation support for their work.

Claiming Indigenous consent is a settler alibi for deeds without honour. Denying Indigenous consent is an essential recipe for the status quo of settler society.

Indigenous consent is the truth of reconciliation. Otherwise, reconciliation is just another roadside attraction.

Getting to consent is recognizing that Indigenous peoples do have the right to consent. Nothing for us without us. While Quill & Quire and Angie Abdou have apologized for elements of “Getting to Yes,” apologies are a poor substitute for respecting and practicing consent. That is why we have provided this offering: a challenge for authors and publishers to seek more than consent, but to build better relationships.

This year, Ktunaxa Nation has undertaken a book project titled Celebrating Who We Are. It is an incredible project for its unique dimension: Ktunaxa Nation has never published a book that celebrates who we are as a nation. While this may be bad history in some eyes, it is essential storytelling and nation building for us. We need to see ourselves represented in publishing and so do you. We invite publishers, booksellers, and others in CanLit publishing to get in touch to help Ktunaxa share our story. That is how we will get to consent: by telling Ktunaxa stories in our way with partners who respect and affirm our ability to say yes … and our right to say no.

“We need to see ourselves represented in publishing and so do you”

Troy Sebastian is a Ktunaxa writer from aq’am. He writes poetry and fiction, and is currently working on his first novel. His writing has been published in the Ktuqcqakyam, The Malahat Review, and The New Quarterly, and is forthcoming in The Walrus.

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cover feature

Mom’s the word Provocative interdisciplinary artist Jordan Tannahill draws on his own life experience in his debut novel, an experimental but tender portrait of a young man’s deep love for his mother By rya n P o r t e r P h o t o g r a P h y By a r d e n W r ay

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cover feature

When Jordan Tannahill was 13 years old, he watched

the film adaptation of Ernest Thompson’s play On Golden Pond and was inspired to write his own family drama, called Capturing November. In his ambition to mount the production, Tannahill phoned the Ottawa performance space Arts Court and reserved it for two nights. He then approached his mother with the good news. “But I need a deposit,” he said. Tannahill’s mother, Karen Markham, looked at him and asked, “How much?” “$1,200.”

“He was so earnest,” Markham recalls. “I thought, ‘Okay!’ Jordan calls me ‘The Reluctant Producer,’ because I wasn’t expecting to bankroll his first play.”

That early investment paid off. In 2014, at only 26 years old, Tannahill became the youngest author ever to receive the Governor General’s Literary Award for English-language drama, for his queer coming-of-age compilation, Age of Minority: Three Solo Plays (Playwrights Canada Press). He dedicated the award to Markham, who is now a major force behind Tannahill’s debut novel, Liminal, to be published in January with House of Anansi Press. In the experimental narrative, the protagonist – also named Jordan Tannahill – finds his mother, Monica, lying in bed. The novel unfolds entirely in that moment, as Jordan considers whether Monica is alive or dead. Nested into that moment is a life story, a survey of existential dread, and a tenderly realized portrait of a mother-son relationship.

“I think it was his way of working through the grief that he felt when I was first diagnosed with the Stage 4 cancer back in April 2014,” says Markham. “He would tease me and say, ‘Oh yeah, Mom, you’ve been on my thoughts every day. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and writing about you.’ But I had absolutely no idea what he was doing, because he didn’t want to share it with me until the very end.”

Visiting Markham shortly after her diagnosis, Tannahill had an experience akin to the one that serves as the premise for Liminal. “I went to check on her in her room and in that instant I could see her as the body that she would be when she died,” he says. “I could see that instant in her sleep. Before I could even register what I was looking at, I could just feel my heart in my throat and this sense of panic at just the sight of my mother asleep. It lasted a split second. I wanted to try to trace everything that had imbued that moment with meaning.”

Tannahill wrote much of Liminal after moving to London, U.K., in June 2016. Every morning he would cook breakfast for his partner, James, before venturing to the British Library to write. “I didn’t even know what I was writing when I began,” he says over breakfast at a Toronto café, his long arms stretched companionably

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across the table. “I just was reading a lot at the time. I had nothing to do. I knew nobody. I just forced myself to write and not be encumbered by any sense of a task.”

Inevitably, his writing bent toward his mom and her mortality. “I went in each day knowing I would be writing about questions of the body and about consciousness,” he says. “But for me the writing couldn’t escape the gravitational pull of my own mother’s experience.”

Tannahill shared the Liminal manuscript with his agent, Michael Levine of Westwood Creative Artists, whose client roster includes Yann Martel, Adrienne Clarkson, and Justin Trudeau. “He really responded to the work,” Tannahill says. “He said, ‘It’s a bit out there, it’s a bit racy, but I am sure we can find a place for it.’” Levine sent the book to Anansi publisher Sarah MacLachlan.

“The character’s voice felt like somebody I would like to sit and spend time with, and I thought a lot of people would,” says MacLachlan. “I thought it was young, and I liked that. The way in which he expresses himself, the way in which he went about discovering who he was, all of that felt youthful and of his generation.” Anansi was the only publisher Tannahill submitted the manuscript to.

Liminal could be mistaken for a memoir: there’s Tannahill’s childhood in Ottawa, his life as a young artist in Toronto, and the rise and crash of Videofag, the short-lived but creatively explosive countercultural arts space he founded with his then boyfriend, William Ellis. (The two recently collaborated on a multi-genre, multi-contributor history of the space, The Videofag Book, which was published by BookThug in November.) Liminal also covers the love and creative satisfaction Tannahill ultimately found in London. “I suspect there is not a whole lot more of my real life in the book than a lot of novels that do a better job at disguising it,” he says.

The novel’s protagonist is an only child whom his mother says was fathered by a sperm donor. However, the real Jordan Tannahill has a brother and thanks both his parents, who separated when Jordan was young, in Liminal’s acknowledgements. “I felt like the presence of a father or even of siblings distracted from the primary relationship of mother and son,” he says. “I thought there was something really potent about this two-person family.”

Markham confirms that Tannahill’s intensity and intelligence have been apparent since childhood. When he was six, he was already asking for books for Christmas. He had such an obsession with geography and history that he could once name every country and capital city on Earth. As a teenager he created richly detailed imaginary countries, drawing maps and buildings and

cover feature

family trees, and wrote hundreds of pages of encyclopedia entries that detailed such minutiae as fictional athletes and the sports they played.

Markham, who at 62 is a retired crown prosecutor, insisted on serving a home-cooked dinner every night while her sons were growing up. “Sometimes we were eating at eight at night, but I insisted that we sit down and talk to each other,” she says. “I used big words when they were around me. They would ask me what they meant. We would have adult conversations about social justice, about philosophy, about history, about all kinds of things. That really fed his curiosity about the world and prompted him to read a lot.”

In Liminal, Monica Tannahill is a scientist researching artificial intelligence at Ottawa’s Carleton University.

She has survived breast cancer but has more recently suffered a small stroke. There is a passage in the book during which Monica attends a performance at Videofag that Jordan warns her is “a little on the autobiographical side” and includes “a slightly gratuitous ejaculation scene.” At one point, Jordan catches sight of his mother in the audience, head bowed, staring into her lap. “It’s based on me and everyone in that theatre knew that,” Monica later snaps. Though that scene may suggest certain real-life anxieties about his mother’s reactions to his work, Tannahill did his best to shrug off that weight.

“I wouldn’t have written the book I did if I got hung-up on anyone’s reaction to it – my mom’s or my family’s or my friends’,” he says.

In reality, Tannahill has only recently begun writing so transparently about his mother. Last year, he debuted Draw Me Close, a 10-minute virtual-reality film, at the Venice Biennale. The National Theatre and the National Film Board of Canada co-production recreates Tannahill’s childhood living room as drawn by artist Teva Harrison, complete with an actual flesh-and-blood actor playing the viewer’s cancer-stricken mother, who supplies a hug in her virtual universe. And on Jan. 23, Tannahill’s new theatrical performance, Declarations – a meditation on the meaning of one woman’s life told through dance and voice – will debut at Toronto’s Canadian Stage, with a print companion published by Coach House Books.

Markham is comfortable allowing those avatars to blur the line between fact and fiction, particularly in Liminal. “I don’t think the book would work if it wasn’t a highly personal interaction between a mother and a son,” she says. She did happily recognize one great truth in the book: her bond with her son is as powerful as the novel depicts. “It’s a very personal tribute and statement about my love for him and him for me,” Markham says.

“That is a treasure for me.”

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poetic practice

Reality check

Young and restless

Upcoming poetry collections from Sonnet L’Abbé, Dani Couture, and more

Bill Gaston, David Chariandy, and Heather O’Neill on family, plus more non-fiction

New books from Matt James, Jillian Tamaki, Elise Gravel, and more

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Spring Preview

Searching in the dark Naben Ruthnum (writing as Nathan Ripley) works to subvert genre conventions in his debut thriller “Most serial-killer books just aren’t very good,” says author Naben Ruthnum.

This rather jaundiced assessment notwithstanding, the acclaimed Toronto-based author of the short story “Cinema Rex” – which won the 2013 McClelland & Stewart/Writers’ Trust Journey Prize – and 2017’s well-received nonfiction work, Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, is poised to publish his own entry in the crowded genre. In March, Ruthnum will debut Find You in the Dark, a thriller written under the pseudonym Nathan Ripley.

The novel tells the story of Martin Reese, a husband and father who made his fortune in the tech world and has now more or less retired. He uses his time to dig up the bodies of murdered women the police have been unable to locate despite, in many instances, having the killers

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in custody. When he digs up what he thinks is the body of his murdered sister-in-law, he discovers that there may be an active serial killer still at work – a discovery that brings him to the attention of a dogged detective and the killer himself, known as the Ragman.

Find You in the Dark will be published simultaneously by Simon & Schuster Canada and Atrium in the U.S. The two-book deal netted the author a cool six-figure advance, sub rights sales in the U.K. and New Zealand, and a TV option from eOne. The book’s pre-publication success may have occurred not in spite of Ruthnum’s suspicions regarding the genre, but because of them. “There’s this general thought, even with people who don’t read thrillers or genre fiction, that those kinds of books are by the

rules, just plug a character with a weird quirk into something we’ve seen a hundred times before.” And Ruthnum is quick to acknowledge that in many cases, this may indeed be true.

It is precisely because Ruthnum is aware of the potential pitfalls of stereotype and cliché that he remains conscious of the need to subvert genre expectations wherever possible. “If you’re writing a character you think you’ve seen before, you have to put pressure on it,” he says. “Why is this interesting? Why am I talking about it?”

For a writer working in a genre that carries with it such clear expectations, finding the right mix of the familiar and the subversive is key.

“I think Find You in the Dark dances around a lot of tropes,” Ruthnum says. “There’s the obsessive cop who wants justice, there’s also the obsessive man who’s trying to atone for something in his past. I think I put pressure on both these by, for example, making my protagonist quite a bit creepier than he thinks he is.”

Another staple Ruthnum works to subvert is the genre’s cavalier treatment of women as victims. There are no graphic descriptions of the murders in the novel, a restraint Ruthnum claims is in part a result of his exposure to a true-crime book – the title long forgotten – from the 1990s. “The detailed descriptions of the women’s corpses in various stages of decomposition read so strangely. It was almost like you were reading erotic fiction, except it was about dead bodies.”

While Find You in the Dark has dead bodies aplenty, it is a psychological novel that employs characteristics more self-consciously literary than standard genre fare. Working within the constraints of the form, Ruthnum says, had the added bonus of improving his literary technique. “It was a really good, late-life learning process to train myself out of some bad habits.” –Steven W. Beattie

spring preview

war story

Fiction New novels, story collections, and poetry

by S t e v e n w. b e at t i e

A new novel by Michael Ondaatje is certain to be big news for the author’s legion of devoted fans. Ondaatje’s previous book, The Cat’s Table, was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize; anticipation is high for his follow-up, set in the years after the Second World War. Beginning in 1945 and spanning the next decade, Warlight tells the story of Nathaniel and Rachel, left behind in London after their parents decamp for Singapore. The siblings fall under the care of a mysterious figure known as the Moth, and his band of accomplices, all of whom share a murky wartime history. McClelland & Stewart will publish the new book in May.

Playing chicken

Gone girl Claudia Dey’s first novel, Stunt, was a Q&Q Book of the Year for 2004, in addition to being shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award. Dey’s highly anticipated follow-up tells the story of a woman who goes missing from a northern town, and the rag-tag cast of characters that must piece together the circumstances behind her disappearance. Heartbreaker is due from HarperCollins in April.

a literary thriller, and also features mysterious twins. The Rule of Stephens (Doubleday Canada, Feb.) focuses on Catherine, who miraculously survives a plane crash, and another passenger who is being haunted by a shadowy figure resembling him in every aspect. Catherine’s “rule of Stephens” – that the world more closely reflects the cosmology of Stephen Hawking than that of Stephen King – is subsequently called into question.

Figments of the imagination

Lost innocence

Rabindranath Maharaj won the Trillium Book Award for his previous novel, 2010’s The Amazing Absorbing Boy. Maharaj is back this season with Adjacentland (Wolsak & Wynn, May), about an amnesiac who awakes in a strange facility known only as the Compound. As the administrators who run the Compound try to convince him he’s insane, the man comes to believe he’s a comic-book writer who has been robbed of his imagination.

Ray Robertson returns to fiction after a detour into high-end self-help (Why Not? Fifteen Reasons to Live) and music history (Lives of the Poets with Guitars). His new novel, called 1979 (Biblioasis, March), is about a teenager in Chatham, Ontario, who must deal with his own family trauma at the moment the world is making a hard turn to the political right.

Christopher Wahl

Flip sides Doppelgängers seem to be all the rage as fictional tropes these days. Michael Redhill’s novel Bellevue Square, which featured the doubling motif in the context of an eerie literary thriller, won the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. In its wake comes the new novel from Timothy Taylor, which also takes the form of

Lynn Crosbie has forged a career writing at the nexus of high culture and trash culture.

She extends this fascination with her latest novel, Chicken (House of Anansi Press, May), about a priapic older actor and the cult filmmaker who falls in with him. When the actor is offered a role in the sequel to the film that made him famous, his relationship with the much younger filmmaker is severely tested.

Rain clouds Marissa Stapley is already a bestselling author in her home country, thanks to her 2014 debut, Mating for Life. Her follow-up is currently available in Germany, where it appeared in fall 2017 as Das Glück an Regentagen. Canadian readers will have to wait until February, when S&S Canada brings out the domestic version of Things to Do When It’s Raining.

when in Rome Tom Rachman returns with a family saga about a painter who abandons his family in 1950s Rome, and his son, who spends his life and career trying to work his way out from under his father’s shadow. The Italian Teacher is due from Doubleday Canada in March.

the rip-off artist Tommy Marlo is a small-time thief who makes a living by stealing people’s laptops. Tommy’s own life is placed in jeopardy when he steals from the daughter of a notorious motorcycle gang member and discovers evidence of several murders on the purloined computer. Andrew Battershill’s sophomore novel, Marry, Bang, Kill (Goose Lane Editions, March), is a hybrid of literary fiction and crime thriller.

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spring preview

Falling stars violent upheaval

border crossings

Kenneth Bonert was born in Johannesburg, but now makes his residence in Toronto. He turns his gaze to his country of birth in the waning days of the Apartheid regime for his sophomore novel, The Mandela Plot (Knopf Canada, May), a family saga about a young man trying to make his way, his rough-hewn father, and the beautiful American interloper who upends the family certainties.

Being appointed to the Canadian senate is clearly not going to prevent novelist David Adams Richards from persisting in his fertile late-career literary output. Richards’s new novel broadens his focus from his long-time stomping grounds of New Brunswick’s Miramichi territory, while also remaining grounded in the political and moral intrigue that has always obsessed him. Mary Cyr (Doubleday Canada, April) opens in Mexico, with a mining disaster and the body of a teenage boy discovered in the eponymous woman’s hotel room.

nature’s bounty, nature’s wrath After struggling with the upkeep on a working farm, the owner, Cynthia, decides to revivify the business by offering free room and board to struggling artists willing to gain life experience by doing the farm’s hard labour.

As poet Silvia and painter Ibrahim find themselves drawn to one another, they also begin to suspect something is seriously amiss with Cynthia and her operation. The Honey Farm (Nimbus Publishing, April) is the debut novel

by Toronto-based writer Harriet Alida Lye.

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Sick at heart In his latest novel, Vancouver writer Kevin Chong – author of Beauty Plus Pity and Baroquea-Nova – turns his attention to one of Albert Camus’s most famous works of fiction. A city is overrun by a galloping infectious disease; panic sets in and authorities quarantine the populace. A doctor, a writer, and a newspaper journalist band together in an attempt to fight the disease and salvage some measure of meaning out of apparently random suffering. Arsenal Pulp Press will publish The Plague in March.

Prime-time drama Kim Moritsugu covers territory similar to the Lifetime series Unreal in her new novel, about a television producer and her protégé-turnedpartner; conflict ensues when a new assistant is brought on board. The Showrunner (Dundurn, June) throws back the curtain on the behindthe-scenes drama involved in producing a series TV show, while also offering a critique of generational discord among women.

Safe spaces Sarah Henstra also tackles campus sexual politics and rape culture in her first novel for adults.

The Red Word (ECW Press, March) follows a university sophomore who finds her loyalties torn between the fraternity her boyfriend attends (colloquially known on campus as “Gang Bang Central”) and the women of Raghurst, a radical feminist collective. Henstra’s novel interrogates the divisive forces on modern campuses, and examines the extremes to which ideology is prepared to take us.

riChard dubois

Cold case Alberta-based Sharon Butala follows her 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award– nominated memoir, Where I Live Now, with a novel that dramatizes a real-life 1961 Saskatoon murder. Fiona, the protagonist of Zara’s Dead (Coteau Books, May), has spent more than 10 years futilely researching the unsolved killing of her high-school classmate. After giving up hope of ever uncovering the truth, Fiona is unceremoniously tossed back into the investigation by a mysterious envelope that arrives on her doorstep.

It’s been two decades since Vancouver author Maureen Medved burst onto the scene with her debut novel, The Tracey Fragments (published by Anansi and made into a 2007 feature film by Bruce McDonald). Medved is back this spring with her sophomore novel, Black Star (Anvil Press, Feb.), which interrogates the exploitative elements at the nexus of sexual politics and academia.

spring preview

Sex and the single girl Toronto writer Catherine Fatima’s debut novel takes up hot-button topics such as female sex uality and internalized misogyny. Sludge Utopia (BookThug, June) is a work of autofiction about one woman’s struggle to define an identity for herself through the prism of a sexuality that is tainted by the forces of patriarchy and late capitalism.

the destroyer of worlds

art history

Avant-garde poet Aaron Tucker turns his attention to the novel form with a fictionalized biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist with communist sympathies who developed the atomic bomb. Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (Coach House Books, April) uses its subject’s reading habits as a window through which to examine his conflicted life and legacy.

Veteran non-fiction author Katherine Ashenburg (The Dirt on Clean; The Mourner’s Dance) turns her attention to Sweden in the first half of the 20th century for her debut novel, Sofie & Cecilia (Knopf Canada, April). The book tells the story of the title characters, wives of two internationally renowned artists (based on the real-life figures Carl Larsson and Anders Zorn). The novel takes up themes of women’s friendships, European history, and the advent of the modernist movement.

in the ascendant

breaking binaries

From Sarah Selecky comes a first novel about female relationships and the price of chasing one’s dreams. After 20 years apart, Lilian Quick reconnects with her cousin, Florence, who has rebranded herself as Eleven Novak, head of a female empowerment consultancy.

Eleven gives Lilian access to the Ascendency, a patented training program designed to help women achieve their optimal potential. But is Eleven all she appears to be? HarperCollins will publish Radiant Shimmering Light in April.

Arsenal Pulp has two debut novels from authors who challenge gender binaries and tackle issues of identity and self-definition. Casey Plett’s first novel, Little Fish (April), tells the story of a transgender woman living in Winnipeg who discovers that her devout Mennonite grandfather may also have been trans. And Oji-Cree author Joshua Whitehead follows the poetry collection full metal indigiqueer with Jonny Appleseed (April), about a cybersex worker who must return to the reservation he fled to attend his stepfather’s funeral.

Love and marriage Uzma Jalaluddin is known in her hometown of Toronto as a guest on the television program Cityline, where she talks about issues pertaining to the Muslim community. She also writes a regular column on the subject for the Toronto Star. This June, HarperCollins will release Jalaluddin’s debut novel, Ayesha Ever After, about a secular Muslim woman who dreams of being a spoken-word poet and falls for a conservative Muslim man.

the vanishing When a pair of women disappear from a bluecollar town on the Fraser River in 1967, their fellow townspeople assume the worst, with the exception of 10-year-old Lulu Parsons, who discovers a clue as to what befell her missing mother. Mimico, Ontario, writer and designer Christine Higdon’s debut novel, The Very Marrow of Our Bones (ECW, April), traces the fallout of Lulu’s secret over the span of 50 years.

in translation Kim Thúy – whose debut novel in English, Ru, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the 2015 edition of CBC’s Canada Reads – is back this April with Vi (Random House Canada), a novel that returns to the author’s themes of Vietnamese refugees, identity, and love. Sheila Fischman is once again on hand to translate. Other novels in translation this season include: Little Beast Julie Demers; Rhonda Mullins, trans. (Coach House, April) The green Chamber Martine Desjardins; Fred A. Reed and David Homel, trans.

(Talonbooks, April) Nirliit Juliana Léveillé-Trudel; Anita Anand, trans.

(Véhicule Press, April) Hutchison Street Abla Farhoud; Judith Weisz Woodsworth, trans.

(Linda Leith Publishing, March)

Short fiction Johanna Skibsrud returns to the short-story form with her second collection, Tiger, Tiger, out from Hamish Hamilton in April. Some other short-fiction collections set to appear this spring are: The Things She’ll Be Leaving Behind Vanessa Farnsworth (Thistledown Press, May) Things are good Now Djamila Ibrahim (Anansi, Feb.) Hider/Seeker Jen Currin (Anvil, March) Blue River and Red earth Stephen Henighan (Cormorant Books, March)

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Shakespeare, revised There has been a great deal of talk about cultural appropriation over the past year, but the focus of that conversation doesn’t usually allow for the possibility of colonized cultures turning the tables on their colonizers. Innovative Vancouver Island poet Sonnet L’Abbé addresses this in her latest collection, Sonnet’s Shakespeare (M&S, March), which uses erasure to “occupy” the space taken up by each one of the Bard’s 154 sonnets, speaking over and metaphorically “colonizing” them with her own words and themes.

own minimalist approach to his debut collection, which includes a combination of lyrics, erasure poems, lists, and concrete poetry. Short but never slight, the poems in Book of Annotations (Invisible Publishing, April) are deeply engaged with poetic history.

acadian days Herménégilde Chiasson, former Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick, is generally considered one of Acadia’s most important writers, in part for his 1974 poetry collection Mourir à Scoudouc. Though a number of poems have been widely anthologized, the collection as a whole has never been translated into English.

Goose Lane, along with translator Jo-Anne Elder, seek to rectify this in April, when they publish To Live and Die in Scoudouc.

in transmission

Sitting practice “When I say I’m fine I mean the sky has opened / like an old wound under scurvy,” writes Robin Richardson, simultaneously pointing to the hurt inflicted on women in modern culture and employing an intentionally historical reference to indicate the way these hurts persist through time. The Toronto poet’s third collection, Sit How You Want (Véhicule, April), examines the commingled terror, anxiety, and power struggles that accrue to being a woman in an inimical world.

warrior woman Nehiyaw poet Louise Bernice Halfe, whose name in Cree translates to “Sky Dancer,” won the 2017 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for her body of work to date. Those books address the author’s experiences in a residential school, along with other issues germane to Indigenous life in Canada. Poems from across Halfe’s career are collected in the Wilfrid Laurier Press volume, Sohkeyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer Louise Bernice Halfe, out in May with an introduction by David Gaertner.

notes and queries Ottawa-based Cameron Anstee is the publisher of Apt. 9 Press and the editor of The Collected Poems of William Hawkins. Anstee applies his

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Dani Couture’s poems have consistently navigated the innermost spaces of the human condition, searching for fractures and bruises and sore spots, but always with an underlying compassion and empathy. Couture has been rewarded for her efforts with a Dayne Ogilvie Prize honour of distinction and a nomination for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She brings her unsparing eye and unsentimental approach to her new book, Listen Before Transmit (Wolsak & Wynn, March).

SteM poetry Alice Major is Edmonton’s inaugural poet laureate. She is also the author of 11 books that take up subjects surrounding science, math, and associated disciplines as a means of interrogating humanity’s ontological nature. Her new book, Welcome to the Anthropocene (University of Alberta Press, Feb.), adds a note of urgency to these questions by associating them with the impending catastrophe of climate change, and questioning the centrality of human activity in the universe.

being and belonging Carol Rose Daniels, the author of the novel Bearskin Diary, casts her eye on the infamous Sixties Scoop in her new collection of poetry.

Hiraeth (Inanna Publications, April) focuses on Indigenous and Métis women and girls affected by the Canadian government’s policy of relocating Indigenous children in the 1960s.

The title is a Celtic word that refers to a search for a place of belonging that does not exist.

international Alan Hollinghurst, long considered one of the U.K.’s pre-eminent prose stylists, returns with his first novel since The Stranger’s Child (2011).

The Sparsholt Affair (Knopf Canada, March) is an epic examination of masculinity and art in England from the 1940s through the present.•Twotime Man Booker Prize winner Peter Carey returns in February with a new novel, A Long Way from Home (Random House Canada).•South Korean writer Han Kang won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for her acclaimed novel, The Vegetarian. Kang’s third novel in English, The White Book (Portobello Books/Publishers Group Canada), is out in January. Kang’s work is once again translated by Deborah Smith.•Bestselling author Minette Walters takes a left turn into historical fiction in her new book, The Last Hours (HarperCollins, April), which focuses on 14th-century England during the Black Plague.•The Hogarth Shakespeare series extends its reach with a modern-day spin on one of the Bard’s greatest tragedies.

In Macbeth (Knopf Canada, April), Jo Nesbo turns the title character into a paranoid, power-hungry cop who might just kill to advance his career.•Acclaimed U.S. short-story writer Jamie Quatro has a debut novel out from Anansi this January. Fire Sermon is a narratively complex examination of modern marriage.

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Non-fiction A season of provocative stories and insights

by s u e c a r t e r

criminal ways

blood lines

dAvid chAriAndy: Al AnA pAterson

Three authors celebrated for their fiction share insights into their familial relationships David Chariandy, whose widely acclaimed second novel, Brother, won the 2017 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, turns his attention to his real-life family with his new book, I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You: A Letter to My Daughter (McClelland & Stewart, May). In the spirit of recent books by Ta-Nehisi Coates and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chariandy connects stories of his ancestral past as the son of Trinidadian immigrants to his thoughts around identity and race.

Heather O’Neill’s debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, about 13-year-old Baby and her life with her childlike, heroin-addicted father, catapulted O’Neill to CanLit fame. In her first non-fiction book, Wisdom in Nonsense: Invaluable Lessons from My Father (University of Alberta Press, Feb.), O’Neill shares unconventional advice from her own father on the necessary thrills of shoplifting and playing the tuba.

Bill Gaston and his father had a volatile relationship, punctured by moments of peace while fishing together on the Pacific Ocean.

But it was only after Gaston’s father died that the 2002 Giller nominee learned more about

his dad’s dark past, and came to better understand the complexities of their connection.

Just Let Me Look at You: On Fatherhood (Penguin Canada, May) is a story of generational turmoil, cut with signature humour from one of our country’s most engaging storytellers.

Dalhousie University associate professor Elaine Craig provides insight into the current laws and legal processes that contribute to the retraumatization of sexual assault complainants in Putting Trials on Trial: Sexual Assault and the Failure of the Legal Profession (McGill-Queen’s University Press, March). U.K.-based criminal psychologist Julia Shaw treads into wicked territory in Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side (Doubleday Canada, May).

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battling memories Two biographies coming from Wilfrid Laurier University Press shed light on wartime experience and legacies, via some close family connections: Joey Jacobson’s War: A Jewish Canadian Airman in the Second World War, written by Jacobson’s son, Peter J. Usher (Jan.) “Without fear and with a manly heart”: The Great War Letters and Diaries of Private James Herbert Gibson, written by Gibson’s daughter, L. Iris Newbold, and his grandson, K. Bruce Newbold (March)

tales from the rock Tom Drogue shares the story of a B-52 aircraft that crashed in Labrador in 1942. The Diary of One Now Dead, out with Flanker Press in January, is based on the journals of the plane’s pilot, Cleveland Hodge.

Writer-teacher David Ward spent time living in one of the most remote areas of Newfoundland, and lived to write about his experiences.

His memoir, Bay of Hope: Five Years in Newfoundland (ECW Press, April), is described as an occasionally comical and emotional tale of survival and courage.

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tice in the court system while defending her assets and family’s livelihood. The Wife’s Tale: A Personal History arrives from Knopf Canada in February.

Home, addressed Vancouver author Chelene Knight’s unconventional memoir, Dear Current Occupant (BookThug, March), reveals her tumultuous past through letters addressed to the current residents of the 20 homes she and her family lived in across the city’s Downtown Eastside.

cultural recall

Women first Social justice and feminist activist Judy Rebick is well known for her public battles standing up for the disenfranchised. In her new memoir, Heroes in My Head (House of Anansi Press, April), the Rabble publisher shares the private challenges she faced during the 1980s as a high-profile pro-choice activist, and in the following decade as president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women.• With her memoir In Search of Pure Lust (Inanna Publications, May), Lise Weil documents an overlooked era in lesbian political history, from the 1970s and ’80s, and her own personal quest to find love.

Open heart Terese Marie Mailhot shares her painful stories growing up with a “profoundly dysfunctional” family on the Seabird Island Reservation in B.C. As part of her therapy after being diagnosed with PTSD and bipolar II, Mailhot – who received her MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts – was given a notebook to write down her thoughts. The result is Heart Berries (Doubleday Canada), a series of essays that serves as a memorial to her parents, and as a testament to a survivor.

boys to men Toronto journalist Rachel Giese shares a broad view of modern masculinity in Boy: What It Means to Become a Man in the 21st Century, out with HarperCollins in May. Giese blends personal stories with reportage to help shed

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light on the current realities and complexities of gender politics in hopes of discarding the old adage “boys will be boys.”•Are men taught to be violent or is it an inherent behaviour?

In attempting to understand his own emotional impulses, journalist Daemon Fairless examines the hidden roots of the issue in Mad Blood Stirring: The Inner Lives of Violent Men (Random House Canada, March).

Katherine Luo’s memoir, The Unceasing Storm: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Douglas & McIntyre, Feb.), is a rare glimpse inside the violent political movement which claimed the lives of millions. Luo, who moved to China from Hong Kong in 1955 to study theatre, was accused of being a spy while those around her were imprisoned or executed. Despite Lou's passionate love for her country, she eventually realized that the feeling would never be mutual.

Ordinary people Academic and philosopher Alain Deneault posits that the current ruling class, including Justin Trudeau and Emanuel Macron, is composed of mediocre people. He examines the ho-hum in Mediocracy: The Politics of the Extreme Centre, translated by Catherine Browne (Between the Lines, March).

tense moments Calgary author Marcello Di Cintio’s travel writing blends the political with the cultural; human stories with an analysis of the policies that affect people most. In his new book, Pay No Heed to the Rockets: Palestine in the Present Tense (Goose Lane Editions, April), the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize winner examines the Palestinian experience through the eyes of the region’s poets, authors, librarians, and booksellers.

Grand gestures Canadian journalist Aida Edemariam recounts the incredible life of her Ethiopian grandmother, who became a child bride at age eight.

As a widowed feudal landlord, she sought jus-

Intelligent reading Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has repeatedly spoken about the imminent danger of AI robots killing humans, which makes Terri Favro’s latest book feel more urgent. Generation Robot: A Century of Science Fiction, Fact, and Speculation (Skyhorse/Thomas Allen & Son, Feb.) traces our cultural history and fascination with robots from early comics to modern movies.

Welcome to the dope show Long before Shoppers Drug Mart started hiring medical marijuana managers, journalist Jon Hiltz was covering the burgeoning cannabis industry. In The Wild West, out with Dundurn in June, Hiltz gives an insider’s look at the legalization of marijuana and the birth of a $1 billion market.

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Love, actually Editors Fiona Tinwei Lam and Jane Silcott solicited heartfelt words from the likes of Mandy Len Catron, Kevin Chong, Susan Musgrave, Ayelet Tasbari, and Yasuko Thanh for Love Me True: Writers Reflect on the Ins, Outs, Ups and Downs of Marriage (Caitlin Press, Feb.)

stories of exile A trio of books offers personal insight into the global refugee crisis:

Masking beauty Kwakwaka’wakw artist Beau Dick is best known for reviving the cultural tradition of wood carving and mask work, which has been celebrated across the country. Dick – who died in March 2017 – and 80 of his finest masks are honoured in the new book, Beau Dick: Revolutionary Spirit by West Coast curator Justin Barski, out in April with Figure 1 Publishing.

Fully completely More than 11 million people across Canada watched the Tragically Hip’s last show on Aug. 20, 2016. They gathered in parks, cottages, and living rooms to say goodbye to the beloved band and its irrepressible lead singer, Gord Downie, who had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Toronto music journalist Michael Barclay takes fans through the band’s early days to the late singer’s emergence as an advocate for Indigenous rights with The Never-Ending Present: The Story of Gord Downie and the Tragically Hip (ECW, April).

Indigenous works Métis writers Kim Anderson and Maria Campbell, along with acclaimed visual artist Christi Belcourt, look at anti-violence initiatives from an Indigenous perspective with a particular focus on the Walking With Our Sisters project.

Keetsahnak: Our Missing and Murdered Indigenous Sisters comes out with University of Alberta Press in April.•Baffin Island native Paul Okalik was the first Inuk to be called to the Nunavut Bar, and later the territory’s first premier. His

memoir, Let’s Move On (Baraka Books, May), reflects on his time in government and his advocacy efforts, with hope for the future.

Fighting and surviving Canadian Lieutenant Colonel Stéphane Grenier, who served in Rwanda during the country’s 1994 genocide and civil war, spent a decade fighting another battle, trying to get help from the military’s mental-health system for his post-traumatic stress disorder. In After the War: Surviving PTSD and Changing Mental Health Culture (University of Regina Press, Feb.), Grenier shares how his experiences led to the founding of a groundbreaking new approach to mental wellbeing.

Natural magnetism Here’s something new to worry about. In The Spinning Magnet: The Force that Created the Modern World and Could Destroy It (Penguin Canada, Jan.), science journalist Alanna Mitchell looks at the power and history of electromagnetism, and how the Earth’s decaying magnetic force field could result in the eradication of popular technology or, worse, a lack of protection from lethal solar radiation.

Alan Kurdi, the young Syrian boy whose death shocked the world after a photo of his body washed up on a beach appeared in international news, has became a haunting symbol for the plight of refugees. Alan’s aunt, Tima Kurdi, who now lives in Vancouver, shares memories of the child and his family in The Boy on the Beach: My Family’s Escape from Syria and Our Hope for a New Home, coming from S&S Canada in April.

CBC journalist Raffy Boudjikanian travelled to Chad, Rwanda, and Turkey – all countries that survived mass displacements and ethnic wars – to understand the long-term effects of horrific crimes on their populations. Journey through Genocide: Stories of Survivors and the Dead is out with Dundurn in April.

Freehand Books picked up Abu Bakr al Rabeeah’s Homes: A Refugee Story after it was selfpublished as a novel in 2016.

Edmonton journalist Winnie Yeung worked with al Rabeeah to turn the story, about moving from Iraq to Syria to Canada in search of a safer life, into a work of non-fiction.

satisfied customers Lorri A. Brotto, Canada Research Chair in Women’s Sexual Health, explores bedroom challenges and solutions in her new book, Better Sex through Mindfulness: How Women Can Harness the Power of the Present to Cultivate Desire (Greystone Books, March).

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Sweet Bake Shop

Rebecca Tucker dispels the belief that trends like farmers’ markets, organic produce, and locavorism are the path to “good food” consumption. A Matter of Taste: A Farmer’s Market Devotee’s Semi-reluctant Argument for Inviting Scientific Innovation to the Dinner Table comes out under Coach House Books’s Exploded Views imprint in June.• Author and filmmaker Marusya Bociurkiw connects vignettes from her life to her relationship with her mother and their shared love of eating in Food Was Her Country: The Memoir of a Queer Daughter (Caitlin, March).•Jackie Kai Ellis updates the Eat, Pray, Love narrative with her own story of leaving her life behind to find comfort and acceptance in cooking and travel.

The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery, and Paris comes out with Appetite by Random House Canada in March.

stir it up Five cookbooks to add to your collection: Sweet Bake Shop: Delightful Desserts for the Sweetest of Occasions, Tessa Sam (Penguin Canada, March) In Good Company: Easy Recipes for Everyday Gatherings, Corbin Tomaszeski with Karen Geir (Figure 1, May) Hot for Food Vegan Comfort Classics: 101 Recipes to Feed Your Face, Lauren Toyota (Penguin Canada, Feb.) From the Kitchens of YamChops, Michael Abramson (Page Street Publishing/PGC, April) The Wickaninnish Cookbook: Rustic Elegance on Nature’s Edge, The Wickaninnish Inn (Appetite, May) tHe FINe prINt: Q&Q’s spring preview covers

books published between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2018.

All information (titles, publication dates) was supplied by publishers and may have been tentative at press time. Titles that have been listed in previous previews do not appear here.

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International Zadie Smith brings her sharp eye to a wide range of subjects and ideas, from Justin Bieber to Socrates, in her new essay collection, Feel Free (Penguin Canada, Feb.) •Jennifer Palmieri, former director of communications for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, redefines women-led leadership not just for political office, but for personal lives and careers. Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Rule the World (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette Book Group Canada) is a welcome, optimistic look at the future.• Clemantine Wamariya was only six years old when she and her older sister fled Rwanda, spending the next six years travelling through seven African countries looking for safety until they were granted asylum in Chicago.

Wamariya shares her story with Elizabeth Weil in The Girl who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (Random House, April).• Guardian senior writer Brigid Delaney gives the wellness industry a colonic in Wellmania: Extreme Misadven-

tures in the Search for Wellness (Greystone, March).•Beloved food-television personality Lidia Matticchio Bastianich shares her personal life story, from her early years in poverty in northern Italy, to life in a refugee camp, and eventually a famed career in New York City. My American Dream: A Life of Love, Family, and Food comes out with Appetite by Random House in April.•Fiction became real-life book fodder for U.K. crime author and television writer Anthony Horowitz in The Word Is Murder (HarperCollins, June).•Biographer Andrew Morton gives a royal wave to Wallis Simpson in Wallis in Love: The Untold Life of the Duchess of Windsor, the Woman Who Changed the Monarchy (Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, Jan.), Letters and diary entries shed light one of the British aristocracy’s most enigmatic figures.• Dave Eggers returns with The Monk of Mokha (Knopf Canada, Jan.), the story of a young Yemeni-American man trapped by his home country’s civil war while travelling to research the country’s coffee culture. •Hector Macdonald’s Truth: How the Many Sides to Every Story Shape Our Reality (M&S, March) goes deep behind the veneer of “fake news” to offer insight into how to guard against competing truths.•Netflix chief talent officer Patty McCord shares insight into how she built a corporate culture responsible for the biggest entertainment companies in the world in Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibilities (Missionday/Publisher Group Canada, Jan.)

dominique nAbokov

Food for thought

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books for young people What’s in store for new and discerning readers

by s h a n da d e z i e l

imagination required In the Fan Brothers’ latest book, Ocean Meets Sky (Simon & Schuster Canada, May), a boy named Finn honours his recently dead grandpa by building a ship and sailing it to the beautiful spot they often talked about. Caldecott-winning illustrator Jillian Tamaki’s debut picture book, They Say Blue (Groundwood, March), follows a young girl as she discovers the mysterious nature of colour. P.E.I.’s Lori Joy Smith gets creative with garden gnomes in I Love You Like . . . (Owlkids Books, May), a bedtime story about seasons, love, friendship, and favourite toys (below).

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p i c t u r e b ook s

Wearing both hats Artist Matt James joins the top ranks of Canada’s author-illustrators with The Funeral Matt James has been illustrating picture books for 10 years. He’s always wanted to write one, but felt his ideas were more notions than fully realized stories. But, he says, Groundwood Books publisher Sheila Barry, who died in November (see page 9), kept encouraging him: “I had this idea about kids at a funeral, and, to be honest, I shared that one because I thought no one is going to go for this. Sheila said, ‘I love that.’ Then I thought, ‘Uh-oh, now I have to do it.’” The Funeral (April) is loosely based on the first memorial service that James took

his children to – how they reacted to being in a church and how they processed an extended family member’s death. Some of the things they said made it into the book: “Is Uncle Frank still a person?” “I think Uncle Frank would have liked his funeral.” For James, the act of creating the text as well as the pictures was eye-opening. “I always valued the writer,” he says, “but secretly I thought I was doing more work than they were.

‘I’m doing all these paintings and they’re just writing 500 words or something.’ But wow, it took me a long time to write those 500 words.”

the Mushroom Fan club Elise Gravel Drawn & Quarterly, June From chanterelles to stinkhorns, puffballs to Lactarius indigos, Montreal artist and 2012 Governor General’s Literary Award winner Elise Gravel knows her mushrooms. And more importantly, she knows just how to anthropomorphize them so they’re fascinating for children and parents alike. Spores have never been so fun.

red sky at night Elly MacKay Tundra Books, May While on a fishing trip, a grandfather explains some common weather phrases (such as “When the wind is from the West, then the fishes bite the best”) to his grandchildren. Author-illustrator Elly MacKay taps into kids’ fascination with the natural world – the extremes of sun, wind, and dramatic rainstorms – making meteorology cool with her signature paper-art style.

dream teams Not all of Canada’s biggest names in illustration are going it alone this season; some have joined forces with heavy-hitting authors: Square Mac Barnett and Jon Klassen, ill. (Candlewick Press, May) The Honeybee Kirsten Hall and Isabelle Arsenault, ill.

(Atheneum Books for Young Readers/S&S Canada, May) Bloom Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad, ill.

(Tundra, Feb.) Sun Dog Deborah Kerbel and Suzanne Del Rizzo, ill.

(Pajama Press, May) The Bagel King Andrew Larsen and Sandy Nichols, ill.

(Kids Can Press, May) Ben and the Scaredy-Dog, Sarah Ellis and Kim La Fave, ill.

(Pajama, April)

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F i c t i on

For the love of stories This season’s fiction for young people is terrifyingly dark, playfully adventurous, and as silly as a baby hashtag book

dark and intense Seventeen-year-old Annika runs away with her boyfriend only to find he’s suffering from a mental illness in The 11th Hour, by Saskatchewan author Kristine Scarrow (Dundurn, Feb.) Addiction, illegal card games, politics, and passion come together in Kate Watson’s Shoot the Moon (North Star Editions/Georgetown Publications, Feb.) Réal Dufresne beat up his best friend, Shaun, on the same night that Shaun ended up dead. Now Réal is falling for Shaun’s pregnant girlfriend. Debut author Regan McDonell explores guilt in her young adult novel Black Chuck (Orca Book Publishers, April). Inspired

by Cotard’s Delusion – a illness in which people come to believe they are dead – debut novelist Star Spider wrote Past Tense (HarperCollins, April), about “a pretty average girl” who’s navigating school, a secret crush on her best friend, and her mother’s morbid psychological illness.

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a Girl like that Tanaz Bhathena (Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Raincoast Books, Feb.) There’s a good deal of buzz around Tanaz Bhathena’s debut novel, which is set in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and explores race, religion, and class. The book, which starts with a car accident involving titular 16-year-old troublemaker Zarin Wadia, is told in multiple voices, as those closest to Zarin try to figure out how the accident happened and if the girl really was who she seemed. this book betrays My brother Kagiso Lesego Molope (Mawenzi House Publishers, May) This coming-of-age YA novel won the Percy Fitzpatrick Prize for Youth Literature in South Africa when it was published there in 2012. South African–born, Ottawa-based author Kagiso Lesego Molope tells the story of a younger sister who idolizes her brother until she sees him do something that throws her life in disarray. here so Far away Hadley Dyer (HarperTeen, March) From the author of Johnny Kellock Died Today,

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comes a novel about troubled tough girl George Warren, a policeman’s daughter who is looking to escape her boring small town by going away to college. During her senior year of high school she falls recklessly in love with an older man – and the secret relationship could jeopardize her friends, family, and the perfect future she’s been planning.

Fire song Adam Garnet Jones (Annick Press, March) Cree-Métis filmmaker Adam Garnet Jones turns his 2015 movie – about growing up, and coming out, on a First Nations reserve – into a YA novel. Shane is supposed to be headed to university, but his sister has committed suicide, his mother has completely withdrawn, and his boyfriend won’t move with him to Toronto.

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thrills and chills Two young teens find summer jobs and danger at the Drumheller, Alberta, dinosaur museum in Death

by Dinosaur, from veteran children’s writer Jacqueline Guest (Coteau Books, May). A Grade 8 class trip to New Mexico turns terrifying when the students experience an earthquake, are plunged into a lake, and their teacher goes missing in A World Below (S&S Canada, March), by Wesley King. Love You Like Suicide writer Jo Treggiari is back with Blood Will Out (Penguin Teen Canada, June), which is told in the alternating voices of predator and prey. Tim Wynne-Jones’s latest murder mystery, The Ruinous Sweep, (Candlewick, June), sees teen protagonist Donovan Turner on the run and trying to clear his name after being involved a fatal car accident.

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Aly, features a reluctant student tasked with a secret mission. Unicorn Rescue Society #1: The Creature of the Pines (Dutton Books for Young Readers/Penguin Random House Canada, April) is written by Adam Gidwitz, Chris Lenox Smith, and Jesse Casey.

the intergenerationals

and the crystal ball says ...

Two books about clairvoyants hit the shelves this season. The aptly titled Clara Voyant (Puffin Canada, May), by Rachelle Delaney, is a comingof-age story set in Toronto’s Kensington Market.

Jodi Carmichael’s Family of Spies (Great Plains Publications, April), features a group of cousins on the run from MI6 and the CIA. Fortunately, one of them has just discovered he has special perceptive abilities.

A grandfather and his grandkids come up with their own versions of a classic rhyme in Sugar and Snails (Annick, March), a picture book from Sarah Tsiang and Sonja Wimmer.•Coming off her critical hit The Agony of Bun O’Keefe, Heather Smith turns her attention to a boy having a rotten year – while staying with his eccentric grandmother – in the novel-in-verse Ebb and Flow (Kids Can, April).•Worlds collide when the hero of Angela Ahn’s Krista Kim-Bap (Second Story Press, April) asks her intimidating grandma to teach her class how to make a traditional Korean dish.

Fantasy fix Set in colonial Japan, The Call of the Rift: Flight (ECW Press, April), from newcomer Jae Waller, is described as Philip Pullman meets Avatar.

On a much lighter note, a new middle-grade series, illustrated by New Brunswick’s Hatem

A unique friendship develops between a Junior Ranger and a forest creature in J. Torres and Aurélie Grand’s How to Spot a Sasquatch (Owlkids, May), while plenty of other adventures and disasters await readers who are too big for picture books and too young for YA: Running through Sprinklers Michelle Kim (Atheneum BFYR/S&S Canada, April) Tara Takes the Stage Tamsin Lane (S&S Canada, May) A Possibility of Whales Karen Rivers (Algonquin Young Readers/ Thomas Allen & Son, March) Fogo: My Favourite Corner of the Earth Dawn Baker (Flanker Press, May)

Waxing poetic

reading the past Newbery Medal winner Christopher Paul Curtis revisits the town of Buxton, Ontario – home to a historic freed slave community – in his new novel, The Journey of Little Charlie (Scholastic Canada, Feb.). Charlie, a 12-year-old sharecropper’s son, makes a stop in Buxton when he is forced to accompany a violent South Carolina plantation overseer to Southern Ontario.•Kim Foster sets her YA debut, the historical fantasy Game of Secrets (Sky Pony Press/Thomas Allen & Son, Feb.), in Victorian London on the eve of the Golden Jubilee.•In The Princess Dolls (Tradewind Books, May), Ellen Schwartz and illustrator Mariko Ando tell the story of a young Jewish girl and a young Japanese girl who become friends in Vancouver’s Strathcona neighbourhood during the Second World War.

Middle-grade shenanigans

Familiar Faces In Modo: Ember’s End (Orca, Feb.) – an adventure from the world of the Hunchback Assignments – author Arthur Slade and illustrator Christopher Steininger bring their shapeshifting hunchback spy character to an Old West town, which is surrounded by a mysterious energy field.•Moonbeam winner Susan M. MacDonald returns with Treason’s Edge (Breakwater Books, June), the third book in her Tyon Collective series about time travelling and aliens.•In Linwood Barclay’s Escape (Puffin Canada, May) – a sequel to last-year’s Chase – the Institute is closing in on heroes Jeff and his genetically engineered spy dog, Chipper, leaving them wondering whom to trust.•The Moon is Up (Amulet Books, May) is the second title in the Lumberjanes middle-grade novel series from Mariko Tamaki and illustrator Brooke Allen. The scouts of Roanoke cabin meet up with “Moon Pirate” – a new friend who can help them win the camp’s Galaxy Wars competition.

Hungry for Science: Poems to Crunch On Kari-Lynn Winters and Lori Sherritt-Fleming; Peggy Collins, ill.

(Fitzhenry & Whiteside, April) Poetree Caroline Pignat and FranÇois Thisdale (Red Deer Press, April) Half the Lies You Tell Are Not True Dave Paddon and Duncan Major, ill.

(Running the Goat, Books and Broadsides, April) Everybody’s Different on Everybody Street (10th Anniversary) Sheree Fitch and Emma Fitzgerald, ill.

(Nimbus Publishing, April) Good Night, Good Night Dennis Lee and Qin Leng, ill.

(HarperCollins, Feb.)

Good Night, Good Night

j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 2 9

spring preview

non-F iction

Just the facts Books that inspire, awe, and teach by d o ry c e r n y

From the sea to the sky A trio of beautifully illustrated books take readers into the deep or up in the air:

Dr. Coo and the Pigeon Protest

calling all creatures

drawing out the issue

A traditional Inuit story recounts how a hare and a fox gave us light and dark in The Origin of Day and Night (Inhabit Media, June), by Paula Ikuutaq Rumbolt. Pigeons get political in Dr. Coo and the Pigeon Protest (Kids Can, April), from Globe and Mail columnist Sarah Hampson and illustrator Kass Reich. After the success of Capelin Weather and The Puffin Problem, Newfoundland’s Lori Doody pens the fun-to-say Mallard, Mallard, Moose (Running the Goat, April). Textile artist Lesley-Anne Green introduces readers to the feltcreature residents of Juniper Hollow in Fox and Raccoon (Tundra, June), the first picture book in a new series. Getting Bob the frog to bed is quite the ordeal, as is getting him up in the morning, in Hop into Bed (Scholastic Canada, Feb.),

by Nicholas Oldland of Hatley pyjamas fame.

Deborah Ellis’s powerful and popular Afghanistan story, The Breadwinner (Groundwood, Jan.), gets the graphic novel treatment, using artwork from the 2017 animated film adaptation. London, Ontario, illustrator Emily Carroll works with author Laurie Halse Anderson on Speak: The Graphic Novel (FSG/Raincoast, Feb.), an adaptation of Anderson’s 1999 award-winning YA novel about a girl who’s raped in high school.

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eyes on the board The subjects of this season’s board books range from the heartbreaking to the ridiculous. Artist and musician Geneviève Castrée, who died of pancreatic cancer last year at the age of 35, left behind A Bubble (D&Q, June) for her twoyear-old daughter. In it, a little girl talks to her mom, who lives in a bubble floating above her and is always there when needed.•Babies are schooled in geography by Roy Henry Vickers and Robert Budd in One Eagle Soaring: A First West Coast Book (Harbour Publishing, May).•For those having trouble explaining memes and manbuns to their infants, there’s Baby’s First Hashtag (Douglas & McIntyre, May) from humourist Scott Feschuk and journalist Susan Allan.

3 0 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

Stories in the Clouds (Whitecap Books, April) by Joan Marie Galat, illustrated by Alberta artist Georgia Graham, uses folklore and customs from cultures including Inuit, Russian, and Chinese to teach kids about meteorology.

being bullied In the picture book What Happens Next (above),

by Susan Hughes and Carey Sookocheff (Owlkids, March), an unnamed narrator confronts her feelings and comes up with a way to relate to the person tormenting her. Video game enthusiast Jaden must get past school bullies if he wants to achieve his goal of winning the Cross Ups video game competition in Tournament Trouble (Annick, March), by Sylv Chiang and Connie Choi. In April, James Lorimer & Company adds to its hi/lo romance series with Romeo for Real and Just Julian, by Markus Harwood-Jones.

The companion books tell two sides of the same story, following the relationship between openlygay Julian and a confused Romeo.

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Matthew Forsythe illustrates American author Kate Messner’s The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World’s Coral Reefs (Chronicle Books/Raincoast, April). By pairing accessible information and Forsythe’s gorgeous visuals, the book tells the true story of Ken Nedimyer’s tireless efforts to save reefs from destruction through the Coral Restoration Foundation.

Rising Seas: Flooding, Climate Change and Our New World (Firefly Books, Feb.), by Keltie Thomas (author of the more lighthearted 2016 title Do Fish Fart?), informs readers about the danger posed by rising sea levels. Vancouver artists Belle Wuthrich and Kath Boake W. provide devastating visuals that compare current landscapes with imagined renderings of the aquatic devastation heading our way if we don’t make significant strides against climate change.

spring preview

exploration nation The latest book from artist and zoologist Peggy Kochanoff’s Be a Nature Detective series is Be a City Nature Detective: Solving the Mysteries of How Plants and Animals Survive in the Urban Jungle (Nimbus, April). The naturalist encourages city-dwelling tots to pay attention to their local flora and fauna.•Kids lucky enough to spend some time on the tundra will find A Children’s Guide to Arctic Butterflies (Inhabit, May) super handy. Author Mia Pelletier takes readers on a journey exploring 12 of the more than 50 species of butterflies found in the Far North. Danny Christopher provides the visuals.

international Fiction

never forget Second Story has two titles this spring with a focus on the Holocaust. In collaboration with her cousin, Israeli journalist Pnina Bat Zvi, Second Story publisher Margie Wolfe mines some deeply personal territory. The Promise (April), illustrated by Isabelle Cardinal, tells the story of Wolfe’s mother and aunt, both of whom survived Auschwitz. The latest in the Holocaust Remembrance Series for Young Readers, When We Were Shadows (April), by Calgary author Janet Wees, tells the true story of Walter, who from age six to 14 hides from the Nazis with his family in Holland. Wees’s narrative is augmented by letters written by Walter as a child to his grandparents, then as an adult to his grandson.

reaching out Lorimer adds another title to its RecordBooks series aimed at reluctant readers with journalist Catherine Rondina’s Carey Price: How a First Nations Kid Became a Superstar Goaltender (April). The book looks at Price’s life from his first experiences skating on a frozen creek to his ongoing work in community outreach for Indigenous youth.•In Six Things (Breakwater, April), Geoff Eaton, executive director of Young Adult Cancer Canada (and himself a two-time cancer survivor), uses his positive attitude to offer kids advice – aimed specifically at a graduating Grade 6 audience.•Explaining why people panhandle or are forced to live on the street is tricky for any parent of young children. With the help of co-author Jaime Casap and illustrator Jane Heinrichs, child psychologist Jillian Roberts gives parents the tools they need in On Our Streets: Our First Talk about Poverty (Orca/Feb.) – the latest from the World Around Us series.

picture books Pulitzer Prize–winning author Junot Díaz makes good on a 20-year-old promise to his goddaughters with Islandborn (Dial Books for Young Readers/PRHC, March). The book, which features illustrations by Leo Espinosa, tells the story of Lola, who doesn’t remember the country of her birth.•Debut author Shanda McCloskey tells a STEM– inspired story of a girl who turns her toy into something spectacularly high-tech in Doll-E 1.0 (Little, Brown Books For Young Readers/Hachette Book Group Canada, May).•The migratory flight of a sandpiper is used to discuss the plight of children in transit or living in devastation in Phil Cummings and Phil Lesnie’s Feathers (Scholastic, Feb.).• Following up his stunning They All Saw a Cat, Brendan Wenzel says Hello Hello (Chronicle Books/Raincoast, May) in a book about diversity in nature.

From Twinkle, with Love (Simon Pulse, May)

by When Dimple Met Rishi author Sandhya Menon is about film geek Twinkle Mehra’s mission to show off her chops as a director and nab the boy of her dreams.•Aspiring writer Muzna Saleem is faced with controlling parents, the prospect of an arranged marriage, and a choice between following her heart or her conscience when the boy she cares for begins harbouring growing anger toward the West in I Am Thunder (Pan Manmillan/Publishers Group Canada, March) by Muhammad Khan.•Jesse Andrews takes the concept of wealth equalling size to new places with his intriguing novel Munmun (Amulet, April), which follows a brother and sister who are as poor – and therefore as tiny – as mice.•Visual master Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) teams up with debut children’s author David Serlin on Baby Monkey, Private Eye (Scholastic, Feb.), a hybrid picture book–graphic novel–early reader featuring Selznick’s trademark black-andwhite illustrations.

non-fiction From Owlkids comes Look at the Weather (April) by Berlin-based author Britta Teckentrup and translator Shelley Tanaka. The book explores different weather phenomena through evocative illustrations and lyrical text.•Lauded husband-and-wife duo Brian Pinkney and Andrea Davis Pinkney delve into the months leading up to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in Martin Rising: Requiem for a King (Scholastic, Jan.), which is being published to mark the 50th anniversary of King’s death. –DC

j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 31

Metafictional games

addressing Canadians

Meeting a murderer

Thomas Trofimuk channels Italo Calvino and Milan Kundera in a stellar new novel

Lee Maracle and M. NourbeSe Philip offer essay collections opposing racial violence

Carys Cragg’s powerful memoir is an act of extraordinary empathy

page 33

page 36

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Reviews After finishing this tale, one is cast back to the beginning to look at what really happened, seeing the entire narrative in a new light

f i c t i on

Mind games A psychiatrist uses his traumatized wife as fodder for his psychotropic experiments in Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s terrifying thriller

By A M i S A n d S B r o d o f f

Hysteria Elisabeth de Mariaffi HarperCollins When approaChing Elisabeth de Mariaffi’s

taut and propulsive psychological thriller, it’s helpful to look at the controversial history of hysteria as a medical diagnosis, which has been used to degrade and control women for millennia. The word derives from the Greek root hystera, meaning “uterus”; historically, physicians attributed any erratic female behaviour to spontaneous movements of the womb.

Sigmund Freud, whose theories dominated 32 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

psychiatry for most of the 20th century, believed that the uncontrolled behaviour of the hysteric was as an outlet for thwarted sexual impulses. Today, hysteria is no longer an accepted medical diagnosis, but the label persists as a way to demean and dismiss women who express outbursts of emotion.

This is the case for Heike Lerner, the protagonist of de Mariaffi’s terrifying sophomore novel. Heike is a fragile and tender-hearted woman, originally from Dresden, who in the years following the Second World War suffers what today would be understood as posttraumatic stress disorder. Remembering the

violence and losses that she and her family experienced during and after the war, Heike muses, “The blood remembers: what’s lost to the mind is not lost to the body.”

The reader gets a harrowing glimpse of Heike’s wartime suffering in the novel’s powerful opening scene. It is 1945, and the teenage Heike has fallen in the woods. She has lost her little sister, and a vicious dog has its sights set on her. Seeking shelter in a barn’s hayloft, Heike witnesses the rape and murder of an innocent girl.

As a young woman, Heike marries Eric Lerner, an American psychiatrist whom she met overseas – or this is what she remembers – and who had briefly been her doctor. They are living in upstate New York for the summer, where Eric is teaching at Cornell and working at a psychiatric hospital. Heike is at home, consumed with the care of their little boy, Daniel.

Eric’s behaviour toward Heike forms the chilling core of de Mariaffi’s horror story, which is set – fittingly – during the 1950s. The doctor views his wife alternately as a patient and a child. Heike is Eric’s guinea pig for research that focuses on developing a medication for anxiety – an early kind of tranquilizer – as well as experiments with other psychotropic drugs. Eric stealthily gaslights Heike; when she begins to suspect she is losing her mind,

Reviews he medicates her: “You’re raving, Heike. Let me give you something.”

Eric has a sinister habit of preparing “tonics” that put Heike to sleep at perilous moments or make her question her own perceptions.

The reader is placed inside Heike’s mind as the boundaries blur between inside and outside, reality and fantasy, sanity and madness.

The narrative forces readers to question their own judgments, and to experience the same disorientation and fear that befalls de Mariaffi’s protagonist.

At times, Heike wishes she could live alone with Daniel: “The truth was that being with Eric often felt like work. … [C]ould she catch that thing before it happened, could she keep the day on an even plane? Prevent him from going sour, or sulky, make everything just right, perfect. Above all, keep the day from seething within him, ward off an evening argument early.

Block the blow-up.” It is a tall order. On one of her rambles in the woods, Heike discovers a hidden cabin set back in the trees and a mysterious little girl who appears at the pond and then vanishes. The sense that things are out of joint reaches a climax when Daniel disappears while Heike and Eric are out for the evening.

Heike is frantic to find her son, while Eric remains icily calm and increasingly domineering.

De Mariaffi nails her characters’ physicality and natures with deft, distilled strokes. Eric, with close-cut dark hair and high cheekbones, is dashing but for “some problem around the eyes, something Heike could identify but not name. Disloyal to think it.” The mid-1950s setting is appropriate here; when Heike’s sister-inlaw expresses a desire to write for an upstate newspaper, her husband punctures that plan tout de suite: “You’ve already got two deadlines: Drop me off at the station … and pick me up. … There’s women who’d kill for that kind of leisure!”

The story moves at a breakneck pace, the sense of place is both lush and forbidding, and the characters, for the most part, are layered and complex. That said, Eric’s controlling cruelty is a bit one-note, and thus somewhat predictable, though the turns of the plot deploy little shocks leading up to the stunner of an ending.

After finishing this tale, one is cast back to the beginning to consider what really happened, seeing the entire narrative in a new light.

Hysteria not only provides the thrills of a suspenseful, disturbing read. On a deeper level, the novel highlights the manipulation, coercion, and abuse of women that, sadly, remains an urgent issue today.

H This Is All a Lie Thomas Trofimuk Enfield & Wizenty readers Will notice something amiss from the

very opening of This Is All a Lie, the new novel from Edmonton writer Thomas Trofimuk. It might be that the first page is numbered 320, with the page numbers descending as the book progresses. It might be that the opening section is titled “1/2,” or that it begins with direct acknowledgement of the reader. It might be that the next chapter is called “A Note on the Font,” followed by one called “Acknowledgements,” then one called “Epilogue.” Do not be alarmed. It’s clear from early on: we’re in the realm of metafiction.

Many readers are — perhaps rightly — somewhat gun-shy about such an approach (some might refer to it as gimmickry). In Trofimuk’s hands, the metafictional aspects include direct authorial interruptions, non-linear timeframes and loops, and the incorporation of seemingly unconnected material (let’s just say that the note on the font is crucially important and, though the author may deny it early on, there are in fact Vikings in this book). Trofimuk, however, is never limited or over-awed by these techniques (or his own cleverness).

Rather, he uses them fully in support of very traditional narrative values, including clear (and suspenseful) storytelling and character revelation and development. This Is All a Lie is, in fact, a powerful, dazzling novel that comes complete with a rich payoff, both intellectually and emotionally.

The novel concerns itself with three focal characters. Ray is breaking things off with his mistress, Nancy. As he leaves her building, Nancy calls his cellphone and threatens to jump from her penthouse apartment. Desperate to save her, Ray tries to keep her talking.

The third character, Tulah, is Ray’s wife, with secrets of her own.

The lengthy phone call between Ray and Nancy forms the spine of the novel. It’s a conversation about the nature of intimacy and truth, the weight of the past and the delicate lies of the present. It’s utterly harrowing, and fraught with genuine peril, both psychological and physical.

Surrounding that central plot device is an exploration of the central trio’s lives, both individually and in collision. Ray, who trained as a lawyer, is now an arborist, with a keen acuity about the trees in his care. Nancy is a Russian immigrant whose father was killed in Afghan-

The major touchstone here, both thematically and in terms of approach, is Milan Kundera istan, and whose brother is a highly protective mobster. Tulah is a science teacher, a bulwark against the rising forces of fundamentalism.

The key to the novel’s success lies not in the narrative pyrotechnics but the overlapping truths these techniques allow to be revealed. As one of the characters says partway through the book, “[I]f you’re going to tell a story at least make the characters do what they would really do.” Freed from the strictures of traditional linear, chronological narrative, the characters emerge with shocking emotional veracity and vitality. As another character says, “[T]his is soul work.”

Readers will be immediately reminded of Italo Calvino (whom Trofimuk cites in an author’s note on page 2). The invocation of the reader in the novel’s opening seems a direct reference to the opening of the Italian postmodernist’s most famous novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. The major touchstone here, though, both thematically and in terms of approach, is Milan Kundera. The experience of reading This Is All a Lie – with its intellectual complexity and devastating, bifurcated ending – is akin to Kundera’s investigation of love, intimacy, sexuality, and honesty.

This Is All a Lie is a powerful, dazzling accomplishment. I strongly suggest you follow Trofimuk’s advice on page 4 – the last line of the story. “Trust me.” More importantly, trust him.

He won’t steer you wrong. – Robert J. Wiersema j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 33

Reviews Chief Lightning Bolt Daniel N. Paul Roseway Publishing

The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia John DeMont McClelland & Stewart

notable Mi’kMaq elder and historian Daniel

N. Paul (We Are Not Savages) makes a move away from his previously preferred genre to try his hand at fiction with Chief Lightning Bolt. Set in the 15th century, the novel recounts the legend of the eponymous figure, from his beginnings as a precocious child to adulthood as a warrior and hunter of great purpose to an elder chief who heroically leads his people in war but also in peace.

Chief Lightning Bolt presents an idealized image of a Mi’kmaq nation, showing them to be wise, honourable, living in harmony with their environment, going to war only when all means of compromise have been exhausted.

The eponymous character – wise beyond his years; a strong warrior and hunter, but humble to a fault – showcases the best of these qualities, proving that even Indigenous writers struggle with the stoic warrior/wise elder tropes.

Most of the key characters are male, with female characters relegated to mother and wife roles At times, the novel can be fascinating, as Paul weaves oral spiritual tales with the Chief’s life story, providing reasons for his actions. The book’s depiction of the political and cultural elements of Mi’kmaq is interesting, but only from on a macro historical level.

Overall, however, the story lacks depth, because all the characters – like Chief Lightning Bolt himself – are idealized images. All the Mi’kmaq in the book are honourable, upright people, with scarcely a dishonourable thought or action influencing any one of them. And the dialogue doesn’t resemble conversations between real people, but rather soliloquies, some a page or more in length, mostly extolling the more upright aspects of Mi’kmaq life in culture. Most of the key characters are male, with female characters relegated to mother and wife roles supporting Chief Lightning Bolt and the other men in the story.

If you are looking for a kind of didactic parable, an oral-style history on how to live a proper Mi’kmaq life, Chief Lightning Bolt fits the bill. But in its lack of complexity and nuance, it falls short as a modern Indigenous novel. –Wayne Arthurson 3 4 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

in august 2017, the bitter strike between the

Halifax Typographical Union and the city’s newspaper, The Chronicle Herald, ended after 19 lengthy months. The paper’s most beloved journalist, John DeMont, was one of the strikers.

The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia was begun before the strike, but themes of labour, mutiny, and adversity seem to yolk together DeMont’s material. While the great men of history get their due, it’s the ordinary folk, the working class, that DeMont really wants to highlight and praise. This comes as no surprise: the author’s previous works of adult non-fiction, The Last Best Place: Lost in the Heart of Nova Scotia and A Good Day’s Work, are tributes to the proletariat.

The Long Way Home traces the arc of Nova Scotia’s history: Samuel de Champlain and the men of the Order of Good Cheer; relations between the French/Acadians and Mi’kmaq; the loyalists and the New England Planters arriving in Shelburne; the Gaelic diaspora; the shipbuilding empires in Yarmouth and beyond. DeMont frames individuals and events in terms of work and achievement, even if the work is privateering, soldiering, or colonializing people and land.

Anyone who stayed awake in high school history class will be familiar with at least some of the events and characters described in these pages. What DeMont does with this well-trod material is render it as a sentimental journey.

He uses colloquialisms. He calls a man recounting a story an “old salt,” and repeatedly spins “yarns.” The author walks the old towns and villages – Yarmouth, Barrington, Glace Bay, Canso, Grand-Pré – leaning hard on nostalgia to bring their stories to life. DeMont knows his audience. Nova Scotians are known as friendly, personable folk, earnest and hardscrabble, with a long storytelling tradition. Pedigree, if they have any, is hard won. Thanks to the continual pilgrimage westward to find work, the province’s population is routinely depleted, yet there remains a belief that all those scattered Maritimers long to come home. That, at least, is the mythology.

But the book is at its best when not just waxing on about the old white men of yore. It comes most alive when DeMont peppers his narrative with less-familiar, less-heroic figures such as the late Mi’kmaq leader Donald Marshall, Jr., who

was convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, or boxer Sam Langford. One of the best stories in the book is that of Bessie Hall, the daughter of a sea captain whose father fell ill onboard ship, leaving Bessie the first to commandeer a transatlantic vessel entirely on dead reckoning.

DeMont also traces the link between Acadian rabble-rouser Joseph Brossard (Beausoleil) and his descendants – the Knowles sisters, Beyoncé and Solange.

While DeMont isn’t exactly conciliatory toward questionable colonial figures such as Cornwallis, they do make up the bulk of this narrative. Mi’kmaq, Black loyalists, and women are treated respectfully, but remain minor, supporting characters. I imagine DeMont would point out that, in terms of numbers, this is what they often were. Still, if he aims to highlight the worker as the heart of Nova Scotian history, it would be wise to include a greater focus on some of the unsung labour (children, women, people of colour) that helped make the province what it is today. –Erinn Beth Langille

Too Unspeakable for Words Rosalind Gill Breakwater Books Finding inspiration from the tradition of oral

storytelling in Newfoundland and Labrador, Rosalind Gill offers a suite of interconnected tales in her debut collection. The eldest of five children, “barely eighteen,” must step in for the ailing family matriarch; a young woman attends classes where she learns “the British highlights of French culture”; and, in the title story, a girl from a working-class family tries to make her mark in a tony private school.

Reviews f i c t i on

History’s underbelly Terry Watada’s epic novel examines the infamous period of Japanese-Canadian internment during the Second World War By d o ry c e r n y

The Three Pleasures Terry Watada Anvil Press the internMent of more than 21,000 Japanese-

Canadians, most of them in B.C., during the Second World War is a known but largely under-acknowledged black mark in Canada’s history. Justified by the War Measures Act and the Japanese bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong, the mandatory evacuation of the Japanese-Canadian population from the West Coast of Canada to ghost towns and camps in the B.C. interior, farms in Alberta (where the men were subject to forced labour), and what amounted to concentration camps in Ontario is one of the most heinous examples of the abuse of power perpetrated by the government under the guise of protecting the citizenry (read: the white population) from the threat of “enemy aliens” during wartime.

In his latest novel, Toronto author Terry Watada employs the first-person narration of a young Japanese-Canadian named Daniel Sugiura to give readers an insider’s view of the happenings, from the weeks preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the implementation of the evacuation through the end of 1945.

Daniel is the Canadian-born son of parents who came to Canada during the first wave of Japanese immigration between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Like many of his generation (known as Nisei), Daniel feels no particular loyalty to his parents’ country. At first, his narration expresses typical generational conflict: while his mother and father cling to the ways of the old country and resist any kind of assimilation, Daniel considers himself Canadian first, resenting the fact that his elders expect him to speak Japanese (of which he has only rudimentary knowledge) and continue to blindly respect the tenets of honour that are so important in Japanese society.

With the formation of the British Columbia Security Commission and the edict requiring all Canadians of Japanese ancestry to register, the tone of the story shifts to more serious matters. Daniel – an English Lit major at the University of British Columbia – is convinced

to join the staff at The New Canadian, an English-language Japanese newspaper helmed

by Tommy Shoyama. Despite the fact that Daniel feels ill-equipped as a journalist, Tommy convinces him he is needed, and sends him out to begin covering the goings-on in their ethnic enclave, alternately referred to as Little Japan or Japantown.

Over the course of the novel – which combines real-life figures and events with fictional ones – Daniel’s job as a journalist (and Tommy’s mysterious connections) allows him to remain in Vancouver and travel between the internment camps, always with a “get out of jail free” letter in his pocket. It’s a handy device, but the fact that Daniel, a lowly and inexperienced writer, would be allowed such freedom of movement and access to high-ranking officials and important situations at times beggars belief.

Among the outsize figures Daniel encounters are the men who comprise the Three Pleasures of the book’s title: Morii Etsuji, the local mob boss, who is conscripted to act as liaison with the Japanese-Canadian community; Watanabe Etsuo, leader of the fishermen’s association in the coastal town of Steveston; and Etsu Kaga, a man loyal to the Emperor of Japan who becomes a leading figure in the rebellious Yamato Damashii Group. Though these men play important roles in how the removal of Japanese-Canadians transpired, they ultimately get lost within a huge cast of characters.

Watada packs his narrative with men, many of whom appear only for one scene. Others – including Tommy and the Buddhist minister Reverend Tsuji – overshadow the figures the story is putatively centred on.

Events unfold in a linear but jumbled fashion: Daniel describes the initial accession of the Nisei and Issei (first-generation immigrants) to the registration and early evacuations, followed by growing unrest among the Nisei as their families are torn apart, the men sent to labour camps or to build roads or work on farms, while women, children, and the aged are shuttled off to camps and ghost towns without a means of supporting themselves.

There is a lot to digest in Watada’s epic novel.

The forced evacuation, selling off of Japanese-

Readers will likely come away from the book with more questions than answers Canadian property and businesses, splitting up of families, violence, racism, clashing opinions and powers within the community, and shifting allegiances should make for an engaging and informative story. But Watada’s reliance on a narrator whose voice feels indifferent and detached, even when he is apparently experiencing grief, anger, or passion, undermines the effect, as does the rambling, character-heavy plot. We don’t even find out what life in the camps was like until two-thirds of the way through the novel, when Daniel finally contrives to get himself sent to one. Readers will likely come away from the book with more questions than answers, and no clearer understanding of how devastating the internment really was to those who experienced it.

The Larger Conversation Tim Lilburn University of Alberta Press in 1999, writer and poet Tim Lilburn published

the non-fiction work Living in the World as if It Were Home, a meditation on humanity’s relationship with the natural environment that has become a classic and was the first book in a loose trilogy examining the connections between politics, environmentalism, philosophy, and modernity. Eighteen years later, the final part of the trilogy, a volume of contemplative essays, is available from UAP. j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 35

Reviews

c u r r en t A f fA i r S

Pushing the needle Lee Maracle and M. NourbeSe Philip address issues of colonial violence and systemic racism in new volumes of essays

By K A M A l A l - S o l Ay l e e

My Conversations with Canadians Lee Maracle BookThug Blank: Essays and Interviews M. NourbeSe Philip BookThug to read Lee Maracle’s My Conversations with

Canadians and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Blank back-to-back is to confront the very real possibility that Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief in a moral universe whose long arc bends toward justice is at best wishful thinking and at worst misleading. Barack Obama loved King’s saying so much, he did the next best thing to chiselling it on a tablet: he had it woven into an Oval Office rug. Maracle and Philip, by contrast, offer essays that puncture the myth of progress through time and suggest that the more things change, the more they stay rotten.

Maracle comes at this notion from an Indigenous world view, while Philip privileges blackness as a gateway to seeing and testing this country’s race relations.

Canada comes out of this mix bruised and tattered, and for good reasons. But what Maracle and Philip offer in their smart, humane, and confrontational books is the reckoning this country needs if we want the needle moved on racism in politics, culture, and our 3 6 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

communities. Both books should be required reading for Canadians on the left and right, especially younger readers who could benefit from the authors’ long creative arcs, which span the past four decades.

Maracle frames her essays as conversations, but they are actually monologues to which the reader is not invited to respond. After decades of fielding infuriating questions from Canadians on book tours and at public lectures, Maracle sets the record straight on a few of our beloved myths, including Canada’s current narrative as a model multicultural society.

“Canada is a British-dominated nation that diminishes all other cultures and promotes its own,” she asserts – assertion being her default rhetorical strategy. Well-meaning white Canadians (and to some degree people of colour who came after them) must stop acting all innocent and unaware of their roles in dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands and, crucially, their stories.

In a powerful conversation simply titled “Appropriation,” Maracle delivers a rebuke to past writers and a warning shot to new ones who think that getting an elder’s permission to write down oral stories gives them a moral absolution from literary theft. Maracle believes that cultural transmission is the birthright of children: “No one but our children are entitled to our knowledge, stories, law, teachings,

science, or medicine.” Many white writers, scientists, and politicians have benefitted financially from appropriation while Indigenous people struggle to reclaim their knowledge or use it to level the playing field.

Elsewhere, Maracle boldly confronts white feminism, literary Canada’s predilection for panels and tokenism, and the residential schools’ legacy, which she convincingly compares to genocide. This much eclecticism gives the collection a survey-like feel, and the inclusion of a speech delivered in India as part of a conference on First Nations literature as the book’s finale suggests a desire to pad instead of revisiting and expanding original content.

Philip’s book, by contrast, is built around juxtaposing older, out-of-print material – mainly from her 1992 collection Frontiers – with codas, new essays, letters, and ruminations. Not everything in this 350-page book is a must-read, and some entries fall somewhere between selfindulgence and self-pity. Yet cumulatively, the essays show not just how prescient Philip is as a commentator, but how much our culture has lost by the marginalization and erasure of voices like hers (hence the book’s title).

Read her analysis of the racist and hypocritical assumptions behind such 1990s debacles as the Royal Ontario Museum’s exhibition Into the Heart of Africa or the Garth Drabinsky production of Show Boat – both touchstones for Black activism in Toronto and throughout Canada. Her anger – then and now – is palpable, but she channels it through precisely the kind of evidence-based analysis that detractors claim is lacking in protest movements and literature.

The book’s masterpiece is a new personal essay titled “Riding the Bus with Rosa in Morocco,” in which Philip recounts how the local operators of a tour through the desert tried to have her removed from her seat to make room for two young white women. Philip directs her gaze to Morocco – a country on the northwestern tip of Africa that distances itself from the continent below it – and its complicity in the slave trade in the Arab and Muslim world, which predates the transatlantic one. She’s aware of the need to build alliances with other colonized subjects who “have felt the brute force of racism,” but critiques the Moroccans’ own brand of anti-Black racism, which, in her assessment, colludes with and validates white supremacy.

In a book that also addresses Philip’s roots in the Caribbean, this sideways glance at Morocco proves that while contexts may differ, the vulnerability of the Black body persists across time and place.

Reviews

Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father Carys Cragg Arsenal Pulp Press “the World stops caring, and we all fall down.”

This sentiment lies at the heart of Carys Cragg’s gripping and immersive memoir, Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father. What begins as a cautious back-and-forth between Cragg and her father’s killer swiftly moves into a rich, multi-faceted rumination on the nature of punishment, restorative justice, and the harsh reality of reconciling a life with that of someone else, when what brought those lives together is an act of immense violence.

In 1992, when Cragg was 11, her father – a liked and respected Calgary physician – was murdered by an intruder who broke into their home. The year following the crime, the perpetrator was sentenced to life in prison. Twenty years later, Cragg – by then in her early 30s and struggling to come to terms with the murder and its impact on her family – entered into a correspondence with the murderer in an effort to understand his history and how this, by extension, has affected her own.

Dead Reckoning is a delicate weaving of narrative threads: one follows Cragg as she writes letters to the incarcerated murderer, while another, told in the third person, depicts her childhood memories of her father, Geoffrey, in the years leading up to and following his death.

The book is structured in sections that use the metaphor of sailing (“In Irons,” “Heave-To”) as a way to steer the reader through this terrain. The framework is effective and Cragg’s

letters are astonishing in their empathy and insight. A youth worker herself, Cragg is no stranger to the ways the system can fail those most vulnerable among us. As a narrator, she is adept at plumbing these failures as a roadmap to navigate the questions and beliefs that have influenced her own life.

The immediacy of Cragg’s first-person narration lends these sections an additional, necessary weight. This does at times render the interpolated third-person narrative – presented as small snippets throughout the book – somewhat thin. Though Cragg makes reference throughout Dead Reckoning to the struggles she experienced in her teens and early 20s, it isn’t until the book’s final third that we get more concrete details about the impact the murder has had on her family. Extending these sections could have further enriched our understanding of this familial history.

Notwithstanding this, Dead Reckoning is a work of staggering grace – a book that highlights the nature of restorative justice for perpetrators and victims alike. It is also testament to Cragg herself, whose fierce search for empathy allows her to traverse a seemingly impossible divide. –Amanda Leduc

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others Carol Off Random House Canada in early 2002, when the world’s attention was

aimed at the war in Afghanistan, CBC Television journalist Carol Off landed the thing people in her profession live for – a good “get.” In Kabul, Off was introduced to Asad Aryubwal, who was willing to talk on camera about a notorious warlord named General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his involvement in a massacre of POWs. Off would fly home and later receive accolades for her award-winning documentary; Aryubwal, the local who remained behind, was left with two choices: banishment or death.

Off, who currently hosts CBC Radio’s As It Happens, has written a riveting account of that interview’s impact. She details how she departed from the journalistic ideals of “objectivity, detachment, disengagement” after she found out – six years later, while on assignment in Pakistan – about the wretched plight Aryubwal’s family was in. Having become friends with their precocious eldest daughter through texts and emails, Off decides she must help the family reach safety in Canada. In doing so, she

crosses “the line that artificially separates a reporter from the story.”

Off has no shortage of tangents to follow, and deftly weaves together a taut narrative that shuttles from a history of politics in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan to episodes as a foreign correspondent covering Canadian forces in Kandahar. She recounts the Aryubwals’ story as well: the affluent father who was disappeared by the Communists; the conservative family who disapproved of Aryubwal’s ethnically mixed marriage; the secret school for girls his wife hosted under the Taliban; and life in a country so politically unstable the family had to flee its home four times.

Throughout the book, Off struggles with the moral imperative behind her profession The second half of Off’s book focuses on the attempt – both desperate and maddeningly slow – to get the family to Canada. It takes years for the Aryubwals to become officially recognized, via a murky and potentially corrupt process, by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. And another three years go by as the Stephen Harper government implements roadblocks to refugees entering the country.

Throughout the book, Off struggles with the moral imperative behind her profession.

As the stress of waiting in the volatile city of Peshawar, Pakistan, takes its toll on the Aryubwals, she realizes that she “might have been the worst thing that ever happened to the family.” The journalist’s best day may be someone else’s worst.

While Off is pursuing her personal mission with an ever-growing support network that comes to include colleagues, churches, and a human rights lawyer, she finds herself covering another refugee crisis, out of Syria. She does not mince words when it comes to her dealings with the Conservative minister in charge of the file, Chris Alexander. He is the subject of an infamous 2014 exchange on As It Happens, during which he hangs up on her.

Thirteen years after Off’s fateful interview in Kabul, the Aryubwal family finally makes it to their new home. All We Leave Behind is a fascinating tale about how one reporter’s request turns an extraordinary family’s life upside down, combined with a cogent examination of her own attempt to hold on to her humanity. –Piali Roy j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 37

Reviews

S Hor t f i c t i on

the element of surprise The stories in Daniel Karasik’s debut collection go off in unexpected directions; Tehmina Khan’s debut proves less adventurous

By J o S é t e o d o r o

Faithful and Other Stories Daniel Karasik Guernica Editions Things She Could Never Have Tehmina Khan Mawenzi House Publishers daniel karasik’s debut story collection opens

with a taut chamber piece that barely fills five pages, and closes with a story – spanning 80 pages, multiple narrators, and several decades – that could easily be branded a novella. Both concern the ravages of time on the human heart and the invincibility of hunger for love regardless of conditions. Here and elsewhere in this collection, Karasik demonstrates vigour, wit, and ambition.

That arresting opener is aptly titled “Mine.”

It is at once a story of possession, a bold exercise in brevity, and the staking of a claim for its author. The story delivers a bracing twist on dementia via prose that is ferociously polished, if a little overwrought. By contrast, “Witness,” winner of the Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award for Fiction, is steeped in irony. The story deploys oneiric, Kafkaesque scenarios involving animals, violence, and inexplicable incarceration as a way of exploring an aspiring writer’s existential crisis. The story witnesses little outside the perimeters of the narrator’s anxiety.

3 8 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

In the excellent “A Much-Loved Teacher,” a young man mistakes an accident victim for one of his former teachers; he contacts the teacher and finds himself submitting to an intimacy he considers instantly uncomfortable. The story is very good at dramatizing the way some people carry a veneer of mystery no matter how transparent they try to be, while others project a friendliness that disguises a deep-seated unease with social contracts.

Faithful’s strongest selection is its title story, which seems to aspire to Alice Munro territory, leaping across swaths of time and lighting upon hinges in the trajectory of a strange, unmoored existence. There are missteps: Karasik makes the curious choice to combine third-person and first-person narration, there’s a precarious tendency to use mentally ill women as plot devices, and not every turn is believable. But there are moments – a reunion with an estranged brother; instances of connection between a woman and the adolescent sibling she’s just met – that are hushed and exquisitely knotty.

Some stories wither in the heat of Karasik’s enthusiasm for effects. Others – the ones that breathe, whose investment in character equals their investment in sentences – suggest that Karasik, already established as a poet and playwright, likely has a strong novel in him, so long as his tendency to lean on a certain urbane, privileged milieu doesn’t constrain his

formidable imagination.

One thing that can be said for most of the stories in Faithful is that they surprise. The characters surprise themselves (and us); their circumstances challenge them (and us); no story begins in a way that makes the outcome feel determined or schematic. This cannot be said for the stories in Tehmina Khan’s debut collection, Things She Could Never Have, which are mostly set in the author’s native Pakistan.

Khan’s characters are too often neatly divided into victims and victimizers; character development typically begins and ends with indications of one’s marginalized status, whether that be a matter of gender, class, or sexuality.

In “Whisperings of the Devil,” a poor woman works as a housekeeper for a rich family. The employer is characterized as shallow and obsessed with Facebook, the housekeeper as very salt-of-the-earth. A precious piece of jewellery goes missing and the employer assumes the housekeeper stole it, so she fires the housekeeper and tragedy ensues. The reader knows exactly where this is going. (“Whisperings” also features a simile – “The kitchen was hot as a tandoori oven” — that brings to mind the image of Naben Ruthnum banging his head against a wall.)

Khan’s stories strive to grapple with some of the most urgent issues of our time, such as young people who are drawn toward radical Islam and terror. However, this ambition isn’t accompanied by any fresh insights into the psychology of radicalization, and several stories feature suicide bombings that do little more than inject easy drama.

What resonates far more are the stories in which Khan considers less overtly fraught crises. “The First” is an evocative portrait of complicated female friendship, while in “Closed Doors,” a young couple measures the effect of their first pregnancy on their professional lives and family dynamics. The story ends with a gesture toward renewed understanding that’s elegant and understated.

While too many stories in Things She Could Never Have simply confirm static notions about power and fairness, some, like “Closed Doors,” show a sober belief in an individual’s capacity for change, however small the change may be.

The weaker stories serve as a reminder that acknowledgement is not the same as empathy; anyone can write a story about, say, a transgendered character in a hostile environment, but to honour that character means imbuing them with complexity and challenging received assumptions.

Reviews Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction Travis Lupick Arsenal Pulp Press

group, with the help of some well-placed political allies, media-savvy protest techniques, a researcher, and a lawyer or two, can change the world – or at least make it a little more bearable.

–Stephen Knight

vanCouver’s doWntoWn eastside might

qualify as ground zero for drug addiction in Canada – the locus for everything from heroin and crack cocaine to crystal meth, Oxycontin, and fentanyl. Travis Lupick, a journalist with experience writing about issues surrounding addiction and mental health, also lives in Vancouver’s troubled neighbourhood, and so has a vested interest in its welfare and the wellbeing of its denizens. Lupick’s new book tells the gripping story of how a small group representing the most marginalized and desperate Downtown Eastsiders banded together during the 1990s and 2000s to change hearts, minds, and laws by advocating for safe injection sites for intravenous drug users.

Lupick charts the experiences of the Portland Hotel Society, the Vancouver Network of Drug Users, and other activist groups as they are repeatedly ignored by politicians, harassed and beaten by police, and defeated in court.

Setbacks and the glacial pace of progress notwithstanding, these various groups persevere and finally convince the machinery of the state to view drug addiction in Vancouver as a public health emergency rather than a criminal justice problem.

Today, a safe injection site offering addicts clean rigs, needles, and other paraphernalia seems like an obvious benefit for society – reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis B and C and resulting in fewer overdose deaths.

But for politicians, police, and NIMBYish taxpayers in 1990s Vancouver, it appeared counterintuitive at best and an abomination at worst.

Enter activists Ann Livingston, Bud Osborn, Liz Evans, Mark Townsend, Dean Wilson, and Dan Small. By fighting to establish Insite, North America’s first legal supervised injection program, what this group of rebels was actually doing was getting all levels of society – healthcare professionals, law enforcement, courts, average people – to acknowledge the humanity of deeply marginalized addicts and to demand they be respected as citizens with health-care problems, not garbage to be discarded.

Lupick’s book does not shy away from the negative: many people die, and PHS comes to a sordid end. But the lingering feeling the reader is left with is one of hope. Fighting for Space demonstrates that a rag-tag but passionate

H Zolitude Paige Cooper Biblioasis given hoW often the stories in Paige Coop-

er’s debut feature solitary characters flailing for connection, readers might be forgiven for assuming the title is just some kind of clever millennial distortion of the English word for being alone. It isn’t until the narrator of the title story, a researcher living on a houseboat in Riga, mentions that her parents live in a Soviet-era housing estate called Zolitude that we realize the title refers to a real-life place – the site of a tragic 2013 accident in which a collapsed shopping-mall roof killed 40 people.

It’s precisely this kind of play – with meaning, expectation, and, fundamentally, language – that makes this collection such an intoxicating read.

Cooper’s main theme is love, but rarely have love stories seemed less clichéd and predictable. None of the book’s 14 pieces is quite like any of the others, and their settings range from eerie but recognizable variations on the present (Latvia; small-town America; Russia; southeast Asia) to dreamscapes of the future.

Indeed, Zolitude engages in a degree of worldbuilding unusual in Canadian literary fiction, with Cooper jumping from a future West Coast devastated by a massive earthquake to a vanguard colony dedicated to terraforming Mars to the jungle construction site of the world’s first fusion reactor. Even settings that at first feel familiar – the hunting lodge in “The Roar” for example, or the tropical resort in “Spiderhole” – turn out to be populated by shapeshifting creatures and prehistoric reptiles.

At times, this penchant for fantasy creates challenges. Cooper tends to drop her readers into the narrative cold, and stories like “Record of Working” and “Thanatos” don’t so much unfold as emerge from descriptions of characters and events that at first seem bewildering.

This at times maddeningly oblique approach works because Cooper has a masterful sense for pacing and tension, and a remarkable facility for creating sentences so descriptively rich and syntactically clever one cannot help feeling impelled to read on.

Still, the collection’s greatest strength is its emotional maturity. Despite their fantastical elements, the beating heart of Cooper’s work is the characters themselves: their bewilderment and longing, their struggles with jealousy and compassion and love. In the most powerful pieces, “Record of Working,” “Zolitude,” and “Vazova on Love,” Cooper manages a virtuosic synthesis of imaginative brio and humanistic insight. Particularly in that last story, which depicts a burgeoning affair between a spy and her target during a frigid winter in a northern Russian port city, tenderness and violence and doom are so densely layered as to deliver the affective impact of a novel.

It is common to hear people describe books they love by saying they couldn’t put them down.

Zolitude has the opposite effect: these stories are so well made, so viscerally moving, I often found the need to take a break between them to recover. Cooper’s work is entertaining, but it also demands our full attention. – André Forget

Darwin’s Moving Taylor Lambert NeWest Press like Many urban centres in Canada, Calgary

has become notable in part for the stark divide between its richest and poorest citizens. A boomtown that thrives on new money resulting from the success of the oil and energy sectors, it is also home to an underclass of ex-cons, addicts, and transients, many of whom find occasional work as movers within the city limits. In his new memoir, writer Taylor Lambert examines the moving industry, where the collision of rich and poor is made starkly evident. j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 3 9

Reviews

Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove and the Art of Resistance Will Aitken University of Regina Press aMong the great Greek tragedies, perhaps no

other has spawned as many successful adaptations and critical reflections as Sophocles’s Antigone. Novelist Will Aitken reminds readers why Antigone remains such a universally accessible play in this visceral recounting of his own reactions to the staging of Antigonick, a recent translation by the poet Anne Carson.

This thoughtful and disturbing memoir poignantly illustrates how, for good or ill, the power of art can transform human understanding.

At the heart of a timeless story that captures the intense emotions generated by an act of female resistance is one of the most soughtafter female stage roles: a strong woman – played here by legendary French actor Juliette Binoche – who defies society, her family, and the government. When Aitken relates his (albeit brief) first-hand experience of the production’s rehearsals and Luxembourg premiere, it is not so much an exploration of process and performance as a retrospective of a deeply personal journey, informed by interviews with Binoche, Carson, and avant-garde director Ivo van Hove. Aitken pulls no punches in discussing how the production pushed him into a prolonged period of depression, despairing introspection on the state of the world, and a harrowing suicide attempt.

The author also branches out from the personal to the global to consider the divergent views of Antigone – both the character and the play – from the perspectives of a range of 4 0 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

cultural theorists and philosophers who inevitably form Antigone in their own image. He reaches back to Hegel and Kierkegaard (with their inexorable focus on the male gaze) along with Virginia Woolf (who lionizes the ultimate female rebel), while sampling more contemporary views from the likes of Judith Butler and feminist legal theorist Bonnie Honig.

Aitken’s writing style is poetic, vibrant, and unabashedly emotional. His ability to encapsulate the personal and political informs his finding that the art of resistance, as reflected by Antigone’s choices, is necessary in today’s fractured, often totalitarian, and technologically intrusive world. His despair that such resistance is still necessary – and yet overwhelmingly difficult to enact – feels authentic and connected to the contemporary angst undergirding many a Facebook post and media story.

The book’s sometimes disjointed narrative, ranging in tone from confessional to academic, makes it unclear whether the parts serve to create a cohesive whole. Indeed, we are left wondering about the ultimate results of Aitken’s personal journey through the labyrinthine analysis of this play. Perhaps, however, that is the point; the volume is a reflection, not a didactic prescription. Questions are posed rather than answered; insights are presented but fealty to them is not demanded.

Ultimately, Aitken’s hope appears to lie in Binoche’s savagely honest portrayal of Antigone, and her willingness to plunge into the painful depths in order to reach a sense of enlightenment and renewed commitment to deeply felt beliefs. For Antigone – and for Aitken – the future of humanity lies within this courage to encounter and suffer through the pain of resistance. –Laurel Smith

Against All Odds P.J. Naworynski Collins in his neW book, Gemini Award–winning

writer and director P.J. Naworynski tells the story of one of the unlikeliest gold-medal victories in Olympic history. An administrative rule change involving the definition of “amateur” athletes led to the announcement that Canada would not be fielding a hockey team in 1948 – the first postwar Olympics. A group of former Royal Canadian Air Force pilots not only formed a team, but went on to victory in what Tim Cook calls “one of the great underdog stories in Canadian sports history.”

Edging Forward: Achieving Sustainable Community Development Ann Dale Fernweh Press With a Constant stream of newsfeed images

showing communities caught up in extreme weather events – catastrophic floods, droughts, and wildfires – juxtaposed against increasingly outrageous political stories and fake news, it’s often difficult to feel we have any control whatsoever over the trajectory of our lives. In Edging Forward: Achieving Sustainable Community Development, Royal Roads University’s Canada Research Chair Ann Dale tackles the matter of agency and the role of storytelling in the quest for transformative change.

Framing the book with the loss of her son to suicide in 1998, Dale encourages empathy and drives home the relationship between community and humanity. In Chapter 6, she crystallizes her overall purpose when she writes, “The main narrative of my book … is that we cannot afford to edge forward – we must leap forward, given the three social imperatives of climate-change adaptation and mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable community development.”

Dale covers much ground in this brief text, employing childhood stories as both chapter headings and accessible ways to frame her arguments. The structure of the chapter titled “Going Down the Wrong Rabbit Hole: The Climate Imperative,” with its many references to rabbit holes, at times intrudes upon the content.

In “Three Trolls Under the Bridge: Barriers to Change,” however, the eponymous creatures are employed to great effect to illustrate how long-held “stories around perpetual growth, capitalism, and government” shape our current reality. One of Dale’s most pressing questions is: “If the pursuit of growth does not increase wellbeing in wealthy societies, why does it remain the dominant policy objective of governments in these societies?”

Backed by more than 15 years of research experience, Edging Forward is one part of a complex multimedia project. On the accompanying website, paintings by Nancyanne Cowell help awaken the senses and evoke an aura of mystery.

A wealth of audio, video, academic, and print articles further fire imaginative leaps. Taken as a whole, Edging Forward comprises a kind of intellectual parkour. In its call for a more authentic engagement with nature, it’s a rabbit hole we’d be wise to go down. –Brenda Schmidt

Reviews

P oet ry

full-throttle technique Three poets run the gamut from stylistic pyrotechnics to subtle plain-spokenness By S t e v i e H o w e l l H Cruise Missile Liberals Spencer Gordon Nightwood Editions H Drakkar Noir Jeramy Dodds Coach House Books H Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015 Robyn Sarah Biblioasis spenCer gordon’s debut book of poetry,

Cruise Missile Liberals, opens with the speaker admiring an X-ray’s clarity of purpose, and closes with a desire to be like the enduring trees, which never need a “wake to drink at.”

Gordon’s collection is about being located uncomfortably between machine and nature, and what it means to be citizens in an unjust world.

Cruise Missile Liberals covers a wide range of terrain, from the poetry community to class issues to governmental policies to the lyrics of Taylor Swift and Avril Lavigne. Gordon employs the vocabulary of pop culture (for example, hashtags) in a way that is never decorative, but always demonstrative. Inundated and mediated, these poems refuse to look away from our cultural glut, and this provides for some caustic social commentary.

Gordon’s attunement also results at times in despair. The answer to “What’s on Your Mind?” takes the form of a litany: “An admission of sincere emotional fatigue. A plea / for more

patience. A transmission of love for whoever / needs it. The ultimate in party shirts, now on clearance.” The first three sentences are earnest, while the last one almost sounds like the poet parroting advertising copy. But Gordon is capable of shifting into Biblical pathos just as deftly: “Wind – mere wind – snatched up Job’s children.”

Cruise Missile Liberals is a complex and accomplished first collection from a writer who has honed his voice by listening. Gordon’s examination of the self in late capitalism is not always optimistic but is, in its humanity, enormously affirming.

If Gordon’s book is firmly embedded in the modern world, Jeramy Dodds’s sophomore collection, Drakkar Noir, creates an impossible world, located nowhere and everywhere.

Poems take place in the city, the country, on a farm, in a castle, on tropical beaches, at the mall, and elsewhere. Much of the imagery involves the air and bodies in motion. There are consistent mentions of the sun, candles and wax, angels, windows and mirrors, and automobiles. The cumulative effect is of an Icaruslike figure going too high, too far, too fast. At the same time, this book is also populated with bodily imagery (rashes or acne, for example) and a pantheon of almost mythic animals. In this impossible world, there is no such thing as too much.

Dodds has long been recognized for his imagistic leaps, wordplay, and attention to the sonic qualities of poetry. These facilities are all on display here, enhanced in a number of

longer poems (“What Pa Saw”; “Trevor Finlayson for Jeffrey Connors”; “The Swan with Two Necks”), in which the syncopated musicality receives sustained treatment.

One of the most interesting motifs of the book is possession – the speaker refers to “my wife,” “my daughter,” “my child,” “my dolphin,” and so on. This is interesting because the finest poems centre on lack of ownership and estrangement. In “Formica Crick,” Dodds asks, touchingly, “What do you call / a trapezist who doesn’t reach out for you?” In “Three on the Tree and Fifth Under the Seat,” he laments, “Making love to you was like / sheriffing a town that’s already burnt down.” There are poems about feeling small while being awed by the sea’s grandeur (“Scapa Flow”; “Harbour Porpoise”). Even Dodds’s opus, “Canadæ,” which occupies the centre of the book, is about a desire to change the nature of a fundamental relationship: “Canada, this is a teleprompted / love song, a ghostwritten Dear John.”

Eschewing Gordon’s of-the-moment commentary and Dodds’s sacred-and-profane surrealism, Robyn Sarah declines to traffic in the pyrotechnics of syntax. The ambition inherent in her work has always involved the use of direct speech to build up meaning by way of gentle washes. Wherever We Mean to Be contains poems spanning 1975 through 2015, including a number of selections from her most recent collection, the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award winner, My Shoes Are Killing Me. Sarah has a gift for detail, and many of these poems engage with memory. They address maturing, parenting, and the dichotomy of cosmic time versus a single life. “Maintenance” illustrates the friction between the ethereal and the quotidian in its description of being called away from writing by the mundane demands of the day: “to call this compensation, is to demean. / The planes are separate.”

For the most part, Sarah writes in her own forms, and does so with a musicality that feels informed by classical composition more than contemporary music – she’s concerned with melody over hook. One form she returns to with élan is the villanelle; in “Villanelle for a Cool April” she writes, “I like to watch the shadows pack their tents / before the creep of the advancing sun.”

Sarah’s style aims for the sublime through subtlety, and for the universal through the specific. The final poem, “An Infrequent Flyer Looks Down,” captures an underlying theme: “Not a bead of thought today, / nothing but doubt. // What is worth wanting?” j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 41

Reviews ed i tor 'S c Hoi c e

Speaking in tongues Heidi Sopinka’s debut novel addresses the nature and purpose of art, but sacrifices narrative momentum By S t e v e n w. B e At t i e The Dictionary of Animal Languages Heidi Sopinka Hamish Hamilton Canada about a third of the way into Heidi Sopinka’s

debut novel, the author describes a painting her protagonist, an artist named Ivory Frame, executes while still a student: There is a group of gluttonous grotesque women, with heads … described as phallic though I thought of them as equine. They sit at a table, abundant with extravagant dishes. It is all writhing and moving and somewhat alive. There is a woman alone, with a neutral expression on her face. She is off in the corner of the painting and appears to be unaware that her fork has dug into a plump, live baby.

The final detail is startling – arguably even more so given the realization that Sopinka is describing an actual work of 20th-century art. The work in question is La comida de Lord Candlestick, a 1938 oil on canvas by the noted English surrealist Leonora Carrington.

Carrington is a clear inspiration for Sopinka’s central character. Both were born in 1917, and Frame is 92 years old in the novel’s narrative present – the same age as Carrington when Sopinka tracked down the reclusive artist in Mexico City and sat with her for two days, from which experience she produced an interview (published in 2012, the year following Carrington’s death) for The Believer. The opening question in that interview (“What are you thinking about right now?”) elicits the response, “I don’t discuss that,” which closely echoes a line Sopinka puts in the mouth of Lev Volkov, the Russian expat who becomes Frame’s lifelong romantic obsession. Lev himself is a loose stand-in for Max Ernst, a married painter who lived with Carrington in Paris until he was captured and imprisoned by the Nazis during the Second World War. Other details from Carrington’s life and work pepper Sopinka’s novel. Frame’s “reverence for nature and animals,” we are told, “borders on mystical,” a clear resonance with 4 2 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

Carrington’s body of work. And Frame is said to have gone mad, which also chimes with Carrington’s life story (during the war, she was incarcerated in a mental institution, an experience she expounds on in her memoir, Down Below, first published in 1944).

But Sopinka also branches out from the biographical record, giving Frame an equal interest in science that spurs her major postwar endeavour: a dictionary of the “languages” spoken by a wide range of fauna, from nightingales to bees to horses to whales. “I am obsessed with language obsolescence,” Frame says as an explanation for her motivation, which is expanded in a series of questions that prompt her work: “What is communication? What is silence? Can animal vocalizations and their meanings be made into a dictionary? … How should listening be translated?”

Undergirding all of these, of course, is the ontological question of existence itself: who are we and how do we know ourselves? And, more pressingly, how do we communicate this knowledge to others?

These are heady questions, and Sopinka appears to have found a provocative entry into them: as the novel opens, the 92-yearold Frame divulges to her companion, Skeet, that she has received a letter informing her she has a granddaughter. This revelation – which is shocking to the old woman who has never married and has no apparent family to speak of – is the central factor precipitating a journey into memory. The reader is offered her experience learning art at the academy of M. Marant, her friendship with a member of the Parisian avant-garde named Tacita, and – above all else – her yearning, aching desire for Lev. Unfortunately, these dramatic elements are subsumed by a prose style that tries too hard, shows too little, and tends to have an alienating effect on the reader. In Sopinka’s novel, night “jewels in.” Lev’s hand “detains” Frame’s ankle.

The “world drops away” and Frame is “filled with these sonorities, this opalescence.” This kind of romantic overwriting reaches its apogee late in the novel when Frame hears laundry flapping in the wind: “The sound reminds me of Lev saying listen to nothing but the sound of your own heart beating when there is the

Sopinka also branches out from the biographical record

nuptial flight of turtledoves high and circling, the whipcrack of their downward-flicked wings against the grey sky.”

At the other end of the spectrum, we are offered a series of pithy aphorisms (“Time does not heal, it medicates”; “Age makes you sensitive as a Geiger counter”) and anodyne observations (“Isn’t the very definition of insanity repeating the same thing over and over again in the same way, expecting a different result”).

These are embedded in a narrative that refuses to allow itself the luxury of forward momentum, instead becoming bogged down in rumination and self-conscious intellectualizing.

This languid quality is exacerbated by another aspect, one that is somewhat surprising in a novel that derives so much stimulus from Leonora Carrington’s life and work. Though Carrington’s imaginative output – and most especially her short stories – could be remarkably funny, The Dictionary of Animal Languages is almost entirely devoid of humour.

It is as though Sopinka feels that the only appropriate approach to her themes – love, art, aging, existence – is to adopt and maintain a pose of artificial high seriousness. Looking at Lord Candlestick, or reading Carrington’s story “The Debutante,” one is initially shocked by the content, then moved to guffaw at the absurdity of its presentation. In Sopinka’s version, the heightened prose and relative lack of dramatic incident tend to preclude either of these reactions.

Ode to a small brown bird

stranger things

You’re breaking my heart

Jan Thornhill turns her attention to the common, but triumphant, house sparrow

A reluctant hero returns to the reserve in David A. Robertson’s latest YA thriller

First cruelty, then love for the teenage loners in Charlotte Gingras’s Ophelia

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Books for Young People be appreciated by older kids – or even adults.

The shifts in time and the sheer manic pace of the narrative might also be too much for very young readers to keep up with, though the frequent poop and pee jokes will make them want to try.

For all its silliness, the book also takes a few surprisingly dark turns. Though we are spared scenes of actual animal torture, it is made clear that the animals in the lab are repeatedly abused.

In one panel, Charlie holds up a red, swollen paw and explains that “They hurt my foot to see how fast I heal.” But for readers who can handle a bit of grit with their goofiness, Sparks! is comicbook catnip.

g r a p h i c n ov el

cats will be dogs In this Simpsons-esque book, two laboratory felines build themselves a robotic dog suit and take on an evil (alien) baby by n at h a n W h i t l o c k

H Sparks!

Ian Boothby and Nina Matsumoto, ill.

Graphix, Ages 7–10 august and charlie are two cats who meet as

fellow prisoners in a secret animal testing laboratory, and later live together in a house with a sentient robot that also serves as a kitty litter box. After foiling a neighbourhood robbery, the cats get a taste for heroism, so they build themselves a mechanical dog suit they control from within. Their exploits catch the attention of a baby girl named Princess, who is in fact an evil alien trying to gain control of all Earth’s animals.

Ian Boothby and Nina Matsumoto first worked together a decade ago on a Simpsons comic book that won them an Eisner Award. They’ve collabor-

ated on many projects since, including Deadbeat Dad and Sneaky Dragon. But Sparks! – a graphic novel for young readers – sees them return to that Simpsons-esque sensibility.

This is the kind of story that, despite its zaniness and hilariously overstuffed plot, makes you genuinely care about the complicated friendship at its core. It’s also the kind of story that introduces one of its feline heroes by showing him licking his own butt.

Boothby keeps a lot of narrative plates spinning without breaking a single one. Matsumoto’s bright, dynamic, and cartoonish illustrations, though vaguely reminiscent of a certain show about a dysfunctional Springfield family, are a perfect fit with the text.

Sparks! is filled with gags that might only j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 4 3

Books for Young People The Pink Umbrella

p i c t u r e book s

poise and propriety A fictional French café owner and a revered English writer are the charming protagonists in picture books from Canadian illustrators by l i n da l u d k e

The Pink Umbrella Amélie Callot and Geneviève Godbout, ill.; Lara Hinchberger, trans.

Tundra Books, Ages 6–9 Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen Deborah Hopkinson and Qin Leng, ill.

Balzer & Bray, Ages 4–8 the rituals of courtship and village life are

at the heart of two new swoon-worthy picture books – one about finding joy and bliss in the everyday, and the other, a loving, biographical ode to a revered writer.

The Pink Umbrella, by French author Amélie Callot (translated by Lara Hinchberger), is a winsome, slice-of-life confection. Adele runs the bustling Polka-Dot Apron café that is the place to be in her tiny coastal hamlet. Its success is due in no small part to Adele’s effervescent loveliness.

However, when rain clouds appear, Adele’s sunny disposition takes a dark turn and she takes to bed, despondent.

Mysteriously, small gifts begin to appear for her in the shop. First, a pair of pink rubber boots 4 4 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

with shining suns carved in the soles. In the following days, a fuchsia coat and a pink polkadotted umbrella enigmatically arrive to complete Adele’s rainy day ensemble – leading her to appreciate the “smell of damp grass” and the “pretty melody” of falling raindrops. The chivalrous benefactor – Lucas, the steadfast grocer – is obvious to all but Adele.

The sanguine notion that “even in the rain, the sun cuts through the grey sky” is complimented and elevated by the charm of Montreal illustrator Geneviève Godbout’s artwork. And the hand-lettered text adds to the intimate appeal of the conversational story. Adele is drawn as a stylish, unassuming beauty. She exudes warmth with her innocent, big black button eyes, flushed cheeks, and penchant for wearing pink. Godbout’s delicate pastel and coloured-pencil illustrations – which have a mid-century, retro flair – lend an ethereal, fairy tale quality.

Jane Austen no doubt would have admired Adele’s entrepreneurship, poise, and propriety. In Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen, U.S. writer Deborah Hopkinson focuses on the English author’s formative years. The economical, lyrical text quickly establishes the budding novelist as

an observant, creative child, who stages plays with her boisterous family and devours books, leaving astute, wry comments in the margins.

But she sometimes feels “awkward and a little shy, especially when company arrive[s].” The narrative tone is personably chatty, and pithy asides subtly shed light on the age: “Her father’s great library boasted five hundred books (almost all of them by men).”

Hopkinson presents Austen as an original, committed to honing her craft and forging her own literary path. This introductory portrait is self-contained and pared down to the authentic essentials (minus the darker periods of illness and financial hardships). Austen’s tenacity and dedication will resonate with children, whether or not they’re familiar with her oeuvre.

On top of Hopkinson’s biographical details, there is more to glean about Austen’s life from Qin Leng’s trademark airy ink and watercolour illustrations. This is evident in the way the young writer intently observes (from her vantage point behind the parlour drapes) exchanges between proper ladies in empire-waist, ankle-length gowns and dapper gents in tailcoats and ruffled shirts.

An aerial close-up shows Austen comfortably secreted in a window seat at the top of the stairs, surrounded by piles of books and intently scribbling with a quill pen. A detailed cross-section cutaway of the three-storey Austen family home, filled to the rafters with lodgers and relations, affords a peek into the household’s everyday hustle and bustle. In this way, Leng beautifully captures the Georgian era and Jane’s multifaceted personality.

Books for Young People Can Your Outfit Change the World?

Erinne Paisley Orca Book Publishers, Ages 12–16 VictOria-bOrn activist Erinne Paisley made

headlines in 2015 when she used her high school prom dress – handcrafted out of old math homework – to make some incisive statements about the lack of access to education for girls in many other parts of the world and the troubling nature of prom culture at home.

Kids should be asking questions about an item before buying, including if the purchase is really necessary

H The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow Jan Thornhill Groundwood Books, Ages 9–12 award-winning authOr and illustrator Jan

Thornhill has a passion for nature that runs deep. From her first picture book, The Wildlife ABC (1988), to this most recent title, The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow, Thornhill delivers sound science with breathtaking artwork and beautifully crafted words.

The house sparrow lives alongside humans. It “cleans up after us” and eats pests on farm fields.

Long ago, boys took jobs as “sparrow catchers,” in one of the many efforts to control its population throughout history. This “small brown bird” doesn’t seem a likely subject for a book. Humans have tried to get rid of this “despised” creature for 10,000 years, but – unlike the great auk, the subject of Thornhill’s 2016 picture book – this sparrow has proven extremely adaptable. The narrative traces the grain-lover’s prehistoric roots in the Middle East through its migration to India, North Africa, and Europe.

Each step contains surprising details. For instance, “Egyptians were expert bird-netters,” and “a simple sparrow pie calls for the meat from at least five dozen birds!” In Europe, in the 1800s, house-sparrow numbers swelled so much that it could be found “nesting in every crevice, including between the legs of gargoyles.” European immigrants living in U.S. cities missed the bird so much that some were captured in Europe

and released in New York. After a few failed attempts, the house sparrow began reproducing in Brooklyn, and, within two decades, its numbers surged across America. Many found it “irritable, intolerable, and lazy.” Others argued it could be “so cheerful, so frolicsome, so amusing!”

Thornhill’s original, descriptive prose is wellresearched and engaging, and accompanied by fascinating extras, including a distribution map and an illustrated life cycle of the species.

Picture-book fans generally prefer handpainted illustrations, but Thornhill’s digital artwork is captivating and gorgeous. Each scene features fine details and realistic textures, such as kernels of wheat, fluffed-up feathers, wide-open orange beaks, and birds in flight, all set against grassy meadows and cirrus-streaked blue skies.

This information-packed book – exploring themes of conservation and climate change – ensures readers will gain respect for and understanding of this common, but triumphant, bird.

–Jill Bryant

The dress earned her a healthy online following and gave her a taste for activism. It also led to a three-book series with Orca. This second title in the PopActivism series (after Can Your Smartphone Change the World?) teaches kids how to make better, more conscious choices when it comes to their apparel. For those new to the issue, Paisley’s instruction – broken into eight chapters – is engaging and fun, with images, quotes from famous figures (“Buy less, choose well, make it last,” says Vivienne Westwood), and pop-quiz activities interspersed throughout.

She also encourages readers to become “fashion detectives” – inspired by #whomademyclothes and #DetoxFashion – pushing them to understand the full story behind their clothing, find environmentally friendly alternatives, and to search out organic and fair trade labels.

Paisley’s main point is easy to get behind: kids should ask more questions about an item before purchasing. Where is it made? Who made it and under what conditions? What is the potential environmental impact of the garment and/or the company? Is the purchase really necessary?

For youth in their early teens, who are often concerned about what is cool and trendy, this message about conscious consumerism is essential, especially in a world where fast, cheap fashion dominates, often at the cost of individuals and the environment. Can Your Outfit Change the World? does the topic justice, approaching it in a simple, informative way that has the potential to make anyone feel like they really do have the power to invoke positive change. –Becky Robertson j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 4 5

Books for Young People House Cree Nation, Robertson writes empathically of cultural dislocation, and plays with some of the tropes of fantasy novels rooted in Indigenous folklore, involving the spirit world and figures like Coyote. Strangers is clever and refreshingly self-aware (the passage where Choch explains, in the third person, about the involvement of “the mythological being known as Coyote” is delightful, and serves to answer a few nagging questions, considering “Coyote isn’t really a thing for us Crees. We’re more of a Wisakedjak kind of people.”

As a thriller, it twists nicely when least expected, defying predictions without seeming deliberate F i c t i on

you can never go home David A. Robertson’s latest thriller, the first in a series, fires on all cylinders by r o b e r t J . W i e r s e m a Strangers: The Reckoner, Book 1 David A. Robertson HighWater Press, Ages 12+ cOle harper – the protagonist of David A. Robertson’s impressive new novel for young adults – hasn’t returned to Wounded Sky First Nation in almost a decade. A high school senior in Winnipeg, with a part-time job and a plan for university (along with some considerable basketball skills), Harper fled the community as a child, in the wake of something tragic.

The novel is coy about the exact nature of the events that drove Harper from his home: there was a fire, and the deaths of a number of children. These occurrences had something to do with the school, and were perhaps connected to the mysterious research facility on the edge of town. We learn very little from Harper, who has no interest in exploring the past – not even when he starts receiving increasingly frantic text messages from his childhood friend Ashley, still living at Wounded Sky, and desperate for Harper to return.

When Harper finally gives in to the pressure (largely at his grandmother’s urging), his return home is greeted with suspicion and scorn. Childhood confidante Eva is so angry 4 6 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

with Harper she can barely speak, though she still wears the ring of sweetgrass he wove for her on the night of the tragedy.

Ashley, who did not, in fact, send the text messages summoning Harper back, greets his friend’s presence with horror: “You shouldn’t be here. You shouldn’t have come here.” Before he can explain why, Ashley is shot and killed.

And then things get worse. A mysterious disease begins to ravage Wounded Sky, and more murders follow. There are ghosts and mysteries, shadowy figures in the forest.

And then there’s Coyote, who calls himself Choch as he toys with Harper, alternately urging him forward and drawing him back, slipping between human and animal form, never giving a straight answer. But then, what would you expect: he is Coyote, after all. Being a trickster is his nature.

Strangers is a powerful piece of storytelling – perfect for teen readers, but with much to appeal to an adult audience. As a thriller, it twists nicely when least expected, defying predictions without seeming deliberate. As a homecoming story, Robertson captures the dynamic of welcome and wariness, yearning for home and dreading the experience, the discomfort of the familiar. A member of Norway

Crucial to the novel’s success is Robertson’s fearlessness. The author – who also penned When We Were Alone, a picture-book about residential schools which won a 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award – never seems to flinch.

For example, Harper – given to surliness and an obnoxious (though guarded) superiority – isn’t always the most likeable of characters. Yes, his negative traits are covering his own discomfort and insecurity, but Robertson doesn’t let him off the hook. Instead, the author allows Harper to be off-putting, confident that readers will recognize the roots of his behaviour.

Harper’s relatability builds naturally to a strange comfort and understanding over the course of the book.

This unflinching quality of Robertson’s writing leaves one both exhilarated and unsettled.

Readers will find themselves eagerly anticipating the next book in what Robertson is calling the Reckoner series. It can’t come soon enough.

A Day with Yayah Nicola I. Campbell and Julie Flett, ill.

Tradewind Books, Ages 4–7 in this vibrant picture book, Nłe kepmx grand-

mother Yayah takes her grandchildren on a springtime gathering trip, passing along her knowledge of plant life in her Nłe kepmxcín language. In the characters’ exchanges, Campbell captures the matter-of-fact cadence that wise Indigenous elders exhibit with charm and authenticity – and the children’s pride in both their harvest and their developing Nłe kepmxcín pronunciations. –Selena Mills

Books for Young People book, but The Ice Chips and the Magical Rink gets this new middle-grade series off to a promising and action-packed start. Will the kids save the arena? Will they all make their beloved Riverton Ice Chips team again this season? And how exactly does a homemade Zamboni carry one back to 1936? – Alex Mlynek

The Fox and the Fisherman Marianne Dumas Nimbus Publishing, Ages 4–8 interspecies friendships abound in literature

The Ice Chips and the Magical Rink Roy MacGregor and Kerry MacGregor; Kim Smith, ill.

HarperCollins, Ages 7–10 best friends Lucas, Edge, Swift, and Crunch

are huge hockey fans whose beloved local skating rink might shut down because of equipment problems. They take what they think will be their last skate at the beloved arena and discover a magic ice-flooding machine, which transports them back in time.

So begins the first book in the new Ice Chips series, co-written by Screech Owls author Roy MacGregor and his daughter Kerry. In their travels, the friends meet a young Gordie Howe, are treated to history lessons – like what Bennett buggies were – and, once back in the present, face Lars the bully, whom we learn is being bullied by his own mom.

Thanks to the MacGregors’ skills as storytellers, moments of insight and empathy don’t jar or weigh down the story, but are deftly woven into the hometown hockey narrative.

There are also elements of diversity: Edge is Sikh, Crunch’s family speaks Spanish, Lucas’s family is in a tough financial spot (so he wears ill-fitting hand-me-down equipment), and Swift is a girl with strong goalie skills who happens to have a partially prosthetic leg.

It’s not surprising how well-crafted the book is given the pedigree of its authors: Roy is the winner of several National Magazine Awards, pens The Globe and Mail’s “This Country” column, and has written over 50 books. Kerry contributed to the Screech Owl series and is a journalist as well.

The time-travel aspect results in a few moments of confusion near the beginning of the

for children – from Wilbur and Fern to Babe and Farmer Hoggett. Quebec-based author and illustrator Marianne Dumas upholds this tradition in her debut picture book, The Fox and the Fisherman.

The story begins with the fisherman Barnaby setting about his daily work. A portly gentleman who resembles Ernest Hemingway (if the writer were to don a striped jumper and yellow Wellingtons), Barnaby’s life is one of steadfast routine.

“As always,” is the refrain of the first half-dozen pages, emphasizing the unchanging nature of this solitary fisherman’s day-to-day existence and giving the narrative a folkloric flavour.

Enter the fox. At first, she and the fisherman watch each other from afar. Barnaby earns her trust slowly, proving his kindness with offerings of fish left by the shore. Unlike so many books for children, there is no anthropomorphism here. The pair sit together, silently watching the sea and delighting in each other’s quiet company. At long last, Barnaby has a companion.

When the fox fails to appear one evening, Barnaby fears he has lost his friend for good.

But the fox eventually returns – with a happy surprise. That day, Barnaby hauls in more fish than ever – harvesting a rather overt metaphor for the bounty of friendship.

Dumas is a gifted painter, and many of her watercolour illustrations are striking. She has a knack for capturing raw emotion, and is at her best when depicting the fisherman and the wildness of the sea. One visual pitfall may be the layout of the text, which can be distracting at times with its many arcs and angles.

The Fox and the Fisherman explores themes of loneliness and yearning for friendship that will be familiar to most readers – be they children or adults. –Devon Arthur

Mr. Mergler, Beethoven, and Me David Gutnick and Mathilde Cinq-Mars, ill.

Second Story Press, Ages 7–10 different generatiOns and cultures are drawn

together by the love of music in this gentle picture book by CBC Radio documentary writer David Gutnick. The book is based on a true story taken from the life of the late Daniel Mergler, a Montreal pianist who chose teaching over a concert career.

Playing in a Montreal park one day, a young girl sees her father talking to an elderly man.

The family has recently arrived from China and the girl has shown an affinity for music. The man turns out to be Mr. Mergler, a musician and piano teacher. After hearing her sing, Mr. Mergler offers to work with the little girl; in the embarrassed silence that follows, he adds that his instruction will be free of charge. As the lessons progress, the child fancies that the bust of Beethoven, looming rather forbiddingly over the piano, is frowning at her mistakes and is generally unimpressed with her ability. But as her skill increases, she imagines Beethoven acknowledging her improvement and scowling less.

Gutnick’s story skilfully conveys the growing confidence of his young narrator, and her absorption in an art. The delicate illustrations of Mathilde Cinq-Mars evoke the strong-thoughcontained emotions of the characters and the flowering of musical talent. Rather than stiff black notes on a staff, the lines of sheet music float and dance through the background of the pictures. Organic forms swirl about Mr. Mergler and his pupil – blossoming boughs rise from the keyboard, and ivy and green leaves in the final pictures suggest how Mr. Mergler’s legacy lives on. –Gwyneth Evans j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 47

Books for Young People ed i tor 's c h oi c e

the ballad of ophelia and ulysses Teenage outcasts overcome severe insecurities to find love and their voices by s h a n da d e z i e l Ophelia Charlotte Gingras and Daniel Sylvestre, ill.; Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou, trans.

Groundwood Books, Ages 14+ nO One texts in the YA novel Ophelia, or Snap-

chats, plays video games, or watches YouTube.

The characters still do teenager-y things – graffiti alleyways, have sex, gossip, bully, and body shame each other – they just do it in person instead of on social media. It could be that Montreal author Charlotte Gingras has set her work a couple decades in the past – the book never says – but more likely she eschews all the techy noise in order to quietly explore how painting, writing, and building things with your hands can be the outlet that helps a person get through the hell that is high school.

The main character calls herself Ophelia after seeing a production of Hamlet and finding beauty in the prince’s girlfriend after she drowns herself: “as though she were asleep on the riverbed.” The other students call Ophelia “rag girl” because she hides herself under layers of oversized clothes (think Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club).

Ophelia rarely speaks at school until one day an author visits her Grade 10 class and she’s engaged enough to ask, “Why do you write? What’s the point in writing?” Afterward, the speaker – named Jeanne D’Amour – gives Ophelia a blue notebook, with the author’s address written in it.

From then on, the novel takes the form of Ophelia’s one-way conversations with Jeanne, which she composes journal-style in the notebook.

A classmate of Ophelia’s also breaks his sullen silence during Jeanne’s talk, telling her, “Last summer, I wrote postcards to myself on my holiday by the sea.” Despite being laughed at by his peers, he approaches Jeanne for an autograph.

Later we learn he calls himself Ulysses. But Ophelia calls him “fatso.”

Early in the novel, these loner characters separately stumble upon an abandoned warehouse.

Ophelia describes it as a “secret place … far from 4 8 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

others and all the noise they make.” She takes to drawing on the interior walls of the building, expanding from the small graffiti hearts she draws around the city to a large-scale fresco of an upside-down girl floating in water. Ulysses has found an abandoned vehicle in the space and is taking apart its engine motor, hoping to get it working and use it to travel. But mostly they’re escaping life at home. Ulysses has a dysfunctional blended family and Ophelia is being raised by a single mom who has made some devastating mistakes. (Ophelia was sexually violated by one of her mother’s boyfriends at age 10, and also spent a year in a foster home.) They’re not keen on sharing this hideout, and Ulysses draws a line down the middle of the room. How they come to cross that line and fall in love is a slow, uncomfortable, and ultimately beautiful journey.

Gingras has published many well-received French novels for young people and twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award. In Ophelia, she succinctly captures adolescent agony – how those hurting the most can also be the cruellest, while the ones who seem the most scared can be pushed into grand heroics. The narration and dialogue are raw and moving – thanks to a deft translation

by Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou (Louis Undercover) – and is sprinkled with poetic moments: “I’ve got nothing to say about my mom and me. Nothing. A total desert.”

Daniel Sylvestre’s black ink and collage-style illustrations, which are meant to be Ophelia’s doodles and sketches, add texture. Whether it’s depictions of robots, monsters, icebergs, female figures, or just abstract chaos, the drawings are exactly what you’d expect to find in a notebook toted around by a moody and artistic teenage outcast; there’s plenty of beauty alongside the mundane. It’s exhilarating to see Ophelia’s transformation from angry and traumatized to open and alive. Gingras has closely tied this journey to writing and art and the courage it takes to share those things with others.

Tangled Planet Kate Blair Dancing Cat Books, Ages 13+ in the second work of speculative fiction by YA

author Kate Blair, the passengers of spaceship Venture have finally arrived at Beta Earth, ready to colonize the untouched planet. But for 17-yearold Ursa, the ship is home. As a junior engineer, and daughter of a former captain, Ursa knows every control, air circulator, and tech that keeps the Venture working as it hovers above the planet’s colony-in-development.

Dissension is growing between those who want to embrace life on Beta and those who appreciate the safety and familiarity of the ship.

The tension increases when Ursa happens upon a dead body on the planet; the victim is Orion, who is married to both Ursa’s sister Celeste and to her friend Vega. The young engineer insists she saw a wolf-like creature hiding in the forest, but because no animals matching her description have been created or released onto the planet, few believe her. Instead, Ursa is identified as the prime suspect. When another murder leaves the Venture’s crew reeling, Ursa begins to investigate in earnest, to both clear her name and keep those around her safe.

In this well-plotted and suspenseful novel, Blair not only asks what if there were another planet to colonize but how do humans create anything new and improved when – even with limitless technology and genetic manipulation – they continue to make decisions based on past grievances and resentment, loss and jealousy.

As Ursa discovers, colonization is more than just moving to a new location and adopting new ways of thinking. She’s not ready to give up on the past, especially the one that includes memories of her father and best friend Maia, who died accidentally on Beta. But Ursa’s vacillation between the established and the unfamiliar may be moot if the whole project is sabotaged. Without knowing whom she can trust, Ursa attempts to stop the acts of treason so that the fate of the Venture and Beta Earth might be chosen, not imposed. –Helen Kubiw

to canada, with love The Canadian Historical Brides YA series, from Books We Love, features a fictional love story from every province to celebrate Canada’s 150th.

Juliet Waldron and John Wisdomkeeper, Fly Away Snow Goose (December) Diane Scott Lewis and Nancy M. Bell, On a Stormy Primeval Shore (January)

Books for Young People

index reviews Aitken, Will, Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo Van Hove, and the Art of Resistance (University of Regina Press) $24.95 cloth 978-0-88977-521-3, 240 pp. Jan. pag e 40

H Cooper, Paige, Zolitude (Biblioasis) $19.95 paper 978-1-77196-217-9, 248 pp. Feb. pag e 3 9

Cragg, Carys, Dead Reckoning: How I Came to Meet the Man Who Murdered My Father (Arsenal Pulp Press) $19.95 paper 978-1-55152697-3, 336 pp. Nov. pag e 37 Dale, Ann, Edging Forward: Achieving Sustainable Community Development (Fernweh Press) $29.95 paper 978-1-77509-040-3, 154 pp. Feb. pag e 4 0

Lupick, Travis, Fighting for Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle with Addiction (Arsenal Pulp Press) $24.95 paper 978-1-55152-712-3, 408 pp. Oct. page 39

Callot, Amélie and Geneviève Godbout, ill.; Lara Hinchberger, trans., The Pink Umbrella (Tundra Books) $22.99 cloth 978-1-10191-923-1, 80 pp. Jan. Ages 6–9 page 44

Maracle, Lee, My Conversations with Canadians (BookThug) $20 paper 978-1-77166-358-8, 168 pp. Oct. page 36

Dumas, Marianne, The Fox and the Fisherman (Nimbus Publishing) $12.95 paper 978-177108-552-6, 32 pp. Oct. Ages 4–8

Off, Carol, All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others (Random House Canada) $32.95 cloth 978-0-34581-683-2, 320 pp. Sept. page 37 Paul, Daniel N., Chief Lightning Bolt (Roseway Publishing) $21 paper 978-1-55266-969-3, 288 pp. Oct. page 34 Philip, M. NourbeSe, Blank: Essays and Interviews (BookThug) $20 paper 978-1-77166-306-9, 348 pp. Oct. page 36

H Sarah, Robyn, Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems, 1975–2015 (Biblioasis) $19.95 paper 978-1-77196-180-6, 152 pp. Nov.

De Mariaffi, Elisabeth, Hysteria (HarperCollins) $22.99 paper 978-1-44345-340-0, 432 pp.

March pag e 3 2 DeMont, John, The Long Way Home: A Personal History of Nova Scotia (McClelland & Stewart) $32 cloth 978-0-77102-511-2, 304 pp. Oct.

pag e 41

Sopinka, Heidi, The Dictionary of Animal Languages (Hamish Hamilton Canada) $24.95 paper 978-0-14319-642-6, 320 pp. Feb. pag e 42

pag e 3 4

H Dodds, Jeramy, Drakkar Noir (Coach House Books) $19.95 paper 978-1-55245-355- 1, 88 pp.

Sept. pag e 4 1

H Gordon, Spencer, Cruise Missile Liberals (Nightwood Editions) $18.95 paper 978-088971-333-8, 96 pp. Oct. pag e 41

H Trofimuk, Thomas, This Is All a Lie (Enfield & Wizenty) $19.95 paper 978-1-92785-577-5, 320 pp. Oct. page 33 Watada, Terry, The Three Pleasures (Anvil Press) $24 paper 978-1-77214-095-8, 326 pp. Oct. pag e 35

books for young people

Karasik, Daniel, Faithful and Other Stories (Guernica Editions) $20 paper 978-1-77183168-0, 168 pp. Oct. pag e 3 8

Blair, Kate, Tangled Planet (Dancing Cat Books) $14.95 paper 978-1-77086-504-4, 260 pp. Oct. Ages 13+ page 48

Khan, Tehmina, Things She Could Never Have (Mawenzi House Publishers) $20.95 paper 978-1-98844-914-2, 186 pp. Oct. pag e 38

H Boothby, Ian and Nina Matsumoto, ill., Sparks! (Graphix) $16.99 paper 978-1-33802946-8, 192 pp. Feb. Ages 7–10 page 43

page 47

Gingras, Charlotte and Daniel Sylvestre, ill.; Christelle Morelli and Susan Ouriou, trans., Ophelia (Groundwood Books) $18.95 cloth 978-1-77306-099-6, 264 pp. March. Ages 14+ page 48

Gutnick, David and Mathilde Cinq-Mars, ill., Mr. Mergler, Beethoven, and Me (Second Story Press) $18.95 cloth 978-1-77260-059-9, 32 pp.

March. Ages 7–10 page 47 Hopkinson, Deborah and Qin Leng, ill., Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen (Balzer & Bray) $21.99 cloth 978-0-06237-330-4, 40 pp. Jan. Ages 4–8 page 44 MacGregor, Roy and Kerry MacGregor; Kim Smith, ill., The Ice Chips and the Magical Rink (HarperCollins) $16.99 cloth 978-1-44345-228-1, 144 pp. Feb. Ages 7–10 page 47 Paisley, Erinne, Can Your Outfit Change the World? (Orca Book Publishers) $14.95 paper 978-1-45981-306-9, 160 pp. Feb. Ages 12–16 page 45

Robertson, David A., Strangers: The Reckoner, Book 1 (HighWater Press) $19.95 cloth 978-155379-676-3, 233 pp. Jan. Ages 12+ pag e 4 6

H Thornhill, Jan, The Triumphant Tale of the House Sparrow (Groundwood Books) $18.95 cloth 978-1-77306-006-4, 44 pp. April.

Ages 9–12 page 45 Fine print: All information was supplied

by publishers and may have been tentative at press time.

H starred revieWs indicate books of exceptional merit

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j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8 | Q u i l l & Q u i r e 4 9

Book Making

Scenic view

Kim Dorland, French River, 2013.

Oil and acrylic on wood panels.

A formidable new art book pays homage to Canada’s physical landscape By B e c k y R o B e R t S o n LaSt yeaR, Canadian publishers, authors, and artists

celebrated the country’s sesquicentennial with a multitude of new books, projects, and installations.

But among all this commemoration, curator Victoria Dickenson, former director of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, noticed there did not seem to be enough work honouring the country’s physical landscape and, in particular, the art it has inspired.

“Somehow images of the landscapes of the U.S., Australia, and India are familiar to curators and museum directors abroad, but those of Canada are less well known,” she says.

Addressing this oversight is The Good Lands: Canada Through the Eyes of Artists (Figure 1 Publishing), which aims to showcase the country’s landscape through paintings, poetry, and essays. For the hardcover title, Dickenson and a group of curators selected visual works by fine artists Lawren Harris and Emily Carr, and commissioned original writing from more than 150 creators, including authors Lee Maracle and Naomi Fontaine, and poets Dennis Lee and Fred Wah. “Each curator chose a set of images that spoke most strongly to us. Then we met by Skype and reviewed

5 0 Q u i l l & Q u i r e | j a n u a r y/ f e b r u a r y 2 0 1 8

almost 500 works of art,” Dickenson says. “In many cases, we all selected the same ones; how can you not include Jean Paul Lemieux’s The Noon Train or Tom Thomson’s Northern River? In the end we made choices based on how each work resonated for us and with the other works.”

In organizing the book, the pieces were not arranged chronologically or geographically, but rather organically, by how they “speak to each other,” says Dickenson.

Written works break the flow of images and provide additional perspectives on landscape, reconciliation, and Canadianism, with priority given to Indigenous voices. “We wanted to underline the importance of the Indigenous view of this land,” Dickenson says.

Additional collaborators like Librarian and Archivist of Canada Guy Berthiaume and National Gallery of Canada director Marc Mayer – as well as a number of artists, museums, and galleries – also proposed and solicited digital versions of pieces, and re-photographed and scanned art as needed. “They gave their support wholeheartedly and generously,” Dickenson says.

“Without their collaboration, this vast project would have been impossible.”

freedom to read week February 25–march 3, 2018 Visit our Facebook page and join the conversation @Freedom_to_Read @FTRWeek

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From the book!

Sesame peanut brittle Ingredients:

9781459811263 • $24.95 HC

⅛ cup vegetable oil (for brushing the pan) 2 cups shelled roasted peanuts (or any other nut you like) ⅓ cup sesame seeds 1 cup cane sugar or brown sugar ½ teaspoon ground ginger ½ teaspoon cinnamon ¼ teaspoon ground star anise

Directions:

author and From acclaimed rsonality CBC Radio One pe

G LEE

JEN SOOKFON

Part of the Orca Origins series Celebrating the magnificent diversity of our modern world

www.orcaorigins.com

1. Line a cookie sheet with parchment paper and brush with the oil.

2. Spread peanuts and sesame seeds evenly on the cookie sheet.

3. Break the cane sugar into pieces and place them in a saucepan with the ginger, cinnamon and star anise.

Heat over medium-high heat until the sugar has melted, about 5 minutes.

4. Pour the sugar mixture over the nuts and spread evenly on the cookie sheet with a heat-proof spatula.

5. Let the mixture cool until it hardens, about 20 minutes. Break the brittle into bite-sized pieces.