Latest news with #Bookends
CBC
4 days ago
- General
- CBC
For David A. Robertson, stories are at the heart of reconciliation
Social Sharing Through his books and public speaking, David A. Robertson has dedicated his career to sharing stories about Indigenous people. Robertson began publishing books in 2010 and has since released 33 titles, including picture books, graphic novels, fiction and memoir. With each of his stories, the Winnipeg author delves into hard truths, always with a gentle touch and a profound sense of hope. His recent book, 52 Ways to Reconcile, is a guide for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people who want to take action when it comes to reconciliation — and shows how we can work together on the long road ahead. "I really do think it's a community movement and it's not good enough for one [group] to understand the other," he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "It's for us to do the work to talk with each other. I can't stress that enough." A two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner and a member of the Norway House Cree Nation, Robertson shared his approach to building community between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people — and why the term "reconciliation" might not be the right word for it. Mattea Roach: I think reconciliation entered the vocabulary for a lot of people when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established back in 2008. But that wasn't the first time the word reconciliation was used to talk about Indigenous peoples and their relationship with Canada. What does the word reconciliation mean to you? David A. Robertson: I've been lucky enough to go to schools across Canada to speak to kids, teachers and adults all over the place. As I've done this work, I've come to a better understanding of what we're trying to do. I do think that reconciliation, in the broad sense that people think about it, is a misnomer because we're not trying to return to anything. We're not trying to fix something that was not broken before. The relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canada has always been broken. So it's not exactly the right word, I don't think. I used it, but I just want people to think critically about everything — so we think critically about this word. What we're trying to do, it's building relationships, it's building community. It's doing that through mutual understanding and respect. What we're trying to do, it's building relationships, it's building community. It's doing that through mutual understanding and respect. - David A. Robertson So we're not trying to build or return to anything. We're trying to build something for the first time. If we keep that in mind, I don't care what you call it, as long as we're doing things properly and with the right kind of vision. I think that conversation hopefully focuses that vision onto the right kind of goals we need to have. You've said that you see reconciliation as a verb. Can you talk more about that concept? It is an action, it is intentionality. We need to continue to think about the actions that we can take in our own capacities and have a long-term view and know that we need to continue to act into the future. My dad used to say that — I'll probably mention my dad every single answer I give — if he did things the right way, he won't see the results of the actions that he's taken in his lifetime. I was given this amazing reminder of that when, after he died, I was giving a personal development session to Indigenous teachers at the Canadian Human Rights Museum in Winnipeg. My dad worked in Indigenous education and after the session, the teachers came up to me and told me that a lot of them were there because of my dad. I saw what he meant there and I wish he was there to see that, but he knew he didn't have to be, he wouldn't be. We have a long road to go and a lot of actions need to be taken and will need to be taken for the foreseeable future. - David A. Robertson It's a continual action and keeping in mind as well that we're still trying not only to heal from what's happened, but we'll be trying to heal from what is happening now for a long time. We still have colonial systems in this country that are doing damage. That means that the clock hasn't started ticking yet to when we need to start healing as a whole. The foster care system, the education system, justice, all of these systems are still in place that are doing harm. So we have a long road to go and a lot of actions need to be taken and will need to be taken for the foreseeable future. If we take them with intentionality and with the knowledge that we all do have a role and we all can take an action and we should take an action, that's when we change this word into a verb. And that verb is a motivational factor for us to continue to do the work together as a community. You say that stories are at the heart of reconciliation. Why is that for you? Reconciliation is inexorably linked with truth. You can't get healing, whatever way you want to talk about it, without truth. And the truth lies in the stories that we tell. My dad and I used to talk about reconciliation as a conversation. It's not a one way conversation. It's like what we're doing now, sitting across the table and talking to each other and listening, really listening to each other and working to understand each other and come to respect through understanding. That's what it is. Then, through that, we see two things. One of them is that we're all people. We share the human condition. And the other thing is that the things that set us apart, the differences, make us stronger as a community. There's a teaching of non-interference in the Cree culture and that is that you don't interfere with how someone else lives. You try to model a good life through how you live. I think that's a really good way to go about anything.
Scoop
11-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scoop
U.S. GIRLS Announces New Album Scratch It Out June 20 Via 4AD
Toronto-based producer, film composer, and author Meg Remy announces her intuitive and adventurous U.S. Girls album Scratch It (out June 20) with the release of an epic and sprawling 12-minute lead single, ' Bookends '. Co-written with Edwin de Goeji, ' Bookends ' is the heart of Scratch It. The sprawling ballad pays tribute to Remy's late friend and former Power Trip frontman Riley Gale, through the lens of Remy's reading of John Carey's Eyewitness To History, a historical collection of 300+ eyewitness accounts of great world events spanning twenty-four centuries. In consuming these first-hand accounts of human history, she began to ponder the thought, 'there is not a hierarchy to suffering, and death is the great equaliser.' ' Bookends ' is also accompanied by a cinematic short directed by Caity Arthur. They explain,' The video is ultimately about death and absolution — how death is one of the only certain things in life; the 'great equaliser,' nolens volens. However, it also subverts the traditional narrative of death as a despairing void, rather, portraying it as a euphoric transitory experience or new beginning through a hallucinatory ensemble cast, a 1960s pop-star performance, and sleight of hand magic. As the video progresses, the TV channels alternate through these scenes as Meg's lyrics evoke death in its various forms.' When an artist follows her instinct, rather than money or trends, she can find inspiration anywhere. When Remy was asked to play a festival in Hot Springs, Arkansas — over one thousand miles away from her Toronto home — it was instinct that led her to enlist guitarist friend Dillon Watson (D. Watusi, Savoy Motel, Jack Name) to assemble a one-time Nashville-based band for the occasion. The performance went so well that she decided to ride that energy right back to where the impromptu band had initially rehearsed, in Music City itself, kickstarting the journey toward Scratch It. In just ten days, Remy and the band — Watson on guitar, Jack Lawrence (The Dead Weather, The Raconteurs, Loretta Lynn) on bass, Domo Donoho on drums, and both Jo Schornikow and Tina Norwood on keys, as well as harmonica legend Charlie McCoy (Elvis, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison) — recorded Scratch It live off the floor with minimal overdubs, mixed to tape. Closeness and ease emanate from this core band with Remy's singular voice sparkling on top of every tune, the most relaxed it has ever been. Scratch It weaves together country, gospel, garage rock, soul, disco, folk balladry, and more, with Remy's masterful songwriting threaded throughout. Her choice to discard the computer-based production of previous albums in favor of two-inch tape serves the songs well, introducing an element of sonic shapeshifting expected from an artist nearly twenty years into making records. If instinct was an instrument, Remy would be a virtuoso. Scratch It and see.
CBC
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Madeleine Thien's new time-bending novel is haunted by her father's story
Madeleine Thien is one of Canada's most acclaimed storytellers. Her novel Do Not Say We Have Nothing received both the Giller Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in 2016, telling the story of musicians during the Chinese Cultural Revolution and its aftermath. Now, she returns with her latest novel, The Book of Records, which continues her exploration of history, memory and the political forces that shape individual lives. "As Madeleine has said herself, she doesn't see history as separate from the present moment," said Mattea Roach in the introduction to their interview on Bookends. "With this story, she questions the very nature of time, asking, 'How do we engage with great thinkers of the past, and what can they teach us about how to live now?'" Set 100 years in the future, The Book of Records follows Lina, a young girl from China, and her ailing father as they seek refuge in a place called "the Sea," where time has collapsed. In this world, voyagers and philosophers from centuries past coexist with migrants from around the globe. Lina grows up with only three books, each chronicling the lives of famous voyagers throughout history. Over time, these figures come to life as her eccentric neighbours, eventually becoming her friends. Thien joined Roach on Bookends to discuss the personal connection she feels to the fantastical world she has created, and what it means to exist in a place that blurs past and present. Mattea Roach: What would it mean for a building to be made of time, as Lina's father explains to her, because it's a very metaphysical concept? Lina's father describes it to her as a piece of string that keeps folding over itself, like a constellation knot. And really, what it is, is a crossroads of history. In some ways, it's the way that we hold history inside ourselves. It's the way that many centuries, many ideas, many philosophers, many words inhabit the space of our bodies. In a way, everyone has a kind of "Sea" within themselves. As a novelist, one tries to imagine what that would be like in a concrete sense. Escaping into literature, reading, writing, storytelling is something that Lina and a number of the other characters we meet in The Book of Records do. I understand that when you were growing up, books were somewhat scarce in your household, but you did have Encyclopedia Britannica at home. Were you an encyclopedia reader as a kid? Is your novel drawn from your own childhood reading? It's drawn from the intense longing to have books, definitely. I was just thinking about that this morning, actually — what was in the house? The Encyclopedia Britannica, condensed books and issues of Reader's Digest. I read everything that was lying around. I think, you know, my parents felt that given limited resources, what books could they put around that could kind of represent [an] abundance of reading material. I went to the library every weekend, and I'd just sit there looking at whatever I could find. The specific three encyclopedias that Lina reads over and over, are about the journeys of three historical figures — the 20th century political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the eighth century Chinese poet Du Fu. Why these three people in particular? In the book itself, the father says it's random. They're the three books he plucked off the shelf in a chaotic moment and threw into a bag and then they had to leave. For me, The Sea housed many different people at many different times. It took me nine years to write the book and people kind of moved in and moved out. But I wanted to be true to a question that had been disturbing me for a long time, which was, 'How had I come to believe the things I believed? What things were so deeply instilled in me that I didn't see them?' So on that level, I stayed with writers and philosophers and poets who had meant a lot to me for decades. Lina's father is a complex man [and] cares a lot for his daughter. You've described your own father as being a complicated man in his own way. Did you find yourself drawing on your relationship with your father at all? Maybe only in the sense that there was an exceptional person in which something was unfulfilled, and a loving person. My father had to grow up in the shadow of a father who was executed during the Second World War — who was forced to collaborate during wartime occupation, and then was killed when the occupation ended by the occupiers, because he just knew too much. The complexity and the tragedy of my father's childhood is probably woven into all my work in some way or another. Those difficult choices and the long shadow of them haunts the work. What was [your father's] life trajectory? He was born in what was British North Borneo, and then became part of Malaysia. He was the youngest child, and eventually he was sent to college in Melbourne, Australia, and there he met my mother, who was born in China and then brought to Hong Kong as a baby, also during the war. They also were refugees. My parents came to Canada in 1974, and I think it was extremely difficult. My mother was pregnant with me, they had two other children. [It's] a story we know — that uprootedness, that profound desire to make a new home, to make a better life for their kids. It's a story that we know well in Canada. I think my father was the most loving man who tried to find a footing in this continuous uprootedness. In the novel, there are these series of books and there's this epigraph that opens all the books. It's Seneca and it says, "I leave you my one greatest possession, which is the pattern of my life." And I do feel that my parents left me this pattern of their lives that I'm kind of in awe of. I feel as a writer, and just as a person, an obligation to this remembrance and love, and maybe to not being silent in the face of things when I feel something should be said. I want to ask about the dedication to The Book of Records because I know it was dedicated to your best friend, Y-Dang Troeung, who passed away in 2022. Can you tell me a bit about her? Y-Dang was an extraordinary person. She was a professor, she taught Canadian literature. She and her family were named as the last refugees when they came to Canada in the early 1980s and were welcomed by Pierre Trudeau as one of the last of the 60,000 refugees to arrive from Southeast Asia. She's definitely one of those people who gives me courage. She was just a light, I wish she was here.
Hamilton Spectator
04-05-2025
- Business
- Hamilton Spectator
‘It tells you about another life': Inside a Toronto bookstore that does more than sell books
A man lugged two bags full of books to drop to the donation box outside. Inside, a woman snapped up marked-down novels while a father and his two kids were excitedly picking out a few reads. These are typical scenes at Bookends South, a small used bookstore tucked in a corner of the Toronto Reference Library. Entirely volunteer-run, Bookends has quietly served readers and raised funds for public library programs for 25 years. Operated by the registered charity Friends of the Toronto Public Library South Chapter, the store offers gently used books, CDs, DVDs, and vinyl for as little as 25 cents. And everything — from pricing books to manning the cash box — is powered by volunteers like Frank Velikonja, who's been with Bookends for 20 years. When Velikonja arrives for his nine-hour shift, he restocks shelves, sorts through donations, and handles managerial tasks like updating schedules and supporting other volunteers. As the longest-serving volunteer at Bookends South, he's also served as president of the Friends of the Toronto Public Library for several years. 'It's always been this sense of love of operating a bookstore, of providing quality materials and being around other people who love books,' Velikonja, 64, said, about his decades of volunteering. 'The camaraderie is extraordinary, and it's an especially great and wonderful environment.' Ken Popert, a retired volunteer, discovered Bookends after browsing the Toronto Public Library website. Now, he volunteers one shift per week, sorting through thousands of donated items the store receives from the public, withdrawn books from the library, and even publishers with overstock. Popert inspects the books' condition, organizes them by subject, and gets them ready for the shelves. Most books are priced at $1, but rare and limited-edition titles are marked with blue dot stickers and priced higher. Popert finds his work particularly interesting, noting that sorting books offers 'a window into the lives of strangers' — such as when he finds money used as bookmarks, which he says happens often. For particularly rare finds, Bookends hosts a major treasure sale every two years at the library's Beeton Hall. Items are sold for just 25 per cent of their market value, raising money for the organization. The funds raised through Bookends help support various Toronto Public Library programs, including literacy and literary programs at the Toronto Reference Library, and fully funding the Elementary School Outreach Program for children. Volunteer Amanda Cheung explained that the store is always looking for new volunteers. While volunteers assist with customer service and inventory management, there is an especially high need for help with sorting donations and pricing books before they make it to the shelves. Volunteers are also needed to organize curated book sales for special events at the library, as well as to fill managerial and leadership roles. Antoinette Fracassi, who has been volunteering at Bookends for three years, works one shift every two weeks. Her tasks include operating the cash register, tidying shelves, assisting customers, and checking out purchases. She first discovered the store while wandering through the library, and with 15 years of experience working in a bookstore, she felt right at home. Now retired and living nearby, Fracassi also volunteers at the University of Toronto's John M. Kelly Library, making Bookends a perfect fit. Fracassi has had many memorable moments volunteering, including a couple who visited the store to purchase 'a few hundred dollars worth of books' for a charity they worked with in Jamaica. They were donating the books to a resource centre there. Volunteering, she says, 'keeps you going.' 'You get this richness when you volunteer because of the people that you meet and the people that you talk to. And it's beautiful, the stories that you hear — it tells you about another life that you've not lived.' As part of the Star's ongoing Toronto the Better initiative, this year we'll highlight the people and organizations making a difference in the GTA and share volunteering opportunities that can inspire real change. Know of a person or group deserving of the spotlight? Email torontothebetter@
CBC
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How writing helps Iryn Tushabe recover what she's left behind
It's been almost 20 years since Iryn Tushabe left Uganda to live in Regina, and she says that she writes to recover things she's left behind. Tushabe was a finalist for the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2021. In 2023, she won the Writers' Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. Tushabe was longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize in 2016. The 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is accepting submissions! If you're interested in the CBC Literary Prizes, the 2025 CBC Poetry Prize is accepting submissions until June 1. You can submit an original, unpublished poem or collection of poems of a maximum of 600 words (including titles). The traditional stories of spiteful gods and triumphant heroes were one of the ways she and her family connected with each other. "I grew up next to a forest. When I was born, my neighbours were baboons and monkeys and just all kinds of wild animals," she said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "On any given day, I might see more chimpanzees and baboons than human beings. So after supper, all we ever had for company were each other. And I had a big family. So we told each other these stories." Her latest book, Everything is Fine Here is inspired by one of those Ugandan folk tales and tells the story of two sisters. Aine is the younger sister and her world is turned upside down when she begins to suspect that her beloved older sister is gay. This is Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal. And as happy as Aine is to see her sister Mbabazi find love, she's caught between disapproving parents, a hostile culture and a desire to see her sister blossom and incorporate some kind of new and fresh ideas into Aine's world. Tushabe joined Mattea Roach on Bookends to discuss why for her, writing is an act of reclamation and recovery. Mattea Roach: Why did you choose to tell a queer love story through the perspective of an observer? Iryn Tushabe: The first draft that I wrote was actually first person. It turned into this long rambling diatribe of a thing that was unreadable at the end of it. It was full of anger because a lot of it was my own experience of growing up bisexual in Uganda. What that draft did is it helped me purge all of that frustration and anger, and now I could tell it from the perspective of someone else and still include those experiences - Iryn Tushabe I think what that draft did is it helped me purge all of that frustration and anger; now I could tell it from the perspective of someone else and still include those experiences, but not make it so personal to myself. Once I stepped out of the way and let the younger sister be the one to tell the story, then it became more real. It became more of a story that includes everything — not just the idea of just being gay and queer in Uganda. What is it like for Aine to grow up with a sister who is kind of that gold star sibling, someone that you want to emulate in a lot of ways? I think that sibling dynamic where the older sister is really much older; they kind of take on the role of a mother too. So she has nurtured Aine since she was very small. So they are quite close Family can be a site for a lot of hurt, a lot of heartbreak and disappointments. It can be a site for healing too. Aine, I think, has a pedestal in her heart for her sister. Just really adores her. It just seemed to me that it would be a good story to tell from the family level because family can be a site for a lot of hurt, a lot of heartbreak and disappointments. It can be a site for healing too. Can you describe what the relationship between religion and queerness was like for you growing up in Uganda and how that has affected your journey as a queer person and as a writer? There's an influx of evangelists from the United States. They come and they hold these massive crusades, and they convert people from whatever religions they're in and they turn them into born again Christians. These are the sorts of people who actually have influenced the Anti-Homosexuality Act in Uganda before it was ever tabled in parliament. I didn't want to inflict any further violences on the queer characters in the book. So religion plays a massive role. But it seems to me that, when you know what you know about Uganda through the news, you don't get the whole picture. You just think that perhaps Ugandan queers are just sitting there waiting to be saved by outsiders. But the way they live their lives is actually — they're resisting. They're moving forward in the world with turmoil for sure. It's hard, but they're happy. I think that's part of the reason why I made the book that way. I didn't want to have to repeat what everyone in the news-reading world already knows about the Anti-Homosexuality Act. I didn't want to inflict any further violence on the queer characters in the book. What is your relationship to spirituality these days? I think for a lot of people who grew up religious and who are queer, it's a complicated thing to navigate. I'm envious of people who are queer who still are able to hold onto their faiths. But for me, I cannot. I cannot reconcile the two because I just feel like growing up a Christian it's, to use a tired word, traumatizing. It's traumatizing on a psychological level to sort of be told that the only way to be in the world is to pray this thing away. But now I find it in meditation. I find it in sitting in silence. And it's very hard, so infinitely harder than prayer. Because in prayer you can just say all these things and unburden yourself in whatever way. But it's hard to sit in silence for 30 minutes because it feels like an eternity. There's some incorporation of Ugandan folk tales in a really beautiful way and the characters in your novel find great meaning in some of these stories that they were told as children. There's this one story in particular about two loyal sisters. Can you tell that story? I feel that this story truly encapsulates what the novel is about. It was the first thing that came to my mind. So basically the story is that these two siblings are tested, their family is tested by this goddess Nabinji, the goddess of plenty. And she comes to the home of the two sisters, and their mother is unkind to her, so she puts this curse on her, so that she's suspended between life and death. And the girls pursue the goddess to the forest so that she will give them their mother back. She subjects them to all these difficult phantasmagoric illusions to break their spirits. But every day they sing to each other and they persist and persevere through all these trials. At the end of it, she just grows bored because she can't break their spirits and she sends them back with this candle that they can burn next to their mother. And hopefully when the candle burns out, then their mother will arrive. Is there a name for a mother whose children have outgrown her? - Iryn Tushabe But when they get back, their mom is still young. That's just the most beautiful thing I like about that story is that she's still suspended at the age where the curse was put on her. And they've grown older than her and part of it is just, 'Ok so is she still our mom if we're older than her? And is there a name for a mother whose children have outgrown her?' I think that's kind of what Mbabazi and Aine are doing. Their mom is stuck in these old colonial Christian ways and they just want to get her unstuck. And they're burning this candle, but who knows how long this candle is going to burn and does it burn out? Does she wake up? I think that's the tragedy of it. They're not knowing if mama gets unstuck. I'm wondering what your hopes are for queer people in Uganda looking ahead? We have a phrase that I have in my acknowledgements and it's in my language, but translated I guess with context would be, "May love always prevail." I think that is my hope — that many people will walk this path towards embracing everybody.
