The fascinating story of how contemporary activists learn from each other and disseminate their knowledge is still being unravelled by acad- emia, as well as by social movements themselves. In Learning Activism: The Intellectual Life of Contemporary Social Movements, Aziz Choudry,an activist-turned-academic and professor in McGill’s Department of Integrated Studies in Education, pays homage to the intellectual work that is inherently produced and circulated when people get together to challenge oppressive systems.
What a thrill to follow a writer from promise to fulfillment. Alice Petersen’s debut collection of short stories won the 2012 QWF Concordia University First Book Prize and marked her as a young writer to watch. Her second collection, Worldly Goods, more than delivers.
An elaborately coiffed woman, an intricate tapestry, and a woodblock sinking ship on the cover promise a story of love, history, and war. And Louis Carmain’s Guano delivers assuredly on all counts. But there’s also an off-white splotch that closer inspection reveals to be bird shit, a commodity once valuable enough to spark the minor war that provides the backdrop for this unsanitized yet sparkling historical novel with a sly contemporary feel.
Set in Chicoutimi-Nord in the mid-nineties, Geneviève Pettersen’s first book is a harrowing coming-of-age novel about a teenage girl whose life quickly spins out of control. Winner of the 2015 Grand Prix littéraire Archambault and a bestseller in its original French, The Goddess of Fireflies is narrated by Catherine as she navigates the eventful year between her fourteenth and fifteenth birthdays, a year full of change, violence, substance abuse, and star-crossed romance.
A playwright in Larry Tremblay’s The Orange Grove, a tertiary character representing the author himself, asks, “Why should he not have the right, as an artist, to talk about war?” – even if he hasn’t been exposed to it. The novel argues that a writer has permission not only to discuss war he has no intimate relationship with, but also to enter into racial and religious conversations beyond his scope as a white, North American writer.
Li Bai, the eighth-century Chinese poet, didn’t like to feel tied down. He spent much of his life on the road. He got married four times. Drank himself to sleep in bars. And he admired those who, as he put it, “made nothing of sea-crossing or of mountain-crossing.”
The year is off to a good start for Monique Polak. Not only will she see her eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth books for young readers published, but she’s also the first CBC/QWF Writer-in-Residence. For Polak, these are all opportunities to tell her stories.
The first novel by second-generation Korean Canadian Christina Park, The Homes We Build on Ashes, explores key aspects of the Korean experience, from the mid-twentieth century to the present. A work of fiction inspired by Park’s grandmother, the story is primarily that of Nara, a woman who repeatedly rebuilds her life in the face of significant hardships in Korea, then Canada.
Barking & Biting: The Poetry of Sina Queyras, edited by Erin Wunker, is the twenty-fifth volume of Canadian poetry in Wilfrid Laurier Press’s Laurier Poetry Series. Thirty-five poems are selected from across a poet’s career and supplemented by an engaging critical introduction by the editor and an afterword by the poet.
The importance of Chris Oliveros to the world of alternative comics publishing is probably impossible to overstate. As the founder and publisher of Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, Oliveros oversaw work by such seminal cartoonists as Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Seth, and Adrian Tomine, among many others, and his successes have been instrumental in carving out a cultural space for offbeat, alternative, and so-called “serious” comics.
