10. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies

One of the great things about my job during the past couple of years is that I’ve had the opportunity to teach Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. It’s like no novel you’ve read before, because it’s a powerful anticolonial novel that decolonizes the genre. I get to reread this book every winter, and it’s always a treat.

Most (not all, but most) novels work in similar ways. They tend to focus on one protagonist; the other characters are more or less secondary to that main character. In most novels, we get engaged with the plot of the novel, in which the protagonist works through conflicts of various kinds. Most novels are in prose (although novels-in-verse do exist, and some parts of Noopiming resemble that form). Some novels depart from these characteristics–William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, for instance, tells a story about an entire family, but it does so by rendering the experience of the characters in series, one at a time, through stream-of-consciousness narration–but most novels are more straightforward. All of this makes sense, because novels came into being during the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, a time when people tended to think about individuals as separate from their communities (I’m making a lot of generalizations here, I realize) and when prose fiction with an engaging narrative appealed to a newly literate population. Yes, works of prose fiction existed before then, but we call them novels now in retrospect, because of the invention of this new form of writing 200 or 300 years ago. We can think of lots of examples; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe is one. Even when novels have a larger cast of characters, one tends to be primary and the others exist to serve the story of that primary character in some way (in the narrative as helpers or sources of conflict, or to provide thematic parallels, for instance).

Noopiming throws that model away. The story–to the extent that there is a story here–is presented in a mix of poetry and prose. In fact, the eighth chapter, “Mashkawaji’s Theory of Ice,” consists of poems that became the lyrics of Simpson’s 2021 album Theory of Ice. The story is communal; I would argue that none of the characters, not even the narrator, Maskhawaji, functions as a main character, and new characters appear at surprising moments while others characters that we’ve grown accustomed to vanish. Mashkawaji is an unusual omniscient narrator; they tell the story from the bottom of a lake, a place where their body was dumped (so this is a story about MMIWG2S people, in part, although it’s not limited to that thread). The narrative, as I’ve suggested, doesn’t behave like any narrative you’ve ever read; Mashkawaji tells a story about their family and friends, but the events in that narrative are surprisingly slight, and after the eighth chapter, we’re presented with new characters (a group of Canada geese and then a mixed group of people and raccoons, all of whom live in Toronto) who function allegorically, suggesting (following Simpson’s earlier writing, particularly Dancing On Our Turtle’s Back and As We Have Always Done) forms of Indigenous resistance and resurgence.

If you expect a resolution of Mashkawaji’s story, or to the story of any of the characters in the first eight chapters, you’ll be mostly disappointed. That’s not what this novel does. That makes it strange, and the reason for its strangeness is that it refuses to participate in the colonial (or colonizing) form of most prose fiction. The title sets up this radical ambition: “noopiming” is an Anishinaabemowin word that means “in the bush,” and the white ladies referred to are Susanna Moodie (author of the Canlit classic Roughing It in the Bush) and Catharine Parr Trail, settlers who homesteaded on land near Rice Lake, not far from Peterborough, Ontario, which belonged to Anishinaabe people until the Crown took it and started handing it out to newcomers from Great Britain and elsewhere. This novel provides the cure for their writing, formally, and for their colonial ideas, thematically–ideas which still dominate this country.

Yes, there is a lot of Anishinaabemowin in this book, and as I read it, I keep my phone beside me, the browser open to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary, which Simpson thanks in her acknowledgements. None of the words in Anishinaabemowin are translated; readers are expected to confront the strangeness of that linguistic Other directly. Simpson isn’t a fluent speaker of Anishinaabemowin, but she makes English behave like it, partly by refusing to use gendered pronouns. It’s not that all the characters are nonbinary; it’s that, like other Algonquian languages, Anishinaabemowin doesn’t use gendered pronouns.

In other words, Noopiming is the most anticolonial, or decolonizing, book you’re ever likely to read. It’s angry, despondent, hilarious, and hopeful. A wild ride, in other words. My students end up liking it, I think, perhaps because we walk together through it very, very slowly, stopping to enjoy the sights along the way. As a community, like the novel’s geese and raccoons and humans, trying to look after each other as we go.

9. Rosanna Deerchild, calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik

I read calling down the sky / î-nîhci-tîpwâtamân kîsik ten years ago when the first edition came out. I reread it last weekend–the new bilingual English/nîhithawîn (Woods Cree) edition–and I like even better now.

calling down the sky is a book about the traumatic legacy of Indian Residential Schools. Parts of the book are what the Cree-Métis literary critic Deanna Reder describes as âcimisowin: “a story about oneself.” Memoir or autobiography, in other words, although those categories don’t quite map onto âcimisowin, because the primary distinction one makes between kinds of stories in Cree is the difference between sacred stories or âtayôhkana and secular stories or âcimowina, rather than (as in English) between stories that are true and those that are fictional. Other parts of the book, though, are âtosiwêwina, or stories about other people. Sometimes Deerchild tells stories about her relationship with her mother from her perspective; other times she inhabits the voice of her mother to tell stories about her experience in residential school and afterwards. That voice is haunting; the short lines encourage the reader to go slowly, pausing often, as if to take a sip of tea or a drag on a cigarette, or just to gather thoughts before speaking again. Deerchild is also the author of a play, The Secret to Good Tea, which is being produced this year at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa and the Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, and when I read these poems out loud, I can feel the voices of the book’s characters as if I were an actor on stage delivering a monologue. Yes, even a môniyâw napêw like me can feel those voices. I take that as a sign of the book’s power and strength.

Not surprisingly, the stories told in this collection are hard to read. Stories about what happened to children in those facilities (former Assembly of First Nations National Chief RoseAnne Archibald suggested we call them “institutions of assimilation and genocide” rather than “schools”) are always hard to read: they relate experiences of physical and sexual abuse, emotional neglect, loneliness, and unfathomable cruelty. The book’s first poem, “mama’s testament: truth and reconciliation,” calls out the violence of the nuns in the school, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for those institutions, and the community’s refusal or inability to do anything about any of it, perhaps out of a numb despair or a belief that resistance was impossible:

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids

when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools

still got sent back
every year
less of us came home

still they said nothing
until we were nothing
just empty skins

full of broken english
ruler broken bones
bible broken spirits

and back home
became a broken dream

calling down the sky also looks at what happened after Deerchild’s mother left Guy Hill Indian Residential School, the physical and psychological aftereffects of her childhood trauma: scars, including being left blind in one eye and deaf in one ear; arthritis; diabetes from the inadequate diet in the facility; and poor sleep, caused by nightly visits from “the dead” who “ask for forgiveness” that cannot be granted. The federal government would not pay any compensation for those experiences, claiming there were “no records” and “no proof.” “there is no word for what they did / in our language,” Deerchild’s mother says.

The book also gives a frank account of the effects Deerchild’s mother had on her relationship with her mother: “mama is always just / out of reach // a bird i could watch / but never catch.” But it also explains how Deerchild slowly built a relationship with her mother, that distant figure whose own childhood made it difficult to express warmth or love, through conversations about her life, including (eventually) her residential school experiences. Those conversations are the backbone of this book. The way calling down the sky stages those conversations, draws on them as sources while crafting them carefully into poems, suggests that it’s an example of documentary poetry.

Together, this collection of poems moves towards relationship, love, and connection. That’s the narrative arc of the book. It also highlights resistance to colonialism and what the critic Gerald Vizenor calls “survivance.” After all, surviving what the critic Jo-Ann Episkenew calls the “psychological terrorism” of colonialism is victory enough. But this book goes beyond survival; the book’s conclusion suggests something more like resurgence, to borrow Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s term. So too does the decision to publish calling down the sky in a bilingual edition, which quietly but powerfully argues that the assimilative project of residential schools did not succeed, no matter how much damage those institutions did to individuals, families, and communities. Let’s all be grateful for that failure. And let’s all grieve that those places were ever built.

8. bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

Last fall, I gave a paper on precarious masculinity in the sitcom Ted Lasso at a conference on that show. The conference happened in Richmond, the London borough where the show’s fictional Greyhounds are based, and while at first I was excited about going to London for the weekend, I quickly wised up and opted for the Zoom option. I’m glad I did, because one of my fellow panelists, a PhD student from Louisiana State University named Madeline Grohowski, mentioned bell hooks’s The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love in her paper. The organizers had mentioned the possibility of publishing an anthology of essays from the conference, and as I listened to Madeline’s description of hooks’s ideas about men, I thought, I’ll have to get a copy of that. When it came time to turn my conference paper into a chapter in the conference proceedings, I got a copy of The Will to Change and started reading it. This book may have changed my life.

I was sold by the way hooks puts the behaviour of men, including men she loves and has loved, into a broader context: patriarchy. That’s especially true of her father, who was angry and held his family hostage “behind the walls of his patriarchal terrorism.” He learned that terrorism by being inculcated into patriarchy as a child, as many (most?) men do, as I did. That’s not surprising: the only emotion patriarchy allows men to express is rage. Any other feeling must be stifled, because if any other feeling is expressed, the man becomes unmanly–and that turns him into a target for the kind of abuse women and children receive. I was never convinced of the utility of the term “patriarchy” before reading this book–it always felt too monolithic and one-dimensional to me–but hooks’s discussion of it opened my eyes to its value. More importantly, I could suddenly understand my father’s behaviour in a different way. When hooks writes about her father, about the way she would wish him dead so that she could live, she could be describing my experience, too:

Lying in my girlhood bed waiting to hear the hard anger in his voice, the invasive sound of his commands, I used to think, “If only he would die, we could live.” Later as a grown woman waiting for the man in my life to come home, the man who was more often than not a caring partner but who sometimes erupted in violent fits of range, I used to think, “Maybe he will have an accident and die, maybe he will not come home, and I will be free and able to live.” Women and children all over the world want men to die so that they can live. This is the most painful truth of male domination, that men wield patriarchal power in daily life in ways that are awesomely life-threatening, that women and children cower in fear and various states of powerlessness, believing that the only way out of their suffering, their only hope is for men to die, for the patriarchal father not to come home. Women and female and male children, dominated by men, have wanted them dead because they believe that these men are not willing to change. They believe that men who are not dominators will not protect them. They believe that men are hopeless.

Being able to see my experience in those words, and being given an explanation for that experience–well, it is a gift, one for which I am grateful. I’m also grateful for the openness in hooks’s analysis of the way men act, for the, well, love she has for men despite their damage and the way they act. All of us, men and women, are patriarchy’s hostages. To dethrone that way of thinking about the world, which hooks defines as “the political system that shapes and informs male identity and sense of self from birth until death,” would set us all free. That is a truth that bros like Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate appear to be incapable of understanding.

Of course the book isn’t perfect. It’s 20 years old, and some of the sources feel outdated or perhaps too rooted in pop psychology, and when hooks describes men as people whose “human body . . . has a penis” she is ignoring the existence of trans folks. But nothing is perfect, and the value of her analysis makes up for those flaws.

I’ve read some of hooks’s essays before, but I’ve never read one of her books. She wrote many of them, and I’m looking forward to reading more.

7. Debora Greger, Off-Season at the Edge of the World

One of my students, a talented poet, is working on a project influenced by Debora Greger’s Off-Season at the Edge of the World, and she lent me her copy so we could discuss it. Of course, I’ve been slow turning to it–this semester is, well, overwhelming–and she needs me to return it. The good news today was that invigilating a make-up midterm gave me an opportunity to read it, finally. The even better news is that this book is wonderful.

Off-Season at the Edge of the World is more than 30 years old. I had never heard of its author, who taught English at the University of Florida and won all kinds of awards. If the rest of her writing is like this, she deserved the accolades. The poems tend to be in tight stanzas–couplets, tercets, quatrains–with subtle patterns of sound and surprising metaphors. Take the poem “Three Graces,” for instance, which comes with the subtitle “after Canova”:

In the dim tent they are dimmer still,
three elephants chained by the leg
one to the next, one to the ground.

Fogbound oceans, they ebb and surge
in a leathery tide. Lost in a rhythm
not even feeding stops, they rock again

the black hold of a freighter
tossed on open seas, the dark portholes
of their unblinking eyes unfathomable.

The tattered maps of their ears
flick away the local flies.
Nothing to them our incurious stares,

having no use for us who neither
feed them nor let them go.
There is no grace as dark as theirs.

That extended metaphor of these circus animals (why else would they be in a tent?) as the sea, their movements as the tide, their eyes “unfathomable”–I wish I could write like that. And the last line! Wow.

I don’t know how my student ran across Greger’s poems, but I’m grateful that she shared them with me.

6. Solomon Ratt, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember

Everything about Solomon Ratt’s 2023 book kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is unique. It’s a bilingual book, written in the two ways of representing Ratt’s mother tongue, nîhithowîwin or Woods Cree, syllabics and Standard Roman Orthography (SRO), and English. As the book’s editor, Arden Ogg, notes in the introduction, Ratt is one of the few residential-school survivors who is “blessed with full retention of his language.” His parents were fluent speakers, and even after he was taken away to the residential school in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, Ratt spent the summers with them on their trapline near âmaciwîspimowinihk or Stanley Mission, northeast of La Ronge. Later, at Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, he learned to read and write in both SRO and syllabics. That led to a long career teaching Cree at that institution, now First Nations University of Canada, from which he retired a couple of years ago. (Full disclosure: Solomon was one of my Cree teachers, and he helped me with some of the language in my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; I’m grateful to him for that assistance and a fan of his writing.) Most of the book was written in nîhithowîwin first, and then in English; from what I knew about the genesis of the book, watching its brief sections being published online over a period of years–it was at least a decade in the making–I suspected that was how it was composed, and when I emailed Solomon to confirm my hunch, he told me that was the case.

kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is singular in two other ways. It brings together âcimisowina, or “personal, autobiographical stories,” as Ogg translates that term, with âcathôhkîwina, or sacred stories. The book’s âcimisowina are short fragments, sometimes poetry, sometimes prose, in which Ratt tells stories about his life, his responses to settler colonialism, and urges people to retain or relearn their languages. Ogg refers to Cree/Métis scholar Deanna Reder’s 2022 book Autobiography as Indigenous Intellectual Tradition, which argues that telling one’s own story is a Cree cultural and intellectual tradition. That’s part of the reason the personal stories are here. The reason for including the âcathôhkîwina is clear: for Ratt, as a child in residential school, those stories were a lifeline to his family, language, and culture. Ratt heard them from his parents before he was taken to that school; they were his true education. As Ogg notes, Ratt often says that his schooling interrupted his education. Since they are only supposed to be told in winter, when snow is on the ground, and since Ratt was only with his parents in the summers, the transmission of those oral stories was broken. Discovering written versions of those stories in the school’s library, particularly Cree writer Edward Ahenakew’s versions, published in English in 1929 as “Cree Trickster Tales,” enabled him to retain them and maintain his connections to family and community. In that way, the sacred and the autobiographical come together.

Those sacred stories or âcathôhkîwina feature wîsahkîcâhk, the Cree culture hero. Those stories have a pedagogical function: they are intended to teach people how they ought to behave, often by negative example, since when wîsahkîcâhk doesn’t follow the rules of proper behaviour, he ends up in trouble of some kind. They tend to be both serious and funny. One of the âcimisowina is a quotation from an article by the Anishinaabe Elder, language teacher, scholar, writer, and residential-school survivor Basil H. Johnston, which argues that sacred stories contain “the essence and substance of tribal ideas, concepts, insights, attitudes, values, beliefs, theories, notions, sentiments, and accounts of their institutions and rituals and ceremonies.” Children who hear those stories–anyone who hears those stories–comes to learn all of those things–especially, and perhaps most importantly, how to behave in a good way. When âcathôhkîwina are taken out of their cultural context by settlers, they often lose their complexity and educational value, becoming understood as odd little tales, which is not their intention, purpose, or function. Of course, Johnston’s words are translated into Woods Cree. I wonder if this book marks the first time that’s happened?

The âcathôhkîwina Ratt tells are both comical and serious because, as the late Delaware poet and playwright Daniel David Moses once explained, they are “at once admonition, instruction, and entertainment.” I think the nature of the Cree language might have something to do with it, too. As Tomson Highway has pointed out in interviews, Cree is funny–when people speak that language, he says, they laugh constantly–and it’s visceral, with bodily functions discussed openly and casually, without judgement or shame (as tends to happen in English). In the last âcathôhkîwina in Ratt’s book, an ermine saves wîsahkîcâhk from a wîhtikow, a monstrous cannibal with a bottomless appetite and no sense of its relationships or responsibilities to other creatures, by climbing into the creature’s anus and eating it from the inside. Other, tamer versions of that story, intended for settler audiences, have the ermine jumping into the wîhtikow‘s mouth. That would not be a safe point of entry, what with the teeth and all. The anus would be unpleasant in all kinds of ways–well, one in particular–but by entering the wîhtikow that way, the ermine would be less likely to become an appetizer before the creature’s main course. As an odd parallel, Ratt’s stories about surviving residential school are also a combination of the serious and the comic; as Ogg notes in her introduction, “Solomon’s reminiscences of residential school escapades almost always end with a close call and a smile.” He was a prankster, and a lucky one, too, and in the stories he tells, he comes across like a Woods Cree version of Tom Sawyer.

I’m teaching kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember this week, and I’m sure my students will be intimidated by the book’s apparent length. Not to worry: the first half of the book consists of the text in syllabics, and the rest is evenly divided between Standard Roman Orthography and English. “Don’t worry,” I told them in an email. “You don’t have to read the Cree unless you want to.” I hope some of them know how; despite my language classes, I would find it difficult, although the bilingual nature of the text means that readers can see how the Cree paragraphs and stanzas translate into English.

This book has tremendous value, not least because its mixture of poetry and prose, memoir and sacred narrative confounds the categories through which settlers understand the world. It’s vitally important to try to see the world the way other cultures do–to understand that our way is not the only way, maybe not even the best way.

If you’re curious, kâ-pî-isi-kiskisiyân / The Way I Remember is available from University of Regina Press.

5. Bevann Fox, Genocidal Love: A Life After Residential School

I’ve been teaching Bevann Fox’s Genocidal Love: A Life After Residential School this week. Fox describes this book as both “a fictionalized telling of my own story” and a novel; as Michelle Coupal, one of my colleagues and an expert on the literatures of residential schools, points out in the foreword, in Cree culture the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is not as clearcut as it is, or pretends to be, in settler culture. Writers who discuss memoir note that it always involves selection, compression, exclusion, even (in some cases) fictionalization; after all, who can remember conversations from decades ago word for word? The main distinction between different kinds of stories, I’ve learned through Cree language classes, is between âcimowina, or secular stories (journalism, history, memoir, novels) and âtayôhkêwina, or sacred stories (such as the ones about kistêsinaw, the Elder Brother, the Cree culture hero, which I taught in a different course last week). Coupal suggests (through another scholar, Deanna Reder) that the best word to use in describing Fox’s book is âcimowisin: “a story about oneself.” That works for me. Whatever is fictionalized here, the truth of Fox’s experience comes through clearly. That’s true of other novels about residential schools that are rooted in their authors’ experiences, like Robert Arthur Alexie’s Porcupines and China Dolls or Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen.

This book is not an easy read. The protagonist, Myrtle, is raised by her grandparents before being sent to a residential school at the age of seven. That life isn’t perfect, but Myrtle is learning her culture, language, and ceremonies, and she is part of a network of loving familial relationships. The residential school, in contrast, is a place of horrific physical, emotional, cultural, and sexual abuse. You have to wonder what would cause the nun and priest who torment Myrtle to behave that way. Maybe they’d been treated like that when they were children and repeat that trauma on others; maybe they’re licensed to be that cruel by the racism that accompanies colonialism in this country; maybe compulsory celibacy plays a role; maybe it’s something else. Certainly when children are put into institutions where they are considered less valuable than others, particularly when those institutions are run by Christian churches, the result is this kind of abuse. There are many examples in our recent history, including the Mount Cashel Orphanage in Newfoundland, which Coupal mentions in her foreword. In residential schools, the children were considered disposable because they were Indigenous, and the violence was part of the way those institutions attempted to destroy their languages, ceremonies, and cultures in an effort to eliminate their claim to the land. Once those Indigenous children had been assimilated, any argument they might make that the land belonged to them, rather than to settlers, would be nullified. “You’re just like us,” the response would go. “You don’t have any more rights than we do.”

The chapter that details Myrtle’s experience in the school is brief, and as Coupal notes, it is “harrowing.” That abuse, that trauma, leaves terrible scars, particularly in Myrtle’s intimate relationships. As Coupal notes, this book is unique in its exploration of the way that the “psychological terrorism” (the late Jo-Ann Episkenew’s term) of residential schools affects romantic and sexual relationships. Myrtle’s abuse teaches her that she has little value, and she unconsciously seeks out partners who do not value her. Perhaps those men experienced abuse as children themselves and are incapable of behaving differently; we don’t know. But the core of this book is the way Myrtle recovers from all of those experiences through therapy, ceremony, and writing. She is always writing–journals, notes on scraps of paper, letters–and she uses that material to write her story. Sometimes we’re given examples of things she has written about her experiences. I wonder if that fictional source material comes directly from Fox’s own notebooks; it seems likely. Myrtle’s writing is precisely what psychologist James W. Pennebaker calls “expressive writing,” and his research over the last 40 years shows how it helps people heal from psychological and emotional injuries.

The point of the book, then, is Myrtle’s resilience and resurgence. In the final paragraph, she describes herself as “absolutely sane.” In her preface, Fox is a little less absolute. “I’m still forced to live with the fact that the effects of genocide will never be over, that the trauma I experienced will never completely go away,” she writes. Maybe that’s one difference between Fox and her fictional narrator.

I wondered about Myrtle’s name. Myrtle, I discovered, is an evergreen plant, but not one that grows in North America. One source I found suggests that the word comes from myrrh, which is a soothing balm. Both the notion of being an evergreen and of something that makes injuries feel better suggest something about resilience. What seemed like an odd, old-fashioned choice of name immediately made sense.

One question I had was why Myrtle’s grandparents allow her to go to residential school. They’re the right age to be survivors of those places, and even if by some miracle they avoided them, surely they’ve heard about what happens to children there. There’s a day school on Myrtle’s reserve, but those institutions weren’t much better than residential schools, and if her grandparents had attended that day school, I thought, maybe they figure the residential school would be better. I was at a loss until one of my students, Brayden Benjoe, clued me in: the family doesn’t have much money (the grandfather, Nimôsom, collects scrap metal at rural dumps and takes it to a recycler in the city to earn a living, and that can’t be lucrative), and sending Myrtle to the school means there’s one less mouth to feed. I felt silly at missing such an important point. The poverty on reserves is, of course, another aspect of colonialism. When settlers took all of the land, they also took its resources, leaving little behind for First Nations.

Genocidal Love situates Myrtle’s trauma within the ongoing genocide of colonialism and, in particular, residential schools in Canada, partly through its prologue, a fable (it begins with “Once upon a time” and ends with “happily ever after”) about a wicked queen who sends a representative to lie to the Red People with a treaty. She’s the one who lives happily ever after, not the people she tricks into giving up their land. One man, though, named Yellow Dog Breast, resists the crooked treaty. When it’s his turn to sign the document, he refuses, angrily:

Everyone stopped to look at him. Yellow Dog Breast was strikingly beautiful. He stood tall as he held his robe around him. Finally, he threw off his robe and stood completely naked! Yellow Dog Breast gave out a cry to the heavens. He threw up his arms and jumped in the air and then fell to his knees. He leaned forward and kissed the ground and said, “This is my land!“

Myrtle’s grandfather tells her that story, and it stays with her; she passes it on to her grandson, who at the end of the book retells it in a speech he gives to Governor-General David Johnston at his school. At one point, she even makes a list of the qualities she wants to find in a potential romantic partner, and “Must be like Yellow Dog Breast” is at the top of it. That story frames Myrtle’s narrative as part of a broader resistance to colonialism and, in her grandson’s words, resurgence. Part of the resurgence in Genocidal Love is physical: the book ends with a naming ceremony for one granddaughter and the birth of another. It’s an excellent place to bring Myrtle’s story to a close, with a sense of hope for the future. Read this book, then, not as trauma porn, but as an example of resistence, resilience, and resurgence.

4. Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

I read Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running 20 years ago, when it came out. I remember being fascinated by his account of running marathons and participating in triathlons, mostly because I’ve never been athletic and found it incredible that a man almost 20 years older than I was then could be so fit. Of course, Murakami had, at that point, been running for more than 20 years, and after that much time and that many miles, of course he was fit. After I finished the book, I must’ve lent or given it away to someone, because my copy is gone. No matter. I needed to read it again, so I got another.

Why did I need to read it again? I’m giving a talk about writing as an embodied practice next month, and I’m looking for examples of writers who talk about it that way–as something we do with our bodies as well as with our minds. I had a vague notion that Murakami observes something like that. And, yes, he does:

Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is loser to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast, or leaping high. . . . The whole process–sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track–requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you. Everybody uses their mind when they think. But a writer puts on an outfit called narrative and thinks with his entire being; and for the novelist that process requires putting into play all your physical reserve, often to the point of overexertion.

I think that’s an accurate observation, although my experience is limited, compared to Murakami’s. I think it’s accurate partly because I’m convinced that our brains are not separate from our bodies, that they are part of our bodies, every bit as physical as our biceps or ulnae or kidneys.

And again I was amazed that a man my age–well, a little younger–could be so fit. I’m not unfit, not at the moment, and the other night I even jogged five kilometres home across Wascana Centre from the university, mostly because I was very late for my dinner, and I’m proud that I can do that, but compared to Murakami, I’m kind of a slug. I haven’t been running for two decades, but I’ve been walking five kilometres or so more or less daily for one, and I love what that has done for me. I crave that exercise now, and because I can’t imagine life without it, I dread the day when, because of age or injury or illness, I’ll be forced to stop. But that day has yet to arrive, thankfully.

I wonder what Murakami is up to now, 20 years later after writing What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (yes, he’s alluding to Raymond Carver, and in the afterword he thanks Tess Gallagher, Carver’s widow, for allowing him to do that). Is he still spending time in Hawaii, running in the refreshing ocean breeze? Is he still completing triathlons and struggling with the swimming and cycling parts of the race? I have no idea. I hope so, although he’s 77 now, and maybe his running has slowed to a walk. He’s still writing, though–he published a 1,200-page novel two years ago–and I’m inspired to read more of his work. Maybe not a 1,200-page epic, though; I’m not sure I have time for anything that ambitious.

3. Stephanie Bolster, A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth

Wow. Stephanie Bolster’s A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth is itself a wonder of precision and economy. It’s a poetry collection about collections: zoos, mostly, but also gardens, which are collections of plants, as well as collections of quotations from a variety of texts and, in the “Life of the Mind” poems which recur throughout the book, collections of the writer’s own thoughts and sense impressions, like epigraph poems arranged in couplets. It’s melancholy and filled with awe at the same time. I was knocked down by A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth; no wonder Bolster won a Governor-General’s Literary Award for her first book, White Stone: The Alice Poems. I read this book quickly, something I had to accomplish for work–it’s a busy day, which explains the brevity of this response–and I want to return to it again, soon, this time to savour it.

2. Maggie Helwig, Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community

I started Maggie Helwig’s Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community late last fall, mostly because of Sadiqa de Meijer‘s post on Instagram about the book (if she says something’s good, I pay attention), but in the rush of work at the end of the semester, I put it down and forgot about it. This week, I decided to finish it, finally, which meant starting over again, since I couldn’t completely remember what had happened in the first half. This time, I read it quickly, reaching the end in two evenings. I’m glad I did. It’s a powerful, beautiful book.

Encampment is about Helwig’s experience as the priest at St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields, an Anglican church on College Street in Toronto, just on the northern fringe of Kensington Market. In 2013, not long after she started working there, homelessness started becoming a crisis in the area, as people were kicked out of their apartments so that landlords could turn their properties into Airbnbs. Along with members of her congregation, Helwig began ministering to the needs of the unhoused, providing food and shelter in the church. As the crisis grew (as James Cairns points out in In Crisis, On Crisis, if a crisis is permanent, it’s no longer a crisis, so I’m probably using the wrong word to describe the massive problem of people who can’t afford housing, which is present in every community in this country), so did Helwig’s involvement. When the COVID-19 pandemic began, the problem got worse. People began pitching tents in Toronto’s parks. Before, encampments tended to be hidden in the city’s ravines or under the Gardiner Expressway, but now they were out in the open. In the spring of 2021, the city began clearing those encampments. People who were unhoused still needed a place to go, and it wasn’t long before they were living in the churchyard at St. Stephen’s-in-the-Fields.

Most of Encampment describes Helwig’s relationships with these new neighbours–some of whom were old neighbours, people she knew from when the church was a drop-in centre. She explains what those of us who have homes don’t understand about those of us who don’t. Being unhoused, for instance, means constant loss: identification, possessions, pets, friends, family members. The shelter system is completely overwhelmed, and getting permanent housing next to impossible, because of arcane bureaucratic rules. There are few supports for people experiencing mental illness, and next to none for people with substance use disorder. But the people Helwig introduces to her readers are more than people with problems:

there are other things I need to explain. And the most important of these is that encampments can also be spaces of grace; that encampments, in a time of great affliction, can be home to creativity and community, healing and mutual support. I need to tell you that this, more than anything else, is what I began to learn in the summer of 2022, and after.

When I read those words, I was reminded of something I was once told by a person who had worked with unhoused youth on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside: they were the most generous people she had ever met. The values Helwig identifies in that passage, creativity, community, healing, and mutual support, are the book’s primary focus, but she also presents a scathing analysis of the structures that are causing what’s becoming a permanent population of people without places to live in Toronto and everywhere else, since what she says about that city could be said of every place, including the city where I live.

Helwig’s neighbours are often less supportive. They’re angry and frightened by what they see happening in the churchyard and elsewhere, which is, as Helwig notes, understandable. The brokenness of the unhoused reminds those of us with houses of our own brokenness. That’s what’s scary. She writes,

The world is ill, and the world is fragile. But some people in the world can pretend that they are well. This pretence, on which many people base their identities, is so thin, so threatened by reality, that they must fight constantly to defend it, and fight against anyone who might make them think that it is not true. In the end, more than anything else, it is this, I believe, that drives the complaining neighbours, drives the City bureaucrats when they are brutal or callous, drives the violence that housed people can bring against the unhoused, drives the anger and the fear.

One of my favourite moments in the book is Helwig’s conversation with one of her angry neighbours. She agrees with that woman: “it is terrible, and it shouldn’t be like this, and coming up hard against the truth that we live in a society that will dump people like garbage on the side of the road, and there is no good thing we can do, is an awful moment for anyone who has not been through it yet.” The woman begins to cry and asks to volunteer at the meals the church serves to those who are hungry.

Against that terrible fear, and against the horror of the way late capitalism discards anyone who is not economically productive, which eventually will include all of us, Helwig marshals love. She takes the injunction to “love your neighbour as yourself” seriously. We see that love expressed in the chapters of the book which reproduce homilies she gave; we see it expressed in her actions, in the compassion she offers to others even when she’s facing her own challenges. During Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve in 2022, she tells the people who have joined her in the church’s sanctuary, “you are worth loving, you, all your particular, difficult, struggling self, and this world, for all its terrors, is still the world which God declared to be good, and will not abandon.” She calls on them–and us–to be that love, “inasmuch as lies within your human ability,” through our actions:

Love is health workers still going to work in the face of a collapsing system, exhaustion, demoralization. Love is continuing to care for other people in a world of self-interest; love is resisting racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia; love is the baptismal call to strive to respect the dignity of every human person. Love is picking up garbage, wearing a mask, being vaccinated. Love is mutual aid, love is protest, love is bread and coffee and boiled eggs. Love can be very tiring, very boring even, very lonely. But the Word came in loneliness, the city around the stable paying no mind to the infant’s cry.

In a world where billionaires–no, sorry, trillionaires–tell us that empathy is civilizational suicide and try to rewrite human history in a way that excludes the love empathy represents, the love Helwig is talking about in that homily, well, her words are radical. Or, perhaps, it’s the Elon Musks of the world who are the true radicals, the ones who are ignoring the thing that has enabled our species to survive. Anthropologists have found evidence that Neanderthals cared for members of their families and communities who were disabled or injured. How is it that we’ve come up with an economic system, and an ideology that supports it, which ignore the fact that empathy goes that far back in our history? Still, I understand how hard it must be to show other people, especially the ones who are difficult, the kind of love Helwig is describing here. I’m not sure I could do it. I’m not sure it’s in me. Not that Helwig is putting herself forward as a candidate for sainthood, but she doesn’t dwell on the frustration or exhaustion she must’ve experienced dealing with her housed and her unhoused neighbours. Maybe her experiences of being bullied as a child, her lifelong battles with depression, anxiety, OCD, the fact that her parents taught drama and creative writing in prisons, which exposed her to people most children would not meet, and that her daughter has autism and requires constant care, have insulated her from such feelings. When she reflects on the reasons she has a sense of ease with the unhoused, she offers those biographical facts as possibilities, but she also notes that “people on the street, exhausting as they can often be, have also been kind to me, and to my daughter, more consistently than almost anyone else.” Their kindness and empathy, perhaps, have called forth her own.

Helwig is a novelist and a poet, as well as a priest–in fact, she entered the priesthood in middle age, after she had established herself as a writer–and so it’s not surprising that Encampment‘s prose is lovely. I can’t say enough good things about this book, both its form and its content. No wonder Helwig won the $20,000 Toronto Book Award last fall. She deserved to.

1. John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

I learned about John Warner’s recent book, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, from a column in The Globe and Mail, and immediately ordered a copy. Generative AI has been a bur under the saddle of anyone who teaches (or tries to teach) writing to young people since ChatGPT went public in November 2022. Why should anyone learn to write when the machine does it better and faster? Well, the answer has become clear over the past three years: it isn’t better, and the cognitive deskilling that goes along with using that technology is a serious problem. I’ve talked to people my age who tell me they’re able to use generative AI as a tool, carefully and critically, and I believe them. However, the key phrase in that sentence is “my age”: they learned to write and think long before generative AI was released into the wild. The young people I teach might never gain those skills, which require practice and ongoing engagement, if they end up relying on a large language model and an algorithm to simulate their thinking.

Warner argues that writing is an embodied process of thinking and feeling. Since a database has no body, cannot think (although it can simulate thought), and doesn’t feel (emotions or sensations, with the exception of vision, perhaps), whatever it does, according to Warner’s definition, is not writing. What it does, instead, is regurgitate an average of anything that has been written on a particular subject in the past–whatever is in its database. It predicts what words belong together, based on what words have been linked in a chain of signification in the past. It can’t do anything new, just repeat what has already been said. The pastiche it spits out can’t be anything more than what’s already been said. No surprises. I’m not so naive as to think that my students are going to come up with unique and original ideas every time they write, although they do that more often than you might expect, but their ideas, even if they’ve already been thought, and their feelings, even if they’ve already been felt, will be unique and original to them. Besides, sometimes their ideas are original and new; we can’t forget that is a possibility. Generate AI robs us of the chance to express our uniqueness. Individuals, Warner points out, aren’t averages, but that’s all generative AI can produce.

In an earlier book, Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities, Warner argues that writing and thinking are intimately connected. Writing is thinking. When we sit down to write, we’re not dumping premade thoughts into a text; we’re coming up with those thoughts, at least some of them, and working with them, testing, exploring, qualifying them. The problem with premade structures like the five-paragraph or “hamburger” essay is that they tend to block that process of exploration. In More Than Words, Warner applies that argument to generative AI. If all we want our students to produce is a five-paragraph essay, Warner argues, we might as well let them use generative AI (despite its horrendous environmental impact or its basis in the theft of writers’ intellectual property, issues which he also considers), because that prefabricated format is almost as far from what writing ought to be as ChatGPT is. Instead, what we need to do is give our students writing tasks that encourage exploration and thought, and not grade them based on how well whatever they come up with matches some pre-existing format. That way, they will come to understand that even using a chatbot to come up with ideas or an essay plan (both of which are essential parts of the thinking process involved in writing an essay) short circuits the notion of writing as thinking. Because writing is taught so badly–and that’s true here, as much as in the United States, where standardized testing is more important; I’ve seen many students who think writing means being bound by rigid rules and structures, like not using the pronoun “I” or having any number of paragraphs but five–students tend to see it as a boring, mechanical exercise divorced from self-expression. Attempts to use generative AI to teach writing double down on this mistaken approach, Warner contends.

Self-expression is at the centre of Warner’s argument. He describes writing as a communicative act that begins with an intention to tell somebody something. That intention, that desire to explain or argue or narrate, is a human impulse. ChatGPT can’t form an intention, because it operates according to an algorithm that predicts syntactic structures. If we want our students to resist the temptation to use that technology, we need to make sure they understand that we’re interested in what they have to say, what they intend to communicate. If they think they have nothing of value to offer, we need to assure them that they do.

Warner suggests ways he’s found ChatGPT useful for specific tasks. He asked it to give him a summary of Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid, for instance, a book he read almost 20 years before he was drafting this book and didn’t have time to reread, and apparently it did an acceptable job. I would’ve just reread Wolf’s introduction and first chapter and skimmed the rest to get the book back into my head, since I do not trust generative AI to do anything without bullshitting, to use Harry Frankfurt’s useful term, as Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries, and Joe Slater do in an article called “ChatGPT Is Bullshit,” but that’s just me. I guess Warner deserves some credit for looking at arguments and evidence that run contrary to his own.

At the end of his book, Warner provides suggestions about resisting generative AI, renewing our teaching and writing practices, and exploring the potential of this technology, since it’s probably here to stay. I’m with him on resistance and renewal, but life’s too short to get sucked into exploring generative AI. I’m not interested. I don’t want to spend any of the limited time I have left playing with ChatGPT. No thanks.

Anyhow, that’s my first book of 2026. I have another reading goal in mind for this year; maybe I’ll reach it, and maybe I won’t, but I’m going to make the attempt.