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.
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.
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.
Here’s my last blog post of 2025: a brief appreciation of Regina writer Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. Before I get to that welcome task, I want to express some gratitude the fact that I’ve read some 60 books this year (I didn’t blog about a couple here but did elsewhere). I love my job, but it takes all of my energy, and the fact that I managed to read these (mostly short) books is a wonder. I have friends (I’m looking at you, Tanis MacDonald and Kim Fahner, but I know many other friends fit this description, too) who seem to read a book every day and even post capsule reviews of them online. My average of one book per week will have to do for now, even though it doesn’t feel particularly ambitious. I mean, one of my students, a talented and prolific poet, has set out to read Moby Dick over the holidays. That’s ambition. By comparison, I am a lazybones.
But I did read Iryn Tushabe’s Everything Is Fine Here. I wanted to read it earlier, and it became my holiday treat, filling the space usually occupied by Great Expectations, which contains my favourite Christmas dinner in literature (poor Pip!). Not that Everything Is Fine Here is a Christmas story: it isn’t. It’s a story about a family that’s divided by religious bigotry exported to Uganda by American evangelical Christians. One of the latest shapes colonialism takes, I suppose, although I’d hazard to bet that the British left sodomy laws behind when they decamped. It’s also a coming-of-age novel; the protagonist, Aine, is 18 years old, an aspiring naturalist and writer (is that a nod to another Regina writer, Trevor Herriot? I should ask Iryn the next time I see her), caught between her “savedee” mother and her courageous sister. I don’t want to say anything more about the narrative, which moves in surprising directions, because I don’t want to spoil this book for anybody.
What can I say, then, that won’t give anything away? How about a list of what I liked about this charming first novel? I really liked the book’s representation of Kampala, for one thing. I doubt I’ll ever go there, and my experience would be different from Tushabe’s, since she was born in Uganda, but she caught what I imagine to be the complexity of an African capital. I liked the chapters at Aine’s boarding school, too. They’re different from the boarding schools in Alpha Nkuranga’s Born to Walk–Nkuranga went to school in Uganda as a Rwandan refugee, and the cruelty she encountered shocked me–and I was heartened by the idea that not all such institutions are so horrible. Not that there isn’t cruelty in Everything Is Fine Here: the worst possible outcomes of Uganda’s laws prohibiting same-sex relationships shape the narrative, but the cruelties are smaller, more domestic and familial. Not that small cruelties are acceptable or easy–no. Even the savedees ought to understand that their God must’ve created people who love in different ways, and that if those kinds of love are acceptable to that God, they ought to be acceptable to us, too. Besides, those verses about same-sex relationships in Leviticus? That book of laws is full of lots of things that, if taken literally, would lead to our executions, including the shirt I wore yesterday, a mix of polyester and merino wool. No blended fabrics, according to Leviticus! Breaking that rule meant death. Yes, I know we’re probably supposed to understand that metaphorically, as a commandment against marrying unbelievers or something, but too many people take the commandments in Leviticus literally. If we’ve put the one about blended fabrics aside, if we’ve decided that makes little difference to us now, maybe we could put some of the other laws aside, too. Things have changed.
I loved this description of reading fiction, too:
Aine stayed outside on the veranda, engrossed in the novella. Time always flew by when she read fiction. Her senses sharpened, connecting her to a world where people were dealing with problems much like her own, making her feel less alone.
I’m reminded of the Life magazine interview where James Baldwin talks about the way that reading lets us know that our challenges are not unique to us, and I know Tushabe is aware of that interview, but the notion that reading sharpens our senses is new to me. If I ever get a chance to teach a course on fiction, I’ll offer this quotation as a hypothesis for my students: is this what happens to you when you read fiction?
I liked so many other things about this book: the straightforward incorporation of African languages into dialogue, the description of life in a small town, the recitations of the names of birds, the characters who are good and bad mixed together, whose behaviour can be understood even if it’s unworthy of them. So Everything Is Fine Here did turn out to be my holiday treat.
After a long walk to the east end of the city to get the screen on my phone replaced (it wasn’t the screen—it was the screen protector! a Christmas miracle!), and before a well-deserved nap (with the tabby cuddled up against my shoulder), I read Simon Armitage’s Dwell. Like Blossomise, it’s a chapbook more than a book, a collection of a dozen or so poems about the nests animals make (dreys, dens, lodges) and other places they call home (ponds, nest boxes, hives), and like Blossomise, it’s illustrated–this time with prints by Beth Munro. Also like Blossomise, it’s a lovely object.
Armitage was invited to write these poems by The Lost Gardens of Heligan, Europe’s largest garden restoration project, which, along with hosting horticultural research projects, also provides habitat, deliberately and accidentally, for birds, fish, amphibians, and mammals. It sounds like a place to visit on a European junket. The poems (of course, since they’re written by Simon Armitage) sing, especially one that imagines how a variety of creatures might review an insect hotel, which made me laugh. But I hate to single one out for praise; they’re all wonderful.
One nice recognition: Armitage often writes in free verse tercets or quatrains, as I do. I’ve always seen that as a kind of timidity in my work, a structure that keeps the maelstrom of formlessness at bay, but because it works in Armitage’s poems so well, maybe it’s a valid choice and not a pair of metaphorical training wheels. I dunno. The idea makes me happy, and it’s Christmas Eve, so I’m going with it.
I’ve submitted a proposal to a conference in Leeds, where Armitage is a professor, and if I get in, maybe I can get my copies of Dwell and Blossomise signed. They’re small enough that they wouldn’t take up much space in my carry-on. Of course, I could just as easily be told to take my proposal and play on it somewhere else, as Humphrey Bogart says in The Big Sleep.
I hope you enjoy the holidays, no matter how or what you celebrate, or whether you do or not. They’re a deep breath before the long bleak cold that lasts, here in southern Saskatchewan, until Easter. First the wassailing, then the wailing. It’s not that bad, really, but it can seem endless.
In September 1874, during the negotiations that led to Treaty 4, the treaty between First Nations and the Crown that covers southern Saskatchewan and parts of southeastern Alberta and southwestern Manitoba, kamooses, one of the Plains Cree or nêhiyaw Chiefs who was speaking on behalf of his people, asked the federal treaty commissioners this haunting question: “Is it true that my child will not be troubled for what you are bringing him?”
I thought about that question, and the promises in the treaties that schools would be provided so that, in the words of Treaty Commissioner Alexander Morris, First Nations might “learn the cunning of the white man,” as I read Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City. It’s not a new book–it was published in 2018–and yet it remains important. It won or was shortlisted for a slew of awards, and it deserved to; it presents an account of how Canada has consistently refused to take seriously its obligations to provide First Nations children with an education comparable to the one settler children receive. Instead, we have engaged in active genocide, through residential schools, or malign neglect, as Talaga describes in this book.
Why malign neglect? The young people Talaga writes about, students as Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario, would rather have studied at schools in their communities. The federal government, however, will not fund high schools in First Nations communities in northern Ontario. That’s not surprising; it won’t fund clean drinking water or proper sewage disposal, either. So young people who want to go to school beyond Grade 8 move hundreds of kilometres from their families to board with people who are often strangers and attend a First Nations-run high school in a converted office building in a big city. Some of those young people have never been south before, have never seen traffic lights, don’t know what to do when they get onto a city bus. The school, which is supposed to look after them, is under-resourced. Many of the young people aren’t fluent in English; instead, they speak Oji-Cree or Anishinabemowin. Many carry the burden of intergenerational residential-school trauma with them.
And, like young people anywhere, they like to party. A little alcohol, or a lot, makes them feel less awkward, more social. Hands up if your experience at parties in high school was like that. They gather to party in parks along the rivers that flow through Thunder Bay into Lake Superior. Sometimes–too often–they disappear into the cold, fast waters of the Kaministiquia or McIntyre. Their bodies are found, eventually. Talaga’s book considers seven lives, seven deaths, but it’s clear they represent only a partial sample.
The malign neglect isn’t just in our refusal to fund First Nations education adequately. It goes beyond the federal government into the Thunder Bay Police Services, which decides no foul play has taken place when yet another First Nations youth is pulled out of a river without bothering to conduct an investigation, and into the Province of Ontario’s coroners, who can’t be bothered to contact families when their children die, which they are required to do by law, or show up on the scene of an unattended death. If white kids were drowning like this, something would be done. But since the bodies are Indigenous, only First Nations people seem to care.
Talaga suggests, at the end of the book, that these deaths aren’t examples of drunken misadventure–that some First Nations teens have survived being assaulted, beaten, and thrown into the water by gangs of white men uttering racist taunts. But she can’t go beyond suggestion, because there’s no evidence, and there’s no evidence because the police don’t take seriously their responsibility to investigate these deaths. The malevolent racism behind their collective shrug is astonishing. They just don’t care.
Talaga’s prose is spare. She talks to people in communities across northwestern Ontario. She connects these deaths to residential schools, to the 60s Scoop, to other assaults on First Nations children and families committed by Canada. Her anger (as you can probably tell) is infectious. We settlers need to do a lot better, collectively, all of us. And our federal government needs to take its responsibilities seriously, to stop fighting Indigenous Peoples in court, to realize that the word “reconciliation” will only take shape in actions, to fund schools, to stop jamming resource development down the throats of communities where you can’t drink the water that comes out of the tap. The treaties we made? They bring obligations with them, responsibilities we settlers need to acknowledge and live up to.
Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road has been reviewed in The Literary Review of Canada. So many excellent books published in this country get little attention; Walking the Bypass has received two reviews, this one and the earlier discussion in Harper’s Magazine. I am beyond grateful.
Check out the new review, which appears in the January-February issue, here.
Yes, my copy of Danielle Janess’s The Milk of Amnesia looks a little scuffed. It’s been bumping around in my backpack for weeks as I tried to find time to read it during the busiest December of my career, which is unfortunate, really, since a) it’s a wonderful book, and b) it came from the publisher’s warehouse bearing the author’s signature, which was unexpected. I finally finished it this afternoon in one of the gymnasiums, pacing between rows of tiny desks as my students wrote their final examination. Here is my brief report.
The Milk of Amnesia is a book of lyric poems that inhabits the form of a five-act play, the way a hermit-crab essay inhabits whatever form its author has chosen. I wouldn’t call it a closet drama, although the third act, “The Wound Carnival,” gets close to being something you could imaging being performed but not quite. Janess’s use of drama as a shell in which to carry this play isn’t a surprise, since she has a theatre background.
As the title suggests, this is a book about trying to remember and inevitably forgetting–not only one’s own stories and experiences, but those of one’s ancestors. That forgetting, as the title’s pun also indicates, can be necessary: both medicine and poison, perhaps. In Janess’s case, she’s thinking about stories from her mother’s family: Polish refugees who came to Canada after the war after enduring the Nazis and the Soviets. Some of the poems track the process of attempting to find documentary evidence of what happened to her forebears; others tell their improbable but true stories. But the book also recounts Janess’s travels through Germany and Poland as well as her memories of her family in Canada. The language is rich and precise, and in a way it’s good that I was forced by circumstances to read it slowly. Like some decadent mittel-European dessert, it might’ve been too much had I tried to read it in one sitting. I had to pause, think, double-check vocabulary I didn’t know. Janess is a linguist and translator as well as a performer and poet, and the glossary she provides her readers is welcome to folks like me who struggle to get by in just one language, never mind four or five.
My favourite poem here is the title poem, which is the second-to-last in the book. It brings together all of the book’s themes in a dizzying seven-page series of prose poems. I was happy it came so close to the end, because by then I was ready for it; I understood the territory the book had staked out for itself.
I highly recommend The Milk of Amnesia. I am looking forward to Janess’s next book.
Long walks can be magical, if you have the time and ability to go on one, and this article describes 13 possibilities. Some I knew about; some I’ve completed; some are completely new to me. One thought: I can’t imagine paying for a guided tour of the Camino de Santiago. That’s not necessary, in my experience, and the suggestion that it is makes me wonder if some of the advice here makes sense. You be the judge.
I’ve been interviewed for the website On Creative Writing. I discuss my influences and what inspired my book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Curious about what connects George Orwell to “dirty nature writing”? Read the interview to find out!
