Month: December 2025

57. Iryn Tushabe, Everything Is Fine Here

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.

56. Simon Armitage, Dwell

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.

55. Tanya Talaga, Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Denial, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

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 reviewed in The Literary Review of Canada

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.

54. Danielle Janess, The Milk of Amnesia

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.