Month: January 2026

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.