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!
The call for papers for Sacred Journeys 13th Global Conference is out. Abstracts for papers on any aspect of pilgrimage are due 15 February 2026, although you don’t have to present a paper to participate. You might just be interested in pilgrimage–perhaps as a practitioner, someone who has travelled to places that are sacred to you. Visit the Sacred Journeys website for more information.
Are there any books in Palimpsest’s Field Notes series that aren’t worth reading? Some of these short books, their titles all beginning with the preposition On, and all addressing some issue of public interest (or at least interest to me) for a general audience, must be dull or poorly researched or otherwise lacklustre, but I haven’t run across one yet. To be fair, I’ve read a half dozen at most, but they’ve all repaid my attention, and I’ve enjoyed their lively, thoughtful discussions of subjects I know little about.
Case in point: Ira Wells’s On Book Banning. My thoughts about censorship were relatively unformed before I read this little book. On one hand, I’ve seen how some of my students have been influenced—negatively, in my opinion—by reading Ayn Rand or Jordan Peterson, or the Bible, for that matter, and I’ve seen how hard it can be to encourage people to think outside perspectives that limit their thinking once they’ve pledged allegiance to an author or a text. On the other, I’m not comfortable with calls to ban (or not teach) books like Huckleberry Finn because its characters use the N-word. Yes, that’s a sign of my privilege, as someone who’s not racialized and therefore not directly harmed by that word. At the same time, though, the novel is set in Missouri and parts south in the 1840s: what word would we expect those southern whites to use? What’s more important to me, perhaps foolishly, is the way Huck decides to help Jim escape enslavement, even though he’s been taught that by doing so he’s committing both a crime and a sin and will burn in hell. Huck’s moral or ethical growth, his ability to become something other than a white southern racist who believes in the institution of slavery simply by being open to the Other (and to another), by getting to know Jim and thereby seeing him as a human being, strikes me as the book’s point. Maybe that doesn’t seem like much, but I’ll wager it was when Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884, because given the rising tide of overt, toxic racism we see now, it’s probably pretty radical still. I would never teach it, though, partly because I’m not tenured and therefore my academic freedom is limited (the same reason I haven’t taught Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks since the fall of 2023), and also because I genuinely don’t want to hurt anyone by teaching something in which that word is so salient.
So I’m all over the place on the issue of censoring or banning books: I value the canon, I’m interested in both the politics and the aesthetics of literature, I’m unwilling to cause offence, I’m afraid of losing my job. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed Wells’s clear thinking on the subject, even though I’m still left with many questions.
The introduction of On Banning Books summarizes Wells’s position, which is then expanded upon in the following four chapters. It (and parts of the rest of the book) is framed around a library audit at the school his children attend in Toronto. Most of the library’s holdings, the principal told a group of parents, didn’t represent the students (or what she imagined them to be): “too Eurocentric, too male, too heteronormative.” In fact, anything more than 15 years old risked being removed from school libraries; in Peel Region, Anne Frank’s Diary was removed from school libraries for that reason, along with books about the Japanese internment in Canada during the Second World War. The goal is to make sure school libraries represent the diversity of students in the school. Wells understood the principal’s point, but he didn’t like the idea of throwing books away–and they must be thrown away, because they are deemed too potentially dangerous to allow anyone else to read. At the same time, he struggled to frame a counter argument in defence of the books that would be tossed. The book is an attempt to do just that.
Wells contends that book bans are increasing, although they’re also as old as books themselves, and that in school libraries, the contemporary battleground over access to books, such bans are motivated by a range of concerns: the ones that motivated his children’s principal, and those of parents’ rights groups (mostly in the US), who tend to be evangelicals who abhor anything that hints at the existence of LGBTQ2S+ people. Both sides, Wells argues, are motivated by arguments about keeping children safe from harm: either from the pain of reading racist language, or the possibility of becoming queer by reading something featuring queer characters. (To evangelical parents, that’s a terrifying possibility, which is both sad and, for LGBTQ2S+ children, dangerous.) Both sides want school libraries purged of titles they find offensive:
Contemporary progressive educators from Ontario bear little in common with parents’ rights activists from Florida, and their aims are not equivalent. But both treat books as sources of contagion and libraries as fields of indoctrination, and both invoke the vulnerability of children as a warrant for censorship. Both abide by the new censorship consensus, where the school library is a microcosm of the ideal society, and books are levers of social engineering. In my ideal society, their thinking goes, there will be more of this, and less of that: more diversity, less racism. Or: More Socrates and Shakespeare, less wokeness. Both ignore the cyclical nature of censorship, presuming that the new censorship apparatus won’t eventually come for them. They deceive themselves.
Public libraries tend to operate differently, and they experience less pressure to limit the kinds of materials they hold, Wells suggests. If the public wants to read a particular title, librarians will make sure it’s available. And, of course, if a book gets published, anyone can buy a copy–if they can afford to.
Part of the problem, Wells argues, is that in recent years we’ve come to focus exclusively on the political content of books and other art forms, which is narrowly defined, at the expense of other qualities. The Canada Council, for instance, has made funding art that eliminates every form of racism and discrimination a priority. “Let me be clear,” Wells writes. “The politicization of art over this period was the product of real, intractable problems, and the calling out of these problems–systemic racism, sexism, cultural genocide, environmental despoliation–is essential to the promise of perfectibility that underlies the legitimacy of liberal democracies.” Compared to those problems, the aesthetics of a book or film or painting are secondary, even, he suggests, “trivial.” Political questions have replaced aesthetic ones, in other words. Moreover, those questions don’t address the implicit or unconscious political aspects of a text; instead, they “praise or call out what was already on the surface,” and the distinctions between the artist and the art collapse, and literature is asked to justify itself in terms of its “real-world utility” to social-justice struggles. Once art becomes politics, we begin distinguishing what’s politically suspect from what’s politically appropriate. The problem, though, is that books, especially novels, “are internally conflicted, containing multiple voices and viewpoints, arguments and counter-arguments, conflicting messages, a surplus that exceeds the author’s own design.” They open up conversations, provoke questions; censorship, in contrast, closes down discussion and demands answers: “Where literature unsettles us with ambiguity, the realization that the ‘meaning’ of a text is never final, censorship seeks to comfort us with moral absolutes.” That’s the argument Wells wanted to make to his children’s principal, and its where the introduction of this book ends.
Subsequent chapters look more closely at the battle over school libraries in the U.S. and Canada, amplifying and extending Wells’s introduction, partly by recounting his experience on a panel examining books in the library at the school his children attend. The checklist he’s given turns out to be difficult to answer, particularly the questions about the intentions of the author of the book he’s been asked to evaluate, Chieri Uegaki’s Suki’s Kimono. Since the 1946 publication of “The Intentional Fallacy,” an essay by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, literary scholars (Wells is one of those) have been trained to think that the author’s intentions are neither available nor valuable as criteria for evaluating “a work of literary art.” That’s the problem, Wells argues: school boards don’t consider children’s books to be art. They are either good or bad, moral or immoral. They either affirm the identities of students by reflecting their experiences back to them, or they don’t. However, many texts don’t affirm anything; instead, they leave their readers unsettled. What then? “Sometimes, students should be confronted with unfamiliar experiences, along with familiar ones, and engage in liberating flights of imaginative fancy that leave their earthbound identities far behind,” he writes. “And they should be taught the art and artifice of narrative strategy, the ways in which the portrayal of any ‘self’ or ‘identity’ in literature is the product of identifiable formal conventions and techniques, the ways in which older and even ancient archetypes underlie our most contemporary stories, and so on.” That’s not what happens with the books in some school libraries, though. In 2023, Peel Region threw away thousands of books, leaving school libraries half-empty, based on the criteria Wells finds troublesome, including Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which was “insufficiently identity-affirming.”
“Book banning is a form of coercion,” Wells writes, “an attempt to control not only what children read, but also what they think.” It poses two dangers. One is that students, accustomed to censorship, will grow up to be “uninformed and passive, easier targets for propaganda and (actual) indoctrination, primed for authoritarian rule.” The other is that “they will internalize the methods of their censorious parents and educators and organize their own lives around a will to power,” becoming authoritarians themselves.
Next, Wells considers the 2,000 year history of censorship in the West, beginning with the Romans, then moving to the destruction of libraries (including the Great Library of Alexandria), the Roman Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, the nineteenth-century campaign of Anthony Comstock to suppress obscenity in literature, and the destruction of Iraq’s libraries and museums after the American military deposed Saddam Hussein (which the Americans tacitly condoned). Against that history he juxtaposes philosophical arguments in favour of free expression: John Milton’s Areopagitica and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. He acknowledges that both of those writers (but especially Milton) assert that there are limits to free expression; neither is a free-speech absolutist. Their arguments led to a reduction in censorship in some places during the 20th century. Among the communities targeted by censorship campaigns then was the LGBTQ2S+ community, whose bookstores were the subject of customs laws that claimed the material for sale in them was obscene. For Wells, “the history of ‘obscenity’ reveals how laws are always shaped by arguments and interpretations of individual people at specific moments in time.” There’s no immutable standard of either vice or virtue, just people with opinions, arguments, and prejudices.
One of the things that motivates those who would remove books from school libraries is the idea that language can be a form of violence. I thought that idea was just a metaphor that had come to be taken literally, but Wells points out that it has its roots in Critical Race Theory, and in the argument that oppression causes physiological and psychological harm to people. I had never considered that point, but it makes sense: African-Americans have higher rates of hypertension, for instance, that white Americans. Racist language in books isn’t the only cause of that “weathering”–exposures to environmental toxins (highways, factories, and incinerators tend to be located in poor neighbourhoods) and the indignities of other forms of racism also play a role–but it doesn’t help, either. Wells notes that Critical Race Theory has made important contributions to our understanding of racial oppression, particularly the notion that racism is systemic, but he also notes that as progressive educators broadened the assumptions of CRT, they came to see banning books as a moral necessity. Thus Huckleberry Finn cannot be taught, or even included in a school library: Huck’s moral journey is less important than the harm caused by Twain’s language. Librarians and school boards set out to make sure that all fo the books on the shelves affirm the identities of students, but that becomes difficult: how can one affirm the identities of LGBTQ2S+ students and religious fundamentalists (of varying kinds) at the same time? “Educators must either admit that certain lived experiences count for more than others or divest from identity affirmation as the sole rationale for reading and literacy,” Wells writes. And many Black and racialized readers have discovered that literary classics do speak to them, despite the differences between themselves and the characters in those books: Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, saw “the same wounded striving” in Macbeth that he witnessed in his Baltimore neighbourhood. I’m reminded of the famous quotation from an interview with James Baldwin about seeing his experience reflected in the work of Dickens and Dostoyevsky. Eurocentric literary classics might not be as toxic as some people assume.
Finally, Wells considers the future of books in an era of censorship. “If there is anything salutary to be gleaned from the attacks on libraries,” he writes, “it is a renewed appreciation for why they matter.” Teachers and librarians need to be supported, and the institutions where they work adequately funded. Education needs to focus on developing the critical-thinking skills of students. And the old books, imperfect as they are, might help us identify our own flaws and biases: “Their failings become part of the story, but not the end of the story, which we inherit, revise, and humbly resubmit to the readers who succeed us.”
I’m left more or less where I was before I read Wells’s book, except that my sense of why I’m both uncomfortable with censorship and also with material I find objectionable is clearer. And, to be honest, books in school libraries are unlikely to have much of an affect on children or adolescents, since they have so many other sources of information (and misinformation) available to them. Some of the students I teach–not all of them, but a few–have never read a book at all. It’s not just the university where I work where this phenomenon exists, as Rose Horowitch pointed out in an article in The Atlantic last year. Those who worry about the malign effects of books might be fooling themselves, perhaps, given their decreasing importance. But it’s easier to censor books than ban TikTok or Grok. In the face of those technologies, Wells’s call for critical thinking and reading don’t seem like much. As a writer, that worries me more than censorship.
The great thing about reading books by people whose experience is different from yours, and probably the reason book-banners want to narrow the possibilities of what’s available for us to read, is that you get a glimpse of what the lives of others might be like. That peek into someone else’s consciousness might generate understanding or empathy or at least a sense that everyone has their own struggles and joys and perhaps we could just let them be, if we can’t muster anything more engaged than mere tolerance. Jes Battis’s recent book of poems, I Hate Parties, is (for me) an example. I’ve never been a queer boy struggling through adolescence (my straight struggles were hard enough), or a queer man dealing with living in a community that would rather not know, thank you very much, and this book gives me a glimpse into what those experiences are like. But, more than those pragmatic or utilitarian concerns, I Hate Parties is a lot of fun. It crackles with sass and joy and playfulness.
The book’s four sections are roughly and recursively chronological, and also roughly and recursively thematic: adolescence, adulthood, autism, and illness. All serious stuff, but considered lightly (sometimes) and occasionally angrily, as in “Pronoun Policy,” a pissed-off Jeremiad about Saskatchewan’s provincial government and its attack on trans kids (I was at the demonstration the poem recounts). The poems crackle with fixed forms—regular stanzas, a variation on a pantoum, a sestina, a villanelle—which provide containers for the experiences and emotions they convey. But the book isn’t slavish in its use of form: I love the prose-poem “The Odd” and the long, irregular stanzas of “The Most Immersive Experience.” I love the range of references here, too; Socrates sits near Scaramanga, Daleks and Days of Our Lives with the Odyssey. And the surprising turns phrase, the real joy of reading poetry and the reason generative AI can’t really do it:
For every lost key
in the master’s bowl
there is a startled lock.
The predictive text function on my phone couldn’t deal with those lines, and befuddling the AI that techbros want to control us with makes my happiness immeasurable.
I Hate Parties has been getting all kinds of attention, which it deserves. I only knew its author as a fiction writer, and clearly they excel in multiple genres.
I’ve been practicing mindfulness in a small way since the beginning of January, mostly by practicing guided walking meditation, and I realize I’m at the very beginning of understanding it. I’ve learned from those guided meditations, and from podcasts, but I haven’t read much about it, and since reading is the primary way I take in information, that’s a significant problem. For that reason, on the train to Ottawa yesterday I opened the late Thich Nhat Hanh’s Peace Is Every Step. I thought it would help me understand more about mindfulness, and it did.
Born in Vietnam in 1926, Hanh became a monk at the age of 16. He came to the United States in the 1960s as an anti-war activist. The Vietnamese government wouldn’t let him return home, and he established the Plum Village centre in France. Peace Is Every Step is a collection of published and unpublished writings, lectures, and informal talks, edited by Arnold Kotler and others. It probably shouldn’t be read in one go, as I did; instead, it should probably be read one chapter at a time, like a daily devotional text. The advantage of reading it the way I did, though, is that it might be easier to take in what makes sense and leave the rest out. At least, that’s my claim.
Peace Is Every Step is organized in three sections. The first, “Breathe! You Are Alive” is like a mindfulness primer, with short chapters on breathing mindfully, walking meditation (I’ve been doing it wrong by walking too quickly, although I’ve found it helpful anyway), and approaching other daily activities, like driving, cooking, washing dishes, and eating, in a spirit of mindfulness. The second section, “Transformation and Healing,” considers personal development, with a particular focus on dealing with anger and other difficult emotions by accepting them with love and compassion, and then looking to find their root causes. It’s good advice, and it echoes the way some psychologists, like Tara Brach, suggest that we recognize, acknowledge, investigate, and nurture ourselves and our emotions when we are in the grip of powerful feelings, instead of taking them out on ourselves and those around us.
The final section, “Peace Is Every Step,” applies mindfulness to larger social or political issues, such as the environment, war, and various forms of inequality. There, Hanh advises readers to carry themselves according to their political goals, so that people advocating for peace ought to avoid anger or hatred, and people advocating for sustainability ought to focus on the interconnectedness of all things. “Our body is not limited to what is inside the boundary of our skin,” he argues; it includes the air we breathe and the sun that allows everything on this planet to live. “There is no phenomenon in the universe that does not intimately concern us,” he writes, “from a pebble resting at the bottom of the ocean, to the movement of a galaxy millions of light-years away.” That emphasis on relationship reminds me of the Plains Cree or nêhiyawêwin word wâhkôhtowin, which means something like “kinship relationality,” although that dry phrase misses all of its nuances, including the way it suggests a physical attitude of walking while bending over towards the earth’s living creatures. I’m not claiming any stronger connection than what my mind creates, and I’m aware that my interest in both wâhkôtowin and mindfulness could be written off as a form of appropriation, even though I think both might help us avoid destroying the world around us and, thereby, ourselves. I saw parallels between Hanh’s discussions of dying rivers and Robert Macfarlane’s recent book Is a River Alive? If a river can die, then it must also have the capability of being alive, too. It only stands to reason.
I’ve picked up other books by Thich Nhat Hanh, mostly (like this one) with titles that suggest (literally or figuratively) walking, and now I’ll make a point of reading them. I also want to thank my friend Roberta Laurie, whose Facebook posts about Hanh introduced me to his thinking. Imagine, social media as a force for good! Don’t tell the techbros, or they’ll block the word “mindfulness” the way they’ve blocked links to Canadian news media.
Karen Solie’s Wellwater arrived last week, before it won the Governor-General’s Award, and its ascension (not the first accolade Solie’s writing has received) prompted me to bring it along to read on the train.
It’s astonishing, so much so that I don’t know what to say about it. My first reading, against the sound of strangers’ conversations and the tick-tack of steel wheels on steel rails, feels too shallow to have given me anything worth saying. Perhaps after I read it again? I’ve signed up for a Zoom discussion, led by Victoria’s former poet laureate, Yvonne Blomer, that’ll happen in a couple of weeks, and that’ll give me some encouragement to reread this book.
I can do two things right now, though. One is to link to Nicholas Bradley’s review of Wellwater, published in The Walrus. Since most books published in Canada don’t get reviews, never mind in a slick monthly magazine, that is a sign of Solie’s importance. The second is to present one of the sonnets that appear close to the book’s conclusion. It’s a contemporary sonnet, without a pattern of end rhyme, but it has 14 lines and is arranged into an octave and a sestet (although the former spills into the latter):
Meadowlark
Prayer in the throat of a nonbeliever
offered up to the absent hereafter,
his two long notes and descending warble
put him at the centre of things.
A partial method, he knows, is no method;
and when you are too weak for beauty’s
startlement, when you desire not silence
but the peace of vague and benign
neglect, at decibels audible over
the wind, radio, tires through gravel,
through the open driver’s window
his song is like arrows of pure math
straight into whatever the heart is,
its still unbroken land, its native grasses.
Why that poem and not another? Selfishness. I love the meadowlark’s song, like any other Saskatchewanian who’s heard it, and the walks I took while researching my new book, Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road, were conducted under its “two long notes and descending warble.” This poem reminds me of that spring and summer, although there was no radio or sound of “tires through gravel,” nor any open windows: just the wind, my footsteps, and the broken land with its fields of canola.
I missed the launch of my friend Kim Fahner’s new book, The Pollination Field, this past week, so I slid a copy into my carry-on bag to read on the flight to Ontario. It’s a book about bees, although other insects, including wasps, monarch butterflies, and especially dragonflies, also make appearances. Sometimes the bees are themselves, in all their apparently cruel and honeyed lives; sometimes they are ways of thinking about heartbreak, grief, and illness. The Pollination Field goes in other directions, too, including solastalgia, notably in “An Elegy for Australia, Burning”:
The kangaroos rush ahead of the flames,
try to outrun the impossible. Days later—
after the firestorm has passed—they are found,
charred statues of bodies caught up in wire fences,
echoes of a shattered nightmare, coloured in inferno.
Among the lyric poems, which draw on the work of artists (Mo Hamilton, Sara Angelluci, Andrea Kowch) and other poets (Jericho Brown, Roo Birson, Carolyn Forché, Vijay Sheshadri), along with marine signals and a wide range of knowledge and lore, are imagined tales about bees. The first, in which a beekeeper becomes enveloped in wax by her bees, reminded me of the art of Aganetha Dyck, except that rather than an object becoming part of the hive, a human does. Fahner also uses a variety of fixed forms, with encourages me to learn more about such things.
So yes, I missed my friend’s launch, but that spurred me to finally read her beautiful book: something good coming out of something bad.
