Tag: Born to Walk

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.

Born to Walk

Dan Rubinstein’s Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act is both a memoir–the story of a middle-aged magazine editor, unhappy with his job, who takes up walking as a compensation and, ultimately, a new career–and an overview of walking’s potential to transform our lives. His thesis is that our species sole evolutionary advantage is our ability to walk upright, and the further we get from this primordial activity, the more messed up we become, individually and collectively. For that reason, Born to Walk examines not only the effect of walking on our bodies, minds, creativity, and spirit, but also its impact on society, economics, and politics.

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Born to Walk introduces us to a variety of walkers, including Stanley Vollant, an Innu surgeon from northern Quebec, who is leading healing walks between every Aboriginal community in Quebec and Labrador; Rory Stewart, a Tory MP from northwestern England who is famous for having walked from the Middle East to Nepal, including a trek across Afghanistan shortly after the NATO-led invasion of that country in 2001; and geographer Dave Sawchyn, who navigates Regina’s pedestrian-unfriendly streets on his way to work every day. We also accompany Rubinstein on a variety of walking journeys: on a pilgrimage along the Welsh Coastal Path to Bardsey Island, an ancient Christian site that’s reputed to be the burial place of 20,000 saints; across North Philadelphia with rookie cops assigned to walk a beat in one of that city’s roughest neighbourhoods; and on a mission to make his own Ottawa neighbourhood safer for pedestrians. The last is probably his most difficult and least successful effort. It’s hard to get city hall to pay attention to the needs of people who walk; it’s more concerned with what people who drive want.

Rubinstein isn’t content to talk about walking in an impressionistic way. He discusses the hard sociological and psychological and economic data about the benefits of walking. He discusses something Japanese researchers call shirin-yoku, or “forest bathing”: the effect of phytoncides–compounds released by trees–on the physical and mental health of humans. He describes WIAT, Woods In and Around Towns, a research program in Scotland that’s trying to figure out whether contact with nature helps Scots who are confronting economic or domestic difficulties. In fact, we learn about so many research studies that it’s hard to keep them all straight. It doesn’t really matter, because they all send a similar message: walking is good for us, and we’d all be better off, individually and collectively, if we walked more.

For me, the most interesting parts of the book were Rubinstein’s original research–his stories about Vollant and Stewart and the scientists working on WIAT, and about his own walks in Canada and elsewhere. The literature review was less interesting, partly because his heavy reliance on writers like Rebecca Solnit and on Internet sources. Not that there’s anything wrong with Rebecca Solnit, or the Internet–I just got a sense that Rubinstein wasn’t adding much to what Solnit and others have to say, and that his use of Internet sources was somewhat uncritical. Nonetheless, Born to Walk is a good book–a worthwhile introduction to pedestrianism from a Canadian perspective and a useful overview of the ongoing research about walking. I particularly liked the way he put walking into a social and economic context. If you’re interested in walking, it’s definitely worth a look.

You can find the Born to Walk web page here.