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Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
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Writer’s Block: Veena Gokhale
We talk with author of Land for Fatimah and Bombay Wali & other stories (both Guernica Editions) and Indian vegetarian cooking school Slurrrrp! owner Veena Gokhale on when she decided to become a writer (it involved squirrels), how books can spur social change, and the spice-fuelled graphic novel she’s working on next.
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READ INDIGENOUS: Witness, I Am
A prolific and talented poet, Gregory Scofield won the 2016 Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize for Witness, I Am (Nightwood Editions), a by turns gut-wrenching and incisive collection incorporating sound poetry, autobiographical work, and an epic poem about missing and murdered Indigenous women. Today’s feature is his poem “She is Spitting a Mouthful of Stars (nikâwi’s song).”
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READ INDIGENOUS: A Really Good Brown Girl
Winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award and now in its 15th (!) printing, Marilyn Dumont’s A Really Good Brown Girl (Brick Books) is a defiant collection of poetry about what it means to be Métis in Canada. Today’s featured poem, “Letter to Sir John A. MacDonald”, embodies Dumont’s fierce, courageous voice and what Lee Maracle had…
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READ INDIGENOUS: Winter Child
Cree artist and writer Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s English debut, Winter Child (Freehand Books) is a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of a Cree-Métis woman grieving her late son—who seemed fated for death from his first breath—and reconciling her complicated relationship with her late father. The narrator says: “I had lost both the man who…
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READ INDIGENOUS: Song of Batoche
In her debut novel Song of Batoche (Ronsdale Press) Métis author Maia Caron brings Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont to life in a fictional retelling of the North-West Rebellion of 1885 told through the eyes of the Métis women. Giller-nominated author Lauren B. Davis says of the novel: “This is a perspective we’ve not seen…
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READ INDIGENOUS: Making space for Indigenous Authors
Recently, All Lit Up got an exciting new addition: Indigenous Litspace, a site that highlights the ever-growing list of Indigenous authors and books we’re lucky enough to read, talk about, and share with you. To make more space for these incredible and essential writers, we’re showcasing work by Indigenous authors across all genres—from fiction to…
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In Review: The Week of September 24th
This week we reflected on our time at Toronto’s Word on the Street, binged The Good Place, compared unreliable narrators, and lots more.
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First Fiction Friday: Peacock in the Snow
Anubha Mehta’s debut novel Peacock in the Snow (Inanna Publications) flips the script on most contemporary immigrant narratives: her protagonist family is not fleeing persecution or poverty, but redefining themselves in Canada all the same after having lost the privileges they enjoyed in their home country. As main character Maya grows out of her life’s advantages, she…
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The Good Place: What Would They Read?
We departed on a binge of NBC’s The Good Place, a fantasy comedy series about the afterlife, after season three’s release last week and couldn’t help but wonder: what would Eleanor and Chidi read? Check out what we think some of the show’s characters would be caught page-turning. (Warning: spoilers ahead!)
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Field Trip: Word on the Street Toronto
This past weekend Team All Lit Up welcomed another Word on the Street in Toronto. The sunny but mild temperatures brought the book-browsing community out in tote-carrying droves to experience the day-long books fest that celebrates literary goods with a large exhibitor marketplace and quality event programming.
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Read This, Then That: Man, Interrupted Edition
The squeamish, beware: the horrors – both real and imagined – that the protagonists inflict and experience in Devin Krukoff’s Hummingbird (Freehand Books) and Anakana Schofield’s Martin John (Biblioasis) will set you on the very edge. We look at what unites and divides these reads, below.
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Beautiful Books: It Begins With The Body
Poet and illustrator of the collection It Begins With The Body (Book*hug) Hana Shafi sits down with designer Kate Hargreaves to ask how she incorporated a “small binder of mine filled with my poems and weird line drawings” into a hybrid book about body positivity and decolonization that showcases all of the raw beauty of Shafi’s…
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In Review: The Week of September 17th
This week, we interviewed authors, learned some science, shared debut reads and so much more!
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Four Debuts on our Reading Radar
No worthy reading list is complete without some debut books to discover from emerging writers who might just be your next scrollmate. Check out the four debuts from 2018 that we’re excited about.
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Slinky Naive: Poetry by Caroline Szpak
The poems in Caroline Szpak’s debut collection Slinky Naive are like a puzzle to be clicked into place: words, turns of phrases, metaphors and similes are pieced together revealing a delightfully unusual collection. Today, publisher Anvil Press tells us a little more about the poems in this collection that poet Stuart Ross describes as “visceral, longing-infused poems”…
Got any book recommendations?