Field Trip: Upstart & Crow

All Lit Up: First of all, congratulations on Upstart & Crow! It’s such a welcoming space on Granville Island, one of the most culturally vibrant places in Vancouver. Please tell us about the when and why of your store: what brought about its creation?

Zoe: Thank you! The idea and space went hand in hand. Long story short, we saw the For Lease sign on the studio space and thought: what if this space was a place to celebrate storytelling and the literary arts in its myriad forms? What if this was a space that championed literature in translation, which is such a small part of our Canadian book industry despite our country’s multiculturalism; a space that explores pressing political and environmental ideas within literary works?

So we conceived of this less as a bookstore and more as a platform for sharing ideas, books being the primary but not sole avenue for doing that. We’re actually a non-profit organisation, the store being both a way for us to share books and ideas we think should get more attention, and a way to help us cover costs for programs such as writer residencies, book clubs, literary dinners, and getting books into communities that have limited access to them.

ALU: Zoe, you’ve been in the books biz on the publicity side for long enough that it’s definitely safe to call you a “veteran” – how did you take your book promotion learnings and apply them to the bookselling side of things?

Zoe: I’d say my time in publishing so far has given me a deep respect and appreciation for the passion and sheer work it takes to not only write a book, but to publish it and see it succeed in a complex, saturated, often-homogenised market. And so I wanted to co-build a space that acknowledges that and helps to get more brilliant books to people — books that you won’t necessarily find in big box bookstores.

Ian: As a journalist and author and non-profit “veteran,” I’m acutely aware that our dominant narratives need to change. I think our studio is one small but important beacon sending signals that we can and must write and promote a different narrative for ourselves than the one that has brought the world to the parlous state we are in.

ALU: Because U&C is a general trade bookstore, you could technically sell any kind of book – so how do you choose what to stock? What kind of literature excites you especially? Any books to recommend?

Robyn: It’s a meld of our passions. We’re a team of six that includes journalists, writers, a poet… so we simply stock what we love, or what we think our customers will enjoy. Right now, I’m eager to get my hands on a copy of Daniel Zomparelli’s new poetry book out in April with Talonbooks. We’ll often ask our customers what they’re reading and order their recommendations, too. I can get excited about almost any book if someone else is crazy about it.

Zoe: We focus particularly on literature in translation, books about environment and climate justice and books from emerging, urgent voices. We also love recommending particular publishers to our community — the personality, list and vision behind each independent press in Canada is so different, as the literary publishing community knows, so we also try to celebrate the folks behind the titles!

Choosing specific titles is always horribly difficult, but this season I’m particularly looking forward to Blue Notes, the second novel from Anne Cathrine Bomann, which is part literary adventure, part moving meditation on grief, identity and ethics (Book*hug Press) and Kazim Ali’s Indian Winter (Coach House Books), which sounds like a remarkable, transcendent and intellectual work on queer identity, love and alienation.

Ian: I can’t wait to read Praiseworthy by Alexis Wright (New Directions), and I am currently playing catchup by immersing myself in her earlier epic, Carpentaria. I love both the idea behind and the execution of the Field Notes series by Biblioasis, and I particularly enjoyed the barbed observations and admissions in Stephen Marche’s On Writing and Failure. Meanwhile, I can’t recommend highly enough Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World (HarperOne) and am jonesing for its sequel, Wrong Story, Right Story: Adventures in Indigenous Thinking — so much so that the Australian edition is in the mail from my sister. Can’t wait!

ALU: Related to this: we’re guessing you have a really interesting mix of customers: from tourists visiting the city for the first time to locals who come to the Island regularly. How does that local, national, and international mix play into how you merchandise your store?

Ian: It’s funny, Granville Island sees more than 10 million visitors a year, and there are lots of tourists in the summer, so you think we’d be overwhelmed. But actually the majority of our traffic is loyal locals who we know — because they constantly remind us — that they love having an independent bookstore that brings a world of ideas to them.

Robyn: The tourists that do come in often want to buy something local, a book about this place, or by someone from here. It’s often their only souvenir. I appreciate that.

ALU: Granville Island is a cultural hub, and you’ve also become a hub yourself: you run writers’ workshops, a podcast, reading series, and other programs. Tell us about what community means to you, and the importance of fostering a community within and outside of your bookstore.

Zoe: Without sounding cliched, community is everything! I think anyone in the literary world would agree with that — community is what supports writers to finish their titles; small publishers to keep the lights on; festivals to attract internationally revered writers to town. Community is what makes the often-lonely or precarious parts of the publishing industry worth it for so many.

We see this, too, with our second space, Upstart Upstairs, a bookstore on the beautiful farm run by Persephone Brewing. There’s a palpable sense of community surrounding Persephone, and on the Sunshine Coast more generally, which buoys everything we do there.

We opened during the Covid-19 pandemic, in August 2020, and so were somewhat hampered in how we could build connections within and outside the space. It’s been such a joy to expand into some of the programming we’ve been dreaming of since we first started building the bookshelves. One question we continually ask is: How do we build a community that is robust and supportive locally, but also spans international scope and ideas? Our efforts, especially in 2024, aim to find modest answers to that.

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Thanks so much to the Upstart & Crow folks for letting us virtually tour their space, and for their candid answers to our questions (and recommendations!

For more Field Trip, click here.