Essais (English)

Shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award Shortlisted for the First Nation Communities READ 2018-2019 Award On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn't possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice and reconciliation, to name a few, are the heart of MyConversations with Canadians. In essays that are both conversational and direct, Maracle seeks not to provide any answers to these questions she has lived with for so long. Rather, she thinks through each one using a multitude of experiences she has had as a First Nations leader, a woman, a mother, and grandmother over the course of her life. Lee Maracle's MyConversations with Canadians presents a tour de force exploration into the writer's own history and a reimagining of the future of our nation.

From Vancouver-based writer Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant is a creative non-fiction memoir about home and belonging set in the 80s and 90s of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Using a variety of forms, Knight reflects on her childhood through a series of letters addressed to all of the current occupants now living in the twenty different houses she moved in and out of with her mother and brother. From blurry non-chronological memories of trying to fit in with her own family as the only mixed East Indian/Black child, to crystal clear recollections of parental drug use, Knight draws a vivid portrait of memory that still longs for a place and a home. Peering through windows and doors into intimate, remembered spaces now occupied by strangers, Knight writes to them in order to deconstruct her own past. From the rubble of memory she then builds a real place in order to bring herself back home.

CanLit—the commonly used short form for English Canadian Literature as a cultural formation and industry-has been at the heart of several recent public controversies. Why? Because CanLit is breaking open to reveal the accepted injustices at its heart. It is imperative that these public controversies and the issues that sparked them be subject to careful and thorough discussion and critique. Refuse provides a critical and historical context to help readers understand conversations happening about CanLit presently. One of its goals is to foreground the perspectives of those who have been changing the conversation about what CanLit is and what it could be. Topics such as literary celebrity, white power, appropriation, class, rape culture, and the ongoing impact of settler colonialism are addressed by a diverse gathering of writers from across Canada. This volume works to avoid a single metanarrative response to these issues, but rather brings together a cacophonous multitude of voices.

Rather than making "something" out of "nothing," what follows is an endeavor to express the potential of language and thought to encounter what is infinitely beyond both yet to be imagined. In The Nothing That Is, Johanna Skibsrud gathers essays about the very concept of "nothing." Addressing a broad range of topics-including false atrocity tales, so-called fake news, high-wire acts, and telepathy, as well as responses to works by John Ashbery, Virginia Woolf, Anne Carson, and more, these essays seek to decenter our relationship to both the "givenness" of history and to a predictive or probable model of the future. The Nothing That Is explores ways in which poetic language can activate the possibilities replete within our every moment. Skibsrud reveals that within every encounter between a speaking "I" and what exceeds subjectivity, there is a listening "Other," be it community or the objective world.

To devote oneself to the study of beauty is to offer footnotes to the universe for all the places and all the moments that one observes beauty. I can no longer grab beauty by her wrists and demand articulation or meaning. I can only take account of where things touch. Part lyric essay, part prose poetry, Where Things Touch grapples with the manifold meanings and possibilities of beauty. Drawing on her experiences as a physician-in-training, Orang considers clinical encounters and how they relate to the concept and very idea of beauty. Such considerations lead her to questions about intimacy, queerness, home, memory, love, and other aspects of human existence. Throughout, beauty is ultimately imagined as something inextricably tied to care: the care of lovers, of patients, of art and literature, and the various non-human worlds that surround us. Eloquent and meditative in its approach, beauty, here, beyond base expectations of frivolity and superficiality, is conceived of as a thing to recover. Where Things Touch is an exploration of an essential human pleasure, a necessary freedom by which to challenge what we know of ourselves and the world we inhabit.

Never forget / to connect the dots / This book is an attempt to connect a couple. In Begin by Telling, experimental pop sensation Meg Remy (U.S. Girls) spins a web out from her body to myriad corners of American hyper-culture. Through illustrated lyric essays depicting visceral memories from early childhood to present day, Remy paints a stark portrait of a spectacle-driven country. As though channel surfing, we catch glimpses of Desert Storm, the Oklahoma City Bombing, random street violence, the petrochemical industry, small town Deadheads, a toilet with uterus lining in it, the county STD clinic, and missionaries at the front door. Each is shared through language of the body; the sensation of experiencing many of the defining events and moments of a country. Immersive and utterly compelling, the threads in Begin by Telling nimbly interweave with probing quotes and statistics, demonstrating the importance of personal storytelling, radical empathy, and the necessity of reflecting on society and one's self within that construct. Praise for Begin By Telling: "Begin By Telling explores the horrors and absurdity of being a "girl" in the mediated warscape of America. With sharp emotional intelligence, Remy reveals a cultural systemic rot that begins with family and fractals out into school, life, the media, the government, and history. Both hallucinogenic and lucid, this work is a radical interrogation of trauma, and a literary salve for the feminist psyche." -Michelle Tea, author of Black Wave and Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions and Criticisms "Powerful and distinctive, Begin by Telling ripped through me with the velocity and weight of a freight train; it's roar drowning out the world around me. A beautiful and brutal work, that forces the reader forward, but is crafted to leave space to catch your breath." -Tegan Quin from Tegan and Sara and co-author of High School

Monsters, Martyrs, and Marionettes is a revelatory collection of personal essays that subverts the stereotypes and transcends the platitudes of family life to examine motherhood with blistering insight. Documenting the birth and early life of her three

In these literary travel essays, twenty-six writers from across North America share journeys back to their motherlands as visitors. Set against mountainous terrain, tropical beaches, bustling cities, and remote villages, these personal narratives weave socio-political commentary with writers' reflections on who they are, where they belong, and what " home" means to them.The result is a vulnerable, humorous, and insightful exploration of meanings and contradictions, beginning a conversation waiting to be had by the growing population of first- and second-generation Canadians and Americans who will find themselves within its pages. These essays navigate the intricacies of hyphenated identities with nuanced stories of heritage and a redefined sense of home. Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity, and Home is an open door to places within ourselves and around the globe.With contributions by: Omar El Akkad, Nadine Araksi, Ofelia Brooks, Esmeralda Cabral, June Chua, Seema Dhawan, Krista Eide, Eufemia Fantetti, Ayesha Habib, Christina Hoag, Mariam Ibrahim, Taslim Jaffer, Vesna Jaksic-Lowe, Kathryn Lennon, Omar Mouallem, Dimitri Nasrallah, Lishai Peel, Omar Reyes, Mahta Riazi, Steve Sandor, Angelo Santos, Alison Tedford Seaweed, Makda Teshome, Nhung Tran-Davies, Alexandra C. Yeboah, Hannah Zalaa-Uul.