Books to Watch for at the 2020 Vancouver Writers Fest
Image courtesy the Vancouver Writers Fest
The Vancouver Writers Fest recently released its 2020 reading list before their events go mostly virtual for the first time this October (thanks ’rona).
While we’ll miss gathering on Granville Island, there will be 35+ events with 60+ authors this fall which will include presentations, conversations, interviews, multidisciplinary collaborations and more.
There are so many wonderful books on the list, but here are a few of our favourites that we’re most excited about. Learn more about the festival here.
Poetry
BURNING SUGAR
Cicely Belle Blain
Arsenal Pulp Press
In this incendiary debut collection, activist and poet Cicely Belle Blain intimately revisits familiar spaces in geography, in the arts, and in personal history to expose the legacy of colonization and its impact on Black bodies. They use poetry to illuminate their activist work: exposing racism, especially anti-Blackness, and helping people see the connections between history and systemic oppression that show up in every human interaction, space, and community. Their poems demonstrate how the world is both beautiful and cruel, a truth that inspires overwhelming anger and awe — all of which spills out onto the page to tell the story of a challenging, complex, nuanced, and joyful life.
WHAT HURTS GOING DOWN
Nancy Lee
McClelland & Stewart
A searing exploration of girlhood in the pre- and post- #MeToo eras from the acclaimed novelist.
Nancy Lee's searing collection of poems confronts how socially ingrained violence and sexual power dynamics distort and dislocate girlhood, womanhood, and relationships. Startling and visceral, the poems in What Hurts Going Down deconstruct a lifetime of survival, hover in the uneasy territory of pre- and post- #MeToo, and scrutinize the changing wagers of being female.
THE GOSPEL OF BREAKING
Jillian Christmas
Arsenal Pulp Press
Befitting someone who "speaks things into being," Christmas extracts from family history, queer lineage, and the political landscape of a racialized life to create a rich, softly defiant collection of poems.
Christmas draws a circle around the things she calls "holy": the family line that cannot find its root but survived to fill the skies with radiant flesh; the body, broken and unbroken and broken and new again; the lover lost, the friend lost, and the loss itself; and the hands that hold them all with brilliant, tender care. Expansive and beautiful, these poems allow readers to swim in Jillian Christmas's mother-tongue and to dream at her shores.
WASHES, PRAYS
Noor Naga
McClelland & Stewart
Coocoo is a young immigrant woman in Toronto. Her faith is worn threadbare after years of bargaining with God to end her loneliness and receiving no answer. Then she meets her mirror-image; Muhammad is a professor and father of two. He’s also married.
Heartbreaking and hilarious, this verse-novel chronicles Coocoo’s spiraling descent: the transformation of her love into something at first desperate and obsessive, then finally cringing and animal, utterly without grace. Her best friend, Nouf, remains by her side throughout, and together they face the growing contradictions of Coocoo’s life. What does it mean to pray while giving your body to a man who cannot keep it? How long can a homeless love survive on the streets? These are some of the questions this verse-novel swishes around in its mouth.
WORD PROBLEMS
Ian Williams
Coach House Books
Williams uses his characteristic inventiveness to find not just new answers but new questions, reconsidering what poetry can be, using math and grammar lessons to shape poems that invite us to participate. Two long poems cut through the text like vibrating basenotes, curiosities circle endlessly, and microaggressions spin into lyric. And all done with a light touch and a joyful sense of humour.
NON-FICTION
A HISTORY OF MY BRIEF BODY
Billy-Ray Belcourt
Hamish Hamilton
Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve.
THEY SAID THIS WOULD BE FUN: RACE, CAMPUS LIFE, AND GROWING UP
Eternity Martis
McClelland & Stewart
A booksmart kid from Toronto, Eternity Martis was excited to move away to Western University for her undergraduate degree. But as one of the few Black students there, she soon discovered that the campus experiences she'd seen in movies were far more complex in reality. Over the next four years, Eternity learned more about what someone like her brought out in other people than she did about herself.
She was confronted by white students in blackface at parties, dealt with being the only person of colour in class and was tokenized by her romantic partners. She heard racial slurs in bars, on the street, and during lectures. And she gathered labels she never asked for: Abuse survivor. Token. Bad feminist. But, by graduation, she found an unshakeable sense of self—and a support network of other women of colour.
DISFIGURED: ON FAIRY TALES, DISABILITY, AND MAKING SPACE
Amanda Leduc
Coach House Books
Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty?
If every disabled character is mocked and mistreated, how does the Beast ever imagine a happily-ever-after? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.
FICTION
CROSSHAIRS
Catherine Hernandez
HarperCollins Canada
In a terrifyingly familiar near-future, with massive floods that lead to rampant homelessness and devastation, a government-sanctioned regime called the Boots seizes the opportunity to force communities of colour, the disabled and the LGBTQ2S into labour camps in the city of Toronto.
In the shadows, a new hero emerges. After his livelihood and the love of his life are taken away, Kay joins the resistance alongside Bahadur, a transmasculine refugee, and Firuzeh, a headstrong social worker. Guiding them in the use of weapons and close-quarters combat is Beck, a rogue army officer who helps them plan an uprising at a major internationally televised event.
WE TWO ALONE
Jack Wang
House of Anansi
Set on five continents and spanning nearly a century, We Two Alone traces the long arc and evolution of the Chinese immigrant experience. A young laundry boy risks his life to play organized hockey in Canada in the 1920s. A Canadian couple gets caught in the outbreak of violence in Shanghai during the Second Sino-Japanese War. The consul general of China attempts to save lives following Kristallnacht in Vienna. A family struggles to buy a home in South Africa, during the rise of apartheid. An actor in New York struggles to keep his career alive while yearning to reconcile with his estranged wife.
REBENT SINNER
Ivan Coyote
Arsenal Pulp Press
In their latest, Ivan takes on the patriarchy and the political, as well as the intimate and the personal in these beguiling and revealing stories of what it means to be trans and non-binary today, at a time in their life when they must carry the burden of heartbreaking history with them, while combatting those who would misgender them or deny their very existence. These stories span thirty years of tackling TERFs, legislators, and bathroom police, sure, but there is joy and pleasure and triumph to be found here too, as Ivan pays homage to personal heroes like the late Leslie Feinberg while gently guiding younger trans folk to prove to themselves that there is a way out of the darkness.
VANISHING MONUMENTS
John Elizabeth Stintzi
Arsenal Pulp Press
Alani Baum, a non-binary photographer and teacher, hasn't seen their mother since they ran away with their girlfriend when they were seventeen—almost thirty years ago. But when Alani gets a call from a doctor at the assisted living facility where their mother has been for the last five years, they learn that their mother's dementia has worsened and appears to have taken away her ability to speak. As a result, Alani suddenly find themselves running away again—only this time, they're running back to their mother.
BUTTER HONEY PIG BREAD
Francesca Ekwuyasi
Arsenal Pulp Press
Some of Kambirinachi's worst fears come true when her daughter, Kehinde, experiences a devasting childhood trauma that causes the family to fracture in seemingly irreversible ways. As soon as she's of age, Kehinde moves away and cuts contact with her twin sister and mother. Alone in Montreal, she struggles to find ways to heal while building a life of her own. Meanwhile, Taiye, plagued by guilt for what happened to her sister, flees to London and attempts to numb the loss of the relationship with her twin through reckless hedonism.
The book descriptions are from the publishers’ websites, and we encourage you to buy these books either directly from the publisher or your local indie bookstore.
Jo Ramsay
is a Canadian editor and writer. She’s the editorial director of Shrapnel, and has worked in publishing for five years at places such as PRISM International, This Magazine, Arsenal Pulp Press, Greystone Books and The Ubyssey. She’s lived in Canada, the UK, and Japan. You can follow her bookstagram @jo.likesbooks or on Twitter @thejoramsay.