Photo by Jordan Murray, @lovelyliterary

Jordan Murray’s perfectly manicured hand displays an annotated title page of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. “From the library of Jordan Murray” is stamped in the centre; just below she’s written, “the cost of pride, love & marriage, social status.” And all around are illustrations of tiny flowers, hearts and envelopes along with a drawing of the famous 18th century English novelist. A multitude of coloured tabs peek out from the novel’s pages.

Murray’s @lovelyliterary Instagram page is an ode to the modern aesthetics of online book lovers. Murray, a 23-year-old University of Windsor student, is an avid book annotator and part of the boom of young adults passionate about reading.

According to a survey by BookNet Canada, a non-profit that collects and analyzes data about the Canadian book industry, half of those surveyed in the 18 to 29 age group preferred books in print. The medium is optimal for recording thoughts, reactions, and feelings in annotated form, and the phenomenon has spread. Practitioners share the art and joy of book annotation on book blogs, Pinterest, Instagram and BookTok, a TikTok subcommunity. Novices seek advice and tips on Reddit and Goodreads. Online retailers like Etsy and Amazon advertize purpose-made book annotation supplies.

OK, Boomer: this isn’t your version of annotating with pencil in hand, making surreptitious notes in margins. Millennials and Gen Zers go all out. They underline, circle and highlight pages. They generously apply different coloured tabs and stickers. “I’m swooning” moments, memorable quotes, relatable themes and spicy scenes are marked. Some annotators have colour coding systems—pink tabs to represent cute scenes, green for standout paragraphs. They also create legends or tables of content for easy reference. The more aesthetically inclined will match the colours of their tabs to their book covers. When it comes to supplies, tools of the trade include pens, scissors, tweezers, rulers, stickers, coloured tabs and highlighters.

“On a more surface level, it’s treated like an art form,” says Murray. “Sometimes it’s idealized for the aesthetics.”

But while these book enthusiasts use their online platforms to spread the word about their art and share with others, creating a hybrid medium of sorts, they also say the hobby offers a much-needed reprieve from the digitization of their lives. “It’s a form of self care, to really connect with my books and disconnect from the world,” says 36-year-old Alexandra Kelebay, a Montrealer and book columnist for CBC/Radio Canada who posts on Instagram @thebookishglow. “It is also a very creative process for some, which is another fascinating way to approach it; people quite literally transform their books into art objects this way, which is a wonderful antidote to our highly digital, online existence.”

This is something Danielle Fuller has observed in her research. The University of Alberta professor of English and film studies is interested in how Gen Z are drawn to analogue media even while they might choose to display their material practices, such as annotation, via digital technology. “Since [Gen Z] grew up with technology, they don’t want to be on screens all the time. Some of their motivations for choosing a print book is to get off screens and that networked environment.”

Equally important is the hands-on approach book annotation affords them. “It makes the experience come alive—it’s physical, tactile, and a kind of tangible way of experiencing a book,” says Kelebay. “When people especially connect with characters or themes in a book, it can be transformative, so annotating concretizes an experience that would otherwise remain abstract.”

Annotation also provides an opportunity to internalize away from a wired world focused on constant social interaction and stimulation.

“For me, annotating has always been something very personal, so to share this with someone would feel very open and vulnerable, almost like peeking into my journal,” says Kelebay. “It’s where I highlight meaningful lines, passages, and quotes, as well as scribble thoughts in the margins as I read. For me it’s a solitary, meditative experience.”

There’s another motivating factor. A few generations ago, books, reading, and annotation were the domain of geeks and scholars. Academics meticulously pored over classic literature and recorded their thoughts. This came with the implicit understanding that only centuries-old tomes by long-dead authors were worthy of annotation—a concept the new generation of book lovers rejects.

Murray started annotating for her Grade 9 English class unit on Shakespeare. But she says she now annotates whatever she’s enjoying – from a Sally Rooney novel to a horror-thriller. “Annotating has made the practice of reading more accessible and enjoyable. It isn’t just for Tolstoy or Austen anymore; it could also be for romance books with cute moments or thrillers with shocking reveals.”

These days, the practice is for everyone. “It leans into the idea that geekiness is now kind of cool,” says Fuller. And that geekiness is viral and massively influential among young adults. A 2024 Statista survey revealed 37 percent of TikTok users in Canada are Gen Z, with BookTok amassing 45.7 million posts. Then there’s BookTube, an online literary community where 90 percent of users are aged 18-24. At the same time, viral book clubs are helmed by the young, rich and famous: there’s Belletrist from Emma Roberts, and model Kaia Gerber’s Library Science. With this kind of star power, it’s no wonder book lovers are happy to share their love for the written word. And annotation is just one way to both publicly and privately display that feeling.

It’s a feeling shared by Ryan Jones, though she takes a digital approach. “I’m 26-years-old, but I’m definitely an old soul at heart,” says the writer and marketing specialist in Waterloo, Ontario. “I like to keep the integrity of the physical book as it is.”

Jones annotates her e-book versions of novels and makes notes on her phone about the writing, characters, and plot. “I do like to highlight things that make me feel so deeply.” And deep feelings about books show no signs of waning, thanks to this passionate generation of young readers.

Art by Valerie Thai

Ronnie Riley learned through social media that their first novel was facing censorship. Riley was scrolling late one evening when they saw what appeared to be a leaked school memo. Their middle-grade book about a non-binary pre-teen named Jude was one of four 2SLGBTQIA+ books that Ontario’s Waterloo Catholic District School Board was trying to get out of students’ hands.

The book wasn’t explicitly banned, but there were enough hurdles for kids to access the novel that Danny Ramadan, the chair of The Writers’ Union of Canada, called the decision a “shadow ban” in an interview with the Toronto Star. (Ramadan’s book Salma Writes a Book, part of his children’s series about a young immigrant, was also challenged by the school board.)

Riley, whose work so far is most prominent in the Canadian children’s literary scene, says that while they anticipated having some issues in the U.S., it’s difficult to acknowledge that Canada is not immune to book bans. “In the States…they’re more vocal,” Riley says. “But I do believe that it’s happening in Canada, just very quietly.”

Advocacy groups in the U.S.—Parents’ Rights in Education, Citizens Defending Freedom and Moms for Liberty are three of the most vocal organizations—represent a growing trend of censorship there. By re-framing language as advocating for parental rights rather than literary censorship, groups like these have been able to successfully ban books. This harms children by suppressing their ability to access information, though advocacy groups often claim that they’re trying to protect children from explicit and inappropriate materials. And, though in its characteristically slower, slightly quieter way, the same has been happening in Canada, with an increase in book ban requests here in recent years.

It’s not just these authors’ books that are at risk. Without them, children have fewer opportunities to learn about other people and customs, and about themselves. Children’s education and exposure to different ways of life are under threat, and public libraries may be, too.

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In the U.S., recent data from the American Library Association (ALA) found that “[books] targeted for censorship at public libraries grew by 92 percent from 2022 to 2023,” and “47 percent of challenged materials represent the voices and experiences of those in the LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC community.” In Texas, 578 books were banned in the 2021-22 school year, 424 in Pennsylvania, and 401 in Florida.

Moms For Liberty, a so-called parental rights group that reports having over 130,000 members, has often made the news due to its continuous calls to ban children’s books in libraries and schools across the country. In July 2023, they were successful in getting five books banned across Leon County schools in Tallahassee, Florida. The books had characters dealing with HIV, sexual assault, leukemia, and life after death.

While parental calls to ban books aren’t always successful, the ones that are can set off a political ripple effect for other parts of the country. “What we know to be true in several states is that they’ve been following each other in a race to the bottom about how many books you can ban in how many different ways,” says John Chrastka, executive director and founder of EveryLibrary, a non-profit political action organization focused on fighting book bans in the U.S.

Chrastka references data from the Unpacking 2023 Legislation of Concern for Libraries report, created by EveryLibrary to examine the status of bills in the U.S. aiming to censor access to books in both school and public libraries. Chrastka says that EveryLibrary was able to track that some bills, despite being in different states, were using the same language as one another to ban books. “That cut and paste job—that copycat—is sometimes very explicit,” he says. “And sometimes it’s based on the intent of the law: how can we make it easier to call a book criminal, call a book obscene, call a book harmful?”

There’s a clear “feedback loop,” Chrastka says, between groups like Moms For Liberty and politicians when it comes to banning books, meaning that citizen organizations and political leaders are influencing each other. “It is a witch’s brew of interest groups that are utilizing a fairly soft target—public libraries—which are intended to be, under law, under Supreme Court precedent, public forums, and the materials are available for all—as long as they’re legal,” he says. “If you can say that those books about those human beings are obscene or criminal or harmful, you can make an attack on those populations by proxy, whether it’s LGBTQ or Black and Brown communities.”

When libraries refuse to remove books from their shelves, parents sometimes push to remove their funding altogether in retaliation. Chrastka says that while not every library will lose funding from continuing to stock challenged books, there have been and continue to be states where this is the case. In Alabama, a legislative code change, enacted this past May, made $6.6 million in state funding for public libraries contingent on their compliance with the Alabama Public Library Service Board’s guidelines about restricting access to books deemed inappropriate for certain ages.

This isn’t just happening in southern states. In Michigan, the Patmos Library nearly lost 84 percent of its funding after the town’s residents voted twice that taxpayer money shouldn’t support the library as long as it continued to supply 2SLGBTQIA+ books. But library staff would not remove the books, and after a third vote, the library will remain open.

When asked whether parental requests for libraries to censor 2SLGBTQIA+ materials could lead to budget concerns, the ALA told This Magazine in a written statement that while they don’t have national data to validate this correlation, they felt this outcome was unlikely: “Although it is challenging to quantify, these incidents emphasize the ongoing importance of defending libraries as vital community resources,” the statement reads.

As Chrastka says, though, “This is not a casual social interaction. This is a political movement.” It’s a movement that’s travelling north of the border, and in an unprecedented way.

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Fully banning a book in Canada is a tough task, and it’s not always clear how it can be done. Public libraries, though funded by municipalities, are run by independent boards which have jurisdiction over the contents of their shelves. Libraries usually respond to disputes by following their challenge policies or request for reconsideration policies. In Canadian schools, the process for vetting books often involves the board developing selection methods through training with librarians, and then trusting librarians to implement those methods. Curricula are set by provinces, and teachers decide how best to meet the curricula. It’s not the role of school boards to police individual books, though parents sometimes appeal to them in attempts to bypass any formal selection and reconsideration processes that boards entrust librarians to follow. When these policies do not exist—and they often don’t—it’s often board members and administrators who end up handling the issue and responding to parental pressures.

Shadowbanning, though, is easier to accomplish. It can include what happened to Riley, where their book was moved to a shelf inaccessible by students and “a teacher must provide the Catholic context” before students are allowed to borrow the book. Basically, citizens and school districts are finding other ways to get books out of people’s hands rather than outright banning them. In the words of Fin Leary, the program manager at We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit organization focused on making the publishing industry more diverse, the goal is to “not have them seen as often.” He says it’s much harder to fight this kind of censorship.

Regardless of whether or not a book is challenged in a public library or a school, book bans affect both readers and authors. A November 2023 statement from the Ontario Library Association said that a diverse representation of books helps students “learn how to navigate differences and develop critical awareness of their environments.” The largest worry, according to Canadian School Libraries, is that groups calling for censorship in the U.S. will continue to inspire Canadians to use similar organization tactics.

According to data from the Canadian Library Challenges Database (CLCD), Canadian libraries facing the most calls for censorship are the Edmonton Public Library (143 requests), the Ottawa Public Library (127 requests) and the Toronto Public Library (101 requests). While the database has information from as early as 1998, some libraries have only reported censorship requests from recent years.

Michael Nyby, the chair of the Intellectual Freedom Committee of the Canadian Federation of Library Associations, said in an article published on Freedom To Read’s website that library challenges from September 2002 to August 2023 represent the highest number ever recorded in Canada in a twelve-month period. According to data from the CLCD, books and events with 2SLGBTQIA+ content made up 38 percent of all challenges in 2022. (Between 2015 to 2021, less than 10 percent of all challenges were connected to 2SLGBTQIA+ matters.) Books surrounding sexual content (19 percent) and racism (16 percent) made up the next highest percentages. The influence of library censorship in the U.S. also extends to books on drug use, abuse, violence, grief, and death.

Though Riley’s novel’s shadow ban was overturned after public outcry, concerns about a rise in book censorship in Canada, and calls to defund in the event that it doesn’t happen, aren’t without reason. At the Prairie Rose School Division (PRSD), a Manitoba-based school board, 11 requests for books to be banned were made in just 2023. Among them were 2SLGBTQIA+ books like Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay. Dawson, who spent seven years working as a sex-ed teacher, described the nonfiction book as “essentially a textbook.” Each chapter of the book focuses on a different aspect of queer life, including definitions of 2SLGBTQIA+ identities, the history of HIV/AIDS, and sex. The book also addresses the importance of queer dating apps and using sexual protection. According to the PRSD, parents proposed banning this book (among multiple others) for reasons of pornography— though the book teaches children about bodies, and is not pornography. The school board said there was “some connection with the Concerned Citizens Canada Twitter account,” but not whether the parents proposing the ban were part of the group, which self-describes as “addressing sexually explicit materials being made available to children in our public libraries.” Still, the group’s account falsely tweeted that This Book is Gay was encouraging minors to solicit sex from adults on Grindr. The school board did not end up removing Dawson’s book (or the others proposed in the ban), but Concerned Citizens Canada is just one of many social and political groups that continue to advocate for book censorship.

In the summer of 2022, Manitoba’s South Central Regional Library was also pressured to remove three books about puberty and consent from shelves. Residents protested a library board meeting, flooded city council meetings, and said public library funding should be removed if the books weren’t, calling them “child pornography.” However, both Cathy Ching, the library services director, and local city councillor Marvin Plett both denied these claims. “Calling books pornographic does not make it so,” Plett said at a Winkler council meeting in July 2023. “Censuring books based on content that some find objectionable can have far-reaching and unintended implications.”

Around the same time, in Chilliwack, B.C., the RCMP were called to investigate after books there were reported for alleged child pornography in schools, too. Also in 2023, library picture books about gender in Red Deer, Alberta were vandalized. A page about using a singular “they” pronoun for nonbinary people was ripped out, according to a news report from the Red Deer Advocate.

Though the case in Chilliwack was dismissed and the books in Red Deer were replaced, parents’ calls to defund the Manitoba library if certain books aren’t removed echoes bills proposed by American lawmakers stressing that libraries should lose funding if bans aren’t enacted. And while books aren’t being overtly removed from shelves in Canada very often, there are other, sometimes more insidious impacts this attitude is having on queer and racialized youth.

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The Toronto Public Library (TPL) is Canada’s largest public library system. When asked about whether groups like those in the U.S. seeking to defund libraries for not removing 2SLGBTQIA+ material could affect what happens in Toronto, the media team at TPL said in an emailed statement that its budget is not affected by these groups. “We are governed by a library board and while our budget is ultimately approved by City Council, our materials selection is governed by our Board policies,” the email reads.

TPL’s Intellectual Freedom Challenges – 2023 Annual Report states that none of the requests to remove books from its shelves were successful that year. However, the same report also acknowledges that there are other issues at play. “TPL has experienced objections to 2SLGBTQ+ content outside of the formal request for reconsideration process, with opposition to Drag Queen Story Time programs at five branches and protests at three of them; damage to Progress Pride decals at eight branches; vandalized Pride Celebration displays at two branches; and vandalized 2SLGBTQ+ books at one branch.”

Historical book banning represents violence and censorship. Current book bans, though they may be disguised as parental rights, are more of the same. Vandalism of Pride displays at TPL is another form of violence, and while it may not be physical in nature, it has lasting effects that can harm queer youth for years beyond the act itself.

Banning queer and trans people’s books sends the message that these folks shouldn’t exist, at least not publicly. Ideas like these contribute to the state of widespread violence against them. Recent data from Statistics Canada found that around two thirds of 2SLGBTQIA+ Canadians had experienced physical or sexual violence. However, this number could be much higher: data from the same report found that around 80 percent of physical assaults against this group within the year prior to the survey didn’t “[come] to the attention of the police.”

Many 2SLGBTQIA+ people also struggle with feelings of suicidality. In the U.S., data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed that 29 percent of trans youth have attempted suicide. In Canada, researchers at the University of Montreal and Egale Canada reported that 36 percent of trans people in Ontario experience feelings of suicidal ideation. Systemic discrimination, erasure, and invalidation contributes to this, and book banning is part of this wider package of behaviours that harms the community.

Canadian author Robin Stevenson was interviewed for PEN Canada about her children’s rhyming picture books, Pride Colors and Pride Puppy!, being targeted by the recent wave of book censorship in the U.S. and Canada. “Book banners say that they want to protect children, but they are doing real harm to the very children they claim to protect,” Stevenson said, explaining that “learning to hate yourself was far more dangerous than any book could ever be.”

Leary says that removing these types of books from libraries can send a message to publishers: if they notice that titles aren’t making it to school libraries or are banned, it could discourage them from publishing and promoting them. “As much as the book bans are horrifying, they also are so much scarier when you consider the larger context of why they’re happening—because it’s to legislate folks out of existence, or to legislate folks out of having an education about these topics.”

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Representation matters because it helps reduce stereotypes. Books with diverse representation are vital. They can help teach empathy and understanding, while also showing readers that they aren’t alone in their experiences. Diverse books also teach a fuller picture of history, sharing stories previously overlooked. They are a key aspect of a well-rounded education.

While it is a terrifying moment for queer and racialized writers, authors are not silencing themselves as a result of the pushback. Protecting their work from the possibility of being banned, though, will take a concerted effort on the part of anyone hoping to support them.

Riley believes that the shadow ban of their novel at the Waterloo Catholic District School Board was only overturned because of statements from not only their publisher, but other authors as well. They say they had a sound support system, and that helped.

That kind of unified support is crucial to fostering an environment that permits the continuation of freedom in publishing. Leary says that from an advocacy standpoint, parents opposing book censorship have the most power when they stick together. “Our voices are stronger when we are collectively organizing, and it also kind of allows parents to have each other to lean on,” he says. One way to do this is by communicating with school board members and going to community meetings that include opportunities to speak to these issues.

Riley keeps their final advice to anyone passionate about this issue simple and blunt. “Keep speaking out,” they say. “Keep making sure that books get into the hands of kids—especially queer books.”

Illustration by Jarred Briggs

“I still remember everything about it,” Zakaria Amara says, sketching the library inside Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison located in Bath, Ontario. He maps the librarian’s glass office inside the door from a controlled-movement hallway. An inspirational sign about reading hangs on the wall (he can’t recall what it says exactly). Next, the law books. Behind that, a back wall offering fantasy novels. There’s a magazine section in one corner. And in the centre of it all, couches to rest and read on.

“Here was my favourite section for a very long time,” Amara taps the pen on a rectangle he’s drawn beside the law section. Self-help.

In the summer of 2006, a series of anti-terrorism raids shocked Toronto and the GTA. Police arrested 13 men and four minors, and took an eighteenth person into custody two months later. Together, the group became known as the Toronto 18, accused of planning a series of attacks including a plot to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange, among other important buildings. Amara, detained at age 20 and considered one of the ringleaders, pled guilty at trial in 2009. He received a life sentence.

Last October, Amara was released on parole following two days of intense interrogation, a month or so apart, by RCMP national security investigators to assess whether he still posed a threat to society. Today, in a quiet corner of the Toronto Reference Library, Amara explains how library access was critical to his transformation and deradicalization in prison. He arrived at Millhaven in 2015, after five-and-a-half years in the special handling unit (SHU)—also known as supermax— at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Institution in Quebec. Despite its reputation as one of Canada’s most violent prisons, Millhaven was “paradise” compared to the SHU.

“I must have read 100 self-help books,” he says. At the time, the genre was new to him and introduced him to concepts and ideas that he wasn’t aware of. “I had no access to emotions,” he explains, “so it opened up understanding emotions, self- esteem, self-worth, and how that tied back to why I became radicalized in the first place.”

Being incarcerated doesn’t—or shouldn’t—mean that you’ve given up your right to access information. In fact, as the Canadian Federation of Library Associations argues in its Right to Read position statement, “certain freedoms, such as those of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion, and expression have a heightened importance behind bars.” Adopted in 2016, the statement joined a list of internationally endorsed foundational documents that support establishing and supporting library services to prisoners. These include the United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules, which state that “Every institution shall have a library for the use of all categories of prisoners, adequately stocked with both recreational and instructional books, and prisoners shall be encouraged to make full use of it.”

Despite the obvious benefits of access to information behind bars, that freedom is routinely limited or not extended to incarcerated people in Canada.

“Hey, librarian,” someone is yelling from the next cell over. The librarian, Michelle De Agostini, is taking her printed library catalogue door-to-door at the Edmonton Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Alberta. “I want some James Patterson!”

Patterson, one of the world’s best-selling authors, is just as popular on the “inside” as he is to the masses. But genre fiction is far from the only material that’s important to incarcerated people. Folks inside prison have the same information needs as those of us on the outside: instruction on languages, cultural practices, entrepreneurship, mental health, self-help and the law.

Though many of the Edmonton Institution men show a desire to read, movement, association and privileges are highly restricted in maximum security. Browsing the stacks was out of the question. De Agostini tried to have the catalogue installed on standalone computers to make the check-out process easier for them, but upgrading the technology proved not to be a high priority for the IT staff. So instead, De Agostini printed the catalogue and took it cell-to-cell, conducting interviews along the way to determine what materials would interest people. The unwieldy paper version of an Excel spreadsheet she carried around was more than 300 pages long. “It was ridiculous. And it never printed in a way that was very readable. I thought, ‘How is anybody supposed to know how to find anything?’”

De Agostini never imagined that she was going to be a prison librarian. But after a talk from the Greater Edmonton Library Association’s (GELA) Prison Libraries Project during library school, she started volunteering with them in 2018 and eventually became treasurer. She began by helping lead creative writing workshops at the Edmonton Remand Centre. In 2019, while still going to the Edmonton Remand Centre monthly, De Agostini began working at the Edmonton Institution, where a new library was being created. She lucked into her full-time paid job there when a manager walked in while she was volunteering and said, “Hey, do you know anybody who wants a job?”

De Agostini, who left prison librarianship in 2021, has since worked as a branch manager at a rural public library in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and is now the Manager of Access Services at York University. “The library,” she wrote in a 2022 paper for Journal of Radical Librarianship, “is a minimum human rights requirement—literally the least prisons could be doing to protect the intellectual freedom of the people they house—and yet adequate library services are still not being provided in Canadian prisons.”

While federal prisons in Canada are legally required to have a library in their institutions, provincial legislation is patchy. Most provincial prisons don’t have their own library services, instead relying on volunteer librarians to bring in programming. This means there’s little continuity in what’s on offer, and, at the provincial level, little assurance that it will be anything at all. A “library” in a provincial prison might be a storage locker full of books that are packed up and exchanged every month or so. Or a volunteer group might be allowed to build a library space that they’ll maintain monthly.

This means that every day, thousands of incarcerated people could be denied their fundamental right to access to information and library services. The consequences range from lack of ability to escape through reading to increased isolation to difficulty working on their legal cases. Lack of access to books, in other words, can make a hopeless situation feel worse.

In Canada, there are two correctional systems. The federal system, governed by Correctional Service Canada (CSC), houses adults who have been sentenced to two or more years in institutions that use minimum, medium, maximum and special handling security classifications. Meanwhile, the provincial-territorial system, regulated by each province or territory’s relevant ministry or department, houses adults sentenced to less than two years and youth aged 12 to 17. The provincial-territorial system also houses people in remand, meaning they haven’t been convicted of a crime and are waiting for trial. On an average day, according to Statistics Canada, there are about 12,395 adults in federal custody and 20,430 adults in provincial-territorial custody, with a staggering 71 percent of provincially incarcerated persons being held in remand.

It’s well known that Black and Indigenous people are chronically overrepresented within these populations. A 2016 investigation by Maclean’s magazine found that Canadian criminologists had quietly begun referring to prisons and jails as the “new residential schools.” According to the 2021-2022 “Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator,” Indigenous people comprise just five percent of Canada’s overall population, yet make up 32 percent of those held in federal institutions. Worse, Indigenous women represent 50 percent of all women in federal custody. Black people, who represent roughly 3.5 percent of the overall Canadian population, are similarly overrepresented in federal custody, comprising 9.2 percent of the total population. The majority of Black people incarcerated are young men between the ages of 18 to 30.

For prison librarians, that means working toward a collection that contains culturally relevant materials, says Kirsten Wurmann, chair and founding member of Manitoba Library Association’s Prison Libraries Committee. Of course, people can dictate their cultural needs for themselves, but sometimes new information is required, and that’s where librarians come in. “What we can do is say, ‘If you really want some picture books that are English and Cree, we can buy some of those.’” She remembers an older woman who’d come to the library looking for books about traditional Indigenous beading. The books inspired her to create her own patterns, which she’d share with other women.

These days, the Manitoba Library Association’s Prison Libraries Committee is often asked by provincial prisons to help with their libraries by bringing in books, or even setting up a new library because they’ve heard about their work with other institutions and there are no funds or provincial policies in place to do that work. “That feels frustrating to me because we’re a volunteer group and the need is there,” she says.

Lack of funding is one of the biggest challenges of doing this work, says Wurmann. The group receives $500 in funding annually from the Manitoba Library Association, and anything other than that depends on donations and fundraising.

On the other hand, there are advantages to being a small group with access to some money, explains Allison Sivak, who helped found the GELA’s Prison Libraries Project along with Wurmann and others back in 2007. “You can move really fast,” she says. Because it’s a small volunteer group that raises money through its own fundraising efforts, it means that they can avoid layers of red tape, getting materials into people’s hands more quickly.

Whether volunteer or paid, these librarians are passionate about their work inside prisons. But they cannot, by themselves, fill the gaps left by structural inefficiencies. It will take a concerted effort on behalf of each province to create legislation to ensure that each provincial institution has a library, bringing incarcerated people access to the information they deserve.

Opened in 1835, Kingston Penitentiary was Canada’s first large prison and housed its first recorded prison library. Early Canadian prison libraries, modelled on those in American prisons, were run by chaplains, held mainly religious texts in their collections and were, not surprisingly, framed as spaces of moral reform. In the late 1880s, the Penitentiary Acts and the Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Penitentiaries of Canada of 1888 stipulated that all federal prisons must have a library containing secular books alongside the religious ones. However, there wouldn’t be a standardized federal prison library policy until 2012’s National Guide for Institutional Libraries. The guide was strongly influenced by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ 2005 Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners which canvassed librarians in more than 25 countries regarding the status of prison libraries and related legislation in their homelands. Today, mirroring the outside to help inmates prepare for their release is considered a crucial purpose of prison libraries. To that end, Commissioner’s Directive 720, CSC’s policy instrument on educational programs and services for inmates, in effect as of May 2017, states that not only are prisons responsible for providing library services, but those services ought to be “similar to those offered in the community.” That’s important, Wurmann says, because incarcerated individuals came from our community, they remain part of it while they are inside, and eventually they return to our wider society.

Though CSC declined an interview, in an email Jordan Crosby, manager of issues management and media relations, stated that library services meant to address recreational, cultural, spiritual and educational reference needs are provided at all federal institutions. Those services may be provided by a dedicated librarian, another staff member or by contract. Some materials are prohibited: particularly anything alluding to weapons construction or sexually explicit works involving violence or children. But books can also be limited on an individual basis. For example, if it “contributes to an unhealthy living environment [or] presents a risk to the safety and security of the institution.” Another reason that materials might be individually limited is if they are inconsistent with an inmate’s correctional plan, a program tailored to each person based on an evaluation they receive when they arrive at an institution. The evaluation is meant to determine the underlying reasons that led to their sentence while the correctional plan, updated throughout the person’s sentence, is intended to prepare them to return to the community.

“Reading and access to educational resources is important and we make every effort to ensure access to inmates,” Crosby writes, noting that book carts, reading requests, access to legal materials and the Digital Reference Library—which is updated quarterly—are available to people. The Digital Reference Library is accessed through monitored and restricted computers which may be located on the unit but also in spots like the school and work program areas or the library. It is also available by CD-ROM, and where necessary, in paper form. However, De Agostini says, “whether or not people get access—reasonable access—to that library is debatable, but they’re legally required to have it.”

Defining what library services are or ought to be is contentious because every library worker and incarcerated person has a different idea of what’s needed. CSC’s own National Guide for Institutional Libraries says that library services should match the public library as best as they can. So for De Agostini, reasonable access means being able to enter the space, browse the stacks and other media, search a catalogue on library computers, be able to attend regular library programming, speak to a qualified library worker and have access to printing and web services, with no banning or censorship of library materials (within reason). She’d like to see maker spaces. Most importantly, perhaps, reasonable access means the library is robustly funded with well-developed collections that meet patrons’ needs and has established inter-library loan services to fill in the gaps.

For Amara, what constitutes reasonable access is much simpler. “Security always trumps everything in those places so that’s the card that’s played” when it comes to accessing the library, he says. At a minimum, he says, the library must be open five days per week when there are no security issues, ideally for both the morning and afternoon movement shifts. A lockdown period usually follows a security incident. It’s a time when all privileges are suspended, though inmates still receive their prescriptions. In the event of a lockdown, Amara thinks the book trolley should come out as soon as possible. In fact, he suggests, since prisoners can’t go to the library every day—at Millhaven, they must request a pass and are allowed to visit only once or twice per week—the trolley should go around daily. “Books are like medication,” he says, “and should be treated as such.”

On Wednesdays, the Kitchener Public Library bus rolls into Grand Valley Institution for Women loaded with books destined for the library in the main building. Inside their residential-style units, the women wait for inmate count to be finished, gearing up for a wild race to the library when they’re released.

“As soon as that bell went off after lunch, after the count was complete, people would just be running as fast as they could to the building to try to get as many books as they could,” says Emily O’Brien, who served 10 months out of a four-year sentence for drug smuggling in the federal multilevel security facility in Kitchener, Ontario. The library at Grand Valley was small, O’Brien explains, but its partnership with the Kitchener Public Library meant that people could request books that the prison library didn’t have.

“Reading [in prison] was never an escape for me. It was more like something that made me feel worthy,” O’Brien says. Not only did she devour 82 books during her time there, but she also started Comeback Snacks, a successful gourmet popcorn company that now employs other formerly incarcerated people—all without access to the internet. “Reading gave me hope because when you can educate yourself through books, that inspires you to build things,” she says.

With a limited library, and no internet, O’Brien had to get creative to expand her reading list. She mostly read nonfiction, so when she really liked a book, she’d check out the source list and place orders for the author’s source books. And sometimes, she says, “I would call my mom on the phone and get her to look up business books that were coming out.”

Books and relationships with prison librarians can also help incarcerated people to feel more like themselves in a situation where there aren’t many chances to show one’s individuality. Sivak recalls an incarcerated woman saying, “We’re treated as a population.” For prisoners, having normal interactions with people who treat them with respect or having packages addressed to them is really important because they are dehumanized on a daily basis.

“I often talk about giving a humanizing experience,” Wurmann says. “They’re not just inmates. They’re not just offenders. They are incarcerated, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve given up their rights.”

Sivak sees library services not just as a way to learn, but as a way to build connections between people. She notes the benefits of outsiders coming in to spend time, whether for a reading, writing or other creative program, as programming inside prison is often designed to change people. However, “in art making or writing, you see people’s strengths and the pride they have in the work they make, and that’s very cool,” she says.

“Volunteering in prison is not an easy process,” explains O’Brien, who participated in a monthly book club at Grand Valley facilitated by Book Clubs for Inmates, a charity that organizes volunteer-led book clubs in federal prisons across Canada. Volunteers have to go through many security clearances to be able to go inside. “For someone to really commit to doing that because they believe in second chances or because they believe in people even though they’ve done something wrong—it was another thing that provided help.” Not only did the book club inspire the women to form new friendships amongst themselves, O’Brien says, but it allowed them to meet people they could connect with after prison.

Volunteers have “the scent of freedom,” Amara says. In the SHU he wasn’t allowed access to volunteers, but at Millhaven, where there was a book club and a poetry club, being around free people gave him hope. “They’re not guards and they aren’t part of the system. You aren’t afraid of them. And they’re just there to help you.”

In her paper, De Agostini charges that “prison libraries have largely been considered a privilege exchanged for good behaviour rather than a well-planned service and a human right.” A “combination of moralism, budget shortfalls and a punitive philosophy…has allowed Canadian prisons to become sites of perpetual punishment and trauma for the people that inhabit them,” she writes. That leaves the prison librarian with an impossible task: delivering a service that matches the public library while contending with the security constraints of prison. De Agostini says she still wonders if she could have fought harder or done more to provide a better library service.

By the time Amara was transferred to the SHU, he’d been incarcerated for three years and was beginning to lay the foundations of separating himself from his extremist mindset. During his first year there, he took a psychology course and a critical thinking course through Athabasca University, which offers flexible distance learning. The trouble was, and continues to be, that CSC offers little to no deradicalization programming. Even though he had the willingness to change, it was difficult to tackle the emotional roots of his ideology on his own. He didn’t have a therapist; all he had was books.

In the SHU, he couldn’t go to the library, but there were old, out of date catalogues at a bookstand where he could make written book requests. He came across Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which led him to one of the most important books he ever read: In the First Circle, also by the Russian author. He loved it so much, he ended up buying it from the SHU. “When I got my parole,” he says, voice filled with emotion, “I gave it as a gift to my parole officer.”

“Any extremist or dogmatic person hides a secret doubt,” Amara says. “That’s why fanatics overcompensate.” The reason the book touched him so deeply was the dialogue between the characters, he explains—the main character was a communist officer who became disillusioned. Had it been about Islamic extremists, Amara says he wouldn’t have read it—too close to home. But because it was about a different type of ideology, he could discern the parallels to his own situation and the conversations between the characters “cracked away” at his beliefs.

“My message is, look at whatever limited access and problematic access I had, look what it’s done for me and imagine what it can do if we make it better,” says Amara. “What I got out of it changed my life.”

Dimitri Nasrallah’s Hotline (Véhicule Press) transports readers to mid-eighties Montreal when weight-loss centres were a burgeoning industry, and “body image” and “health consciousness” were terms just entering the vocabulary of self-care. Muna Heddad, a French teacher by trade, takes a job as a hotline phone operator at meal delivery company Nutri-Fort when no school will hire her. An immigrant escaping the Lebanese Civil War, she has little alternative if she is to provide a semblance of security for her son, Omar, following her husband’s disappearance from the war-torn streets of Beirut.

Nasrallah, who teaches creative writing at Concordia University, elaborated on his decision to set his novel in the heyday of hotlines.

“There’s always an unsophisticated idealism baked into the possibilities of new mediums,” he says. “A little later on, everyone comes to a consensus about usage and conventions. But there’s a window of time in which people are still figuring [out] what can be done, and that was when this era of the hotline became appealing. It’s an obscure technology now, but in its heyday it spoke to that universal need to connect with others in ways we’ve emulated since with the internet and social media.”

Known for his politically charged writing in books like The Bleeds, Niko, and Blackbodying, Hotline sees Nasrallah taking inspiration from his own childhood, articulating some of his mother’s experiences working as a weight-loss call operator.

“The people who call Nutri-Fort’s hotline and speak to Muna experience the shame that comes with fatphobia,” he says. “They’d dedicated themselves to meeting the many expectations Canadian life was throwing at them, and along the way they gained weight, which set them even further back from where they wanted to be—that consensus ideal of happiness that hangs over all of us,” Nasrallah says.

“For Muna, xenophobia brings a similar shame, of not understanding the way the game is played here and the sense of being manipulated by circumstances [she doesn’t] yet understand. That shared sense of shame makes her sympathetic to the voices she counsels on the phone.”

Muna fears that her Quebecois clients struggling with loneliness and bereavement will sever their ties with her if they discover that she is a French-speaking Arab. This balancing act of appearing sympathetic to callers who would not deign to speak to her outside of a professional scenario is the lamentable if commonplace dynamic at the centre of the novel.

“The anxiety over these two forms of visibility—body image and race—were paired together for me by that situation,” Nasrallah explains. “It was only much later as an adult that I began to see how the two were linked and fit into this larger context of unattainable ideals that are a part of North America’s social fabric.” Nasrallah notes that fatphobia and xenophobia are both fears of the body. “Both come from the same intolerances and are hardwired into the social construct. Both devalue how people see themselves.”

At a time when borders are reopening and immigration numbers to Canada are beginning to rise following disincentives to travel, Hotline documents how social issues newcomers face have root causes that have not been completely addressed four decades later.

“In every historical setting in fiction, there has to be some resonance back to the current moment, something that connects the reader to the material and helps organize the story so that parallels emerge and serve to give the narrative layers of meaning,” Nasrallah says. “When we draw from the past, it’s to understand the present moment, and organize some understanding out of the parallels we see.”

Photos courtesy Jennifer David & Waubgeshig Rice

When Jennifer David decided to start Storykeepers, a podcast that spotlights Indigenous literature, she knew Waubgeshig Rice was her only choice for a co-host. He was an experienced journalist with CBC, a published author—most recently of the bestseller Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press, 2018)—and they were both passionate about uplifting Indigenous voices.

However, the first time David approached Rice about co-hosting in 2018, he had to decline. Although he was excited about the idea, he couldn’t take on a new project. He was working full-time at CBC and he had a new baby.

“I shelved it because I never pictured any other co-host. I did not want to go ahead unless I was going to go ahead with Waub,” David says.

David sees herself as a communicator. She has a background in journalism, she’s an experienced facilitator, and she’s the author of two books, including the podcast’s namesake, Story Keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal Writers (Ningwakwe Learning Press, 2004). She’s spent her career promoting Indigenous voices on television, radio, and in literature.

Early in 2021, David heard Rice was leaving CBC so he could write full-time. She approached him again and asked if this was a better time for him to co-host the podcast. He said yes. Right away, they got to work. They successfully applied for funding with the Ontario Arts Council, hammered out the details of what they’d like the podcast to be, and started planning the first season. The first episode aired in March 2021.

Rather than the typical radio show where authors are interviewed about their books, David wanted to do something different. Storykeepers is more like a book club, with a book being discussed in depth without the author present. They record one episode per month. The entire focus of Storykeepers is Indigenous voices: they discuss Indigenous writing across genres—fiction, memoir, plays, and poetry—with an Indigenous guest host.

“It’s a bit of a challenge to transpose that book club kind of vibe,” Rice says. “How we approach each episode is very informal and casual.”

Although they read the books, take notes, and discuss topics ahead of time, David and Rice keep the actual episodes unscripted. For Rice, the podcast was an exciting challenge after working at CBC for so long, where almost everything was scripted.

When planning the season, David and Rice started with a list of books they wanted to discuss, and then they made a list of potential guest hosts. Afterwards, they tried to match them up.

“What we try to do is identify somebody who has some sort of personal or professional connection to that book or to that author or to the Indigenous nation that it’s about just to open our eyes to perspectives we may not have considered either,” Rice says. They bring in voices from Anishinaabe, Cree, Inuit, Métis, and Two-Spirit backgrounds, among others.

They recorded 10 episodes for the first season, including a discussion with Cherie Dimaline about Eden Robinson’s Return of the Trickster, Duncan McCue about Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk, Rosanna Deerchild about Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, and more. To encourage listeners to engage with the podcast and interact with them online as if it is a book club, Storykeepers offers book giveaways. At the end of the season, David and Rice were thrilled when they realized the podcast had over 47,000 downloads.

Season two kicked off in January 2022 with a discussion of Katherena Vermette’s The Strangers with guest host Jamie Morse. Rice has taken a slight step back for season two, as he will be a judge for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize and he’s editing his forthcoming novel. Instead of participating in every episode, he’ll be co-hosting every second episode.

“I didn’t want to spread myself too thin. I want to do the books we feature in the podcast properly,” Rice says.

He expects to return to co-hosting every episode in fall 2022.

Listeners can look forward to hearing about an exciting lineup this season, including Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, Michelle Good’s Five Little Indians, and the podcast’s first episode featuring a graphic novel, This Place: 150 Years Retold.

David hopes the new season reaches even more listeners. She would like people to come to them and tell them what they’re reading. She’d be thrilled to hear from Indigenous writers and artists interested in being a guest host on the show.

“We can do this for 10, 20 years and still not get through all the books by Indigenous authors,” David says. “I feel like I kind of owe it to Indigenous authors to keep this going so that they can see themselves and their books in here. We’ve just touched the surface.”

Photos courtesy Party Trick Press

When Natahna Bargen-Lema and Megan Fedorchuk launched Party Trick Press, they didn’t shy away from lofty goals. With a mission of revolutionizing eLiterature and bringing higher standards of diversity, accessibility, and inclusion to the publishing process, the digitally focused press aims to challenge the publishing industry’s complicated reputation.

Soft launched in October 2020, Party Trick curates literary works by current and up-and-coming authors. Among them are former City of Edmonton Youth Poet Laureate Timiro Mohamed (Incantations of Black Love), Furqan Mohamed (A Small Homecoming), and D’orjay the Singing Shaman (Shit My Shaman Says, Volume 1).

“Party Trick Press is truly a pandemic baby,” says Bargen-Lema, herself a writer. After losing her job, she called Fedorchuk, a long-time friend and former colleague from the University of Saskatchewan. “It spiralled from there!”

“I agreed before we even had a fully formed idea,” says Fedorchuk. The pair haven’t seen each other since before the pandemic began. Separated geographically, Fedorchuk lives in Toronto while Bargen-Lema is in Edmonton.

Party Trick was born of a belief that eLiterature is undervalued, yet crucial for a number of reasons. It’s accessible, allowing readers to download ebooks on a variety of devices, using magnification and read-aloud features. It also reduces paper waste. To increase financial accessibility and to challenge the publishing industry’s capitalist model, Bargen-Lema and Fedorchuk have adopted choose-what-you-pay price points.

“We’re always learning. We’re always evolving,” says Bargen-Lema, noting that the press is continuously researching opportunities to be increasingly accessible. Aware of the space they’re taking up as white women, Bargen-Lema and Fedorchuk agree that a key value is “creating a platform that is truly inclusive, that people feel represented by, that people can feel comfortable sharing on,” says Fedorchuk. A positive and collaborative experience for authors is also of utmost importance.

“Every single person that reaches out and trusts us with their words is just so humbling.… We do feel like there’s a place for us here. There’s a need for this type of work,” says Fedorchuk.

Photo courtesy Goose Lane Editions

“Bent out of joint / in order to hold every-thing together. Won’t snap, won’t dissolve in an acid bath.” These are the opening lines of Self-Portrait as Paperclip, from Fredericton-based writer Triny Finlay’s third book, Myself A Paperclip, in which she transforms an inconspicuous office article into a clever metaphor for those attempting to hold everything together. The queer writer’s first book-length long poem was published in October 2021 with Goose Lane Editions.

The collection details experiences with stigma surrounding mental illness, trauma, treatments, and life in the psych ward. With section titles such as “You don’t want what I’ve got” and “Adjusting the Psychotropics,” Finlay’s words serve as a call to action for mental illness and its treatments to be normalized, and for the needs of those living with mental illness to be met with more compassion.

The title Myself A Paperclip was conceived from her poem Self-Portrait as Paperclip, although the author admits she originally had another title in mind. “I had all these lists, dozens of possible titles, and the one that I liked best was ‘Nothing like a mad woman’ from [the song “mad woman” on] Taylor Swift’s folklore album, which I was obsessively listening to,” she laughs. Due to foreseeable copyright issues, Finlay had to abandon this option.

“I wrote [Self-Portrait as Paperclip] during a really fraught period of my life where I was struggling with a lot of changes in my life. I was going through a divorce, I was coming out more publicly as queer, I was just dealing with a lot,” she says. “So I went back to that poem … as a touchstone for the whole book and realized it said everything I wanted the book to say about trauma, mental illness, and treatment.”

The section of her book titled “You don’t want what I’ve got,” which was previously published as a chapbook by Junction Books in 2018, became the impetus for the collection. This section initially zoned in on unrequited love, with the author ultimately realizing that it was time to shift focus.

“I started to ask myself: why am I writing about unrequited love? What is it that I need to say about that?” It occurred to her that the parts of her “novel-esque” long poem involving the main character’s obsessions and compulsive behaviours arising from unrequited love were what interested her the most. Trashing the bulk of the manuscript she’d been working on for over 10 years, Finlay took another swing at the project. “I wanted to write about how a person loses their mind, and how people are treated when they lose their mind…” she explains.

She also found it important to incorporate humour into the collection. In the section titled “Psych Ward Types: a List,” she candidly reflects on her stays in the psych ward, bringing to life a list of characters who offer comedic consolation to a situation that Finlay recounts as absurd.

“You know, people with mental illness also run the gamut of emotional experience, so there can be humour.”

The writer hopes that her book has the potential to shine a light on the nuances of living with mental illness. From stunned silences to voiced concerns from loved ones regarding medication, Myself A Paperclip showcases ample instances of stigma-fueled behaviours and actions that need to be continually addressed.

“For me, one of the major obstacles when we bring mental health issues to the table is that often the people who are talking about it, writing about it, treating it, legislating it, trying to accommodate it in the workplace, are the people who are the least affected by it personally,” she says. “I think people need to check their beliefs. I think they need to check their values, change their behaviour, offer actual compassionate support…”

Finlay encourages writers to derive inspiration from their own lives, especially individuals belonging to marginalized groups. “I think the writing that comes from lived experience, especially of conventionally excluded groups—so communities who haven’t always been given the right to speak or the right to be heard—is often the strongest work,” she says. “For me, from an ethical standpoint, it is really important to consider the lived experience of the people who are going through these kinds of struggles.”

In These Lifeless Things, by Edmonton writer Premee Mohamed, a character looks at her partner in a post-apocalyptic landscape. “We could make love right here!” she thinks. “Who, in this dead city, would stop us?”

Amid pandemics, rising fascism and climate disaster, science fiction writers are imagining new futures in new ways.

Mohamed is a 40-year-old Indo-Caribbean scientist and writer. Her debut novel, the cosmic horror Beneath the Rising, is currently shortlisted for Canada’s Aurora Award. She has several novels and novellas published or forthcoming, including this summer’s And What Can We Offer You Tonight, set many generations from now, in a city-state in which the government can hunt and kill anyone who isn’t employed.

This September, ECW Press published The Annual Migration of Clouds, set in a struggling post-collapse community in what was once the University of Alberta, where Mohamed did two degrees. Though remnants remain, universities have become distant dreams.

“The truth is, of course, that the chain did break,” thinks Reid, the young female protagonist in The Annual Migration of Clouds. “And not once but again and again and again; and not just in the transmission of knowledge from the learned to the unlearned but also parent to child, elder to youth, country to country, every way you could think of. We live in the scattered links that remain.”

Mohamed grew up reading science fiction, with influences stretching from Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves to H.G. Wells’ 1895 novella The Time Machine, which shows a deeply divided future humanity.

“I was really struck by that, as a kid,” Mohamed says. “It must have formed part of my fictional DNA, because I guess I was thinking, what does drive us as we go along, as humanity goes along, to a common cause? Rather than splintering like that into more and more distinct groups that have less and less contact with each other?”

When Mohamed was a kid, the disaster looming over every imagined future was nuclear war. Now, it’s climate change. Mohamed’s job as a reclamation and remediation policy specialist in the Alberta public service includes “future proofing” policies related to the impacts of industrial activity on the land, looking at trends, modelling and tipping points.

“I realize now that the only thing that is positioned to make the needle move on climate change, the only thing that’s big enough, is government. And governments have to coordinate to do that together.”

Governments did not coordinate to prevent millions from dying of COVID-19, Mohamed notes.
“So I’m unfortunately profoundly pessimistic about humanity’s ability to stop climate change, rather than just come up with increasingly baroque ways to deal with it, that will be increasingly segregated into: who has the money to survive the effects of climate change in their area, and who doesn’t.”

The Annual Migration of Clouds is not alone among recent science fiction in exploring the future at a local level; another example is Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow, in which an Indigenous community finds its own ways to deal with widespread disaster.

The choice of whether we splinter or work together is before us. But even in a fractured future, stories such as Mohamed’s show how community persists in the cracks.

Photo and book cover courtesy of Anstruther Press

Black lesbian poet Victoria Mbabazi’s poetry collection, chapbook, was published by Anstruther Press in January 2021 and is now in its third printing. Their poetry’s No Name Brand design and style was inspired by the advertisements they saw commuting to the University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus last summer, a time when they were also searching for direction with their project for a year-long independent study with creative writing professor Daniel Scott Tysdal.

The No Name Brand style has become a signature visual for Canadians. Drawn from Loblaws’ signage for generic grocery and household products, the packaging is characterized by the combination of an uncomplicated bright yellow background and a Helvetica font. While the phrase “no name brand item” has colloquially described inexpensive yet sturdy alternatives that were outliers to leading brands, Loblaws has ironically reassociated the phrase in consumer consciousness to refer to their specific line of no-nonsense yellow packaging, which Mbabazi adapts stylistically.

“I liked the way [No Name] branding works because I think it’s hilarious. [I thought] it’d be really interesting to do that format as a book … honesty and parody mixed together. Everything is a show when you’re writing, and all of the poems are expectations,” they say.

With poems titled “trauma poem,” “diaspora poem,” and “fat girl poem,” Mbabazi takes sharp aim at the tropes that primarily white audiences celebrate and expect from work created by marginalized artists. Pigeonholing writers into pain-filled community representatives—a pressure applied
by a predominately white publishing industry—is akin to No Name brand packaging, as it confines an individual’s experience into a generic product.

“The only way that people will listen [to people of colour] is if they write in a way that is digestible to white people. There’s an expectation of when I give you this book that I’m going to have to say something intelligent about what’s going on. And I don’t really have anything to say other than I’m upset. And that’s what I wanted to write.”

Although the parodic poems were submitted in jest, Mbabazi found themselves taking on a bigger project following positive feedback from their professor. “I was just going to hand [my professor] six poems, all in No Name brand format, as a joke. And then he was like, ‘No, this is good. Can you write 10 more poems?’”
Addressing the events surrounding the death of George Floyd, including lynchings and burning fast food chains, they confront the expectation to produce eloquent, breakthrough insight to articulate a movement. Regarding a four-poem series that sews a narrative thread through chapbook, Mbabazi’s speaker accepts words are inadequate in “no name: final draft,” the last in the series.

“I was feeling suffocated by the financial disparities, the police brutality, and race and white supremacy in North America in general. And then I was thinking about how people keep trying to capitalize off that. People are trying to emote about how they feel, and then they also need to make money.”

In “no name: final draft,” Mbabazi takes a different approach. “The evolution comes in choosing not to say anything about what’s happening,” they say. “I don’t actually have anything to say, and there’s an emotional truth to [‘no name: final draft’] … It’s giving up on trying to say something important, and just feeling your feelings.”

After finishing at U of T and completing chapbook, Mbabazi sought to further their writing craft and began the first semester of their MFA at NYU last fall over Zoom. There, they’ve felt free to explore their own themes and ideas in a way that feels authentic to them, while also paying close attention to a poetic structure.

“I just really loved my workshop class a lot. My professor was Alex Dimitrov, and he was so funny. He was just like, ‘I just care if the poem is good. I don’t really care what it’s trying to say … I just want it to be beautiful.’ He cares about beats and how it sounds and it’s liberating for not everything needing to be aboutisms.”

Over the past two years, Mbabazi has written a series of vignettes that are short profiles of their friends, detailing past conversations. Teaming up with their friend and photographer Noor Gatih, the two are co-creating a scrapbook-style prose collection.

“I feel like my writing is … very casual, like you’re listening to a friend tell you something stupid.”

Their self-aware, tongue-in-cheek style allows for a fluid and purposeful transition from hilarity to sobering seriousness.

“For me, humour has always been a really big coping mechanism. The funnier my writing gets …. the more upset I am. The serious and the funny are always going to be together.”

Image courtesy of Glass Bookshop Radio

The magic of a bookstore arises not only from books and stories, but from community and conversation. Glass Bookshop Radio, the new podcast from Edmonton’s Glass Bookshop, founded by Jason Purcell and Matthew Stepanic, celebrates its first year this fall.

Purcell, Stepanic, and podcast producer and co-host, Makda Mulatu, have built their working relationship on a solid friendship. Even over a video call, their friendly dynamic is apparent as they constantly compliment and tease each other.

When Purcell and Stepanic started Glass Bookshop in 2019, their goals were to advocate for LGBTQ2S+, BIPOC, and underrepresented voices in the literary scene, and to promote independent publishers. Glass Bookshop Radio is an expansion of that dedication.

“Glass Bookshop mostly exists in people’s heads,” Stepanic says. “Everybody kind of has their own idea of what it is because they’ve only been in the space a couple of times. Or we have so many customers who are new to us that never visited the shop but get deliveries from us.”

Their bookstore hasn’t taken a traditional route. They started as a pop-up bookseller at various literary events in Edmonton. On March 1, 2019, Stepanic and Purcell launched an Indiegogo campaign to open their physical bookstore, where they raised over $30,000. On October 1, 2019, they opened up their first physical space, a pop-up shop in Edmonton City Centre mall. When the pandemic hit, they realized they would need to move online. They launched their online shop and closed their location at City Centre in March 2020. Since then, they’ve been selling books online.

In time for their third anniversary in October 2021, Glass Bookshop will open their permanent in-person location at Stovel Block, a historic building in Edmonton located at 10327 97 St NW.

When everything shifted to virtual in 2020, Purcell and Stepanic had to redefine their definition of bookselling. While fulfilling orders and managing a team of delivery drivers, they struggled to find time for live virtual events like other independent bookstores, so they decided to launch Glass Bookshop Radio.
They released their first episode, a conversation between Purcell and Stepanic, on October 1, 2020. The logo for the podcast features a boombox painted in soft pastel colours designed by Michelle Campos Castillo, a local artist who has done work for Glass Bookshop in the past.

Purcell composed the podcast’s jingle. “I wanted the theme song to have a kind of ’80s synth-pop-BBC-Radio combo vibe,” they laugh. “I wanted to speak back to those old radio shows.”
Purcell shares how the podcast allowed them to take the shop and their brand in a whole new direction. “It couldn’t have happened just with Matthew and me. We have someone like Makda who saw what we were doing in the shop and wanted to be involved. We are so grateful.”

Mulatu came on board with Glass Bookshop Radio early on in the process and has taken on more responsibility as a producer, collaborating with Purcell on planning and editing future episodes.
She describes how the show has grown in the first two seasons. Alongside a constant stream of pitches from publishers and listeners, they’ve seen an increase in book sales from the podcast. “Starting in June, we’re going to go weekly, so there will be lots more to come,” Mulatu says.

Purcell and Stepanic are emphatic that without Mulatu, the podcast would’ve fizzled out. “Makda’s involvement is 100 percent the reason the podcast is still happening,” Purcell says.