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.

One of Book Madam & Associates' online comics.

The words “book” and “fan” don’t really fit. Music and fan, sure. Sports and fan, you bet. But when it comes to books, you’re a reader or a lover, rarely a fan. Maybe it’s because fandom has little place in an industry infamous for its cynicism and curmudgeonly attitude, its scything insults and ivory tower. Or maybe it’s because the word suggests an uncritical appreciation that doesn’t quite match up to the way we feel we should appreciate books. Imagine calling yourself a fan of Borges. It just doesn’t fly. When it comes to books, “fan” falls flat.

Enter Book Madam & Associates, professional book fans. Based in Toronto, with outposts in Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax, BM&A are professional appreciators—not critics or influencers, just people who really, really like books and the publishing industry. They spread their appreciation through blogs, tweets, and occasional podcasts, events, DJ playlists, and online comics clumsily drawn in Microsoft Paint.

Julie Wilson, a.k.a. the Book Madam, describes the group as a bunch of enthusiastic lateral thinkers: “We have a wide range of interests, along with a desire to connect people across those interests.” They’re what you could call enablers, fuelled by the underlying belief that people want to connect to books, but often don’t know how, and that there’s an ever-growing list of media tools that can enable this connection.

Wilson started on the road to professional fandom in 2006 with her blog Seen Reading, which she describes as an “esoteric spy journal.” On the blog, Wilson logged what she saw commuters reading while in transit. Each entry includes the location of the spotting, a description of the reader, the book being read, the passage Wilson imagines the person is reading, and her riff on that excerpt.

An example, from October 7, 2008:

Spadina streetcar: Caucasian female, mid 20s, with short blond hair and black-framed glasses, wearing skinny jeans, pink striped T-shirt, and green cargo jacket.

The Withdrawal Method, Pasha Malla (House of Anansi Press), page 87:

In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you’ve got inside you— Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang—depending on what you’ve got. And right then, right when I’m thinking that—I swear—the clouds break up a bit and even though she’s gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

The muted voice offers gentle guidance from behind an inch of hollow door, all that separates this embarrassing and gymnastic feat from the perfumed cheek of the woman who bore her. She sits defeated on the toilet, applicator in hand, and calls her mother in.

Since 2006, Wilson has logged more than 800 entries: a curly-haired woman wearing a white backpack reading Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote; a Hispanic teenager reading Unbearable Lightness by Portia de Rossi; a black man in his fifties wearing a forest-green sweater reading A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne. Recently, Seen Reading went global via Twitter, gathering sightings reported by literary voyeurs in Thunder Bay, Winnipeg, Halifax, and Singapore, and in spring 2012, Calgary-based Freehand Books will publish a book based on the project.

Wilson sees Seen Reading as “an impressive, open-ended display of anecdotal evidence that proves people still read, still read paper books, still read in public as entertainment.” She’s made influencers of readers who, though they may not know it, are producing culture through the act of reading. Considering the publishing industry’s current troubles, BM&A’s unflagging enthusiasm is heartening. A new returns policy instituted by Indigo Books & Music will soon see Canada’s largest retail book chain sending books back to publishers 45 days after they’ve been ordered, slicing in half the long-standing 90-day returns term. That means some books will have only a month and a half to make an impact on readers, an impossibly small window in a very busy season. Some larger publishers, like McClelland & Stewart, who just released Michael Ondaatje’s new novel, The Cat’s Table, have less to worry about. Others, whose fall lists centre on newer voices, may have more of an uphill battle.

“In all your other relationships you’d practice more care, but publishing you truly can’t ever stop trying,” says Wilson of book marketing today. “You’ll turn that book into whatever you think the reader wants: ‘You want a blonde? I can be a blonde!’” As bricksand-mortar bookshelves disappear, some advocate for a re-emphasis on book criticism as a way to keep the conversation going. The reality, though, is that the space available for book reviews in major media outlets doesn’t allow for the considered criticism the New York Times Magazine’s Sam Anderson refers to as the “ground zero of textuality.”

The idea of a professional fan may not jibe with notions of how we receive books. But in building a book community that explores the manifold ways people interact with books, BM&A is doing readers and the publishing industry a great service, reinvigorating the lives books have off the shelf.

Another way Wilson is accomplishing this is through work with the Canadian Bookshelf project, a government-funded database of Canadian books. Its goal is to build community around Canadian titles through customized portals aimed at the general public, film and television producers, teachers and librarians. Wilson blogs about books and authors, and runs a personal-shopper program that matches readers with books based on five self-submitted descriptors, filling the gap left as more curated independent bookstores disappear. The realm of professional book fan keeps growing.

Engler’s book sheds light on several of the skeletons harbored in the closet of Canada’s foreign relations record. While the book may be an alternative to the political posturing of our government–and much of the mainstream media’s slanted coverage–it may also be a difficult pill for wool-eyed idealists to swallow.

Canada is often seen as—to quote Salutin—the “backwaters of empire,” an innocent bystander to the bullying tactics of the nation’s southern neighbours. Engler points out that while nearly nine out of ten Canadians view this country as a benevolent force in the world, the truth isn’t always so kind. Engler’s book draws attention to some lesser known fragments of Canada’s diplomatic past and present: its undermining of the democratically elected Aristide government in Haiti; its role in overthrowing Salvador Allende and subsequent support of the Pinochet regime in Chile; piggybacking on Uncle Sam in the Middle East and even supporting South African Apartheid.

At his book’s launch, Engler spoke of the ideal Canada—one  whose foreign policy initiatives would be centered upon being good neighbours as opposed to self-interest. While Engler insists that he is not an expert in foreign policy he points out that, as a journalist, “informing citizens about what their governments, corporations and other institutions are doing is a central task.” Engler writes: “The goal of this book is to reveal a side of international relations that our governments and corporations have kept hidden from the vast majority of us. This black book, unlike a secret list of girlfriends kept by a lothario, has a progressive purpose: To inspire Canadians to demand change.”