Reading Wednesday
Oct. 19th, 2022 07:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabby Welp, I hit my 50-book goal, with a few months to go in the year. Yay me!
Just finished: The Strangers by Katherena Vermette. This was a compelling and haunting story of intergenerational trauma and the way institutions are structured to tear apart Indigenous families. It could have been a very depressing read, given the subject matter, and to a large degree it was, but the fraught, messy, but ultimately deeply rooted relationships between the Stranger women always kept the possibility of hope on the horizon. Beautifully written.
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez. As I mentioned before, I am automatically skeptical of things that claim to decolonize colonial institutions like, well, schools. But this was a hugely helpful book. While it is aimed at a different audience (writing workshop facilitators with a much greater degree of autonomy than a humble high school English teacher) there was so much in here that I can use both in my classroom and the way I approach pedagogy in general. I don't think the MFA/Iowa model exists in Canada to the degree that it does in the US—and it's certainly not used at the high school level—but it was fascinating to learn about it and the experience of BIPOC and working class authors within it. I'd highly recommend this not just for educators but for anyone interested in developing their writing and critiquing practice in general.
Currently reading: Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle For Truth by Elizabeth Williamson. This is not ordinarily the type of thing I read but it was highly and passionately recommended to me, and I can see why. This is a brilliant piece of journalism. Obviously, it is a horrible thing to read about—not just the massacre itself but the aftermath, the ways in which national attention compounded the parents' trauma and loss, and then of course the book's main focus, the campaign waged by Alex Jones and his acolytes to revictimize the families of the murdered children. But it is so compellingly written that I can't put it down, except that I have to go to work—you know, a place where the potential of school shootings always exists, and a place where truth is always contested.
Just finished: The Strangers by Katherena Vermette. This was a compelling and haunting story of intergenerational trauma and the way institutions are structured to tear apart Indigenous families. It could have been a very depressing read, given the subject matter, and to a large degree it was, but the fraught, messy, but ultimately deeply rooted relationships between the Stranger women always kept the possibility of hope on the horizon. Beautifully written.
The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom by Felicia Rose Chavez. As I mentioned before, I am automatically skeptical of things that claim to decolonize colonial institutions like, well, schools. But this was a hugely helpful book. While it is aimed at a different audience (writing workshop facilitators with a much greater degree of autonomy than a humble high school English teacher) there was so much in here that I can use both in my classroom and the way I approach pedagogy in general. I don't think the MFA/Iowa model exists in Canada to the degree that it does in the US—and it's certainly not used at the high school level—but it was fascinating to learn about it and the experience of BIPOC and working class authors within it. I'd highly recommend this not just for educators but for anyone interested in developing their writing and critiquing practice in general.
Currently reading: Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle For Truth by Elizabeth Williamson. This is not ordinarily the type of thing I read but it was highly and passionately recommended to me, and I can see why. This is a brilliant piece of journalism. Obviously, it is a horrible thing to read about—not just the massacre itself but the aftermath, the ways in which national attention compounded the parents' trauma and loss, and then of course the book's main focus, the campaign waged by Alex Jones and his acolytes to revictimize the families of the murdered children. But it is so compellingly written that I can't put it down, except that I have to go to work—you know, a place where the potential of school shootings always exists, and a place where truth is always contested.
The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones. This one has been on my radar for awhile. It's absolutely brilliant so far, one of those books where the prose is so phenomenal that I wonder why I bother to write at all. It's about four Blackfeet men who are haunted—literally, this is a horror novel—by an act that they committed a decade earlier. It's unsettling and visceral and everything a horror novel should be. If I have one critique, it's that the first of the men we meet, Ricky, has too similar an internal monologue to the second, Lewis, but everything else about it is so skillful that I'm wondering if that's on purpose. Other than that it's fantastic so far.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-19 05:52 pm (UTC)The Only Good Indians sounds really good. I've read Mongrels by the same author and really enjoyed it so I'll have to look into it. (I lovelovelove horror and especially horror that's not by random white guys, so.)
EDIT: To clarify that last bit, obviously a writer being from a minority doesn't automatically make their writing good and there's plenty of white guy horror I love! It's just that I like horror that draws on different perspectives and settings, it keeps things fresher and fully utilizes horror's potential IMO.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-19 10:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-10-19 05:58 pm (UTC)YES YES. I recced it to everyone, and people understandably recoiled from the idea, but the book is SO good and it's really not "just" about the massacre. I thought she wrote about that with great skill and tact and she doesn't focus on the shooter at all. That's so rare.
no subject
Date: 2022-10-19 10:59 pm (UTC)