Literature

Experimental children’s book goes against the grain – and kids love it

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Jan 2024 20:35:08 +0000

Experimental children’s book goes against the grain – and kids love it

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 01/31/2024 - 15:35

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Michael Gayle participates in a Q-and-A at a Toronto bookstore with his children’s book Krumpp’s First Taste on the shelves behind him (photo by Samar Salman)

Alexa Battler

Topic

City & Culture

Alumni

Literature

��ϲ�� Scarborough

Subheadline

Written by ��ϲ�� alum Michael Gayle, Krumpp’s First Taste has a darker feel and doesn't shy away from complex words and less familiar references

A cover featuring only black text on a red background. Pages of intricate, gothic illustrations drawn entirely in black and white. Big words, a freewheeling rhyming scheme and an ugly main character who hates almost everything in the world – most of all, children.

It doesn’t sound like a recipe for a successful kids’ book – but Michael Gayle says the response to Krumpp’s First Taste suggests children love the unconventional.

“The positive reactions I get from students only makes me want to experiment even more with the genre,” says Gayle, an alumnus of the ��ϲ�� Scarborough who writes under the pen name Magic Mike.

He published Krumpp’s First Taste last January and spent the year travelling across Europe and North America to perform readings and workshops in schools, where he got to see first-hand how children were reacting to his genre-bending creation.

The book tells the tale of Krumpp, a seemingly incorrigible grump, and Petunia, a little girl determined to cheer him up. Despite Gayle’s darker, Tim-Burton-esque visual style, Petunia looks far closer to what one would expect in a kid’s book – beaming smile, fluffy hair, massive puppy-dog eyes. Krumpp, by contrast, exudes misanthropy. With a hunched back and wearing vintage formalwear, his goblin-like face is dominated by his furrowed brow and deep frown.

He’s also the character kids gravitate toward most.

“The childhood personality is curious,” Gayle says. “There is a slightly forbidden nature to Krumpp, being as beastly and misshapen as he is for a lead picture book character, that I think deeply provokes their intrigue – theirs and adults’ interest, too.”

The two main character's of Gayle's latest work, Petunia, left, and the titular Krumpp (illustrations by Michael Gayle)

In the era of the iPad, books are already a tough sell and children’s book authors need to sway both kids and their parents, Gayle says. So, he set out to create a book any adult could find substance in – one that would transcend a target age group while still belonging in the picture book section. It’s led to the most praise of his three books and landed him seats as a panellist at events across North America.

Gayle packed the book with references to theatre and fine art – and he didn’t shy from complex words like “curmudgeon.” He also sporadically breaks into French and alludes to things that may not be on children’s radar, from loam to capers.

“A great takeaway from the last year has been the confirmation that kids care a lot less about how neatly something fits into a genre, than the experience you’re offering being one they find compelling and fun,” he says.

Not everyone gets what he’s doing, which Gayle says is perfectly fine. His style is so outside the box that his book has been placed in the graphic novel section in some bookstores and has been outright rejected by others.

Michael Gayle shares his work with students at Internacional Aravaca in Madrid, Spain (supplied image)

Gayle capped a hectic year of travel and events with a December signing and Q-and-A at a Toronto bookstore (he's embarking on a reading tour in Western Canada this spring). One audience member asked whether the book is black and white because it’s told through Krumpp’s eyes, suggesting his (initially) miserable world is devoid of colour.

Gayle, however, says he made the choice simply because it felt right for the story, but notes that unpredictable insights are a plus to making something that’s left open to interpretation.

“The stories I’ve written are the products of what has come most naturally to me to make at those moments,” he says. “I think it would sound more impressive if I lied and said these were all calculated steps to try to upend the genre. That idea doesn’t inspire me.

“I’m just a curious person, like the audience I write for, and want to see what treasures might be floating about at the bleeding edges of this thing that I love.”

Margaret Atwood reveals she’s writing a memoir: NBC’s Today

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 08 Mar 2023 16:20:26 +0000

Margaret Atwood reveals she’s writing a memoir: NBC’s Today

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 03/08/2023 - 11:20

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(image courtesy of David Fernandez, Fisher Library)

Topic

Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library

��ϲ�� Libraries

Victoria College

Her bibliography includes more than 50 titles spanning fiction, poetry and essays, but author Margaret Atwood says she’s tackling new terrain in her next book: her own story.

Atwood revealed on the NBC’s Today show that she’s working on a memoir – a project she’d previously denied any interest in tackling.

“That’s the kind of thing you say in your youth,” Atwood, 83, told host Jenna Bush Hager during an interview shot inside the ��ϲ��’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. “You say that when you’re maybe 70.”

Atwood – who completed her bachelor’s degree at Victoria College and was a ��ϲ�� writer-in-residence in 1972 – talked about her latest collection of short stories, Old Babes in the Wood, and leafed through selections from her extensive archives housed at Fisher, which may serve as a useful resource as Atwood turns her pen on herself. “You can’t just make stuff up,” she says.

Back in the studio, Bush Hager told her Today co-hosts she was excited to spend time with Atwood at her alma mater. “��ϲ�� was where Margaret did her undergrad, so it was very cool to be back there with her,” Bush Hager said, thanking Thomas Fisher for hosting the interview. “They very rarely let people film there, but of course, when the queen of Canadian literature comes, they roll out the red carpet.”

Watch the Today Interview

��ϲ�� researcher sheds new light on accusations against medieval poet Chaucer: New York Times

rahul.kalvapalle — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 21:01:19 +0000

��ϲ�� researcher sheds new light on accusations against medieval poet Chaucer: New York Times

rahul.kalvapalle Mon, 10/17/2022 - 17:01

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Geoffrey Chaucer, a14th-century English poet and author is depicted in a portrait from the Welsh Portrait Collection at the National Library of Wales (image via Getty Images)

Topic

Research & Innovation

Long-held assumption about 14^th-century English poet Geoffrey Chaucer are being challenged by new research co-led by the ��ϲ��’s Sebastian Sobecki and covered by The New York Times.

In a development that has rocked the world of medieval literary studies, Sobecki, a professor in the department of English in the Faculty of Arts & Science, and Euan Roger of the British National Archives unearthed court documents that they say establish that Chaucer and Cecily Chaumpaigne – who was previously believed to have accused Chaucer of rape – were in fact co-defendants in a labour case.

Sebastian Sobecki

The documents, discussed in The Chaucer Review, show that the case was brought by a Thomas Staundon, who accused Chaumpaigne of leaving his employment without his authorization to go work in Chaucer’s home. Sobecki and Roger found the key writ in the case, from 1379, in the records of the King’s Bench – the top criminal court in England at the time – held in a deep storage facility in a former salt mine in Cheshire in northwest England.

In a blog post discussing the discovery, Sobecki and Roger note that while it is “impossible to rule out an act of physical or sexual violence” or coercion around Chaumpaigne’s move from Staundon’s employment to Chaucer’s, the new evidence shows that the accusations against Chaucer “were not charges of rape, and they probably did not refer to a physical abduction (or at least there is no evidence for this among the court’s records), but rather related to a labour dispute.”

However, Sobecki told the New York Times that the finding shouldn’t be used to discredit the feminist critiques of Chaucer, which is why he and the journal’s editors sought commentary from three eminent feminist scholars. In their article, Sobecki and Roger also emphasized that it remains vital to continue exploring how Chaucer “participated in hegemonic discourses that shaped the lives of all women.”

Read the New York Times article

Read the scholarly article in The Chaucer Review

‘Write the stories you want to read’: SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods

lanthierj — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 15:54:57 +0000

‘Write the stories you want to read’: SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods

lanthierj Fri, 12/10/2021 - 10:54

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(Photo by Sarah Bodri)

Don Campbell

Topic

Our Community

Department of English

Literature

��ϲ�� Scarborough

When SJ Sindu was younger, she couldn’t wait for her annual family vacations to Scarborough.

“Scarborough was a completely different world to where I grew up,” says Sindu, an assistant professor in the department of English at ��ϲ�� Scarborough.

“You could go to Tamil stores, get Tamil food, and just be surrounded by Tamilness. That was very meaningful to me.”

She says her early experiences – growing up in a conflict zone, immigrating to the U.S. and exploring her own identity as a Tamil living in the mostly white, suburban town of Amherst, Mass. – were instrumental in shaping her voice as an author.

Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, tells the story of Lucky and her husband Krishna, who married to hide the fact they are gay from their conservative Sri Lankan-American families. Her new novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, follows Kalki, a boy born with blue skin and black blood who is believed to be the reincarnation of Vishnu. He begins to doubt his divinity as his personal life and relationships fall apart, then moves to New York where he becomes embedded in the underground punk scene.

Published in Canada by Penguin Random House, the book was described by Roxane Gay as a brilliant novel “that will take hold of you and never let you go” and received glowing reviews in The Guardian and The New York Times among others. It will launch at Glad Day Books as part of their Naked Heart Festival on Dec. 18.

UTSC News spoke to Sindu about her early influences and how faith, identity and family continue to shape her writing.

How have your early influences shaped you as a writer?

I was born and lived in the northeast part of Sri Lanka until I was seven years old. A lot of my childhood and early years were shaped by the war, and being a Tamil living in Jaffna during the war.

The other was immigrating to the U.S. I was very much isolated as a kid. There were other Indians around, but there weren’t Sri Lankan Tamils. So I read a lot of books and escaped into stories. It was a way to cope with being taken out of a war situation and put into this very suburban American life without any peers or ways to explore my own identity.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I didn’t really start writing until I was in university. In fact, I started out in computer science and then fell in love with creative writing. I just loved the potential that writing fiction had for communicating the ideas that were obsessing me.

Where did the inspiration for Blue-Skinned Gods come from?

Partly the inspiration came because I lost my faith in religion. I was raised Hindu, and as a teenager I started to lose my faith and began to explore atheism. At the same time, my family became increasingly religious. So I wanted to explore that relationship.

I also saw a documentary by Vikram Ghandi called Kūmāré where he pretends to be an Indian guru and ends up gathering this large following. I was also closely watching the growing popularity of the BJP, a right-wing nationalist party in India, and interested in exploring what it meant to have a strain of fundamentalist Hindus on the rise in India and how that might affect the region.

In your first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, you also explore themes of identity, sexuality, faith and family. Why do those themes inspire your writing?

There are things I’m still trying to work out in my own life. I’m trying to figure out my relationship with my family, especially my extended family now that I’m living in Toronto. How to be part of a family that fundamentally rejects parts of who I am – the queerness, the atheism, the progressive beliefs I hold. Negotiating that with the older family members has been interesting. I’m still trying to figure it out, and I think I explore those things in my writing.

Did you have a favourite book, or one that influenced you as a writer?

There are two. The first is The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. It was the first novel I read where I realized that I should and could write about my experiences with war. It’s the book that made me want to be a writer.

The second is Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. For the first time I saw Tamilness and queerness explored together, and that was very important to see, especially in my development as a writer.

What advice do you have for your students and aspiring writers?

Write the stories you want to read. Many of my students at UTSC are racialized, many are from immigrant families, and they haven’t read a lot of stories that reflect that experience. I hope they can be inspired to write about their own experiences.

Being Black in the World: With new essay collection, Ian Williams explores experiences with anti-Black racism

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 21:14:33 +0000

Being Black in the World: With new essay collection, Ian Williams explores experiences with anti-Black racism

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 10/06/2021 - 17:14

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(Photo by Justin Morris)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Humanities

Literature

When Ian Williams was in Grade 6, a teacher told him that he shouldn’t attempt to play the French horn because the mouthpiece was too small for him. He understood that to mean that his lips were too big for the horn.

Though just 11 years old, Williams says he vividly remembers the feeling of unease – a new uncomfortable awareness that by being Black he was somehow different from his classmates.

“That sticks,” says Williams. “If you constantly learn about your race in these negative kinds of contexts, you're constantly off balance for the rest of your life, always pointing back to that experience.”

It would be the first of countless incidents when Williams was subjected to racism – often in the form of a small comment, gesture or look. He says each one of these events, which continue to this day, impacts how he moves through life, taking up valuable mental and emotional space.

Williams, an awarding-winning novelist and poet, and an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of English, has sought to capture how these experiences shaped his life and his state of mind in Disorientation: Being Black in the World, his most recent book.

This essay collection was shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction. The winner is scheduled to be announced Nov. 3 and will take home a $60,000 prize.

Some of the essays are analytical and theoretical, covering such topics as institutional whiteness, blame culture and achieving tangible change when no one feels responsible for the systemic structures of the past.

But most are personal essays that chart Williams’s course through the world and the different receptions to his body and his presence.

“I suggest that when Black folk recognize or are informed that they're Black, it's a profoundly disorienting experience,” says Williams, who previously won the 2019 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel Reproduction.

Disorientation was born out of a difficult summer in 2020 that included massive wildfires around Vancouver, where Williams was living at the time, a steady stream of racial violence and justice movements happening south of the border – as well as the global COVID-19 pandemic.

“All of these things happening in the world, it felt apocalyptic,” he says.

Amid this steady barrage of bad news, Williams felt compelled to share his experiences of being Black. As well, with so much attention being paid to racial tensions in the United States, Williams wanted to offer his perspective on racism in Canada.

“All of this media about killings, shootings, the ‘Karens’ – all of this analysis was coming up from America,” he says. “As Canadians, we tend to not centre the discussion on the Canadian landscape.

“What does race and racism look like in a middle-class suburban landscape with no bullets flying, without chokeholds? What are the tiny indignities that Black people face that multiply and accrue over time in Canada? If we can identify them, maybe we can start to address them.”

These smaller scale incidents never make the news, but they’re no less damaging and impactful, says Williams, who recalls hurtful events from every chapter of his life.

“Like walking into the department store at 16 and having the attendant look at you suspiciously because of who you are,” he says. “And this happens in elevators, in hallways – it happens all over the place.”

What’s not visible, he adds, is the constant mental assessing and processing of situations – a never-ending analysis of the environment.

“You're always receiving information about whether you're welcome or not,” says Williams. “‘Can I actually stay in this coffee shop today? Because last week, I couldn't.’

“There all of these tiny negotiations that constantly happen. And it's never just a single event. It’s all of the history that we carry with us from these constantly disorienting moments. Every time one of them happens, we get slapped in the face.”

Such incidents continue to be part of Williams’s everyday life.

“A few days ago, I’m playing tennis in Vancouver,” says Williams. “And the people on the next court only addressed my white tennis partner.”

Several times, when their ball rolled onto the adjacent court, Williams says he held up his racket and waved, asking politely for the ball back. They acted like he didn’t exist.

“Now you can say, no big deal, right? And in that moment, it would be hard for me to prove that that is a particularly racist occurrence. It’s those kinds of things that we don't want to talk about as racist activity because they’re so tiny, but that’s what racism looks like in Canada.”

The mental effort it takes to recover from these constant reminders of one's race is taxing, says Williams. “While other people move from interaction to interaction, we have to do this processing and figuring out what went wrong,” he says.

“So many of my Black friends are exhausted in a way that’s not linked to their jobs or anything. It's just linked to like being Black in the world and trying to understand and shield themselves and their loved ones from these constant impositions. If this happened to you on a weekly basis, it would wear you down.”

Despite the obvious challenges and injustices, Williams insists Disorientation is not about laying blame or pointing fingers.

“I want to create a conversational space for us to talk about race in Canada in ways that are not punitive or didactic, but just open, transparent and sincere,” he says. “I'm not the race guru, I'm not the expert on Blackness. I just want to bring our racial experiences forward and have readers understand what we're doing to each other and what systemic things are doing to all of us.”

And to achieve this, he felt nonfiction was the right choice.

“I wanted to address the reader directly without the artifice of fiction, I wanted to talk directly to somebody in their living room,” he says.

“There are many ways I could talk about race, I can code it into a character, I can create hypothetical situations, create poetry. And I've done that. But just for a moment in my career, I wanted to pause with the imaginative and just deal with the real.”

Multi-language ��ϲ�� project celebrates 700th anniversary of Dante's death

Christopher.Sorensen — Wed, 31 Mar 2021 14:52:36 +0000

Multi-language ��ϲ�� project celebrates 700th anniversary of Dante's death

Christopher.Sorensen Wed, 03/31/2021 - 10:52

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Dante displays the incipit Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita in a detail of Domenico di Michelino's painting, Florence, 1465 (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Peter Boisseau

Topic

Our Community

Alumni

Faculty of Arts & Science

St. Michael's College

Trinity College

The department of Italian studies in the ��ϲ��’s Faculty of Arts & Science is leading a project that will see most of the cantos of Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno read in more than 30 different languages – including, for the first time, Indigenous languages.

The Toronto Salutes Dante project, timed for the 700th anniversary of the Italian poet’s death, includes readings from the best-known section of the epic poem, Divine Comedy, in Farsi, Arabic, Swedish, Portuguese, Mandarin, American Sign Language, Russian, Slovak, Thai, Spanish, Bulgarian, German, Ukrainian and Sanskrit, as well as French, Latin, English, Italian and 10 Italian dialects.

The opening 30 lines of the first canto of The Inferno will be read in Anishinaabemowin by translator Matthias Nunno, a member of the Ojibways of Garden River First Nation who is of both Italian and Ojibway heritage. The last section of the final passage will be read in Stoney Nakoda by translator Trent Fox, a doctoral student in education at the University of Calgary who identifies as Îethka.

Both Indigenous translations were prepared specifically for the project.

“We are honoured to be able to start in Anishinaabemowin and conclude with a passage in Stoney Nakoda,” says Nicholas Terpstra, the interim Emilio Goggio chair in Italian Studies, which is largely funding the project. “The idea of starting and finishing with Indigenous languages was something we thought was particularly important in Canada.

“While Dante has been translated into many different languages, he hadn't been translated into Indigenous languages until now – so these are the first ever done.”

Organizers recruited community members, professors, students and alumni to read the cantos and share their thoughts about Dante and the canto they chose. ��ϲ�� alumna and former Governor General of Canada Adrienne Clarkson – who earned her bachelor of arts in English language and literature in 1960 as a member of Trinity College, a master of arts in 1962 and an honorary doctor of law in 2001 – will be among the performers.

Clarkson, who learned Italian as a doctoral student and has a special passion for Dante, will read the entire first canto in English, including the portion previously read in Anishinaabemowin.

The canto texts will also be available for download from the department’s website in Italian, English and the language its performer chose for the reading.

The canto readings are being posted at regular intervals on the department’s YouTube channel. The first video was posted on March 25, the traditional New Year’s Day in medieval Florence, where Dante was born in 1265. The series will conclude in June.

The March 25 start date is also significant because it marks the day Dante enters The Inferno, the first canticle of The Divine Comedy, which also includes two other sections: Purgatorio and Paradiso.

The Toronto Salutes Dante project is the brainchild of Terpstra, Associate Professor Elisa Brilli and ��ϲ�� alumnus George Ferzoco, who earned his bachelor of arts in philosophy in 1980 as a member of St. Michael’s College.

The Emilio Goggio visiting professor for the spring 2021 term in the department of Italian Studies, Ferzoco had established a tradition while teaching in the U.K. of having his students read Dante aloud to better appreciate the poem and get over their shyness around speaking Italian.

“Like most poetry, Dante is meant to be read aloud,” says Ferzoco, a visiting fellow at the Calgary Institute for the Humanities. Through the University of Calgary’s vice-provost for Indigenous engagement, he arranged for the translation by Fox of the final passage of The Inferno into Stoney Nakoda.

“I thought, ‘Well, I'm from Toronto, which is such a multicultural city. I'm in the Italian department. Can I bring something to my visiting professorship, and can it reflect the culture of the city, and indeed the country?’”

An acclaimed Dantista for her research and publications, Brilli has made ��ϲ�� an international centre for Dante studies through a series of annual seminars. Two years ago, the Dante Society of America held its annual meeting in Toronto, the first time the society has held a meeting outside the United States since its founding in 1881.

“Toronto Salutes Dante is rooted in research done at the ��ϲ�� and the events we’ve held here, like the first-ever meeting of the Dante Society of America in Canada in 2019, and my 'Dante. Les vies Nouvelles’ Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council project,” says Brilli.

“I warmly hope this new endeavour will foster collaboration among scholars, students and our community of alumni, and the broader audience interested in Dante.”

While the bulk of funding for Toronto Salutes Dante comes from the Goggio Chair, community sponsors of the project include the Istituto Italiano di Cultura di Toronto (Italian Cultural Institute of Toronto) and Villa Charities.

In February, ��ϲ�� hosted an international event for the Italo-Indigenous community called Indigenous-Italian Canadian Connections: Starting a Conversation that was led by people of Indigenous-Italian-Canadian heritage. The event included more than 100 participants from five countries – Canada, the United States, Italy, Spain and Costa Rica. It launched a year-long research and community project at the Italian studies department’s Frank Iacobucci Centre for Italian-Canadian Studies that will include a workshop in May and a conference next year.

Jane Austen a polite, safe read? Not according to ��ϲ��’s Tom Keymer

Christopher.Sorensen — Tue, 30 Mar 2021 14:36:08 +0000

Jane Austen a polite, safe read? Not according to ��ϲ��’s Tom Keymer

Christopher.Sorensen Tue, 03/30/2021 - 10:36

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Tom Keymer, a ��ϲ�� University Professor of English, recently wrote a book about Jane Austen that explores her work and, among other things, whether she should be considered a conservative or radical writer (photo courtesy of Tom Keymer)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Literature

It’s difficult to imagine the original manuscript of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice being used as kindling for a fire, tossed into the flames one by one. But the ��ϲ��’s Tom Keymer says it’s a likely scenario.

Why? Austen wasn’t a celebrity author in her time – and manuscripts, once printed, were typically discarded.

“Just think of how much it would be worth now,” he says.

Keymer – a University Professor and Chancellor Jackman Professor of English at in the Faculty of Arts & Science’s department of English – recently wrote his own book about Austen’s work and hopes.

It’s titled Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics and Keymer hopes it sparks even more interest in the influential writer whose books are still adored and continue to be the inspiration for movies, television series and just about every other form of entertainment.

“I wasn't writing completely in my comfort zone,” says Keymer, whose previous book, Poetics of the Pillory, was about 17th- and 18th-century censorship. “And I think that can help when you're pushing yourself into slightly new territory.”

Jane Austen: Writing, Society, Politics introduces Austen’s six major novels, exploring key themes of her work, narrative techniques and the social and historical context of her fiction. He also touches on her relationship to the writing marketplace of her time, noting “although she's one of the world's most popular classic authors, she found it very difficult to get into print. It took her at least 15 years.”

“It's a short book and I’m trying to reach out to address a much broader audience,” Keymer says. “The idea is to give a general introduction to as many aspects of Jane Austen's writing as possible. But at the same time, I’m also trying to add to scholarly debates as well.”

One of those debates is whether Austen can be categorized as a conservative or radical writer. In many ways she’s both, according to Keymer.

“She writes novels with happy endings which can be seen as reaffirmations of the social status quo,” he says. “The heroine gets married, her identity is absorbed into that of her upper-class land-owning husband. And it seems to be a reaffirmation of a hierarchical society.”

But Keymer feels it’s a misconception that [Austen's] a polite, safe read. Writing in the wake of the French Revolution, she blends her own subtle statements and views on society, relationships and even politics with literary trends and traditions that enabled her work to be published.

“She walks that tightrope, but like any novelist she’s able to think in multiple ways at the same time,” says Keymer. “I think she is very conflicted. She is very divided. She's got genuine conservative impulses. She's got genuine radical impulses, and they're coming together in tremendously interesting ways.”

Equally alluring and enduring is her ability to speak to readers about the constraints of society for women.

“She gives you these full and compassionate views of women in disadvantaged social and economic circumstances, trying to navigate their way through them – often in very highly regulated societies, confronting conventions and expectations that prevent her characters really achieving much freedom of movement.”

Austen paints a distinctively 18th-century picture of how women should conduct themselves and of the barriers they face. For example, women would rarely inherit property and remained dependent on male relatives if unmarried with few career possibilities.

“These are all things that characters find ways of dealing with, and Austen finds ways of writing about,” says Keymer. “And that's something that I think speaks to readers and speaks to young readers in societies all over the world.”

The world’s love affair with Austen’s work continues. More than 20 movies have been made that are based on her books. Anyone who has seen the 1995 movie Clueless watched an adaptation of Austen’s novel Emma.

While some movies closely follow Austen’s plots and characters and attempt to be historically accurate, others take far-reaching artistic liberties such as the 2016 horror film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Keymer personally found the YouTube video Jane Austen’s Fight Club very funny.

As for books, there’s the 2009 parody novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the 2009 novel Jane Bites Back with Austen returning to modern day as a vampire. And if you enjoy reading Austen with a beverage, there’s Gin Austen: 50 Cocktails to Celebrate the Novels of Jane Austen.

“There are a lot of these very amusing things,” says Keymer. “It’s a sign of her incredible popularity that you can sell something just by arbitrarily yoking the idea to Jane Austen.”

In fact, there are few writers from 200 years ago, Keymer says, that continue to have such a massive global following – and an audience that continues to grow.

“And that's why she's such a pleasure to teach,” says Keymer. “She's such a great thing for undergraduates to work from because there are so many little nuances and these clever little ticking time bombs in Austen that will suddenly go off.

“Even though there are only six novels – she died in her early forties so it’s a limited corpus – it’s so rich. There's so much still to discuss and debate.”

'I feel hope': A devastating diagnosis prompted ��ϲ�� alumna Natalie Jenner to pick up the pen

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 07 Jan 2021 15:51:05 +0000

'I feel hope': A devastating diagnosis prompted ��ϲ�� alumna Natalie Jenner to pick up the pen

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 01/07/2021 - 10:51

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Natalie Jenner, an alumna of ��ϲ��'s Faculty of Law, published her debut novel The Jane Austen Society last spring. It's now being translated into 18 different languages (photo by Sarah Sims)

Topic

St. Michael's College

Five years ago, ��ϲ�� alumna Natalie Jenner decided to pursue a passion project: a bookstore in Oakville, Ont. But shortly after opening, her husband was diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and terminal condition impacting the lungs.

“The majority of people diagnosed with this disease will pass away within two to three years of diagnosis,” says Jenner, a graduate of ��ϲ��’s Faculty of Law and St. Michael’s College. “My husband has outlived those statistics so far.”

To cope with the devastating diagnosis, Jenner turned to her favourite author: Jane Austen. She read the author’s six novels, delved further into Austen’s life and even visited the cottage in Chawton, England where Austen worked on or wrote all six of her major novels during her final years.

“My respect for Austen is boundless in terms of what her books can give you,” says Jenner. “They regenerate and give you different things at different stages in life.”

Austen – and her works – inspired Jenner to write her own novel, which was published last spring. The Jane Austen Society tells the story of a group of villagers – a doctor, a lawyer, a teacher, servant girl, a farmer, an heiress, a Sotheby's auctioneer and a Hollywood film star – who come together at the end of the Second World War to save Austen’s cottage before it is sold off to a developer. It was released last year.

As a work of historical fiction, only the book’s setting is real. The two Chawton structures featured in the story have been saved by ongoing real-life efforts and are now both public institutions.

As in her book, Jenner says a group of people met in someone's living room and decided to save the cottage – but were unable to raise the funds during the war. After it was over, a grief-stricken villager who had lost his son in battle bought and donated the cottage in his son’s memory.

“I felt the weight of history and the beauty of what was around me, and from that, I must have derived some sense of hope,” says Jenner, recalling a visit to Chawton.

“The whole time I'm reading Austen and researching her, I wasn't doing it thinking I was going to write about her at all. I was doing it purely to distract myself. I am so happy I had that light bulb moment, where I said to my family, ‘I'm ready to write again’. My husband is stable. We don't know what's around the corner. But I feel hope.

“I think through [writing] this book, [I was] able to explore grief, actively living with grief, and that moment when you decide to re-engage with life again.”

The Jane Austen Society has received several accolades, including runner-up for best historical fiction in Goodreads’ Choice Awards for Best Books of 2020 and a finalist in the debut novel category.

The novel has been sold for translation in 18 different languages.

“I never thought I'd say these words, but just being nominated is an honour in itself,” says Jenner. “The company that you're next to is such a thrill when it happens.”

Jenner previously worked as a corporate lawyer in downtown Toronto. She says her inspiration to study law came from seeing the 1973 film The Paper Chase.

“We didn't know any lawyers. They were arguing contracts law [in the film], and I was fascinated. I looked at my mother and said, ‘I don't know what they're doing – but I want to do that when I grow up.’”

After several years of practice, Jenner sought a new career path. For nearly 20 years, she worked as a career coach to national law firms.

Following her husband’s diagnosis, she closed her just-opened bookstore to focus on his health and her coaching work was put on-hold to focus on her book’s launch.

“I'm not quite ready to say that I won't be going back – I love being a coach for lawyers. I feel very lucky and blessed to have had a few careers.”

Although Jenner she says never thought The Jane Austen Society would be published – her first five novels had been rejected by agents – she has just sold her second book, which follows the later adventures of the society’s servant girl.

“We have not left our house since March because of my husband's lung health,” Jenner says. “That’s been, as everybody knows, incredibly trying. But I feel very grateful that I have this skill that I can use, whenever I want and whenever I need to.”

“This [past] year has taught everybody not only the importance of our health, but also to make the most of what we have.”

'Why don’t I just write?': Souvankham Thammavongsa on winning the Giller and her time at ��ϲ��

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 26 Nov 2020 17:58:39 +0000

'Why don’t I just write?': Souvankham Thammavongsa on winning the Giller and her time at ��ϲ��

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 11/26/2020 - 12:58

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Souvankham Thammavongsa, who studied English literature at New College, said going to school at ��ϲ�� gave her the confidence to follow her dream of being a writer (photo by Sarah Bodri)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Literature

New College

Poetry

Souvankham Thammavongsa, an alumna of the ��ϲ��’s Faculty of Arts & Science, recently won the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize for her book, How To Pronounce Knife.

The book was informed by her experiences growing up in Canada, where she arrived at the age of one. Her Laotian parents brought her to Toronto from a refugee camp in Thailand.

The collection of short stories is on Time magazine’s list of 100 Must-Read Books of 2020 and was named one of the best books of spring 2020 by the New York Times, Salon, the Millions and Vogue.

All of which has brought new-found attention to Thammavongsa, who earned her bachelor of arts degree from ��ϲ�� in 2003 as a member of New College.

While this is her first short story collection, Thammavongsa is also the author of four books of poetry, including the 2013 Trillium Book Award for Poetry winner Light. The other three books are Found, Cluster and 2004 ReLit Award-winner Small Arguments, which she wrote as an undergraduate student at ��ϲ��.

Thammavongsa’s fiction has appeared in Harper's, Granta, the Atlantic, the Paris Review, Ploughshares, the Best American Nonrequired Reading, the Journey Prize Stories and the O. Henry Prize Stories.

Writer Peter Boisseau recently chatted with Thammavongsa about the Giller, her writing and time at ��ϲ��.

Congratulations for winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize! How does it feel?

It feels kind of strange because there's what you want, what you wish for and what you hope for – and often they don't arrive at the same time.

What does it mean for your writing to be recognized in this way?

I do notice that people outside of literature, people whose lives don't revolve around books or publishing or writing – they're paying attention. I've seen tweets from Canadians living in Tanzania about how excited they are. It’s lovely seeing people say they're so proud to be Canadian in the same way that I feel proud to be Canadian.

Tell us about your writing process?

I've been doing this for 25 years. I care about the word after the word after the word. I think about it all the time.

In the forms that I work in, poetry and short fiction, there's this idea that these things don't sell. But as a writer, I'm not afraid of those market forces. All I care about is that readers who read what I write, feel what I write.

I get asked a lot, “What is the difference between a short story and a novel?” And I always say, “A short story can give you anything a novel can, but it doesn't take up your time.”

Writers, when they talk about process, they're always talking about how they do it all the time, like they have to prove they’re nine-to-five. But I feel it's okay not to write, to have a life. Just because you don't put pen to paper nine-to-five doesn't mean you're not a writer.

How did ��ϲ�� help prepare you? Have you kept any lessons from ��ϲ�� in mind as an author?

I majored in English literature because that's what I wanted to do, but I also took courses in geography, epistemology and metaphysics. I loved that about ��ϲ��; because arts and science are together, when you're an arts student, you can take some of those science classes.

It made me love literature more. Maybe in science it's good and wonderful to be able to bring dinosaurs back to life, but it's English literature that tells you maybe that's not a good idea. It’s English literature that teaches you to think about humanity.

We had an anthology called 15 Canadian Poets x 2, and I just thought it was amazing that some of the people we were reading were working in the English department at ��ϲ��. Or I could walk on campus and I might run into Margaret Atwood, because she was giving a reading or something, and I just thought how young and alive Canadian literature was. That was such joy.

I went to the best school in the country, and that made me so confident. I wanted to be a writer and I thought, why don’t I just write?

When you're at ��ϲ��, you have the best professors in the country and I just felt I could do so much. My first book was published when I was an undergrad there. And I am really proud to be to have been a New College student.

What's next for you? Are you working on anything new?

I'm working on a novel. I wrote it in six weeks, a year ago. I watched a Margaret Atwood video and she said, “Just get it down and keep going.” So that's what I did. Now I have a draft and I know what's wrong with it, what I have to fix. But the other thing is, now there's an expectation. I feel like readers are waiting and I've never written under that kind of attention or scrutiny.

Author and alumnus Cody Caetano says Indigenous Voices Award win signals he's 'on the right path'

Christopher.Sorensen — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:56:18 +0000

Author and alumnus Cody Caetano says Indigenous Voices Award win signals he's 'on the right path'

Christopher.Sorensen Thu, 10/22/2020 - 10:56

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Cody Caetano won the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for best unpublished prose in English for excerpts from his debut memoir Half-Bads in White Regalia, which will hit bookstores in spring 2022 (photo by Kris Caetano)

Topic

Faculty of Arts & Science

Indigenous

Literature

��ϲ�� Mississauga

Cody Caetano’s debut memoir won’t hit bookstores until spring 2022 – but it’s already getting noticed.

The ��ϲ�� alumnus from the Faculty of Arts & Science recently won the 2020 Indigenous Voices Award for best unpublished prose in English for excerpts from Half-Bads in White Regalia. The news comes shortly after a seven-bid auction for the memoir’s publishing rights, which were acquired by Penguin Canada’s Hamish Hamilton imprint.

As an undergraduate student, Caetano double majored in English and professional writing and communication, earning his honours bachelor of arts degree from ��ϲ�� Mississauga in 2017. He graduated from ��ϲ��’s Master of Arts in English in the Field of Creative Writing program in 2019.

Caetano is a writer, editor and teacher of Anishinaabe and Portuguese descent. He is an enrolled member of Pinaymootang First Nation and lives in Toronto. In 2019, his short collection of poems called Pleasure Dome Poems was published by Knife Fork Book under their BIPOC/Queer imprint, and his work has appeared in publications such as PRISM International and The Hart House Review. He’s also the former editor-in-chief of UTM Mindwaves: The Professional Writing & Communication’s Creative Non-Fiction Journal. Caetano is currently working on his second memoir, The Cancelling of Captain Pleasure Dome.

Congratulations on winning an Indigenous Voices Award! What was your reaction when you heard the news?

I found out during the live stream on TV. Even though I saw that I had won, it didn’t hit me until an hour or two later. There is this conspiracy theory I’ve hung onto forever that winners are told in advance, but it was such an honour to be wrong. Many of the jurors and nominees are some of my favourite writers, so it feels like I am on the right path if I am getting recognized by and amongst them.

What inspired you to write Half-Bads in White Regalia?

It feels more honest to say that Half-Bads in White Regalia inspired the writing, rather than the other way around. It began one night when I was 16 and up late like always. I was about to finish reading The Glass Castle. After the last page, I pulled out my journal to write down my intentions for “The Story,” which developed over the course of nine years before it became Half-Bads in White Regalia.

While my intentions have certainly popcorned over the last nine years, the kernels remain the same: to write a book for my generation of readers and writers – something that makes my family proud.

There was a seven-bid auction for your memoir's publishing rights. How did it feel to know there was so much interest in your book?

It makes me feel fortunate more than anything else. My agent called me the next day and told me it was the first time she had received an intent to offer on a submission in 24 hours. There were so many kind editors and publishers we spoke with, so it was hard to pick, but I'm so happy I went with David Ross at Hamish Hamilton. He just sent me the first round of edits and they are fantastic. He is getting me excited about my writing in brand new ways.

What drew you to the creative writing master's program at ��ϲ��, and how was your experience in the program?

I had first bookmarked the program's landing page on a whim in the summer of 2014, and had dreamt about getting in until I was admitted in the spring of 2017. Mind you, 2014 was just three years after I wrote that journal entry, and, by 2016, I had done enough writing during my undergraduate workshops to submit my application. I didn't have strong marks or an English specialist degree, but I had "The Story," which I never stopped brainstorming about.

In terms of my experience, it was nothing short of transformative. I got to hone my chops teaching and facilitating writing workshops, join a robust community of writers in Toronto, serve as an editor for Echolocation Magazine, publish a chapbook, run a circuit of readings and experience being a mentee with the one and only Lee Maracle, amongst countless other joys. The program and the faculty are so supportive and caring, and I met some of my best friends during it. I'll be talking about my experiences for a while, and I highly recommend it. The time in the program still feels like a dream.

Can you tell us about The Cancelling of Captain Pleasure Dome? Does the process of writing a second memoir differ from writing the first?

While I won't share too much just yet, I will mention The Cancelling of Captain Pleasure Dome is the second book in a tetralogy of books, and that it picks up where Half-Bads in White Regalia ends. If Half-Bads in White Regalia is The Hobbit of this tetralogy in terms of the vibe, then The Cancelling is The Empire Strikes Back.

What advice would you give to aspiring writers?

Write every day!

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'Why don’t I just write?': Souvankham Thammavongsa on winning the Giller and her time at ������ϲ�����

Author and alumnus Cody Caetano says Indigenous Voices Award win signals he's 'on the right path'

��ϲ�� researcher sheds new light on accusations against medieval poet Chaucer: New York Times

Multi-language ��ϲ�� project celebrates 700th anniversary of Dante's death

Jane Austen a polite, safe read? Not according to ��ϲ��’s Tom Keymer

'I feel hope': A devastating diagnosis prompted ��ϲ�� alumna Natalie Jenner to pick up the pen

'Why don’t I just write?': Souvankham Thammavongsa on winning the Giller and her time at ��ϲ��