As I have been spending a lot of time thinking about writing as a craft, I have also been reading about writing and writers.
In Pity The Reader, Suzanne McConnell writes about Kurt Vonnegut’s lessons on writing, and what she herself has learned. It’s an odd choice for me, given I’ve always meant to read Vonnegut but haven’t gotten around to it.
I picked it up during a visit to the Drama Book Shop in New York, which is a place that can fill a creative person head and blood with ideas and dreams.
In particular, I have been fascinated by a section of Pity The Reader in which McConnell mentions that she herself has taught a literature course to health care professionals–because of the power of reading to increase empathy.
The more we read, the better able we are to put ourselves in others’ shoes.
It also brought to mind a recent post I saw from writer Jen Sookfong Lee about the book Denison Avenue and the way it was critiqued on Canada Reads.
Jen Sookfong Lee’s own book Superfan was very meaningful to me in the ways that we were similar in pop culture icons but lived very different lives.
Her posts on Denison Avenue were interesting to me because I had previously heard Naheed Nenshi, the books champion, and its author Christina Wong on CBC radio together.
The interview made me want to pick up a copy of the book immediately. Sookfong Lee’s defence of it even more. What are books for if not to allow us to experience something we cannot experience in any other way?
In Canada we have a high literacy rate. The total literacy rate in the country is steady at about 99 per cent, which means that almost all of us can read and write. However, almost 50 per cent of Canadian adults score below high-school level literacy.
From ABC Life Literacy Canada:
Research shows that adults who have inadequate literacy skills are more likely to have poorer overall health, lower salaries, and lower levels of participation in their community.
In our world right now, in Canada and, I think, the United States, communities are a bit fractured. People are scared and angry, and they’re being told that their worldview is being challenged or threatened and that makes them more angry and more scared.
Overwhelmingly, most people don’t have the extreme opinion on any given topic, only the loudest ones, the angriest ones, and the ones who are the most threatened.
Overwhelmingly, when presented with a real person in a real situation, most people can feel empathy. The over-arching concept of abortion that they’ve been sold makes them furious, but the real woman who will die without one takes them aback.
They hate ‘the gays’ but then they meet someone who is just like them, living their life, someone they become friends with and whoops find out that guy is gay. But he’s so… normal?
Books can bring that normal to life in a wide-ranging, far-reaching way. I have been drawn into stories I never could have experiences through the devastation of novels like Five Little Indians by Michelle Good and The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill, which was re-titled Someone Knows My Name when it was published in the US, but was named after an actual list of slaves who escaped to British territory during the American Revolution, and settled in Nova Scotia.
A list that is part of the history of my country that I had never, ever heard of until I read this book. The book was created at the request of Sir Guy Carleton, and there is a school in my city named after him, but no history of Black slaves coming to Canada was ever taught to me.
I didn’t know until years after I graduated high school that the last residential school in Canada — the schools that caused the tragic outcomes of the characters in Five Little Indians — closed while I was still in high school.
1996
Not ancient history.
Demon Copperhead took me into a town destroyed by opioids and showed me how easy they make it to become addicted and how hard to stop once you start. How poverty can define everything part of your life no matter what your circumstances.
And that is the life some people are staring down when someone with big promises offers them easy answers. Someone who tells them that he understands their anger, that life is unfair, and gives them someone to blame, instead of making them feel stupid.
It’s no coincidence that these people selling them these promises is also banning books and limiting education. It’s a feature.