Getting Lit with Linda - The Canadian Literature Podcast - You Have to Decide: Rita Wong's Forage and Clayton Thomas-Muller's Life in the City of Dirty Water

You Have to Decide: Rita Wong's Forage and Clayton Thomas-Muller's Life in the City of Dirty Water

02/11/22 • 23 min

Getting Lit with Linda - The Canadian Literature Podcast

Linda is delighted to be back for her third season of Getting Lit With Linda!

In this first episode of the season, she considers the movie, Don't Look Up (dir. by Adam McKay, 1.13, 2.49), the nature of satire (with reference to Mordecai Richler, 2.00, and Jonathan Swift, 2.11), and the looming environmental crisis. It's a topic that poet, Rita Wong (4.32) has addressed unflinchingly in her work, especially forage (published by Nightwood Editions, winner of the Dorothy Livesay Prize, 6.09). Linda recalls getting in touch with Wong when her former student, Morgan Cohen (5.25), used her work in an independent study (which has since gone on to be published). In so doing, Linda is shocked to discover Wong's legal entanglement (7.44), but, in the process, she realizes and is inspired by Wong, who has made a clear decision to be a land protector.

Appropriately, Clayton Thomas-Muller's book, Life in the City of Dirty Water (16.30) came to her attention while working on this episode--his work as an activist emerges from the realization that self-healing is essential to the process. This fascinating book has since been shortlisted for the Canada Reads competition, which includes the following writers this year:

Michelle Good's Five Little Indians
Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough
Esi Edugyan's Washington Black and
Omar El Akkad's What Strange Paradise

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Linda is delighted to be back for her third season of Getting Lit With Linda!

Michelle Good's Five Little Indians
Catherine Hernandez's Scarborough
Esi Edugyan's Washington Black and
Omar El Akkad's What Strange Paradise

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Previous Episode

Holiday Wishes & A Gift from the Archives - An Interview with Ali Hassan (from 2020)

Linda and several of this season's contributors--Chantel Lavoie, Marco Timpano, Amanda Barker, and Michael Nest--render their book recommendations for the holidays:

Ivan Coyote's Care Of
Margaret Atwood's The Door,
David Chariandy's I've Been Meaning to Tell You
Zoe Whittall's The Best Kind of People
Anne-Marie MacDonald's Fall on your Knees),

Linda offers her listeners a gift for the holidays - from the archives, her previously-unpublished interview with Ali Hassan, the host of Canada Reads. The interview, from 2020 (and Canada Reads 2020-2021), alludes to the background of the pandemic, which (alas!) remains relevant. Drawing back the curtain to allow us see the inner workings of Canada Reads, Ali Hassan offers interesting insights about this national literary competition and about his role in it.

Happy holidays everyone - The third season of Getting Lit with Linda will return in early February 2022.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Next Episode

Ever Receding Fruit: Wayde Compton, the Black Archive, and the Call for a Black Cultural Centre

In this episode, Linda has the great pleasure of chatting with Wayde Compton, the writer, scholar, publisher, and current Chair of Creative Writing at Douglas College (in New Westminster, BC). He is the author of several books, including 49th Parallel Psalm (finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize); Performance Bond; After Canaan: Essays on Race, Writing, and Region (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award); the graphic novel, The Blue Road; and The Outer Harbour (winner of the City of Vancouver Book Award). He has also edited two anthologies: Bluesprint: Black British Columbian Literature and Orature and The Revolving City: 51 Poems and the Stories Behind Them (finalist for the City of Vancouver Book Award).

During this interview, we also speak about

the Black population in Vancouver compared to that of Nova Scotia (17.15)
May Ayin (22)
the Black Cultural Archive (4.30 and 8)
What to read (and his own reading patterns, 30)

Compton is a co-founder of the Hogan’s Alley Memorial Project (8), an organization formed to raise awareness about the history of Vancouver’s black community, and was one of the co-founders of Commodore Books (11.40), with Karina Vernon and David Chariandy. For February, he has been an active social media presence, for Black History Month. If you follow him on Twitter—and if you don’t, we highly recommend that you do at @WaydeCompton – you’ll know that he’s been tweeting stories about people of African descent in Vancouver.

So, just in time for Black History Month, we hope you enjoy this interview with Wayde Compton.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.