Maybe you remember Zora. I used to see her on St. Laurent selling jewellery and T-shirts and scraps of paper scribbled with art. In and out of bars and cafés, always alone, a storming shadow. Our eyes met once and I smiled. She stared, walked on.

So, when I saw her on Sunday, sitting in the garden of the American University campus in Cairo, I stopped. I’m not a student there but had taken to ducking into its gates to escape the clamour of the streets. Two children obscured her face, but I recognized the jet-black hair made grey with dirt, and the listless, arrogant slump of her body.

“I know you,” I said. “From Montreal.”

She squinted as the children ran back to their mother. Her voice was scratchy vinyl, a previous century, an emptied barrel of drink. She asked me when was I in Montreal last, was it cold, where did I live. Her arms and face twitched with delight that we frequented the same places and knew the same people.

As odd as she was, I was thrilled. I had been suspended in a waxy nothingness for weeks, a bug in amber that wasn’t setting. We exchanged phone numbers and addresses. She would be leaving for Luxor in two weeks, she said, and promised to call me when she returned. But as I started to walk away, I heard over my shoulder, “What are you doing tonight?”

Excited at the prospect of having something to do, somewhere to go, someone to talk to, I answered quickly. “Nothing.”

“Meet me at Café Riche at 8 o’clock. You know where it is?” “No.”

“You’ll find it.”

*

The winter sun in Cairo sets at six, and by eight, the downtown streets undulate to the hum of fluorescence and neon. I had read about Café Riche, its intellectuals and revolutionaries who leaned over its small round tables, smoking, arguing, living, waiting. Now, the cafe was a nest of backpacking tourists and women who had discovered they could sit alone, a respite from hands that touched and eyes that followed.

Zora arrived. Three heavy art books under one arm, a bag of sugar and a cigarette in her free hand. The books were rare, she said, as a pungent cloud settled around our heads. She said if I ever wanted more than the rationed allotment of sugar, I must come to her. She crushed her Cleopatra cigarette and told me she smoked two and a half packs a day. She rushed me through my beer so we could go to her place and have dinner.

We took a rickety elevator up to the roof of a ten-story building in Dokki. Directly across the Nile, the Sheraton’s neon dolphin flickered in the moonlit sky. The tiny apartment was a swamp of brushes and cigarettes, solvent jars, paint cans, ruts in the floor, cracks in the walls. Colour poured off drawings onto bread and garbage. At the far end, a pile of boots and an opened sofa bed confirmed that the place was indeed occupied.

In the other corner, she chewed a burning cigarette over a pot of boiling water and oil, and threw chopped vegetables into it like they were rocks. Every now and then a cardamom seed was added. From underneath a stack of old pita to the edge of the counter and up the wall, a long thin line of ants carried away the crumbs.

Bowls in hand, we sat on the mattress. She chewed loudly between breaths, exhaling words and cinnamon. The silence was noisy. She got up quickly to look for a brush she remembered needed cleaning. “Would you like to have an affair with me?”

The sound of my spoon falling into the bowl rang through the room. I hadn’t understood much that was happening, but I was understanding now. My involuntary laugh slithered to the floor then lay there, numb. I thought: this is her world, her game, learn the rules or go home. It was my intention to never go home.

“Do you?” My only concern was how nonchalant I could make myself sound.

“Yes. I think so. I think we should.”

“Why?”

“Because.” She found the brush. “Because I know you. You are from Montreal, we know people in common, you are alone in this city and, anyways, I think you are gay.” She sat down again. “I need an affair.”

She leaned her head back, rested it on an outstretched arm, hand finishing into a cigarette. As she talked, her eyes contracted. Sometimes she watched me, sometimes she stared at her paintings. I kept speaking Arabic, that was why I was in that country; I had goals after all. But her words were too thick, wrapping me in smelly blankets, at once hot and suffocating. Her accent was a muddy mixture of Arabic, Armenian, French, and English, none of which, she assured me, she spoke well.

It gave everything she said a scripted cadence.

“Do you like me?”

“Sure,” I said, trying to follow cues, trying to ignore cues. “Why not.”

“You say nothing with too many words. Do you find me interesting?”

“Ok. Yes.” I did my best to keep my smile, but it was unsteady. I asked her, “Do you find me interesting?”

“La. No. But you’re nice. Anyway, what is an interesting person?”

She told me about the lesbians in Cairo, that they were all married but had petting affairs. She told me that except for a few short petting affairs, she hadn’t had sex in seven years.

“Do you think I’m neurotic? Do you think I’m very materialistic? People say I scare them, that I’m too full of nervous energy. It’s really just sexual energy, you know.”

She had a plate of seeds and was cracking them between her teeth.

“You are very nice,” she said, spitting shells. “You are soft and mellow. And you are intelligent. I think also you are reserved. You do not like intimacy. There is a dark side to you.”

She paced the room and searched the floor around my legs. “Am I right in all this? I am very perceptive, aren’t I? People say I am very perceptive.”

Finding another brush, she taped a piece of paper to a wall and began painting, occasionally transferring her severe gaze my way. She kept talking, mostly admonishments. “Don’t say that. You are so Canadian. I don’t like it. The Arab in you has seen too many winters. I should take you to the desert.”

“You know why we should have an affair?” She threw down the brush. “To get rid of this stupid verbosity. If we go on and on like this, we will get close and that is not necessary and I do not want it. I want to build a wall, create a distance. If we have an affair and have sex and are intimate, then we can put a distance between us. I don’t want us to be dependent upon each other.”

She tore the paper off the wall. “Yalla, we go,” she said.

She took me to a cafe in the Souq al Ataba where we were the only women. Zora’s 43-year-old body was stuffed like straw into rags. She was the most outstanding and frightening of the whole lot of nighttime marauders. She wracked herself over the chair, dropped ashes onto her chest, hid her face behind the tangled mess around her head. I tried to not care, but kept catching the smirking expressions of the men around us. After a few cigarettes, she was anxious to go. I was a fish in her net as she dragged me to a taxi.

Back on her couch, in the light that did not warm or reveal, we drank more tea. It was late and I said I would go home. After half an hour, she finally conceded. In the elevator she threw her arms around me as I parsed the odour of her hair. Gasoline, tobacco, jasmine. Just before I got into the cab she mumbled something then spat on the ground.

*

The next day after class, I went straight to her apartment. It was a shock to see other people there, as if I had convinced myself she was a mirage and this building my own private tomb. The visitors were a priest and the wife of a German businessman, she would tell me later, there to buy her jewellery. They were elegant and well-spoken, smiling at me as if they knew something I didn’t. I could make no sense of it. In any case, I was in a bad mood. The city was still shocking, overpowering in its demanding chaos. Everything was catching me off guard, leaving me mercilessly vulnerable and trusting nothing, least of all my instincts. All day I had been disturbed by Zora. Was she a familiar haven or a distraction? Or worse? On her couch, on the verge of everything and nothing, I drank more tea. Neither of us spoke.

*

“We go. Yalla.”

I was growing fond of the now-familiar order to rally.

All week I followed her to art galleries and museums, met people she knew, and got a hint of what flourished in the quiet spaces between donkeys and dogs and the interminable honking of cars. Zora bought me the books I flipped through, the scarves I touched, the bracelets I tried on. I was hungry and she took me to dinner. I was curious and she explained what she knew. Everywhere we went, seas parted, pulling back in equal measures of disgust and respect. When she spoke, people strained for meaning, not believing that the language of their mothers flowed from this woman’s lips.

We went to Ramses train station and got her a ticket for Luxor. We hopped on and off buses, in and out of taxis, trying to decide what to do next.

“Would you like to see the pyramids?”

After two months in Egypt, they were still rumours to me. It was nighttime, dizzy and perfect. Fifteen minutes later, mouthing along to Om Kalsoum in a taxi, I let out an involuntary cry.

“What is it, what’s wrong?” she asked, reaching over. “Nothing.” I laughed. “I just saw a pyramid!”

We walked in the dark along the base of Cheops, its massive sides easing to an infinitesimal point with a strength and subtlety I could hardly grasp. We were leaning into a petrified tidal wave, following the trail of a cadaverous whisper. A guide, one of the hovering men who lived on the baksheesh of tourists, led us into a long, dark tunnel. “Secret, secret,” he repeated.

It got darker and the air thicker and the walls wetter. He and Zora moved quickly till all I could see were their green shadows.

“I have to get out of here,” I said.

I had no idea if they could hear me, and didn’t care. I backed out until it widened and I could turn around. No one would ever describe Egyptian air as fresh unless they were exiting the rank denseness of the pyramids.

“Cigarette?” Zora shook an extra one from her pack.

The guide now had a few of his friends in tow. If I looked slightly to the left or right of them, as one does in the emptiness of night, I could see more coming up from the paths. Everything scraped loudly in the darkness, like cars on dark snowy roads. Never a friendly sound, no matter the country, no matter the season. They encircled her, asked questions, gestured, jostled, came in closer. I heard my name. She passed around cigarettes.

“Let’s go,” she said to me.

“What?” I was not going to follow these men.

But we did, into the village and along a narrow dirt road lit only by a string of plastic lanterns. I turned back for one last look at the Sphynx, catching only a glimpse before the flood lights shut down and his comforting outline dissolved into the chilled indifferent sky.

“Do you hear dogs barking?” Zora asked. “They bit me once and they want to do it again. Never mind. We are here.” The men corralled us to a handful of tables outside a makeshift cafe. A partially-tuned radio played classical Egyptian music while they served mint tea for us and shisha for themselves. Zora had lived in this village years ago, I discovered, and the men remembered her fondly. They traded jokes and stories for hours, and every time our glasses drained, they drowned the leaves in more hot water. The smoke and flickering lights, the voices, the hot tea, my utter uselessness, all of it led to unconsciousness. When Zora woke me up, most of the men had gone. The backsheesh guide put us on a horse drawn caleche and took us to the main road, where we caught a taxi.

Her flat smelled of paint and smoke and I wanted to go home. She made us tea. I told her I wasn’t staying. She opened the bed. I sat on it. She lay down, entreated me. I let myself fall back, couldn’t keep my eyes open any longer. She took my hand and teased me about things I was saying. She pulled me to her, wrapped her arms around my back. The day’s exhaust steamed through her teeth and she was on top of me.

“I want you I want you I want you I want you.”

I held my breath, didn’t dare move. The lightbulb on the ceiling burnt through my eyelids, casting silhouettes of ugly desperation as she moaned and chanted, chanted and moaned.

“Do you know how many years it’s been? How many women say no? I didn’t think I’d feel any emotion.”

We were fully dressed as she moved over me, anxious not to lose a second of my captivity. I forced myself to look at her, then over her shoulders and down her back. She moaned like a train exiting a tunnel, her tongue lolling as urgent groans rushed down it.

I felt affection, pity, disgust, and profound relief that our clothes were on. She reached into my pants but I grabbed her hand.

“No.”

“Why? You aren’t sexually aroused? You don’t find me attractive?”

“No.”

I wanted her to get it over with. To reach the point she’d begun moving toward from the moment I stepped into her shadow. She had courted me as if I were a scarab that would disappear if she moved too fast or too slow. She had paid for everything, had taken me everywhere, given me no reason to complain. It was time to complete the exchange.

While her shoes gripped the dirty mattress, I bit her shirt to keep from gagging. She came in a wild and ancient frenzy. Like a camel falling through the water, like a dog tearing its leg from a trap. She said thank you. At 4 a.m. she let me go, walking me down to a taxi.

The next day Zora went to Luxor. She will be gone three weeks, long enough for me to not answer the phone when she returns.

There are few things left that I can still derive joy from, the night bus being one of them. Whenever I can’t sleep and feel terrible about the state of all things—which is often—I remember that I can just walk out of my apartment in the middle of the night and wait at the bus stop and eventually, somebody will pull up. And then I’ll be on my way.

The last time I took the night bus, my apartment fell into a hole. Well, actually, it had fallen into the hole a week prior. But nobody was counting the days except for me, and every day felt the same. Time was irrelevant to how I felt and how the world seemed to be moving on.

That time, I didn’t have to walk to the bus stop alone. Ian walked me. Ian, who had bought me two drinks and left a large bruise on my inner thigh.

When we had arrived at his apartment a couple hours earlier, he kissed me on the cheek and took my sweater, folding it into a neat square. I was wearing a tank top I had stolen from H&M and a pleated skirt I had borrowed from a friend a couple of days ago. I had mentioned that I hadn’t eaten supper. He handed me a bowl of cereal and we sat on his rug cross-legged with our knees touching until both our bowls were drained.

All the while, I kept looking at him and mustering the strength to speak. I got dizzy when I stood up to get a glass of water. I wasn’t eating normally then and hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours a night.

“It feels like my whole life is falling apart,” I wanted to say.

But I said nothing, and just sipped my tap water and looked at the contours of his face, hollow and bird-like, flushed from the warmth of the kitchen lights.

“I didn’t have anything else, I hope this is enough,” he said, gesturing to our bowls.

He seemed sweet, then. He looked at me intently and I wanted to know everything about his life; where he was born and if he separated his laundry by colour.

Instead I said, “It’s perfect. It’s exactly what I needed.”

He smiled and went back to eating his cereal. When we kissed, I tasted milk.

Later, when we were lying naked together, and I was watching the hands of his clock stutter, he turned to me and smelled my hair.

“I just noticed your shampoo,” he said. “I mean, I wash my hair,” I said. “Argan oil?” he asked.

I nodded.

He paused, then looked up at the ceiling. I was starting to get comfortable in his bed. His sheets were standard-issue cotton-blend. He had a portrait of Che Guevara thumbtacked above his dresser. It stared at us, lips curling toward the ceiling.

“My mom also washed her hair with argan oil shampoo,” he said.

Around then I realized that I couldn’t stay. I didn’t say anything in response—it wasn’t worth it. People say a lot of weird things to me. Once, while training me, one of my co- workers said: “Make sure it’s written in a way that’s easy to understand, so you could explain it to a child, or a woman.”

I said, “Excuse me?”

And my co-worker said “No no no no, no, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Back in Ian’s room, I was snapping my nylons over my waist. I kept my eyes steady on the horizon, like I was sitting in a lurching car trying not to vomit. I heard him re-making his bed behind me, tucking his duvet under the mattress, fluffing his pillows.

“I’ll walk you,” he said from across the room.

And since we were no longer strangers to each other, and since I already knew that I wasn’t in love with him, I said yes, yes, the bus stop is far and I’d really appreciate it if I didn’t have to walk alone in the dark.

I didn’t bother mentioning that a sinkhole had opened up in the basement of my building and swallowed everything whole.

I noticed the hole while doing laundry. First, it was small. It looked like a paint drop, or a squashed bug. I only noticed it because I dropped a hair pin and it fell through the floor in a straight vertical line. Like a swimmer doing a pencil dive. When I ran my finger over it, I could feel the air underneath.

The next week, I could fit my index finger. Then, my fist.

I stopped doing laundry altogether after that. My clothes accumulated into a rank pile at the foot of my bed and I closed my eyes and plugged my nose every time I entered my room.

When my landlord called to tell me what happened, I had just dragged a suitcase full of dirty clothes to the laundromat.

“Sorry,” he said. “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to stay for the night.”

“But how long until I can return?” I asked.

“I don’t know, up to the city,” he said.

I walked to the depanneur and cried in front of the cashier. He gave me a pack of beers and two limes for free.

At night, the city is cool and everything is still. Nothing rots in the cold. While waiting for the bus, Ian put his arm around me. Suddenly I felt awful and embarrassed—the scene we had practised and put on within the confines of his apartment was now out for the whole street to see. A taxi drove by.

“Do you ever just worry that all the pollution we’re emitting is going to fuck up the air and one day we’ll run out of oxygen and we’ll all just suffocate together at the exact same time?” I asked.

Ian dropped his arm softly.

“Um,” he said. “Honestly, that’s never occurred to me as a possibility.”

The bus pulled up.

“Thanks for being nice,” I said.

We both paused. This is when we kiss, I thought. The air moved slowly around us. Although he was standing a foot away from me, he suddenly seemed very far and very small. Like I was looking at him from an airplane window.

“Well, have a good one,” he said. When he turned away, I sensed that I would not see him for a long time.

On the bus, I opened my phone to my workplace app and clicked “Active.” As long as I have the app open, the automated timesheet system counts it as working hours, even if I’m not really doing anything. And since the company has international offices, it doesn’t matter if I work weird hours, because it’s bound to be daytime somewhere. Whenever I’m online, it feels like I’ve never logged off, like whatever I did in between my shifts never actually happened. The hours are flat. I scrolled mindlessly up and down conversations and channels. I’ll do this for hours while at a bar, or at the movies. Walking through the grocery store. Waiting for the doctor. Waiting for someone to text me back.

There was one other person on the bus, a young girl wearing a puffer jacket, a huge scarf, and a knit beanie. She turned to look at me, and took out one of her earbuds.

“Excuse me, but did you date Allan?” she asked.

“Who?” I asked.

“Allan,” she repeated. “Your ex-boyfriend?”

I shook my head slowly. “No, that’s not me.” “But I know you from somewhere,” she pressed. I shook my head again. “You must be mistaken.”

She frowned. “Don’t act so oblivious.”

Before I could say anything, the bus pulled onto my street and lurched to an unsatisfying stop.

“Bye,” the girl in the puffer said. She had a half-wrapped Filet-O-Fish in her hands.

“Can I have that?” I asked. I was really hungry.

“No,” she responded, and took a big bite. She ate noisily, the saliva snapping in her mouth as she chewed. The plush bun glistened under the fluorescents. I could smell the tartar sauce, fantasizing about how it would coat my tongue with a thick, creamy layer.

She leaned against the door handles and they opened with a hiss. I stepped off and walked ten feet to the right, where my apartment was. Had been. Where it had been. Where there was now a hole.

I looped around through the back alley to get a better view of the sinkhole. A mountain of rocks and cracked concrete slabs loomed, sloppily covering the crater.

I stepped over punctured garbage bags, their trashed guts spilled out, to see if I could peer beneath the debris. I flashed my phone light into an opening. All I saw was bent concrete and rubble.

The low hum of a train passed through the alley. I could hear one of my neighbours watching TV from a second-floor unit.

“Mr. Trebek, I’d like to make this a true Daily Double,” a contestant said.

I heard Mr. Trebek’s voice, warm and smooth and paternal. “This is a natural opening where surface water enters into underground passages. These are typically found in landscapes dominated by porous limestone rock.”

Impulsively, I buzzed in.

“What is: A sinkhole?” I stated confidently.

Mr. Trebek shook his head at me. “I’m afraid not.” I lost $400. No one else buzzed in. I kicked a piece of gravel. It dinged off of a metal fence.

“A ponor,” he said, tapping his cards against the podium. “That, my friend, is a different sort of hole in the ground.”

I nodded. There was only one question left on the board, in the category “American Rock Music” for $1,000.

Mr. Trebek cleared his throat. “This 1971 album by Alice Cooper takes its title from this fatal adjective.”

There was a dead pause as everyone wracked their brain for the answer. But I knew it, I obviously knew it.

I buzzed in. “What is Killer?”

Mr. Trebek smiled warmly at me, ear-to-ear. “That is correct.” From the alleyway, I smiled back at him.

The word lingered in my mouth. It tasted cold and bitter. I said it again, awaiting a response, but the ground remained still and silent. The earth did not shake or scream or display any signs of grief or loss. It held its breath during the slow erosion toward entropy. I stood for a while longer, thinking about these so-called signs and my so-called oblivion. I wondered what else I had made myself wilfully ignorant of. If there were any symptoms of genetic disease I’d overlooked, any strange moles or lumps on my body. If there was a black hole opening up in the middle of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch waiting to swallow us all up.

I started walking to my friend Hannah’s. I knew she would be awake watching Chinese singing competitions. Her couch was comfortable and available and at my disposal. I walked the length of the city block alone. I could tell that everyone in the city was asleep, but that they were all sleeping very poorly. They were sleeping on their sides, knees curled to their stomachs, their dreams filled with boring symbolism. Their dreams were full of teeth and dogs and normal sexual urges. They were all sleeping with their blinds open, the eyes of their apartment buildings wide and ready to capture light.

I caught my reflection in the darkened pharmacy window. I thought my face looked inviting and sad against the outlines of half-clothed mannequins and discount sunscreen. I hoped that if people passed me on the street, if they saw my reflection through a pane of glass, they would think of how morose and fascinating I looked. My lips pouty and chapped. Large streaks of black smudged under my eyes. I wanted to look like I had a rich interior life. That I had internalized death and God and the slow climate apocalypse better than any of my peers. That I looked like I deserved a boyfriend.

An electric scooter was idling in front of a 24-hour shawarma place. The driver sat solo, backlit by the glow from inside the restaurant. He was checking his phone. I walked over and tapped him on the shoulder. He was a middle-aged East Asian man with straight bangs. He looked up at me. Even in the helmet, I could see how perfect his bangs were. They hit right above the arch of his left eyebrow.

“Excuse me, where are you driving that to?” I asked. He didn’t miss a beat. “5432 Jeanne Mance.”

“That’s Hannah’s.”

He eyed me up and down.

“Can I ride with you there?”

He says yes, and since neither of us have anything to lose or gain, suddenly I’m being whisked down the street, cold air rushing against my face. Droplets of road dew splattering on my ankles and knuckles and nose.

I tilt my head all the way back while my hands are around his waist. He feels warm. As my head falls back, I crane my neck to glimpse any stars. Even with light pollution, I can see a few. Not that I can name any, but they’re there. You can see satellites and planes better, anyways. There’s always something worth seeing.

Flying past me, the ground doesn’t look hard anymore. It looks plush. It looks standard-issue. It streams by, beckoning me. If the ground can swallow my apartment, surely it can stomach me. When the scooter halts, I get off and immediately crumple, my ankles and knees faltering under the weight of my body. My palms dig into the asphalt and I let my skull thump against the ground. I roll onto my back, my spinal alignment straightening against the hard ground. I can vaguely make out the man calling my name from the scooter, but I can’t hear him clearly. He’s calling my name from a cellular dead zone. It’s all static. It feels warm, and I close my eyes, drifting off to sleep. It’s inconvenient for everyone else, but impossible for me to resist. I can’t resist. The sidewalk is simply too soft.

I was walking home from the grocery store when a well-dressed man politely stopped me to ask for directions. “Could you tell me which way to Bloor and…” He struggled to get the next word out, a pained expression on his face, but I knew better than to try to finish his sentence for him. “… Bathurst?” he finally said after several seconds of straining.

When I tried to answer, he quickly interrupted to tell me that he didn’t actually need to know. He was practicing stuttering openly, he explained, hoping to become more confident doing so around strangers. I lit up with excitement. “Are you doing that because it’s National Stuttering Awareness Day?” I asked, always eager to connect with other people who stutter. The man looked surprised and asked why I knew that, so I explained that I grew up with a stutter. He nodded, looking a bit wistful: “And I suppose your stutter has magically disappeared since then?”

His question gave me pause. I understood why he assumed this—when compared to his stutter, which was fairly severe, I sounded fluent, stutter-free. But was I? Even in the brief time I’d spoken to him, my stutter had influenced my speech: for example, I’d chosen to misname International Stuttering Awareness Day as National Stuttering Awareness Day, to avoid the tricky front vowel sound at the beginning of the word—a sound I continue to struggle with, likely because it’s at the beginning of my name. And while it’s true that my stutter was more noticeable when I was a child, this was partially because I’d since found reliable workarounds for difficult words and sounds, helping me hide the worst of it.

To answer his question, I opted for the simplest explanation: that I used to stutter but had grown out of it. But was this true? Had I really outgrown my stutter?

*

According to the Canadian Stuttering Association, four percent of Canadian children stutter, with three-quarters of them eventually ceasing to do so, leaving only one percent who stutter into adulthood. But what about the other three percent, the supposed ex-stutterers—can we assume they grow up to be completely free of their past disfluencies? Or on some level, do their stutters continue to influence their decisions and affect their lives?

Most people who meet me don’t notice my stutter, or they chalk it up to shyness or insecurity. But while most of the time, I don’t stutter overtly—thanks in large part to my learned knack for word substitution and assortment of ready-made circumlocutions—many of my choices are still guided by a deep fear of the disfluency that resides, dormant but waiting, on the tip of my tongue. Stutterers like me, those who can reasonably pass as fluent, are called “covert” stutterers, meaning that the most prominent features of our stutters aren’t the overt ones—the syllable repetition, prolonged sounds, and vocal blocks usually associated with stuttering—but the things we do to hide them.

Tiffani Kittilstved, a speech language therapist and lifelong covert stutterer, started stuttering as a child, though no one ever named or diagnosed her condition. Her stutter provoked negative reactions from authority figures, so Kittilstved quickly learned to hide it using a combination of whispering, changing the pitch or tone of her voice, and putting on strange accents. “I’d gotten to the point where if someone talked to me, I would cry and just not respond,” she says. When people meet Kittilstved, they might not even notice her stutter—and yet it has affected her life tremendously.

As any stutterer can tell you, vocal disfluency can deeply impact a person’s decisions. For example, most stutterers have difficulty saying their names. I struggle to introduce myself without backpacking on other words, and always respond with a rushed “My name is Isabel,” rather than just “Isabel” when asked my name, a trick that usually works, even if it often sounds clunky and awkward. My worst nightmare is a circle of strangers saying their names one at a time, and despite being a social person, I generally avoid situations where I have to meet many new people at once.

This is a common experience for stutterers, and one that can complicate our social and professional lives. “I can only imagine how many people think I’m an aloof bitch based on how rarely I ever introduce myself to someone new,” says Sophia Stewart, a journalist who has written much about her covert stutter. “Mostly I just don’t introduce myself unless it is absolutely imperative. I try not to think about how many missed opportunities, missed connections, and bad first impressions this has resulted in.”

All this to say, many people who supposedly outgrew their childhood stutters are still guided by their effects, both vestigial and lived. So while I may have grown out of my stutter in the sense that its severity has decreased with age, I’ve also grown out of it in the sense that it has shaped my identity, informing the way that I speak, interact with others, and move around in the world.

*

Between 2018 and 2021, the British Stammering Association (STAMMA) implemented a cross- sectional survey of U.K. adults and found that between two and four percent of respondents self-identified as stutterers—significantly more than the previously accepted figure of one percent. Unlike its predecessors, this study relied on self-reporting, which means that while there are far more stutterers than previously thought, many of us are hiding it—at least, those of us who can.

Being a covert stutterer is a liminal position, teetering between ability and disability. Which begs the question:is a stutter defined by one’s experience of speaking, or by the perception of the listener? If others don’t notice your stutter, can you really call yourself a stutterer at all? And if covert stutterers don’t identify with their disability, how might this affect the way they see themselves—as well as whether or not they ever come to accept it?

The social model of disability, which has been accepted and celebrated by disabled communities worldwide, defines disability by the limitations imposed upon an individual by society, rather than any supposed limitations of the individual. Stuttering, however, has been notably absent from disability discourse. As Stewart wrote in an article for The Baffler, there has been “a glaring omission of speech and vocal impairments from disability scholarship as a whole.” Most research done on stuttering is clinical, with a focus on the reduction of overt stuttering, rather than accommodation and acceptance.

But this is beginning to change. Some researchers argue that treatment shouldn’t be centered around eliminating a person’s stutter, but rather on reducing harmful thoughts and behaviours surrounding it. In a 2022 paper published in Topics in Language Disorders, researchers Tichenor, Herring, and Yaruss proposed a new framework for understanding stuttering that prioritizes the speaker’s experience over the listener’s, making room for the ways in which covert stutterers’ lives are affected by their ways of speaking. This includes their personal reactions to their stutter, including their affective reactions, such as shame, fear, or anxiety; behavioural reactions, such as avoiding certain sounds or not making eye contact when speaking; and cognitive reactions, such as ruminating about future events when they expect to stutter. In short, having a stutter is about more than just the sound of one’s speech—there are a whole host of psychological and behavioural factors at play, too.

Nevertheless, from what I’ve seen, many covert stutterers have imposter syndrome about their stutters, meaning they likely wouldn’t seek out this kind of treatment. I never asked for accommodations in school because I was convinced my stutter wasn’t “bad enough” to count, and didn’t want to have to justify my covert stutter to skeptical teachers. Of course, I regretted this decision every time I had to present a paper aloud, forced to cut out entire sections on the fly because getting the words out was taking twice as long as I’d anticipated. I wish I’d asked for alternate ways of presenting my work: a peer could have read my paper for me, for example, or I could have pre-recorded my presentation.

For some covert stutterers, this imposter syndrome is reinforced by others’ reactions. Stewart recalls being shut down when asking for an accommodation from a high school teacher who randomly called on students to answer questions. “I went to her early in the semester and told her that I didn’t feel comfortable or able to participate this way,” Stewart says, adding that she offered to work with the teacher to figure out another, more accessible way to show her engagement. “She was incredibly dismissive and basically said no. Every day I sat in her classroom in sweaty, heart-pounding terror that I’d be called on.”

In university, Stewart was granted the accommodations she requested: she was excused from “compulsory oral participation,” meaning her final grade wasn’t affected if she didn’t verbally participate in class, and she was given alternatives to oral presentations. However, this came with another set of problems. “There were some who made assumptions off of my disability requests—who quite clearly assumed I was slow or shy,” she says. The way they spoke to her was patronizing, which was frustrating for Stewart. Indeed, studies have shown that stutterers are perceived as less intelligent, articulate, and competent than non-stutterers. This is due to “disability drift,” a phenomenon Jay Timothy Dolmage explores in his 2014 work Disability Rhetoric whereby people assume that someone with one disability is also impacted by other, unrelated disabilities.

Ultimately, whether or not a covert stutterer identifies as disabled is deeply personal. “I consider disability as more of a public identity than a private one,” Stewart says. “Like, if someone asked me to describe myself, I don’t think I would list ‘disabled’ as one of my intrinsic attributes.” The label has proven useful for her, however, both because it has helped her access accommodations and because it offers others an easy foothold for conceptualizing her experience. “Disfluency in particular is not really understood by most people as an actual, neurological disability,” she says. “It’s largely seen as the product of being nervous or shy or deceitful… When I say stuttering is a disability, it helps people to understand that it’s as constant and out of my control as, say, blindness or deafness.” Not only does the “disability” label enable stutterers to better access the care they need and advocate for themselves, it can also help them find community—which is crucial for disabled people, who report being significantly more socially isolated and lonely than people without disabilities.

*

When you’re able to pass as fluent, “coming out” as a stutterer can be a fraught decision, and many covert stutterers conceal this part of themselves. In my most recent relationship, for example, I went four years without ever discussing it with my partner. My stutter feels like a core part of my identity, and yet it’s something I’ve generally kept private, out of fear that being open about it would change the way others see me.

While Stewart openly identifies as a stutterer now, she hasn’t always. “I have actively hid [my stutter] before, from people I cared about quite a bit,” she says. Covert behaviours save her from both social and physical strain, meaning that when possible, passing as fluent is usually the easiest option. “It is much more difficult to be disfluent than it is to be fluent,” she says. “Whenever I choose to pass, it’s for my own comfort, not for anyone else’s.”

Plus, coming out can make covert stutterers vulnerable to discrimination. When Kittilstved was applying for a major in linguistics, she approached the department head and told him about her stutter, as well as her dream of becoming a speech language pathologist. He replied that she needn’t bother apply, as the program wouldn’t accept a stutterer—according to him, parents wouldn’t entrust their child’s treatment to someone who stutters themselves. Kittilstved was crushed. “That was the first time I really told someone I stutter…and it had a really negative outcome,” she says.

Kittilstved ended up becoming a speech language pathologist anyway, applying for grad school years later at the encouragement of a supportive anthropology professor who noticed her recurring interest in the social impacts of stuttering. Nowadays, she is almost always open about her stutter, at least with people she feels safe with. “I put it on my dating profile and I bring it up in conversation pretty much immediately,” she says.

Still, the reality is that she hides her stutter in some situations. “It’s so easy to be like, ‘all your avoidance behaviors are wrong and bad, let’s just be open and stutter’…but that’s not the world we live in,” she says. “Especially when you have intersectional identities—I’m a woman, I’m queer, and I stutter and have other disabilities like ADHD, so I don’t always feel safe to be totally open…I just try to lean into the nuance of it, because it’s so complex being a marginalized person in our society.” Even as the disability justice movement flourishes, “coming out” remains a complicated choice for people with invisible disabilities.

*

Ever since childhood, I’ve devoured any scant media representation of stutterers I could find: Bill from It, Merry from American Pastoral, King George VI from The King’s Speech. But recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in stuttering content: essays in mainstream publications, books from Big Five publishers. Not to mention that one of the largest global superpowers has elected a person who stutters as president.

All of this has given me space to begin reclaiming my stutter and reimagining how it might fit into my identity. In addition to writing about it, I’ve also begun speaking with my family about how it impacts my life, and have even begun opening up to some of my friends. As covert stuttering gains recognition, I feel like I have permission to accept that my stutter is an intrinsic part of who I am, whether or not the people around me know it.

Covert stutterers might not see themselves in conventional disability narratives, but recovery narratives might not quite fit either. “There is no ‘recovering’ from stuttering,” Stewart says. “There’s no pill, no surgery, no way to get rid of a stutter… but there is recovering from the shame and self-hatred that stem from stuttering. So that is the recovery that I’m always focused on.”

As for me, to return to the question of whether my stutter has “magically disappeared,” I’d say no, or at least, not exactly. Yes, I’ve found ways to conceal it, but I’ll never outgrow my stutter, despite what my doctors repeatedly told my parents. But maybe I got something better than growing out of it—I grew alongside it, my identity inextricable from the way that I speak.

Illustration by Talaj

A picture may not be worth a thousand words anymore. Generative AI art tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, which rely on artists’ existing work to generate images through textual prompts, became available to the public last year. Since then, conversations about how Artificial Intelligence (AI) will render creative jobs obsolete have gripped many North American writers (myself included).

I used to agonize over securing a well-paying, non- precarious job in a creative industry. Now, I must compete for jobs with professionals from non-art backgrounds, like coders, software developers and engineers, who may not have knowledge of ethics and art. Despite what they may think, though, what they’re creating with generative AI is far from original.

All existing generative AI art platforms are deep neural networks, a learning technology modelled loosely after the human brain which can recognize patterns. Engineers develop these software to imitate existing artwork that selects and scrapes large datasets of images, codes, text and music from the internet. The next stage involves feeding the software this ‘training data’ through neural networks. During this stage, the algorithms identify and extract specific features, including shapes and colours. Finally, once trained, the generators are ready to imitate art, sometimes even in the style of specific artists. In short, engineers and software developers train these generators on creatives’ artwork found online, often without their consent or knowledge.

I’m not against using AI tools. I edit my writing through an AI-based word editor, Grammarly, and use Adobe Lightroom to organize my photography. Recently, these companies introduced generative AI elements: GrammarlyGO will allow users to prompt Grammarly’s AI assistant to draft entire documents with a personalized voice, tone and clarity, and Denoise aims to reduce photographic noise and enhance details. And I will likely try these tools to assess their creative might.

Nevertheless, I feel critical of the AI arms race helmed by tech leaders who are hell-bent on enhancing creative arts but forget that these AI generators can erode trust in photography, the medium that sanctified truth-telling. Creating AI-generated images may seem entertaining, but plagiarizing artists’ work without consent or giving them due compensation is the furthest thing from art or creativity.

Chantal Rodier, STEAM projects coordinator and artist- in-residence at the University of Ottawa, says that while AI has the potential to inspire artists, giving it too much credit is dangerous.“[AI] can coherently present data, but it’s not reflective or creative. It is statistically based. It can’t distinguish between mis/disinformation. So what it presents can be garbage,” she says.

Historically, art has been the epitome of human originality, creativity, expression and refuge. While some proponents of AI art tools try their hardest to pit neural networks against the human brain, these models only serve as our second best. They interpret data that was fed to them by humans to mimic humanistic art. For some, incorporating AI in their work or art can be an emotionally fulfilling experience. But idolizing algorithms just to satisfy our techno-fetishist itch is unwise, and the AI art-generating process is riddled with complex ethical issues.

First, the pro-generative-AI crowd doesn’t necessarily regard the datasets on which software like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney and DALL-E were trained as bootlegging. Many say that the images are simply content scraped from the internet and amalgamated, and since there is no sole owner, there’s no infringement. The proponents of AI art tools often argue in favour of training these software on copyrighted data. In the U.S., this is covered by the fair use doctrine, which upholds the use of copyright-protected work to promote freedom of expression. While generative AI art users and developers often make this claim for fair use, the argument amounts to professional gaslighting. Canada’s Copyright Act is a bit more strict, but without any responsible surveillance over AI, it doesn’t functionally stop people from using others’ work.

The term fair use is “dubious,” said Naimul Khan, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University’s engineering department. “The fair use [doctrine] allows developers to use data for personal and non-profit reasons. But tech companies are making for-profit software off of artists’ intellectual property and discrediting them simultaneously,” he says.

“Intellectual property does not cease to exist just because it is alongside 100 million other pieces,” says Blair Attard-Frost, an AI ethics and governance researcher and PhD candidate in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. “I find the argument that AI models are not taking people’s intellectual property hard to take seriously when you can go into the data sets and see it is copyrighted material,” they say. Worse, Attard-Frost says, in North America there are no governance or regulatory bodies preventing that scale of potential intellectual property theft from happening. They say we need design requirements specifying how to build these applications, how to ensure data is being ethically sourced and attributed, and that no unauthorized data is being swept up in training data grabs.

Second, many may use generative AI tools for seemingly harmless reasons like satire and fun. But a report by the U.S-based geopolitical risk analyst Eurasia Group notes that as AI technology advances, the possibilities for those using this technology to spread misinformation increase with equal measure.

Moreover, not everyone is falling head over heels for generative AI technologies. Maybe it’s because they realize that systems like Stable Diffusion and NightCafe are complete failures in the racial and gender representation arena. I purposely prompted the two models with an unsophisticated prompt like “Arab belly dancer.” All the outputs I received were pictures of either white women dressed as dancers or disfigured, scary faces with hyper-sexualized bodies. Attard-Frost had a similar experience. They prompted DALL-E for non-binary and trans outputs only to be disappointed. They say that the system produced “freakish” looking renders as if the tool did not know what to make of trans or non-binary representation.

AI systems appear to be reinforcing normative cultural dogmas by othering anyone who is not a cisgender white man. In the past, Attard-Frost says, tech companies didn’t have enough representation. But now, with more knowledge around bias in data sets, there’s no longer any excuse. Tech companies are well aware of these issues. Mistakes happen; however, if software developers don’t take measures to correct them and they keep transpiring, then it’s negligence, they say.

But then again, this kind of ignorance is to be expected when tech developers fire their “responsible AI” researchers, whose job is to advise on ethical oversight, only to listen to the pioneers of AI. In 2020, Timnit Gebru, one of the lead researchers on Google’s ethical AI team, was let go after releasing a paper that explored racial and gender biases and environmental risks that AI poses. However, when Geoffery Hinton, the so-called “Godfather of AI,” decided at 75 that it was okay to get cautious about these technologies, he quit Google. It’s a good reminder that in 2015, when another researcher asked Hinton about furthering AI technologies that could be abused for political gains, he said, “I could give you the usual arguments, but the truth is that the prospect of discovery is too sweet.” His answer makes me doubt his apparent newfound ethical realization.

Khan says there’s no easy solution, especially not a technical one, to AI-related ethical issues. But making ethics a core part of engineering education would be a start. “It has to be a collaborative effort between software developers, artists, engineers, and regulatory bodies,” he says. Khan thinks this would usher in a generation of engineers who would be more aware of how their codes and algorithms impact non-STEM professions. However, he notes that there are two barriers to this. The first is that the tech developers who hire engineers work for for-profit companies and will chase opportunities to make money. The second is related to the ethics knowledge gap: he says it usually doesn’t occur to engineers that their data might be taken from someone unfairly. “But we can teach them better,” he says.

While I hold engineers and tech developers against my critical pitchfork, I show no mercy to corporate media for neglecting marginalized voices around the conversation about AI ethics either. The news media hypes up AI and under-reports the power dynamics behind it. This is problematic because it only reflects business and government interests. As a journalist, I expect reporters to do better. Media must diversify their sources by including voices of marginalized tech experts, who recently penned an open letter about the lack of inclusivity.

Instead of hailing the “Godfather of AI” for resigning so he could speak freely about AI risks, journalists should be questioning why he didn’t speak sooner or show solidarity with his marginalized counterparts. I’m not minimizing Hinton’s concerns. But women and non-binary researchers from social sciences and STEM backgrounds who are critical of AI technologies should be equally centred.

By giving hegemonic voices the centre stage in journalism, using anthropomorphized language like “artificial intelligence” instead of algorithms or machine-learning technologies and by glorifying AI’s capabilities, we are priming people to adapt to these tools. It ought to be the opposite. We must adapt and regulate the tools to meet human needs.

Illustration by Jarred Briggs

“I still remember everything about it,” Zakaria Amara says, sketching the library inside Millhaven Institution, a maximum-security prison located in Bath, Ontario. He maps the librarian’s glass office inside the door from a controlled-movement hallway. An inspirational sign about reading hangs on the wall (he can’t recall what it says exactly). Next, the law books. Behind that, a back wall offering fantasy novels. There’s a magazine section in one corner. And in the centre of it all, couches to rest and read on.

“Here was my favourite section for a very long time,” Amara taps the pen on a rectangle he’s drawn beside the law section. Self-help.

In the summer of 2006, a series of anti-terrorism raids shocked Toronto and the GTA. Police arrested 13 men and four minors, and took an eighteenth person into custody two months later. Together, the group became known as the Toronto 18, accused of planning a series of attacks including a plot to bomb the Toronto Stock Exchange, among other important buildings. Amara, detained at age 20 and considered one of the ringleaders, pled guilty at trial in 2009. He received a life sentence.

Last October, Amara was released on parole following two days of intense interrogation, a month or so apart, by RCMP national security investigators to assess whether he still posed a threat to society. Today, in a quiet corner of the Toronto Reference Library, Amara explains how library access was critical to his transformation and deradicalization in prison. He arrived at Millhaven in 2015, after five-and-a-half years in the special handling unit (SHU)—also known as supermax— at Ste-Anne-des-Plaines Institution in Quebec. Despite its reputation as one of Canada’s most violent prisons, Millhaven was “paradise” compared to the SHU.

“I must have read 100 self-help books,” he says. At the time, the genre was new to him and introduced him to concepts and ideas that he wasn’t aware of. “I had no access to emotions,” he explains, “so it opened up understanding emotions, self- esteem, self-worth, and how that tied back to why I became radicalized in the first place.”

Being incarcerated doesn’t—or shouldn’t—mean that you’ve given up your right to access information. In fact, as the Canadian Federation of Library Associations argues in its Right to Read position statement, “certain freedoms, such as those of conscience and religion, thought, belief, opinion, and expression have a heightened importance behind bars.” Adopted in 2016, the statement joined a list of internationally endorsed foundational documents that support establishing and supporting library services to prisoners. These include the United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules, which state that “Every institution shall have a library for the use of all categories of prisoners, adequately stocked with both recreational and instructional books, and prisoners shall be encouraged to make full use of it.”

Despite the obvious benefits of access to information behind bars, that freedom is routinely limited or not extended to incarcerated people in Canada.

“Hey, librarian,” someone is yelling from the next cell over. The librarian, Michelle De Agostini, is taking her printed library catalogue door-to-door at the Edmonton Institution, a maximum-security men’s prison in Alberta. “I want some James Patterson!”

Patterson, one of the world’s best-selling authors, is just as popular on the “inside” as he is to the masses. But genre fiction is far from the only material that’s important to incarcerated people. Folks inside prison have the same information needs as those of us on the outside: instruction on languages, cultural practices, entrepreneurship, mental health, self-help and the law.

Though many of the Edmonton Institution men show a desire to read, movement, association and privileges are highly restricted in maximum security. Browsing the stacks was out of the question. De Agostini tried to have the catalogue installed on standalone computers to make the check-out process easier for them, but upgrading the technology proved not to be a high priority for the IT staff. So instead, De Agostini printed the catalogue and took it cell-to-cell, conducting interviews along the way to determine what materials would interest people. The unwieldy paper version of an Excel spreadsheet she carried around was more than 300 pages long. “It was ridiculous. And it never printed in a way that was very readable. I thought, ‘How is anybody supposed to know how to find anything?’”

De Agostini never imagined that she was going to be a prison librarian. But after a talk from the Greater Edmonton Library Association’s (GELA) Prison Libraries Project during library school, she started volunteering with them in 2018 and eventually became treasurer. She began by helping lead creative writing workshops at the Edmonton Remand Centre. In 2019, while still going to the Edmonton Remand Centre monthly, De Agostini began working at the Edmonton Institution, where a new library was being created. She lucked into her full-time paid job there when a manager walked in while she was volunteering and said, “Hey, do you know anybody who wants a job?”

De Agostini, who left prison librarianship in 2021, has since worked as a branch manager at a rural public library in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley and is now the Manager of Access Services at York University. “The library,” she wrote in a 2022 paper for Journal of Radical Librarianship, “is a minimum human rights requirement—literally the least prisons could be doing to protect the intellectual freedom of the people they house—and yet adequate library services are still not being provided in Canadian prisons.”

While federal prisons in Canada are legally required to have a library in their institutions, provincial legislation is patchy. Most provincial prisons don’t have their own library services, instead relying on volunteer librarians to bring in programming. This means there’s little continuity in what’s on offer, and, at the provincial level, little assurance that it will be anything at all. A “library” in a provincial prison might be a storage locker full of books that are packed up and exchanged every month or so. Or a volunteer group might be allowed to build a library space that they’ll maintain monthly.

This means that every day, thousands of incarcerated people could be denied their fundamental right to access to information and library services. The consequences range from lack of ability to escape through reading to increased isolation to difficulty working on their legal cases. Lack of access to books, in other words, can make a hopeless situation feel worse.

In Canada, there are two correctional systems. The federal system, governed by Correctional Service Canada (CSC), houses adults who have been sentenced to two or more years in institutions that use minimum, medium, maximum and special handling security classifications. Meanwhile, the provincial-territorial system, regulated by each province or territory’s relevant ministry or department, houses adults sentenced to less than two years and youth aged 12 to 17. The provincial-territorial system also houses people in remand, meaning they haven’t been convicted of a crime and are waiting for trial. On an average day, according to Statistics Canada, there are about 12,395 adults in federal custody and 20,430 adults in provincial-territorial custody, with a staggering 71 percent of provincially incarcerated persons being held in remand.

It’s well known that Black and Indigenous people are chronically overrepresented within these populations. A 2016 investigation by Maclean’s magazine found that Canadian criminologists had quietly begun referring to prisons and jails as the “new residential schools.” According to the 2021-2022 “Annual Report of the Office of the Correctional Investigator,” Indigenous people comprise just five percent of Canada’s overall population, yet make up 32 percent of those held in federal institutions. Worse, Indigenous women represent 50 percent of all women in federal custody. Black people, who represent roughly 3.5 percent of the overall Canadian population, are similarly overrepresented in federal custody, comprising 9.2 percent of the total population. The majority of Black people incarcerated are young men between the ages of 18 to 30.

For prison librarians, that means working toward a collection that contains culturally relevant materials, says Kirsten Wurmann, chair and founding member of Manitoba Library Association’s Prison Libraries Committee. Of course, people can dictate their cultural needs for themselves, but sometimes new information is required, and that’s where librarians come in. “What we can do is say, ‘If you really want some picture books that are English and Cree, we can buy some of those.’” She remembers an older woman who’d come to the library looking for books about traditional Indigenous beading. The books inspired her to create her own patterns, which she’d share with other women.

These days, the Manitoba Library Association’s Prison Libraries Committee is often asked by provincial prisons to help with their libraries by bringing in books, or even setting up a new library because they’ve heard about their work with other institutions and there are no funds or provincial policies in place to do that work. “That feels frustrating to me because we’re a volunteer group and the need is there,” she says.

Lack of funding is one of the biggest challenges of doing this work, says Wurmann. The group receives $500 in funding annually from the Manitoba Library Association, and anything other than that depends on donations and fundraising.

On the other hand, there are advantages to being a small group with access to some money, explains Allison Sivak, who helped found the GELA’s Prison Libraries Project along with Wurmann and others back in 2007. “You can move really fast,” she says. Because it’s a small volunteer group that raises money through its own fundraising efforts, it means that they can avoid layers of red tape, getting materials into people’s hands more quickly.

Whether volunteer or paid, these librarians are passionate about their work inside prisons. But they cannot, by themselves, fill the gaps left by structural inefficiencies. It will take a concerted effort on behalf of each province to create legislation to ensure that each provincial institution has a library, bringing incarcerated people access to the information they deserve.

Opened in 1835, Kingston Penitentiary was Canada’s first large prison and housed its first recorded prison library. Early Canadian prison libraries, modelled on those in American prisons, were run by chaplains, held mainly religious texts in their collections and were, not surprisingly, framed as spaces of moral reform. In the late 1880s, the Penitentiary Acts and the Rules and Regulations for the Government of the Penitentiaries of Canada of 1888 stipulated that all federal prisons must have a library containing secular books alongside the religious ones. However, there wouldn’t be a standardized federal prison library policy until 2012’s National Guide for Institutional Libraries. The guide was strongly influenced by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions’ 2005 Guidelines for Library Services to Prisoners which canvassed librarians in more than 25 countries regarding the status of prison libraries and related legislation in their homelands. Today, mirroring the outside to help inmates prepare for their release is considered a crucial purpose of prison libraries. To that end, Commissioner’s Directive 720, CSC’s policy instrument on educational programs and services for inmates, in effect as of May 2017, states that not only are prisons responsible for providing library services, but those services ought to be “similar to those offered in the community.” That’s important, Wurmann says, because incarcerated individuals came from our community, they remain part of it while they are inside, and eventually they return to our wider society.

Though CSC declined an interview, in an email Jordan Crosby, manager of issues management and media relations, stated that library services meant to address recreational, cultural, spiritual and educational reference needs are provided at all federal institutions. Those services may be provided by a dedicated librarian, another staff member or by contract. Some materials are prohibited: particularly anything alluding to weapons construction or sexually explicit works involving violence or children. But books can also be limited on an individual basis. For example, if it “contributes to an unhealthy living environment [or] presents a risk to the safety and security of the institution.” Another reason that materials might be individually limited is if they are inconsistent with an inmate’s correctional plan, a program tailored to each person based on an evaluation they receive when they arrive at an institution. The evaluation is meant to determine the underlying reasons that led to their sentence while the correctional plan, updated throughout the person’s sentence, is intended to prepare them to return to the community.

“Reading and access to educational resources is important and we make every effort to ensure access to inmates,” Crosby writes, noting that book carts, reading requests, access to legal materials and the Digital Reference Library—which is updated quarterly—are available to people. The Digital Reference Library is accessed through monitored and restricted computers which may be located on the unit but also in spots like the school and work program areas or the library. It is also available by CD-ROM, and where necessary, in paper form. However, De Agostini says, “whether or not people get access—reasonable access—to that library is debatable, but they’re legally required to have it.”

Defining what library services are or ought to be is contentious because every library worker and incarcerated person has a different idea of what’s needed. CSC’s own National Guide for Institutional Libraries says that library services should match the public library as best as they can. So for De Agostini, reasonable access means being able to enter the space, browse the stacks and other media, search a catalogue on library computers, be able to attend regular library programming, speak to a qualified library worker and have access to printing and web services, with no banning or censorship of library materials (within reason). She’d like to see maker spaces. Most importantly, perhaps, reasonable access means the library is robustly funded with well-developed collections that meet patrons’ needs and has established inter-library loan services to fill in the gaps.

For Amara, what constitutes reasonable access is much simpler. “Security always trumps everything in those places so that’s the card that’s played” when it comes to accessing the library, he says. At a minimum, he says, the library must be open five days per week when there are no security issues, ideally for both the morning and afternoon movement shifts. A lockdown period usually follows a security incident. It’s a time when all privileges are suspended, though inmates still receive their prescriptions. In the event of a lockdown, Amara thinks the book trolley should come out as soon as possible. In fact, he suggests, since prisoners can’t go to the library every day—at Millhaven, they must request a pass and are allowed to visit only once or twice per week—the trolley should go around daily. “Books are like medication,” he says, “and should be treated as such.”

On Wednesdays, the Kitchener Public Library bus rolls into Grand Valley Institution for Women loaded with books destined for the library in the main building. Inside their residential-style units, the women wait for inmate count to be finished, gearing up for a wild race to the library when they’re released.

“As soon as that bell went off after lunch, after the count was complete, people would just be running as fast as they could to the building to try to get as many books as they could,” says Emily O’Brien, who served 10 months out of a four-year sentence for drug smuggling in the federal multilevel security facility in Kitchener, Ontario. The library at Grand Valley was small, O’Brien explains, but its partnership with the Kitchener Public Library meant that people could request books that the prison library didn’t have.

“Reading [in prison] was never an escape for me. It was more like something that made me feel worthy,” O’Brien says. Not only did she devour 82 books during her time there, but she also started Comeback Snacks, a successful gourmet popcorn company that now employs other formerly incarcerated people—all without access to the internet. “Reading gave me hope because when you can educate yourself through books, that inspires you to build things,” she says.

With a limited library, and no internet, O’Brien had to get creative to expand her reading list. She mostly read nonfiction, so when she really liked a book, she’d check out the source list and place orders for the author’s source books. And sometimes, she says, “I would call my mom on the phone and get her to look up business books that were coming out.”

Books and relationships with prison librarians can also help incarcerated people to feel more like themselves in a situation where there aren’t many chances to show one’s individuality. Sivak recalls an incarcerated woman saying, “We’re treated as a population.” For prisoners, having normal interactions with people who treat them with respect or having packages addressed to them is really important because they are dehumanized on a daily basis.

“I often talk about giving a humanizing experience,” Wurmann says. “They’re not just inmates. They’re not just offenders. They are incarcerated, but it doesn’t mean that they’ve given up their rights.”

Sivak sees library services not just as a way to learn, but as a way to build connections between people. She notes the benefits of outsiders coming in to spend time, whether for a reading, writing or other creative program, as programming inside prison is often designed to change people. However, “in art making or writing, you see people’s strengths and the pride they have in the work they make, and that’s very cool,” she says.

“Volunteering in prison is not an easy process,” explains O’Brien, who participated in a monthly book club at Grand Valley facilitated by Book Clubs for Inmates, a charity that organizes volunteer-led book clubs in federal prisons across Canada. Volunteers have to go through many security clearances to be able to go inside. “For someone to really commit to doing that because they believe in second chances or because they believe in people even though they’ve done something wrong—it was another thing that provided help.” Not only did the book club inspire the women to form new friendships amongst themselves, O’Brien says, but it allowed them to meet people they could connect with after prison.

Volunteers have “the scent of freedom,” Amara says. In the SHU he wasn’t allowed access to volunteers, but at Millhaven, where there was a book club and a poetry club, being around free people gave him hope. “They’re not guards and they aren’t part of the system. You aren’t afraid of them. And they’re just there to help you.”

In her paper, De Agostini charges that “prison libraries have largely been considered a privilege exchanged for good behaviour rather than a well-planned service and a human right.” A “combination of moralism, budget shortfalls and a punitive philosophy…has allowed Canadian prisons to become sites of perpetual punishment and trauma for the people that inhabit them,” she writes. That leaves the prison librarian with an impossible task: delivering a service that matches the public library while contending with the security constraints of prison. De Agostini says she still wonders if she could have fought harder or done more to provide a better library service.

By the time Amara was transferred to the SHU, he’d been incarcerated for three years and was beginning to lay the foundations of separating himself from his extremist mindset. During his first year there, he took a psychology course and a critical thinking course through Athabasca University, which offers flexible distance learning. The trouble was, and continues to be, that CSC offers little to no deradicalization programming. Even though he had the willingness to change, it was difficult to tackle the emotional roots of his ideology on his own. He didn’t have a therapist; all he had was books.

In the SHU, he couldn’t go to the library, but there were old, out of date catalogues at a bookstand where he could make written book requests. He came across Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which led him to one of the most important books he ever read: In the First Circle, also by the Russian author. He loved it so much, he ended up buying it from the SHU. “When I got my parole,” he says, voice filled with emotion, “I gave it as a gift to my parole officer.”

“Any extremist or dogmatic person hides a secret doubt,” Amara says. “That’s why fanatics overcompensate.” The reason the book touched him so deeply was the dialogue between the characters, he explains—the main character was a communist officer who became disillusioned. Had it been about Islamic extremists, Amara says he wouldn’t have read it—too close to home. But because it was about a different type of ideology, he could discern the parallels to his own situation and the conversations between the characters “cracked away” at his beliefs.

“My message is, look at whatever limited access and problematic access I had, look what it’s done for me and imagine what it can do if we make it better,” says Amara. “What I got out of it changed my life.”