Illustration by Valentine Smith.

One way to examine a marriage is to look at the pattern of jokes. Fourteen years ago, when Heidi started her daily running practice, when Marley was two, terribly two, Heidi used to joke that she ran because she could pretend she’d keep running and never come back. Sometimes she ran for an hour, for two. Jake laughed loudly, generously, and it was one of his best points. He could take a joke.

Her breaths were as loud as the rustling of leaves. Footsteps too heavy. Her breath a fog in the air, dirty as exhaust.

Last night, she’d gone to bed early. They’d had Dinah and Steve and Nathan over, and they were a little drunk, trying, a bunch of academic ex-radicals, to revel. Their parties were growing sluggish as their metabolisms. Talk now turned around aches and pains, ageism, the fact of death. “I’m going to die, me!” Dinah said. Dinah had recently gotten through a bout of breast cancer. “Riddled!” she said. “I’m riddled with disease.” Heidi had smiled. She’d been amused, slightly, but was already thinking forward to the morning, to her ritual in the still-dark world. Snug clothing thin as a rubber cast peeling up and over her body, her neon pink runners, the sweat-wicking socks. Yanking the laces hard. It was a place she could go to in her mind, down to the paved trails curving around the marsh called Cootes Paradise, down to the view of the lake, choppy and wild. The fishy smells, the dead things, skeletons recalling wasps’ nests when viewed from a long way off. Marley called it an addiction. Teenagers were prone to misusing words and exaggerating. Everything random, everything literally.

“I think the definition of addiction includes the possibility for ruin. Drugs and alcohol and gambling ruin people’s lives.”

“So drugs aren’t always so bad?” Marley was withering, eyebrows high, and Heidi suspected a trap, that she’d have to allow that hard drug use was okay. She skirted it.

“I don’t think my running’s an addiction.”

“You depend on it, Mom. You’re de-pend-ent.”

Sometimes at parties Jake still talked about her PhD, as though he worried about how people might view her. And Dinah talked and talked about cancer, about bodies.

Steve said, “I haven’t passed on my genetic material.”

“Maybe it all comes down to biology in the end,” Nathan said. None of them believed this, but they allowed it to pass unchallenged. A

s they talked, Heidi watched her husband, sexy because he would be inaccessible to her until afterwards. Married 20 years, they were now amazing to people. “I need a little more dysfunction in my life!”: one of Marley’s ridiculous complaints.

She got up to pour everyone more wine, to offer chocolates. In half an hour, she’d go to bed, armed with the excuse of her morning run. From upstairs, she would hear their voices faintly, the eruptions of laughter. Would hear when they decided to put on reggae, possibly to dance. Would hear Dinah say that she was running so much it was like she thought she wasn’t going to die. Soon it was only Dinah’s voice, and Jake’s. The words, the laughter, the drumbeats wound into her mind, while she fell by drowsy steps to sleep. Was that Dinah talking to Jake after the others had gone home? Was that them saying “her”? Over and and over again, her her her, scritch-scratching like branches hitting the window in a storm.

Heidi used to joke, when asked how they’d gotten together, “He was just so obsessed with me, I felt sorry for him.” Funny because Jake was so good looking. Funny because it had been she who’d been obsessed. “A marriage based on pity.”

Some years ago, there’d been a body right on the trail where she ran every day. It had been lying there in plain sight, decomposing, presumably with its unseeing eye or eyes staring right at Heidi as she breezed past. She read the paper for clues, brought it up in every casual conversation with neighbours, with parents dropping their kids off in the morning and picking them up in the afternoon, with the woman who owns the bakery, with the librarians. It had been a calm, almost idyllic time in her life, with both kids in school and space in the day for walking by herself, stopping at the bookstore, treating herself to lattes. But in this body there seemed to be something personal, especially in the fact that she had missed it, a half-dressed woman, torso pricked with stab wounds, skin mottled and bruised and swollen, barely covered by leaves and pine needles.

She should have noticed something. A smell? Scavenging animals? She returned to her memory of the day when she would have run right past the body twice—once in, once back—and could not see anything where seeing the body should have been. It was all she talked about for a while. She joked about turning herself into the police for being such a bad detective. There was guilt in it, wasn’t there? A sin of omission?

The body had, while living, belonged to a student who lived around the corner from them. And when she racked her memory for this, too, she thought she almost remembered the girl’s long sweep of blonde hair, her slender body, glasses that appeared to be ornamental, but she knew that this picture in her mind came not from her own observations but from the newspaper, the neighbours’ reports.

Semen had been found on her person, semen eventually determined to have been deposited only an hour before her death. The rage indicated by the many stab wounds were said to be proof that she had been killed by someone she knew intimately. But there were no witnesses, no DNA matches.

A woman detective came by, claimed only to be making rounds. “I’m afraid these things rarely get resolved,” she told Heidi. Middle-aged, paunchy, but pretty in her way, she walked slowly around the living room, pausing at the teak bookshelves covering one large wall, pausing again to peer at photos and artworks sat here and there. “Call me if you think of anything,” she’d said, and there was a meaning to her look that Heidi understood was a police trick, an attempt to suss you out if there was anything to be sussed.

There were layers of years between her and those months of investigation, layers between the investigation and what had really happened, and she was only thinking of it now because of something Dinah had said last night. It was a bin you found in an attic full of things you’d forgotten existed.

Heidi no longer became breathless while running. More likely were her legs to give out than her lungs. Lately it was heel pain; the only time her foot didn’t hurt was when she was actually hitting the ground hard, silencing it, and then it whimpered through the rest of her day. She limped while walking; running, she flew.

The only way to survive those years when the kids were babies was to be like that heel, numb and silent, getting through. So that now she could not remember. She must have told Jake about the detective. Now it throbbed in her mind, a halo of light around the thing to which she should have been alert.

A year after the body was found, she’d become a cliché, the bored housewife imagining things. She could not find significance in the details. Her sympathy was with the police, dealing always with gaps and misarrangements of facts and— how could the justice system rely so heavily on eyewitness testimony?—human memory. “I think I’ll retire the detective’s cap,” she said to Jake one evening after dinner. “At the risk of becoming ridiculous.”

Jake had laughed. The table was strewn with dirty dishes, rice spread like maggots around Kent’s chair. She took him to the kitchen to wash the sticky soy sauce off his hands and said to Jake, “Was she ever in any of your classes?”

“Who?”

“Larissa Cheminovsky or however you pronounce it.”

“Oh, her.”

The Who?. The Oh, her. These responses made no sense in the context of their discussion. They sent a chill through her so that she thought, her hands on Kent’s, working the suds through his fat fingers, she might make her son shiver.

“Her.”

“I thought I told you that? She was in the first Sensationalist class I taught,” he said, boldly looking at her, a dare in his eyes.

***

Sometimes when she was running her body disappeared. She became spirit. Only her eyes floated in midair like two firebugs. Sometimes during a long run it was as if she’d fallen asleep.

It was as bad as an addiction. When she had to stop, it might ruin her. How could she go on without the way it felt? Running was a way of sorting the thoughts into their proper channels, sending them along like paper boats out to sea. Her body in leaps and falls, its acquaintance with gravity. An old joke about why she ran marathons, about why she insisted on giving birth without an epidural: “I have a guilty conscience.”

Running also made her see herself as prey. When she went down her trails, the wooded ones, the asphalt ones trimmed by the polluted, fish-stinking waterways, she was always alert. A branch falling along the path ahead of her felt ominous. Rustling sounds were wolves in her imagination. Once she had come across a pack of five enormous deer, and camouflaged as she was by her black Gore-Tex and the winter’s dark they didn’t notice her. From a distance and until she was a few metres away, she thought they were fantastical, too fine to be animals, and too large to be people.

Perhaps with her routine, her isolation, she was inviting rapists and weirdos. She didn’t stop running underneath overpasses, in absolute darkness, not even after the body was found.

***

Just before she’d said good-night, she gave an anecdote about running past the giant blow-up black cats someone had put on their lawn for Halloween. They were at least six-by-six-by-six feet large, and there two of them, rigged up to a motor so that they turned their giant grinning evil black cat faces toward each other and then forward and then toward each other. “It was terrifying to run past them,” she said. She felt judgment or boredom in the silence of her audience. “I don’t know how to explain it. My instincts flared. Obviously they were made out of nylon or whatever. But as I was running past them I felt distinctly like they were going to pounce on me.”

Distinctly was one of those words people used when they wanted to sound smart. It had been well over a decade since she’d given up her academic life. Dinah and Steve and Nathan stared at her, blinking.

It reminded Jake of something amusing that had happened. He could read her and a crowd, rescuing her from the limelight.

He told the anecdote about the squirrel, about their bad detective work. The joke was that his specialization was Sherlock Holmes and the 19th-century detective novel, that in his work he dealt with the detail, with clues, all the ways to think about the epistemological problem of everyday life.

“First, there was a hole in the screen. We found a huge gaping hole one day in the dining room window screen. We thought it was Kent!” Everyone laughed. “Just like Kent to punch a hole in the screen for no reason. And then the next day our fruit basket was knocked over. My first thought was—there’s been a burglar! What did he want with our fruit?” He was into the story now, standing. “There was an apple with some bites in it and of course I assumed it had to be Kent!”

“Tell me you did not eat the apple,” Steve said. He was famously fastidious, and grimaced largely for everyone’s amusement.

“Well, I cut out the bite marks.” Jake seemed quite far from her, and she smiled at him from another place, underwater. “Then, at dinner time, a squirrel comes along and sits on the windowsill and stares at us while we’re eating.”

“We really didn’t have a clue,” Heidi said. “I think I said ‘We need to cover up that hole or we’ll have wildlife getting in.’”

“We interrogated Kent and Marley: Why did you break the screen? We couldn’t figure out why they wouldn’t just tell us the truth. We’re the worst detectives in the entire world! It wasn’t until we saw the squirrel sitting in our fucking nut jar that we finally put it together.”

“At least the irony isn’t lost on you,” Nathan said.

As she left the room with empty plates, and on her way back with another bottle, Heidi heard Dinah say something about Larissa. “Remember that whole thing?”

“Did they ever find the guy?” Steve said.

“Of course you assume it was a guy,” Dinah said.

“They never caught him,” Heidi said. They all stared. Everything always came blurting out of her.

“Wasn’t she in a bunch of your classes?” Dinah said to Jake.

“She was his RA,” Nathan said. Then they moved on to another discussion: the barrage of email, the problem of cell phones.

“I’m a hamster on a wheel,” Heidi said, by way of apologizing for leaving the room.

“Aren’t we all,” said Dinah.

***

In the morning, she ran the knots out of her mind. She thought them over like a surgeon, plucking them out as though they were tumours she was riddled with. What might it mean to live as though the irony weren’t lost on you? She thought again and again. What might it mean to live like someone upon whom nothing is lost?

She thought about the rice maggots, Kent’s hands under the water, Jake’s strange response. Oh, her. She’d been a student in more than one class, a chosen research assistant. His reaction had been a lie so easily deciphered that it was an insult as well as a dare. What had it meant? You never believed a person capable of cheating, let alone killing, let alone killing in such a gruesome way, but every killer had a family, had at least one friend who’d say: not the person I knew.

No. These were the thoughts of an irrational, a paranoiac, a conspiracy theorist. There was something there under the thoughts—something about her—but she ran around it, couldn’t dig.

As she neared the house, she saw him there on the porch.

“What are you doing?” she said, unable to look at him directly.

“What do you mean?”

“Standing vigil?” He had never been there to greet her, not once in all these years, but now it seemed to her that marriage as a form of guardianship was inescapable.

“Yeah, ha.” She didn’t need to look up from her stretch to know how his smile looked. “How’s your foot?”

“Same,” she said, pulling off the sock and digging her thumbs into the meat of her heel. You couldn’t see a person you’ve loved this long.

“Don’t let it cripple you,” he said. Then, he reached out his arm to help her up. “You’re allowed to take a day off, you know,” he said, eyes kind, smile relaxed. It was too easy to trust him. No, that was the wrong modifier. Just: it was easy enough to trust him.

The Water Beetles

At times graphic and disturbing, The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan tells the heroic and poetic story of a young boy living in Hong Kong during the Second World War. Based loosely on the diaries and stories of Kaan’s father, the narrative follows 12-year-old Chung-Man as his prestigious family is reduced to shambles. Along with his siblings, Chung-Man is forced to leave his home, travelling on foot to find safety. The book seamlessly flips between present day and the war, with the narrator shedding insight on how the war affected him after all those years. Along the way, the young boy faces the horrific realities of war. However, Kaan is able to balance the bloodshed with beautiful imagery and detail.

Date with Destiny

Ten grisly but rich descriptive short stories, Date With Destiny by Hélène Rioux glimpses at the many ways death affects our lives at any given age. From a mother with a suicidal son, to an overzealous funeral sales telemarketer, each character experiences death with a semblance of normalcy through Rioux’s colourful prose. Translated from French by frequent collaborator Jonathan Kaplansky, each story evokes a wide variety of emotion, from sadness and sympathy, to hilarity and awkward discomfort. Chapters also feature thought-provoking quotes by poets, playwrights, and even rock star Jim Morrison—each a nod to the overall themes of the collection.

The Nearly Girl by Lisa de Nikolits is many things, but predictable isn’t one of them. Broken into a few chapters, The Nearly Girl tells the story of an unusual family, including a daughter named Amelia, who inherited her father’s peculiarities and is confronted with a grim reality when she is forced to deal with her issues.

De Nikolits’ novel reads like a movie. It’s fast paced and full of colourful, loud characters, but Amelia is certainly the stand-out. Her fascination with the unusually beautiful fuels her need to prove that she, like her father, requires an unorthodox way of living to truly be happy.

The Nearly Girl is brimming with bright story lines and vivid themes. The story becomes a commentary on life through the artist’s mind and the impermanence of happiness.

Illustration by Kat Verhoeven

I was maybe, what, eight years old? There I was, standing in my literal cave of a stinky basement—a carved-out hollow of dark, dank stone under my rickety old house—scrounging through books piled high into mountains of dust. I whipped out one book. The cover stood out: A woman with flowing ebony braids is striking an ultimate power pose atop a flying carpet. At her side sat a man with eyes agog in admiration. Aladdin and Jasmine, I wondered? No, far from it. It was so, so much better. Her name was Princess Cimorene, a protagonist girl with gumption, confidence, bravery; she was everything I wanted to be. And that was my introduction to the Enchanted Forest Chronicles, an epic fantasy series and my all-time favourite set of books.

I remember it as the first time, in my burgeoning mind, that I never wanted a book to end. This book was different. There was magic and enchantment, sure, but the true fairytale aspect was Princess Cimorene herself. A girl with some ’tude, some spunk (oh, and, yeah, she fully, coolly befriends dragons). In the following years, however, I’d come to learn Princess Cimorene was a minority. As much as I fell in deeper and deeper love with the genre, I was not heart-eyed at all over the dearth of characters like me. I soon discovered it wasn’t enough for authors to plop a female character into the story (which was rarity enough)—I wanted complex female characters, vulnerable ones, strong ones, ones that felt real and diverse. It felt paramount to me that I, and other readers like me, could see themselves in these stories.

In his November 2012 Tedx talk, “The Mystery of Storytelling,” literary agent Julian Friedmann argues prehistoric caves were the earliest cinemas. Hunters would go in, look at the paintings, and imagine the fear they’d feel when they went out in the bushes. They rehearsed it. It’s the same reason we use literature, theatre, and cinema. “When we’re looking up at the screen,” he says during his talk, “we’re certainly not looking at you, we’re looking at ourselves, because only we are the storytellers.” They gazed up at the walls and, in place of dragons and wizards under the flickering torchlight, they saw beasts, and in them they saw themselves. But where do girls and women, people of colour, and those on the LGBTQ spectrum go when they want to look at themselves?

These days, more and more, fantasy and sci-fi are our pop culture cave drawings of choice. The genre has played an ever-larger role, gradually increasing in dominance since the Second World War, says Lisa Makman, a Columbia-educated Ph.D. and English lit lecturer at the University of Michigan. Just look at cultural staying power of Harry Potter or Game of Thrones’ cult following. We have superhero movies galore, what seem like an endless amount of post-apocalypse books and movies, and a surplus of monster-human and dystopian love triangles. The new Star Wars grossed nearly $120 million at the U.S. box office on its first day. That’s not to mention the hundreds of spin-offs, imitations, and other popular shows and books—we’re saturated. And, yet, in a series of worlds where there are, quite literally, no boundaries, why have so few authors and creators imagined a world of diversity?

Fantasy and sci-fi have nothing and yet everything to do with reality. The twin genres aren’t about escapism; they’re a search for meaning. In them, we see a mirror of the world reflected back— our own modern struggles dancing in the cave light. In many cases, when we read fantasy we’re hoping for a sort of redemption: from war, from nuclear weapons, from broken hearts, from a depleting ozone. There’s a reason dystopian fantasy is on the rise. One of the most influential fantasy writers, J.R.R. Tolkien, coined the term eucatastrophe: “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” He argues that a eucatastrophic state privileges us with a glimpse of truth—one that liberates us from our limitations. That’s why we read fantasy: truth.

Fantasy is all about truth. Alison Gopnik is an American psychologist who, in a 2005 Slate article, argued in favour of the genre. Those enmeshed in the world of fantastical lore, she argued, are more secure in their physical and psychological environments than those with a lessened propensity for the magical. “Children may love fantasy not because they can’t appreciate the truth or because their lives are difficult,” she wrote in the article, “but for precisely the opposite reason.” Such stories are important because, rather than offering readers escape from their woeful environment, they let readers embrace a single-minded determination towards truth. In other words, fantasy lets us work out our shit—but how do you do that when you can’t see yourself in the narrative?

When I got sick in my early 20s, fantasy became excruciatingly important to me. Doctors had no idea what was happening. I felt lethargic and on the verge of falling asleep all the time. I lost my job as a salesperson at Indigo. I couldn’t leave my bed for over two months; even watching TV became too tiring. Even now, way after the fact, doctors still have no idea what happened—the best they can surmise is that I contracted a devastating virus. But what I do know is this strange time in my life let me a lot of time to think. I’d imagine what was happening in my body. I felt like I was living in a corpse, everything was failing, weakening, into nothing. That’s where the image of the snake came in.

In my feverish, weakened state, I kept imagining a glistening snake in my lower abdomen, a venomous serpent. It felt like a mythical battle going on inside my body. Later, I was sure the recurring image was an instinctual urge to fight for my life. I felt on the verge of death and so everything became primal. I would imagine the snake shedding its skin and in it I wished for my own rebirth. When our ancestors looked up at the churning grey sky, they saw anger. In the sun and abundance of crops, they saw benevolence. When we have no answers, we construct tales. Centuries ago, they made gods. For everything prolific and small, we weave stories where answers have yet to present themselves. That’s what I was doing in those months. Without paper or pen, I was writing a fantasy story in my mind, discovering my truth, working it all out.

An interminable hope impelled me toward these stories—I would get better. The mystery illness would abate. Escapism buffers us against reality, even as it continues to be plundered. Fantasy helped make me proactive; I visualized what I could not see. After I recovered, I kept writing stories, but they evolved. I incorporated dragons as main characters in my story, and they would coalesce with female characters. I made these characters wild, defiant, feminine, and strong— exactly the kinds of women I’d always wanted in the books that I read.

In all the various mainstays and tropes in fantasy, women and dragons inhabit close quarters in our psyche—and this relationship has played out time and time again in literary and cultural scenes. Silken-haired Game of Thrones fan favourite Daenerys Targaryen is best known, for example, as the mother of dragons. After her husband dies, she cremates his body and burns herself along with three petrified dragon eggs in his remains. The eggs hatch, and she goes from being a child (who, it must be said, was “given” to said husband as a gift and political pawn), to a boss-ass bitch. It’s the quintessential rise of the phoenix.

Yet even Daenerys, often lauded as a model for awesome women characters, is problematic: she comes with some serious white savior issues, a whole lot of indecision, and much—too much—is made of the men who follow her out of devotion to her beauty and goodness. She’s as much of an example of how far we’ve come as she is of how far we have to go.

I often wonder where, as Game of Thrones continues, she’ll fit into Carl Jung’s theory of the dragon as the arch-enemy of the hero: “[The] mother dragon which threatens to overwhelm the birth of the God, which the Hero must defeat before becoming the Hero.” In Jung’s world, the father figure triumphs over the matriarch—a trend we often see in real life, but also in Sleeping Beauty’s puissant Maleficent. Though she’s recently received an Angelina Jolie remake, this spunky, spiky lady is best known as the evil dragon who battles the heroic prince. And loses.

Dragons are a classic villain, says Jordan Peterson, eminent psychologist and University of Toronto professor. He points to Medusa as a prime example. Even on her best hair days, this lady turned men into stone. She represents what Peterson says is man’s ultimate fear: a woman rejecting them. Taking a Darwinian approach, Peterson theorizes that when a woman rejects a man, he’s also rejected by nature—because, as gatekeepers to reproduction, women symbolize the power of nature, natch. When a (male) knight tames the dragon, he also tames the woman, ensuring survival through his offspring. It’s a fascinating theory, but one that reduces both women and men to their pure biological makeup. I suspect Peterson’s right—it’s a classic case of fantasy, but also one that needs to change.

Too often both women and dragons represent wild natural forces, either within us or outside us, but always ones that must be tamed and conquered. After watching a video clip in which mythologist Joseph Campbell describes the Western dragon as a symbol of the untamed wild, it struck me that in myth women, too, usually symbolize an uncontrolled element of nature. In her seminal book Women Who Run with Wolves, Clarissa Pinkola Estes analyzes the roles of female characters in classic tales. “Wildlife and the Wild Woman are both endangered species,” she writes. “Over time, we have seen the feminine instinct nature looted, driven back, and overbuilt.” To Estes, the Wild Woman has been mismanaged just like the wild lands, relegated to poorest land in the psyche. I can’t help but agree.

It’s truly hard, if not seemingly impossible, to break away from archetypal figures. Since the dawn of stories, through goddesses and sorceresses, powerful women have graced our imagination. And there are shining examples of diversity like my treasured Enchanted Forest Chronicles stories. At the same time, we’ve collectively kept women largely in narrow roles—and that’s not to mention both the stereotyping and scarcity of heroes who are people of colour or LGBTQ. Luckily, I’m not the only one who’s desperate for more diversity. While change seems slow, many authors are starting to defy standard narratives, and many of them are Canadian women.

I spoke to Vancouver-based author and teacher Linda DeMeulemeester about the inspiration behind her award-winning children’s fantasy series, Grim Hill, which follows two sisters who move to a new house and battle supernatural forces. DeMeulemeester was drawn to the power women have in Celtic mythology. While other mythologies portray women with power and supernatural abilities, DeMeulemeester stresses, that power often resides in their ability to weaken men. That’s not what she was after. Instead, legendary Celtic figures like Queen Maeb intrigued her—these mythological women who held wealth, power and influence of their own accord, not in relation to their sexiness. “Influence is the key,” says DeMeulemeester, “that they had power to make important decisions and contributions.”

Influence also means it’s not all about muscles. While it’s nice to see women with sheer physical strength, I’d also like to see more stories where women can depend on cleverness, wit, talent. Ontario-based children’s author Alison Baird agrees. As a young woman, Baird was in love with larger-than-life heroines. She recognizes now that these books, often women-authored, were likely written as a way to address the need for strong, brave, proactive female figures in fiction. But eventually, she became disillusioned with the trend. The heroines felt a little too strong, a little too unrealistic. “I could not, as a nonathletic bookworm,” says Baird, “relate to a woman who could wield a broadsword and handily defeat a male opponent on the field of battle.” The female protagonists in her many fantasy books rely less on physical strength and more on strength of character and cleverness.

This concern harkens back to an age-old question: Can women still have it all? My answer is: why the hell not? Fantasy gives us room to be optimistic: we strive towards admirable characters and learn from evil ones. Fantasy gave us one of TV’s greatest feminists, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a character that flips patriarchy the middle finger,shows that feminine doesn’t equate weakness, is never defined by a man, shares her power with other women, and on. (Though she’s also a pint-sized, white blonde.)

Yet, Buffy went off-air in 2003. More recently we have Marvel’s Jessica Jones, a complex superhero who helps us confront rape culture and sexual trauma. There’s also Rey from Star Wars, who, it should be noted, was criticized for being too awesome—some film buffs, views, and pop culture writers called her a Mary Sue, a term used to deride a woman character who’s good at everything. Apparently, to them, she was unrealistic. Let’s just pause a second to ponder this: In a world full of fantastical scenarios, it was the heroic woman that caused them to stir uncomfortably in their seats. And let’s not even get started on the noticeable lack of Rey toys in the Star Wars sets, despite her status as the main character.

Strong women characters who are in charge of their own fates isn’t a new trend, says Liz Johnston, manager of Toronto’s Mabel’s Fable Childrens Book Store. It’s often one book, though, that makes it mainstream and enlightens the populace, like the recent Hunger Games. (Although it’s worth debating whether protagonist Katniss’s ultimate reward of a husband and babies is a positive message or not.) Johnston says that the number of female protagonists in popular dystopian fiction has helped advance diversity. Once something becomes so widespread and popular, she says, it makes it easier for book publishers to pick it up. She’s noticed many publishers are now starting to move away from books targeted toward males, which is a welcome change.

While recently browsing the children’s section at Indigo, I noticed two categories: “LGBTQIA” and “We Need Diverse Books.” Admittedly, I didn’t know whether to feel happy or uneasy. While I want increased awareness, I also hope the day will come when such classifications won’t exist—that diversity will be just as much a part of fantasy and sci-fi books as plot, spaceships, and magic.

I think about Tolkien, whose work I like but also find uncomfortable. Traversing the plains of Middle Earth while reading Lord of the Rings as an adult, physical descriptions of some characters—the evil ones—snapped me out of my eucatastrophic state. I was transported back to my living room couch, shaking my head. As John Yatt wrote in the Guardian: “Perhaps I’d better come right out and say it. The Lord of the Rings is racist.” Tolkien’s evil characters have dark skin, slant-eyes, broad features, and dreadlocks. After I wrenched the spear of truth from my heart, I thought, “Damn, this Easterling—enemy of the free people, sallow and swarthy, dark hair and dark eyes—sounds just like my uncle.” So maybe, for now, I’m just happy to know children browsing the many colourful covers can find themselves.

Almost universally, white is seen as divine and a force of good, where as darkness is evil. When these features are projected on characters, I start to drift out of these worlds. I’m trying to see myself in the forces of good, but the good doesn’t look like me. My hair is thick, dark, and curly. My eyes are an almost black-brown, cupped in dark circles. I’ve never read a description in a book that refers to my features as angelic, and let’s face it, neither have most readers. Because angelic is an assumption; one of beauty, one of light features, one of worthiness.

Even in writing this article, I realized my sources were a pretty homogeneous group: they were all white. While I’m glad to have spoken to women—and those who identify on the LGBTQ spectrum—it was clear that it’s not just characters of colour who are absent, but writers, critics, booksellers. When Léonicka Valcius started Centennial’s book and magazine publishing program in 2011 she realized the same thing: “I walked into my class—of 60 to 70 people—and saw it was primarily white. There were a handful of people of colour, and a handful of men. That was another ‘huh’ moment.” Later, she came to the conclusion that CanLit “felt like very dead white guys writing about the Canadian experience that meant nothing to me.” That’s when Valcius started the #DiverseCanLit movement, a weekly Twitter discussion about all things diversity in Canada’s publishing world. Valcius says books are like time capsules, and when people look back to CanLit, they should have an opportunity to see how everyone—not just a select few—lived.

Certainly, I’m happy that J.M. Frey exists. Frey is a Guelph, Ont.-based science fiction and fantasy author, as well as a pop culture scholar and a self-described fanthropologist (a term used to describe employing anthropological techniques to study fans and fandom.) She is best known for her book Triptych: a sci-fi novel that follows three narrators as they recount major turning points in the life of a character named Gwen Pierson. Frey’s goal is to write intersectional, feminist novels, but she admits it’s hard to train herself out of writing the genre’s tropes.

She knows it’s frustrating for female readers and writers, especially those who identify as LGBTQ and/or as a person colour, to read or watch prolific fantasy tales. Echoing my earlier thoughts, she asks me: How can an author imagine all these incredible things, yet not imagine a diverse world? While she agrees fantasy is evolving, she also concurs that it’s doing so slowly. “For those of us who want better now, now, now,” she says, “it’s difficult to know we could have much more inclusive media, and more protagonists who are different.”

New Brunswick-based fantasy author KV Johansen adds that “the tendency still exists to use the heterosexual male as the default main character.” Lately, in an attempt to redress past favouritism toward male heroes, publishers are pushing for female protagonists—to the exclusion of men and boys. For Johansen, it’s not a perfect solution. Like me, she hopes we’ll soon outgrow this exclusionary categorization for the sake of equality. She’s not holding her breath, though, noting that there seems to be more reluctance in some segments of “fandom” to accept women, non-white, and non-straight heroes than there is to accept other inverted expectations and clichés—like “aged-and-creaky-archetypes and traditionally villainous creatures.” In other words, readers can get behind a good vampire, but not necessarily a complex, Black, gay, woman hero.

Later, though, when I speak to John Sellers, the children’s review editor for Publishers Weekly, he cautions against getting caught up in what’s meant for boys and what’s meant for girls, or certain categories. Sellers says publishers have an increased interest in diversity in children’s books, including a movement to stop “gender publishing” and start giving kids permission to read what they want to read. Books are packaged more neutrally and even so-called romance books are trending toward typographical covers. “Stories about people of colour, sexuality and identity,” he says, “have been more widely explored in recent years.”

While Sellers and others like him acknowledge the push towards diversification, publishers only make up one part of the equation. Opportunities must exist for readers to see themselves in stories, and for writers to create stories. It’s not enough for those books to be published; they have to be widely promoted, taught in schools, and made easily available. We should all be happy we have people like 11-yearold New Jersey girl Marley Dias, who launched the social action project and book drive #1000BlackGirlBooks after she became tired of reading about white boys and their dogs. She aptly called her assigned school books “monochromatic”.

Whenever we read a fantasy or sci-fi book or watch a movie, it’s our own self-discovery that’s the driving force of these many great quests. Vital to the exploits and the encounters is the identity that is revealed—and challenged—throughout. I’m hopeful that Sellers and others are right: that we’re seeing a change in the genre and using our great imaginations to craft a bigger world. Because everybody, not just beefy white dudes, deserve to open the doors to adventure, just like I did that day in my smelly basement.

I used to laugh it off, or even make jokes to fit in, but now, at the age of 23, I take offense to it. I had a turning point over the last few years when “jokes” about brown families from white bodies began to gnaw at me. I recognized people weren’t laughing with my people, or me, they were laughing at us.

That’s when I realized I was also, in fact, on the margins, part of this homogenized “other” I attempted to distance myself from. From a young age, we are taught to perform whiteness and distance ourselves from brownness to assimilate and fit in, but it’s also as a tool of survival. Part of the uncomfortable laughing when a joke is made about immigrants, or brown people—whether it was one about couponing, the curry smell, hairy women or one that used the racial slur “paki”—was about survival. And, part of it, for me, at least when I was a kid, was buying into the notion that the West was superior.

A lot of what helped me unlearn this integrated and pervasive internalized Western supremacy was reading. As I grew older, reading helped me to unlearn and relearn, to hold myself accountable and to grow. It fostered a love of literature in me—reading as an act of self-care. I found a safe space in narratives and stories, explanations of my displaced feelings in diaspora.

I found myself and depictions of me that were desirable could be found in books, more easily than filmography. I could find authors who wrote dignified narratives of brown girls, and found security between pages and have since been optimistic that literature (well, independent or small press literature written by women of colour—the rest is, at times, jarringly white)—has carved spaces for people of colour to flourish.

This stemmed into a love of bookstores. At least twice a week, I wander aimlessly in one, coffee in hand. I look forward to these visits, but avoid sections with white savior covers. I know how to navigate the aisles of my favorite shops to stay safe. I look at beautiful gold embossed spines, vibrant covers, read multiple book jackets.

Recently, I decided to treat myself to a book or two. I wandered to the diaspora, race, culture and community section of the bookshop. To my disgust I found a magazine back cover turned outward, depicting a South Asian bride being embraced by her father, with bold white lettering that read, “proudly overprotective.”

I immediately felt all of my bookstore happiness evaporate I scanned the advertisement, trying to figure out which “well meaning” white feminist organization had yet again crossed the line between solidarity and orientalism. I’ve become well acquainted with white feminism in my early twenties. A few years ago, I first realized the nuances involved in feminist practice while volunteering at Hamilton City Hall. Another woman remarked, “Wow your people must be proud—it’s rare to see your people volunteer at something like this.”

I don’t have formal education on women and gender studies, but what I did understand at that moment was that a feminist had told me she didn’t authentically believe in someone like me also being feminist. This was someone with an embodiment more privileged than my own letting me know my volunteer work was an anomaly. I’ve had many of these conversations that ring in my ears—“you’re not like your people”—when, indeed, I am like many of my people. So I am now accustomed to this very limited white feminism. The magazine triggered a lot of unsettling feelings. Then, I realized it was a car advertisement.

Stereotypes hurt. Questions like, “When is your arranged marriage” are not cultural dialogue, they’re rude and insulting. I don’t care that someone’s token Indian friend “says it’s fine” to say such things, or that it was asked from curiosity.

People often let me know how whitewashed my father must be for letting me move away from home for college. Others will say patronizing things at supposedly progressive learning institutions, like that woman’s comment—ones that seem to say, “Wow you are an anomaly for your community.” It should go without saying that not all South Asians are the same. Never mind that such comments erase a long history of strong, vocal and independent South Asian women.

We live unique lives “back home” and in the diaspora. I am myself, Nashwa, not some caricature on an episode of Law and Order: SVU.

The notion that as a South Asian woman, my life journey is leaving my father’s house to enter my husband’s home is an erasure of my personhood. Within feminist circles, I often find that women with a white feminist savior complex feel an obligation to ask me about my father in a concerned manner. They interrogate me about my marital status not realizing how patronizing this is. In essence they are fortifying the dichotomy that “brown girls get married” but “white girls have choices.”

From a young age many non-South Asian people would concern troll myself and other South Asian women I know. They inquire deeply into our lives without realizing how offensive their casual fascination is. Many of my college friends have had their visiting fathers mistaken as their husbands, resulting in racially charged commentary.

As a South Asian woman, I have many choices and a lot of support, as do many other women I know or read about. Many women also do not have choices, but that is not isolated to any one culture or religion.

Within South Asian communities there are different sets of values and experiences, however in media we largely see a one-sided representation of all brown people in cookie-cutter storylines. We witness iterations of the “tiger-parent” who rarely displays affection, is strict and demands respect and excellent grades from his or her children. We witness brown children as spelling bee-champions, nerdy, awkward, * insert samosa joke here *, fulfilling a model minority role in school and society. When they deviate from these scripts, bodies like mine are viewed as “rebelling” instead of just living life, a privilege that white characters always have.

We often let media shape our perceptions of the “other” and I hope we can move to more critically thinking about how media can sensationalize and skew a few narratives to represent a whole people. I also hope we can move towards recognizing nuances in communities and that not everyone is the same. Sweeping stereotypes and generalizations are violent.

From our education system to our literary community, why is CanLit so white? Nashwa Khan challenges the default narrative

JUNOT DÍAZ UNLEASHED A BOMBSHELL on the writing world when he published his essay “MFA vs. PoC” in the New Yorker last spring. The Dominican American author is a creative writing professor, a fiction editor for the Boston Review, and has won numerous awards for his writing—most notably the Pulitzer Prize for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. His New Yorker piece was about his own experiences as a racialized man in an MFA program he completed in 1995 at Cornell. Díaz’s take resonated with many who had lived through being racialized in the Ivory Tower, but it also unsettled some readers, predominantly white ones, who seemed shocked and outraged. Their reaction didn’t surprise me. Historically, academia at its foundation was built for white men, and not much has been done to rework the initial framework of how institutions are built—even if today’s student body is much more diverse.

I read hundreds of online comments. I read pieces analyzing Díaz’s essay. I read as much as I could digest. A lot of it made me cringe. Online comments seem to bring out people’s worst prejudices and even readers of the venerable New Yorker seemed no different. Commenters said people of colour were “not grateful;” they were told to “go back home.” Others praised his work. People wrote response pieces, both negative and positive.

Díaz’s essay was published at a time when I was at a crossroads with my own education. Reading it, I thought he was describing a racist experience, but one at a wealthy school that may have been less diverse. Plus, if he could, in the end, find like-minded people and support as a racialized man, I figured I could too. I was inspired to take the leap, and signed up for a creative writing program.

As a racialized Muslim woman, I grew up without my stories. I grew up reading about kids who weren’t like me, teenagers who weren’t like me, and now adults who aren’t me. I thought Díaz’s experience was anchored so long ago that mine would be better and I could foster his experience to build my own journey.

I found a program that had the flexibility and diversity I wanted. Díaz’s piece became a way for me to baptize myself in the world of creative writing courses, to learn how I could avoid the whiteness of the writing world. I told myself I would learn from his mistakes; he wrote that he slipped up because he was young. I was determined not to: I checked faculty, campus culture, and communities. I purposely chose faculty for my first set of classes who were queer or racialized, here in Toronto, the city Drake keeps trying to make happen, a city proud of its multiculturalism and cracksmoking ex-mayor.

I decided to do a certificate program, not a full MFA. I wanted to dip my toes in this world, not dive in unprepared. I wanted to avoid all the negatives situations Díaz recounted—things like workshops that were “too white” and a body of literature that similarly lacked diversity. I took all of the precautionary measures and, at first, it seemed to pay off.

On my first day, I was thrilled to walk into a classroom where a man of color was the instructor and the class was roughly 50 percent white and 50 percent people of color. I thought I had done my due diligence to find something close to a utopia in writing. I would soon learn, however, that I had walked into another sort of baptism, this one by fire. As much as I thought I had prepared for an MFA vs POC environment I called “Creative Writing vs. POC”, I should have expected, and have now amended it to, “Creative Writing vs. MOC vs. WOC:” Creative writing versus men of colour versus women of colour.

I’VE NOW READ DÍAZ’S PIECE at least a dozen times in full; I often pull up paragraphs that resonate with me most. I have a few sentences memorized. Tears well in my eyes every time I read it, but now they well in my eyes for Athena, the woman of color in his MFA program, the one who was gifted, but had enough, and left. Athena is not entirely fleshed out in his piece but Díaz does reminisce that the whiteness of the program exhausted her, and I feel that. About 20 years after Díaz and Athena felt the casual racism and microaggressions of being racialized while writing, I feel that.

To date in my life I have largely been “the other” but have not felt as hurt by microaggressions elsewhere as I have by those in the writing world. The writing world has made me feel more othered than any other space. Writing can expel so much.

Writing to expel shame.

Writing to cope.

Writing to tell stories.

Writing to riot.

Writing to right.

What writing cannot expel, however, is the anguish I leave the classroom with every time we workshop pieces. This kind of anguish is something hard to articulate. What I can identify is that my own experience is very different than the men of color with whom I write, and even more alien from my white classmates. Perhaps being a racialized female is an archipelago of an experience on its own. Perhaps it’s this belief that racialized people are their own category, and my female embodiment is one too distant for men to relate.

Every writing class I relive trauma.

I. I litmus tested Díaz’s mistakes, and failed.

I’ve realized that what I deduced from Díaz and others’ writing about classes being “too white” in numbers did not account for situations where the numbers may be in people of colour’s favour, but whiteness as a system and standard would dominate. White literature would be the default, white stories the skeleton of every piece, and white voices, even if outnumbered, would be the loudest even with a man of colour running sessions.

II. Minorities as a majority does not hold.

Hari Kondabolu’s skit “2042 and the White Minority,” about the census calculation that 2042 will be the year white people will be a minority in America, should be a primer for white people. When you really do the math in my workshops it doesn’t play out the way white women often thought it did when they mumbled things like “wow, so diverse.” But as Kandabalou makes light of in his skit, there is one big problem: as people of color, we aren’t all the same. This presumption of the white minority is heavily rooted in the belief that racialized people are a homogenous and united front.

Looking at the composition of certain classes, faculty, and program promotional material, both printed and on the web, you would think I found the utopia so many writers of color search for, including myself.

You would think people of color flourished and thrived as they wrote their vulnerabilities, shared their hearts on paper. You would think. When you look at my most diverse class, the composition is 50:50.

On days when one of their Ashley squad is missing, the white women will not let us forget how they are suddenly a “minority.” I don’t know whether our educational system hindered their basic math skills or if they just love surface level analysis, but in actuality women of color are still the “minority” on these days, and every other day in class. This particular class is comprised of 50 percent white women, versus five percent black women (i.e. one black women) and five percent non-black women of color (i.e. me). The rest is 40 percent men of color.

Bodies like mine and stories like mine remain foreign, uncomfortable, and on the margins. My stories become abstract even to the men of color who many classmates presume must relate to me. So when a white peer remarked during a workshopping of my piece, “well, you’re no longer a minority” and the class cackled, I still question their math.

III. Men of color don’t often support women of color in the same ways; #solidarityisforwhitewomen is real in the realm of writing.

White women in writing seem to have an easier time attacking women of color. This could be because of any variety of factors, but I want to say that it is a combination of intimidation and conditioning to believe that men are usually correct. I am still testing out my theory, but after conducting a few social experiments—such as using very WASP names in my writing or removing factors that potentially identify race, gender, and sexual orientation—my writing remains viewed as “foreign.” Maybe seeing me in the flesh is what constantly makes people fixate on what I can and cannot write. I am still conducting
experiments.

I say “white” but what I mean is women immersed in the very simplistic and classic ways literature is taught, those who uphold white feminism and let it seep into their writing and workshopping of pieces. I mean white women who would let myself and the other woman of color in my class know how to write about our bodies and existence, question our use of words from our mother tongues, and surveillance our truths. These white women were often cosigned by the silence of men of color I adamantly defended or agreed with in workshop sessions. These men were not part of my supposed “people of color majority.”

I still don’t know Maybe I feel bitter. But at the same time I understand that some have folded their bodies to fit into boxes that appease our white peers during
the workshops. I found their silence to be more comforting than their vocal approval with white women who said things like, “Why did you use that foreign word there?”

What I can say is having people of color does not equate to solidarity.

IV. Díaz was right in saying, “that shit was too white” about 1995 and I concur in 2015.

Díaz discusses how Athena and another friend often reflected on the shit their peers said to them. Feeling isolated, I kept a list that moved from a Post-It, to a sheet of paper, to pages in my notebook.

I try to slyly add to the chicken scratch list as people speak.

“Wow, since I was born here it’s fascinating for me to listen to your story.”

“You know I moved from England when I was six; I am an immigrant too!”

“I’m not racist but…” (Multiply this times infinity.)

“The names used in the story are really difficult, why can’t you pick …” (Insert any number of Anglo-Saxon names.)

“Oh, so, obviously English is not your first language.”

“Well this is obviously grossly exaggerated: Kids aren’t racist.” (Said during a memoir writing workshop.)

“I am a woman so I face oppression too.” (As if I am not a woman—very Patricia Arquette circa 2015 Oscars, if you ask me.)

The list that started as a page at the back of my notebook has now filled margins of my notes. It is blossoming like weeds throughout my pieces; a page can no longer contain the comments that my white and male peers will never face. These comments have also made me fold myself into a smaller version of myself, whittle down my stories to make them more palatable for a white liberal gaze.

Sometimes I want to scream, “Did you even read the words I wrote?” Tangential topics arise that are heavily laden with subtext. In fiction writing, if I wrote about any kind of conflict and the character had a name that seemed foreign or exotic, the same women would lament “this is cultural” and even once, a slip, “Is this from your experiences with your father?” Tropes saturated my existence—if only they believed my memoir writing the same way they believed my fiction.

Every week, they would explain how they did not understand my writing because they were “born here” and every week I would tell my white peers how I too was “born here,” on stolen land. I realized soon enough that they did not want to understand my writing. They couldn’t even humour reading my pieces: about immigrant parents crossing oceans and breaking their backs while being exploited by cheap labour for the American Dream.

They would not give me space to write about discovering myself as diaspora when I went to Morocco as a teenager. There was no space for my stories. This shit is still too white.

V. Memoir as fiction and fiction as memoir.

I discovered quickly that memoir writing classes should have beencalled something along the lines of “memoir; fiction for women of color, though.” No amount of reading on the MFA/workshop/writing retreat life would have prepared me for how much my truth would be interrogated along with the other woman of color in my program (who is actually the most educated person in the class, at least in the formal sense people seem to respect).

My stories had traces of flirty racism, racist iterations of sexism, and the pain of growing up racialized. That list in my notebook grew tenfold in memoir sessions. White women would use my workshop time to reflect on how my “gross exaggeration” made them cry. Once, the sole black woman in my memoir class wrote about herself, explicitly giving her character her name. A white peer asked why this white character was in Barbados. As if she did not realize it was memoir and the author right in front of her was a black woman. When I brought up how the default is white and that creates blind spots during workshopping and how egregious it was to suppose women of color wrote their memoir characters as white, the white women, joined by men of color, were up in arms.

Instead of letting me or other women of color receive feedback that was constructive, to requite the feedback they received, feedback I paid for, I got to hear about how they cried, how they “understood,” and how women of color memoirs made them “sad.” I wrote about my insecurities around women who looked like them as a child. I still cannot grasp how they “understood.”

I started to water down my writing like cheap coffee. I limited my memoir scenes to retellings of the awkward situations that not eating pepperoni caused me as a kid because if these women thrived off stories of drunk prom queens deserving to win, I could try writing about the tiny things in my life, close myself off from sharing anything more meaningful, more real.

VI. Social experiments don’t work on white people.

As much as I would remove markers of anything that was not white, straight, or middle class in my writing, my time in workshops became very specific. Regardless of how WASPY I made my pieces, white women still fixated on how I made them cry. They lamented that I was exotic and mysterious, despite having removed identifying markers from my writing. My body, the body I am trapped in, will never be able to write literature without having 21 questions unfold. My peers would say “I disagree with your memoir, but I learn so much from you.” Beyond the abhorrent notion that people can disagree with others’ memoirs, this labour I provided, vulnerability, and the display of my heart, only resulted in trauma for me and debating points, along with amusement, for them.

Once, I wrote a poem about the repetition of hearing the questions: Where are you from? What are you? Where are you really from? Where are your parents from? Three white women approached me after class to let me know these questions stem from genuine curiosity. They had good intentions, they told me; they weren’t racists. This all happened after a dedicated class discussion to my reverse racism. Throughout the term, this particular group kept relaying to me that they, too, were oppressed: they were oppressed by the yoga moms, the rich, the men—the list goes on, letting me know all I had was my identity oppression, whereas they had so much more.

VII. Pedagogy.

In the first five months of class, I read more white cis hetrosexual authors than I have in my entire life. Many don’t seem very special to me, but they are held to some kind of imaginary gold standard. Even in Canadian high schools, most of the literature taught is white, American, and male, as Michael LaPointe argues in his 2013 Literary Review of Canada essay “What’s Happened to CanLit?” The piece highlights truths that speak volumes. At the time, seven out of every 10 students in Toronto, for instance, were non-white. Of those surveyed, two-thirds expressed that learning about their own race would be more desirable. As well, unsurprisingly, half of the students surveyed believed that if that were the case, they’d do better in school. But whiteness will follow them into post-secondary education.

If we are what we read, will my writing become nuanced in the classic expectations of straight, white male writing?

I’ve read James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Muldoon, Ted Kooser, Theodore Roethke, and Raymond Carver, all white men I’ve chased with the works of white women, such as Alice Munro, Amy Hempel, Eudora Welty, and more. This survey of whiteness is predominantly non-Canadian. Yet, it serves as Canadian literature, which I’d argue has morphed into ubiquity with white Anglo-Saxon protestant default writing.

White descriptions rooted in very colonial normative reality remain the default in writing programs today. This is witnessed in what we deem as “American Literature” and who is let into that elite group. The ahistorical erasure of methods of teaching writing in all forms is witnessed in what works we do close readings of and those we reference as authors to which we should aspire. I have navigated classrooms for most of my life and I want to reiterate that this is about white classrooms and not necessarily white people.

I say white classrooms to emphasize that it isn’t about the bodies occupying the room, the way we often think it is. Rather, it’s all taught to us within the pages of the syllabi and novels we treasure in these courses; the way we teach who to respect; the stories that are viewed as true; this the deep-seeded white normalcy.

It it is time to reevaluate the changing landscape of writers and adjust course curricula. Until then, the current set-up provides the ammo that weans out and exhausts women of color in these spaces. Until then, the framework for what is considered “respected literature” and what is not will remain the same. Until then, we will continue to see novels written by talented people of color used to fill diversity quotas, instead of just integrated as compelling works. Until then, we will we witness “diversity” writing integrated through the gaze of white authors. We will elevate novels like Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. Until then, this is all that we will give racialized people: our stories retold through other mediums, selectively placed into marginalized classes.

VIII. Future.

I am weak and vulnerable; I feel too much, maybe. I like to think it could be a “me” problem but often realize it isn’t when I go online or to events. I find peers who look like me and I find a twisted comfort in finding out they have gone through similar experiences. I find ways to cope by ranting with them, listening to them, constantly being in solidarity with them. I’ve met people through the internet, which I always thought I would never do, just to find solace. I actively look for racialized writers forums and events now. Prior to being in this program I would go to any event, not wanting to be read as divisive. Now I know part of my survival is finding people like me in this struggle.

Will I finish any formal writing program?

Truthfully, I am not sure. There are days I feel great about a piece I’ve read or written that is creative non-fiction and get told I should be “realistic” about having a racialized person in fantasy, science fiction, or performing daily activities in a way that isn’t palatable to my workshop. I guess the same way dragons are more realistic than a man of color as a knight in medieval times.

Athena is only a tiny piece of Díaz’s essay, but to me she is everything. I’ve heard many racialized women feel the isolation, expressing similar sentiments that their alone is so alone that leaving any given writing program seems like the most appealing option. A future in writing looks bleak when this white default thrives in literature, a default that erases my being.

What real and dignified future is there for writers of color who make it?

Díaz has multiple awards to his name including, beyond the Pulitzer, a MacArthur Genius Grant. Yet, as an esteemed author honored by white dominated spaces, he still faces racism to serve as a punch line, even as a guest of honor. When Peter Sagal interviewed Díaz in October 2013 at the Chicago Humanities Festival, for instance, he riddled his introduction and questions with microaggressions and racial stereotypes. This exchange during the introduction made my skin crawl:

SAGAL: Welcome to this evening’s presentation of two bald guys from New Jersey. This is actually true. You’re from Perth Amboy, right?… And I’m from a town called Berkeley Heights …

DÍAZ: Yeah, I delivered three pool tables there.

SAGAL: What I like to imagine, well—We weren’t there quite the same time, and we never had a pool table, but I love the idea like a truck pulls up and in walks these Dominican guys—

DÍAZ: Nah, it was me and an African-American dude.

SAGAL: OK. And deliver to this, you know, suburban house where there’s this Jewish kid that’s going to Harvard and it’s like freeze it—Which of these is going to win a MacArthur Genius grant? [Points at Díaz.]

Similarly, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie can author a New York Times’ 10 Best Books of 2013 but still be referred to as “Beyonce’s favorite feminist,” instead of as a talented author who has won numerous accolades.

In this system that has manifested, it may be that I could thrive— or I could perish a slow and painful demise within it, along with many other women of colour, along with Athena. Let me return to an earlier question: If everything we write is an extension of ourselves, what do women of color have in these workshop spaces? How can we flourish in male- and white-dominant spaces? Will I succumb to stories that are not my own, narratives of lives I cannot relate to?

I believe that writing, as an art, does not necessarily imitate life; it grows from it, roots itself in truth and blossoms with stories. But the roots cannot break through and take to the soil, they cannot sprawl and have their storied seeds planted when a system only values certain stories. I am a racialized woman writing in 2015. If I get rooted as a rare token writer, I may yet flower. Or, I will wilt at the margins of pages, my stories untold, my words unwritten. I know only that every workshop I walk into is like a battle, and my mental struggle in these spaces will determine my fate.

Straight, white, men still dominate the technology industry. In our May/June issue, This Magazine contributing editor RM Vaughan introduces us to LGBTQ activists around the world who are fighting for change. Also in this issue: Sam Juric tells us why we should stop painting foreign adoption as a Brangelina fairytale, and instead focus on the  not-so-happily-ever-after of trauma, mental health crises, and isolation that many adoptees and their families face; Nashwa Khan asks “Why is CanLit so white?” and challenges the default narrative in our current education system and literary communities; plus new fiction from Jowita Bydlowska, an essay in defence of Kanye West, and much more!

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By the time Friday rolled around last week there was a veritable anthology of jokes to which “David Gilmour” was the punch line. The paper-bag jowls and complacent half-smile of his face pasted on News Feeds and blogs like an advert for a public flogging. Everywhere that CanLit went, so too went the name David Gilmour, followed by some expletives or exasperated eye-rolling. The Canadian author had detractors aplenty; but he had defenders a-one.

In case you missed the original rant, here it is. For people, like myself, who care a good deal about Canadian literature, it was big news. Far from being incensed, many of us saw it as an opportunity to laugh at the curmudgeonly prattling of a man who should’ve lived a hundred years ago. But backlash opportunism reared its head—as it does when anything seems too one-sided—and its head was in a national newspaper.

Coming to Gilmour’s defense, Margaret Wente, a Globe and Mail columnist, steered the conversation towards academic feminism and its pesky reputation of late for sneaking into all nooks of the humanities faculty. “Frankly, I was surprised and glad to learn that there remains one small testosterone-safe zone at U of T”, she said. “As anyone who’s set foot on campus in the past 30 years ought to know, courses in guy-guy writers are vastly outnumbered by courses in women writers, queer writers, black writers, colonial writers, postcolonial writers, Canadian writers, indigenous writers, Caribbean, African, Asian and South Asian writers, and various sub- and sub-subsets of the above. But if you’re interested in Hemingway, good luck. No wonder male students are all but extinct in the humanities.”

Well, I went through a humanities faculty—an English department more specifically—and I can confirm that quite a few courses privileged “sub-sets” of writers, but I can also say that I took a whole course devoted to T.S Eliot, and that, in literature classes that teach a period before our current one, male writers still make up the bulk of the syllabus. I mean, I didn’t go to U of T, but I can only guess that—Wait, what? They post their course list online? And the first three courses are exclusively male? Oh…

Here’s the kicker, Margaret Wente: I didn’t go to university to have my masculinity stroked. I didn’t go so that I could grow a great bushy beard like Hemingway and shoot belts of whiskey off a buck’s carcass—I could’ve done that without higher education, I’m pretty sure. I went to school to learn. And a big part of learning in the humanities is empathizing, divesting oneself of the performance of gender, or class, or race, and digging an antenna into what it is to be human.

In her last paragraph, Wente attempts to dissolve the whole discussion by saying that only in academia would this be a controversy. Her last sentence, directed at academic feminists is, “Please get a life”. This is classic, children’s rhetoric. Offer a viewpoint then erase the issue’s importance to ensure that yours is the last viewpoint.

It’s a shame. The argument shouldn’t have been jilted that easily, because it’s one that still crops up in literature studies, most notably from the luminary American critic Harold Bloom, in what he terms “The School of Resentment”. Wente’s done no one a favour by stifling the discussion around this topic. Is academic feminism ruining the aesthetic aspects of literature studies by politicizing them? In this age when girls outnumber boys in all but the engineering department, is education becoming feminized, and is that feminization built around opposition rather than inclusion? Is women’s studies, as University of Ottawa English professor, Janice Fiamengo is quoted as saying, “actually preventing learning by substituting a smug sense of oppositionality, woundedness and bitterness for the intellectual curiosity, openness to ideas and eagerness to pursue truth that university education in the humanities is supposed to produce”?

Or might it be that viewpoints can co-exist. Art can be for art’s sake, and it can also be a social bellwether and political tool. Humanities education can be a hulking chimera of feminism, masculinism, normalization, destabilization, aesthetics, politics, etc. and we can trust students to understand that the large tapestry of viewpoints, only when understood holistically, may indicate a deep sense of what it is to be human. There exists in this world oppositionality and woundedness, and, far from these things being substitutions for truth, they are part of the truth. Young men and women interested in literature would do well to read voraciously—in, as well as out, of their comfort zone. Authors (ahem, David) would do well to do the same. Professors would do well to attempt to teach the vast, variegate human experience. Reporters for national newspapers would also do well not to feed into this petty cycle of boys vs. girls, girls vs. boys and all the balderdash that goes along with that. And I think we’d all do well just to listen to each other.

The CBC could be a force for CanLit. Why isn't it? Illustration by Dushan Milic

If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in my notebook: Five stars!” As a taxpayer and a citizen who believes in a public arts dialogue, I’m glad that the CBC pays Onstad to write intelligently and entertainingly about Hollywood film. Notably, however, our taxes don’t fund Hollywood film.

Our taxes do fund Canadian literature. Most CanLit gets some level of government subsidy. We pay millions each year to support CanLit through writing and publishing grants, libraries, and literary festivals. That’s a good use of public funds. Unlike our support for the auto industry or Bombardier, we actually get profitable job creation from arts funding. But we subsidize CanLit with one hand and then give the CBC more than a billion dollars a year with the other. Why, why, why does the CBC pay people to review Hollywood films that will cost you $13 to see but refuse to tell you whether the $25-$40 books you subsidize are worth your time and money?

Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.

As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)

CanLit has been a big industry since the late ’60s (when government funding created it). That our literature now wins international renown and our private media doesn’t reliably tell us, or the world, what does and does not make for good CanLit is lamentable and, quite simply, immature. That we spend more than a billion dollars a year on the CBC and they don’t review Canadian books is unthinkable.

Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.

The show can be fun and informative. As a judge, comedian Scott Thompson got to say (while speaking of Frances Itani’s Deafening) that describing the contents of a handbag is not literature. Amen. But as a genuine book-reviewing vehicle, the inadequacies of this show versus an Onstad-like book columnist on CBC.ca are many. First and foremost, as radio and a five-sided debate, the format is too unwieldy for a reader who wants to do an informative search about a particular book. Second, we can’t ever forget the show’s Survivor-style elimination gimmick. Lastly, the show is doubly ruined by its (pointless) devotion to celebrity panelists and the flawed CBC celebrity barometer. Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell was a panelist in 2002. If I want advice on how to keep David Milgaard in prison, Kim Campbell’s the source. But for book reviews? Aside from Canada Reads, CBC books coverage consists solely of interviews and reporting, and nowhere tells you what books are good and why.

Qualified, incisive, and accessible critics shape the culture they analyze. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have expressed their debt to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. As director of Britain’s National Theatre, Laurence Olivier brought in influential critic Kenneth Tynan to help run it.

Dear CBC: give me a reliable, regular and intelligent book reviewer. Not more Randy Bachman.