I loved talking with @CTV Saskatoon about three books for this month. Firstly, I dived into How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa, a collection of short stories, which won the Giller Prize in 2020 and was top of my list of books to get to read. Wow. I’m so glad I did. It’s such a gorgeous, vivid, beautiful book. The stories are luminous–very short, very sparse, and yet filled with real people and lives. Each character is an immigrant. One has a mother who is deeply in love with, she believes, a country music star; another is too old, she feels, for spin the bottle, but plays anyway; a third works in a chicken factory, while the story is called Paris–does it mean something? Does it make us dream of something more?
The second book is by a local Saskatchewan author: Forgotten Saskatchewan by Chris Attrell. It’s a book of photographs, and the evocative images of a lost world bring my imagination fully to life. One of the pictures is of a house by a slough and there’s something in it that sparks me and makes me want to write. Any of the images will inspire the writers out there to put pen to paper; there’s something about the not-so-distant past and those haunting old buildings that is both deeply nostalgic and creative.
I added a third book this month because #IReadCanadian is coming up and I wanted to start acknowledging the incredible range of authors we have here in Canada. This picture book is called Birdsong by Julie Flett and it’s truly stunning. The story is of a girl moving house and both finding and losing someone dear. But it’s also about art and relationship and the way time moves through the world and our lives. Beautifully illustrated, I think it’s the sort of book that inspires children to draw and create themselves. It won the TD Book Award for Children’s Literature in 2020.
