Marion Agnew

MAKING UP THE GODS launched on Sunday! Here's just a little of the gratitude I expressed that day at Thunder Bay's independent bookstore, Entershine Bookshop. I feel more grateful every day for the support and the opportunity to share this story with readers.  Thank you so much for being here with me today.   The view from the audience at Entershine Bookshop To start, I acknowledge as a grateful guest that I live and write on lands of Anishinaabe and Metis peoples, in Robinson-Superior treaty territory, and I am reckoning with my family’s settler roots.   Making Up the Gods is the first novel I’ve finished, but it’s not the first one I started. I worked on three other novels, even starting a new one after I’d tried imagining my way through this book. Making Up the Gods itself has felt like several novels along the way. BUT this, at last, is the story that kept bringing me back to the page for a dozen years, through many versions. In fact, the work continued until ...

I think a lot about words and what they mean.  The persistent ice of early May, 2023. I also think a lot about how writers are not their work. And recently, in my very own life, I've used words that confuse a writer with their work.  A couple of weeks back, I had the chance to bond with a bookseller over the writing of a famous author. “Oh, I hate Famous Author!” I said. Far too loudly, in fact. And I felt yucky. Understand this: I do not know Famous Author. I actually don’t hate Famous Author. They’re possibly a perfectly nice person. You know, maybe. Of course I imagine that the elements of their work I don’t like are proof positive that Famous Author is a showboat, and I so I have actual reasons why I don't like them, and why I don't think we'd be friends.  Maybe, maybe not. Many Famous Authors (and Famous Others) are horrible people.* Maybe this one is too. But maybe not.  And let's be clear, Famous Author gives zero hoots about my opinion or potential as a best...

Recently, I went to a writing retreat.   In the past, I always thought I wouldn't benefit from a writing retreat. My husband is a writer, and the two of us live in a relatively spacious house with great views. Also, we don't have live-in dependents, day jobs, or many other commitments.  For those reasons, the benefits other people say they get from a retreat—isolation from noise and the chaos of daily living, the ability to focus on one project, congenial company of folks who understand the allure of writing and creativity—are part of my regular life.   Three years ago, I was in a transitional space—though if you recall February of 2020, you can see how I had no idea how much the world could change, and how quickly. Still. Back then, my essay collection had been out for a few months, I’d done a few events to support it and connect with readers (so much fun!), and I was itching to get back to writing and revising.    Three years ago, the project I was...

Is it an accident that two of my favourite books of the past year both address the concept of receiving or claiming credit? (No.) In If Sylvie Had Nine Lives , by Leona Theis, Sylvia wonders why there's no real way to get credit for all the things she manages to not shoplift.   And in Marina Endicott's The Difference (AKA The Voyage of the Morning Light ), Kay wishes that people could know just how many pieces of cake she has managed not to eat, how chubby she might have been. Sorry, I don't have page references for these ideas--you'll just have to read the whole books (you'll thank me later). My point here is this: in December of most years, I look at what I'd hoped to accomplish and see where I fell short. It's harder, in spite of all the urging from self-help self-care gurus, to think about what I did get done. I try--I even write a list every Friday of things that happened that week that I'm proud of. But it's easier to focus on the areas where ...

Last month, I showed a stack of books that constitutes part of my antiracism reading since June. I’ve written about How to Be An Antiracist most recently, here ; about Me and White Supremacy , here ; and about So You Want to Talk About Race , here . Today I want to highlight Black people in Canada. Although all people currently living in North America share history, Canada also has its own history to reckon with. And the two books below are excellent places to start. The Skin We’re In , by Desmond Cole , has won All The Awards, and deservedly so. Cole, a journalist and activist, writes about one year (2017) in journalism in Canada, primarily Toronto. Thirteen broad topics, all different and all depressingly the same, shed light on parts of Canada’s past and present that most of us would prefer to ignore. It’s full of research and great explanations, straight talk and vivid descriptions. I appreciated how Cole doesn’t mince words. Early on, he sets up the reader for what to e...

What if the world of books were one big dinner party? Or perhaps I mean some other metaphor—perhaps holding hands?*   Let’s stay with the dinner party for now. Sometimes a book is like a new guest at a dinner party of otherwise familiar people—a new energy that creates and directs energy into conversations in new ways.   Of course, that’s always true, in a sense—books live in a context. They’re produced by individuals who live at specific times when specific things are happening. Entire literary theories and theorists debate whether a book can be extracted from its time, and how to handle books that once expressed the best thinking of the time but that now are obviously (and painfully and dreadfully) flawed. But I’m not talking about that, today. What I’m describing is a slightly different experience. While reading Diana Beresford-Kroeger’s To Speak for the Trees , I felt that this book could happily chat at a dinner party (or hold hands) with two other books I’...

Sometimes a book—or a series of books, or a cultural shift—comes along that causes lasting change.    In the past five years, I’ve been part of many conversations about cultural appropriation, creativity, and Indigenous visibility. In the past four or five months, conversations around Blackness in North America have increased in frequency and intensity.   It’s come to a head, recently. I’ve spent the past month reading and working through Me and White Supremacy , by Layla F. Saad. It’s been intense. I may be able to speak about the experience coherently in the future.   For now, I want to talk about a recent re-reading experience, of a different book.   +++++   One of my favourite Book Groups (as they’re known in the US; Canadians don’t seem to mind saying “book club”) meets electronically. It’s small, just two of us. We used to be in groups together in Colorado, before we both moved.   One of our books back in the day was Walk...