Hester in Sunlight
- Hannah Calder
- Publication date: 2024-10-24
Yes, that Hester — the fallen woman who bore the Scarlet Letter while raising her daughter on her own. She is looking back, across that clearing, and 150 years, at her fateful lover.
Less a re-telling or transposition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic than a re-purposing of the materials to tell a different version, Hester In Sunlight, revolving around the relationships between the (unnamed) narrator; her husband Sonny and non-binary child Luna; her sister Dani and her two kids; and their parents, is a heady and stimulating riff on contemporary motherhood and parenting.
“The narrator in my novel has OCD,” novelist Hannah Calder says. “The book is an exploration of what OCD thinking can do to a classic, a meditation on what thought — often unwanted — can do in the gaps that naturally occur in literature.”
Tomorrow's News
- Marc Edge
- Publication date: 2024-11-21
Canada’s news is a mess. A self interested, divisive, and profit-fixated news business has bred a corrosive and deepening distrust not just of the media, but of our democratic institutions themselves. Many see this this crisis of the fourth estate as an existential threat to a bedrock of democratic decision-making.
In Tomorrow’s News, Marc Edge lays out some of the new forms of journalism that are emerging in the post-print, digital-first world. The bad include “dark money” funded non-profits, such as the US news outlet Richmond Standard, which have been rushing into the breech with “pink slime”. The good include community co-operatives, such as CHEK-TV in Victoria, B.C., the Prince Albert Daily Herald, and CN2i in Quebec City. Tomorrow’s News also explores the potential of tax vouchers as a financing mechanism for local news organizations.
People will always be news hungry; journalism isn’t going away, Marc Edge argues. The news organizations that thrive in the post-print world will be the ones that are able to shift their support base, and revenues, from advertisers to readers.
When Heroes Become Villains
- Jon Bartlett, Brian Robertson
- Publication date: 2024-09-19
Reckoning, reconciliation, and reflection are changing our landscapes. In When Heroes Become Villains, Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson bring home the “naming” controversy, telling the stories of three erstwhile heroes, and how our reconsideration of their roles in our collective story is unsettling our maps.
John Sebastian Helmcken is memorialized for bringing British Columbia into the Canadian federation. But that same act also meant the displacement and alienation of Indigenous peoples from the lands they had occupied for countless generations.
Joseph Trutch was B.C.’s first Lieutenant-Governor after Confederation — rewarding his services as Land Commissioner of the Colony, in which role he actively worked to alienate Indigenous peoples from their lands.
William Bowser, premier of the province in 1915-16, served as Attorney General in successive Richard McBride cabinets, in which role he was instrumental in forcing the Squamish First Nation off their Kitsilano lands, as well as deploying police forces against striking Vancouver Island coal miners.
Jon Bartlett and Brian Robertson argue that this “naming” controversy is simply part and parcel of current generations coming to a deeper understanding of their history and province, and an important part of the process of reconciliation and social justice.