Here’s a video of Alan Freeman and Radhika Desai, author of the recently published Geopolitical Economy, speaking in Moscow about several issues, including Thatcher’s death, and introducing the “Future of World Capitalism” book series.

We are positively thrilled to announce that Susan Dodd, author of The Ocean Ranger, has won the Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly Writing. The awards were given out last night to a packed house, and we’d like to send our congratulations to all the other winners as well.

For those of you who weren’t there — especially the folks from our office in Winnipeg — here’s a transcript of Susan’s acceptance speech:

—

Unlike other award winners, I did bring notes, just in case, because as a professor, I am trained to talk for two hours and I needed to bracket myself off.

The Ocean Ranger story is very much a Newfoundland story. My brother Jim was killed on the rig. He was a Nova Scotian and my family is Nova Scotian. One of my chief anxieties in writing this book was that it needed to make sense to Newfoundlanders. So far it has been well received there and I am deeply grateful for that.

Writing this book was at times excruciating. Everyone I know helped me in some way or another in the past four years while I was half… well… completely crazy at various times writing this.

I’m happy with my acknowledgements as published in the book, so I’m not going to go into those now. I’d ask you to please read those. You will see just how much support it took to produce this book.

This strange little book is profoundly interdisciplinary. It starts with a memoir about our hearing the news that Jim’s rig was “in trouble” and it makes the very crucial point that this disaster was caused by a political failure, not a technological one. One of my central aims was to show that the technical chain of events was possible only in the context of a complete lack of regulation. In 1982, there was no regulation in the offshore petroleum industry, and that was a political failure. That Preface is in some ways the best part of the book. The book turns to political journalism and then gets more and more theoretical with each chapter. The structure of this book very much expresses who I am.

Thank you to Marquis Imprimeur for this prize. I am delighted that we have this new Atlantic Book Award for Scholarly writing. It is an honour to self-consciously join your community of writers and readers. This is a great opportunity to remind ourselves of the relationship between academic writing and our community.

This award is also excellent because we now have this way to honour the scholarly publishers of the region and the chance they give us to tell our own stories. This ability to tell our own stories is incredibly powerful; there’s a great power here.

I’d like to give a special thanks to Errol Sharpe of Fernwood Publishing.  At one point, I was dithering over whether to include that weird chapter of philosophical history of Blood Money. Errol said: “Just tell this story in the way that only you can tell it.” That is what I tried to do.

Finally, I’d like to acknowledge my mother, who is here. This has been a very emotional journey for us and I’d just like to say: Thanks, Mom.

May is short story month, and since we’re just at the half-way mark, there’s probably no better time than now to share an excerpt (or two, maybe) from our very first collection of short fiction, Everything Is So Political, edited by Sandra McIntyre.

The idea behind the collection is to explore the numerous ways fiction can be, and is, political. As Sandra McIntyre said, “In choosing stories for this collection, I have taken a broad and open definition of what constitutes the political. In my opinion, it is very difficult, impossible perhaps, for fiction writers not to ‘write political.’ They,
like everyone else, can stand for or against the status quo, but not outside
or beyond it. No art has any special claim in this regard.”

The issue of political fiction seems to be a bit of dividing line among readers (and writers), and the phrase, “this novel is thinly-veiled critique on…” is one the comes up in the some of our reviews. But tenets like these, I think, are knee-jerk reactions by readers who are simply looking to be entertained, nothing more. Similarly, such quick reactions to the term “political fiction” fail to recognize that, like all writing, the scope of the genre, and the degree of the political-ness of story varies widely, from the overt to the subtle.

With Roseway Publishing, we believe in the power of narrative to make you think differently about the world around you, whether it be overtly or subtly, just as much as we do our non-fiction works that we publish with Fernwood.

But enough of our words. Here’s an exclusive preview of Everything Is So Political, with a story from Susi Lovell titled, “The Brothers Wolffe.”
—

I shouldn’t have minded that George sat down beside me at Carla’s
party. I shouldn’t have cared that he’s different. If my mother had been
here, she would have disapproved of my irritation. It doesn’t matter, she
would have insisted, skin, fur, fish scales, feathers, who cares?
But it did matter. Everyone stopped dancing and stared, and I hate
it when people stare. I gazed out of the window with a preoccupied air
as though ruminating some complex philosophical conundrum, hoping
George would take the hint and go away. Carla scowled at me, deep vertical
lines pinched between tented eyebrows, red lips sucked in tight. Did
she think I’d invited George? I shook my head—discreetly—to tell her:
no, no way, not me, are you crazy?

And then there stood George’s brother Mike, a vision in white fur,
framed in the doorway, nose twitching, eyes flickering around the room.
Poor Carla. She looked ready to burst into tears. I sympathized, I wouldn’t
want it known that the Wolffe brothers had come to my party either.

Without greeting anyone (what would be the point, who would have
responded?), Mike stalked, stiff legged, through the throbbing music
and placed his haunches on the arm of the sofa beside my shoulder, on
the other side from George. Jen, Barb and Ellis snickered, relieved they
hadn’t been the ones who’d had to sit down because their shoes pinched
so badly. I transferred my gaze to the carpet, counting the holes that had
been left in it by generations of smoking pre-Carla tenants, trying to
breathe through my mouth.

Hi, said George. I couldn’t look into his face. It wasn’t that he was ugly,
but he didn’t, well, he didn’t look right. If my mother were here she’d
have hissed to me that I had the sensitivity of a stoat, didn’t I see how
uncomfortable I was making him? It’s not about what someone looks
like, my mother likes to say, it’s about what’s inside—that’s what counts.
I shouldn’t have minded. But I did. I was sorry of course that everyone
stared at the brothers and made jokes at their expense. About the size of
their noses, the hairiness of their legs, and above all, about the way they
smelled. As long as I wasn’t personally involved I had no problem with
them carrying on their lives however they liked. But if “however they
liked” involved me, then…

I jumped to my feet. Hey, Jen, I called. Jen pointed to her empty glass
and slipped out of the room.

Wanna dance? George’s low growl—or perhaps it was Mike’s—was
not threatening but it made the hairs on my arms stand on end.

No, I don’t dance, thank you.

Silky white fur slipped over my skin as George draped an arm
around my shoulders. Beneath the fur, bone, and sinew. He moved in
a most peculiar way, knees jerking high, elbows wide, snout lifting and
mouth pulling forward into a little round “o”. His movements had nothing
to do with the rhythm of the music on Carla’s sound system. Mike
crouched, belly low to the carpet, then leaped, twisting in the air as he
kicked up his legs high behind him. George swept me up, tossed me to
Mike. Face buried in fur, I breathed in the manky smell of the Wolffe
brothers. Then I was crouching too.

My friends stared and shrank back against the walls as the three of us
hurtled around the room, yapping and howling, tumbling on the holey
carpet, springing up onto the back of the sofa, onto the window sill, the
coffee table, the bookcase. Now I’d caught the rhythm that the brothers
were dancing to: Of bright sun-glanced glaciers, of darting fish and green
pebbled stream-beds, of pines and, beneath their bark, slow-seeping resin.

We stood on the carpet, panting. Well, that was fun, said George,
leading me back to the sofa. We sat down, George on one side, Mike on
the other. I stared at George, then at Mike, into those black-rimmed blue
eyes. A flash of light. Carla rushed for a dustpan and brush. The bulb in
the lamp beside the TV had exploded. That could only mean one thing: I
was in love. The tip of George’s white tail entwined itself around my calf,
Mike’s nestled in my elbow. Oh no, the tails. I’d forgotten the tails. They
shouldn’t have mattered, I know, but they did.

—

Everything Is So Political is available in stores and from our website now.

“The six-minute production is a minor blues with jazz inflections courtesy of guitarist Wes Carroll (who also produced and mixed the recording).  It includes footage, photos and other images (contemporary and historical) from many social and ecological facets of our troubled world. Teachers and activists may find it of use in spurring discussion and ‘connecting the dots’ to form a bigger picture.  The message combines what Gramsci called a pessimism of the intellect with an optimism of the will, as in the lyric, ‘keep a rose fastened to your chest; expect disaster but hope for the best…’”

Watch the video below.

(Halifax, Nova Scotia) March 18, 2013 – Fernwood Publishing is pleased to announce that Montreal journalist and Fernwood Publishing author Arnold August has been presented with the Distinción Félix Elmuza (the Félix Elmuza Award). Created by the Cuban Council of State in 1979, it is Cuba’s highest journalism award. The award is granted on behalf of the Council of State by the Association of Cuban Journalists for outstanding work carried out by Cuban journalists. The Association is also mandated, as circumstances warrant, to bequest the award to non-Cubans devoted to reflecting the Cuban reality. The Association’s March 2013 statement recognizes the author, journalist and lecturer’s numerous articles on Cuba and collaboration on Cuban web sites. The statement also highlights his writings about the Cuban Five, and his books dedicated to opposing the media war against Cuba. His most recent publication is Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (Fernwood Publishing, 2013). The neighbours under consideration in his book are: the U.S., Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. On March 6, on the occasion of the award presentation, Arnold was asked to speak in Havana to a group of Cuban journalists. For the full text of Arnold’s presentation outlining his journalistic endeavors and his impression of the Cuban press as well as his comments on the passing away of Hugo Chávez, see below.

For more information about this award, and to read Arnold’s presentation in French and Spanish, visit his website.

For more information on Arnold’s book, Cuba and Its Neighbours, visit our website.

Colleagues,
I visited Cuba more than 40 times between the early 1990s and 2009. Many of my trips lasted several weeks while I investigated and analyzed in detail the Cuban elections in 1997­­–1998 and 2007–2008, as well as the functioning of the state at all levels between elections. The purpose of my inquiries was to write books – the first one published in 1999 and the second one just released in January. While writing my second book, from 2009 to 2013, I once again took up my devotion to journalism. And so I found myself carrying out two tasks simultaneously – writing the current book and writing articles, most of them in English, Spanish and French. I took up journalism again because I simply could not keep quiet in light of the media war that was underway against Cuba, knowing full well that the writing and publication of a book is a long-term effort. And so I threw myself into the battle and wrote a few dozen articles during that period. They dealt with the disinformation campaigns against Cuba such as the so-called dissident hunger strikes. I also interviewed wives of the Cuban Five and their mothers who were deputies in the Parliament (ANPP) deputies at the time. A series of articles on the coup d’état in Honduras and the role of the Obama administration constituted another theme. I wrote in defence of Cuba on human rights issues and Cuban elections and democracy. Much of my writing dealt with the Cuban Five, including letters to Obama seeking their release. I also focused on Cuba in the new Latin America and U.S. policies toward what they considered their former backyard. And so I am here before you today as a journalist – like many others here, I imagine – compelled into this profession by a need for the truth to be written about events as they unfold before our very eyes.

While I did not visit Cuba as frequently between 2009 and 2012 as I had in the past, I grew to appreciate the work of Cuban journalists even more. During this period, I was fortunate to have access to Cuban television via satellite, which picks up all the Cuban channels. Even the U.S. – positioned as it is between Cuba and Canada – cannot stop the airwaves from providing me with this window into Cuba. Additionally, many radio programs are available online. What’s more, my morning routine begins with reading the digital versions of the main Cuban press, including Granma, Juventud Rebelde, UPEC, Trabajadores, as well as the ANPP and Cubadebate websites, and many more. I have been particularly interested in the new wave of Cuban bloggers who defend Cuba against the so-called “left” dissidents and the openly right-wing ones.

Many themes come to mind when one thinks of Cuban journalism. It is most inspiring to see how the Cuban medical missions in outlying areas in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries carry out their work. However, Cuban journalists and their crews are the ones who bring these stories to us, in the same way that they have brought home the truth about Cuban aid to Haiti before and after the earthquake. The changes going on in Cuba today are increasingly being followed and analyzed by the Cuban press as it strives to improve its work on this front.
One feature reflected so well by Cuban journalists never ceases to astound me: the number of people of all ages involved in a wide variety of cultural activities. Watching Cuban TV and reading the press online, I find myself asking if there is anyone in Cuba not involved in cultural activities of one sort or another. This is a great achievement of the Cuban Revolution and it is so well reflected by the journalists. Sports comprise another aspect, whether it is the Olympic Games in other countries or the local baseball series in which I have a keen interest, trying to be objective even as an Industrialista  (a fan of the Havana baseball team, the Industriales).

In the international arena, especially lately in collaboration with TeleSUR, Cuba and its affiliates are the only source of sound information as to what is transpiring in Libya, Syria, Iraq, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere. Your country is in a very difficult position with regard to the U.S., but you journalists never give up principle for the sake of convenience. Your support of the Palestinian people against Israel – the main U.S. ally in the region – is a prime example. Cuba represents dignity, and Cuban journalists strive to reflect this in every manner – from international missions and culture, to current changes in society and the economy, to sports and international affairs.
I would like to close by saying a few words with regard to the passing of Hugo Chávez. In my latest book, I deal with democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. After completing the eighth draft of my book in December 2012, I indicated, regarding the Venezuelan people, that – and I quote here – “participatory democracy is a daily way of life for a growing number of people.” In the same vein, and linked to this, I wrote that one cannot view the role of Hugo Chávez from the U.S.-centric point of view as simply an elected representative or president. Rather, Hugo Chávez and the PSUV (Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela – United Socialist Party of Venezuela) – quoting once again from my book – are “part of the Bolivarian Revolution.” Thus, when Venezuelans took up the slogan Yo Soy Chávez during his long period of illness, each person was declaring that the Bolivarian Revolution was his or her own Revolution. They were thus increasingly empowering themselves to carry on the Revolution. This further development of participatory democracy was their pledge to the person who was and will always be part of the Bolivarian Revolution and its leader. Like the Cuban Revolution, the Bolivarian Revolution will continue. Journalists in Cuba and around the world have the professional duty to contribute to this. You are not alone, and I am not alone either, as there are thousands of other journalists and writers like me in Canada, the U.S., the United Kingdom and elsewhere who firmly and unhesitatingly uphold principle and truth before any other consideration.

It is a great honour for me to receive this Félix Elmuza Award. After a heroic career as a journalist, Félix Elmuza was killed in action after the landing of the Granma expedition, of which he was part. I have felt close to the Moncada and Granma experiences ever since my university days. Today, for the first time in my life, I feel vindicated.
Thank you.

Dru Oja Jay, one of the authors of Paved With Good Intentions: Canada’s Development NGOs from Idealism to Imperialism, will be doing a series of speaking engagements in Halifax starting this week!

If you’re in the area, don’t miss out!

March 19, 2013
Sackville, NB
Facebook event
7pm, Wu Centre

March 21, 2013
Halifax
Facebook event
12pm, Room 204, Weldon Law Building
Dalhousie University, 6061 University Avenue

March 25, 2013
Sydney
Facebook event
12pm, Sydney Credit Union Room
Great Hall, UCCB

March 26, 2013
Antigonish
Facebook event
7pm, Dennis Hall, Coady West Building
Saint F-X University

March 28, 2013
Wolfville
Facebook event
7pm, Just Us Café, Upstairs Studio

While being a work of fiction, Tailings of Warren Peace is strongly rooted in and inspired by real-life events. HudBay, the Canadian gold mining giant went to court in March, accused of human rights abuses and crimes ranging from assault, murder and rape.

We spoke to Stephen about his inspiration behind the book, his experiences working as an activist in Latin America and the challenges of turning real life into fiction

Stephen Law has a series of speaking engagements already scheduled in Atlantic Canada. Visit our website for full details, or visit Stephen’s website.

—

Tailings of Warren Peace is a book that covers a lot of ground, both thematically and geographically.  Where did your inspiration come from for the book originally?

Latin America was where I became awakened to the world. It is where I first met human rights advocates, revolutionaries, radical nuns, farmers, peasants and folks who were struggling in ways that I previously had no understanding of or exposure to. And Latin America is a place that infuses into your skin, it is vibrant, alive, passionate, troubled, and complicated. And the people I met there were courageous in ways that I wanted to understand and share.

I know you’ve spent some time in Guatemala and Latin America, how long were you there? What were some of your experiences and how did they affect Tailings of Warren Peace?

I first went to Latin America when I took a hiatus from University. I spent 3 months on an exchange in Costa Rica with Canada World Youth where I lived with a communist organic farmer in a small idyllic village outside of the capital of San Jose.  Upon my return to Canada I became involved with the Arusha Centre in Calgary and met up with the Salvadoran exile community that was supporting the armed struggle against the oligarchy. Scenes from the novel around a fundraising event in a church were drawn from some of the events from back at that time.

In the early 1990’s, the war in El Salvador was still raging, and I tried to think of ways to get into the country to become more directly involved in the struggle, to understand more deeply the challenges people were facing and to move myself out of the comfort zone that allowed me to proselytize the struggle without really having experienced it.  I was able to do that through an internship arranged through the University of Toronto.

My time in El Salvador indelibly impacted me. I was able to live and work with repatriated communities who had been forced to flee from the violence perpetrated by the military and return to resettle their communities under the watchful and malicious eyes of the state. I spent a year there which coincided with the signing of the Peace Accords. It was a very fragile time, with ongoing threats of violence, rumours of coup d’etats, curfews, travel restrictions and human rights violations. And in the midst of the repressive state there were people working night and day, scraping and struggling, and advocating, and building a new, peaceful society based on justice and human rights. It was a pretty heady and sobering experience for a young guy in his twenties.

I returned to Canada, finished my University degree and then went to work with the Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America which was based out of Toronto.  We supported human rights defenders throughout the region, and tried creative ways to affect public opinion. We once crashed a press conference when Peruvian President Fujimori came to town, met with members of Parliament, hosted speaking tours and lobbied at the United Nations.

I also became involved in the Latin American exile community, not unlike the Lalita Arayo Solidarity Association. We organized fundraisers, educational events, and even created a Latin American variety program for cable television called Que Pasa Aqui, where I played the witless Canadian official.

Through this work I realized I wanted to go back to Latin America and, specifically to Colombia. I felt that I could use my “Canadian’ness” to be in  solidarity with folks in Latin America, participating as an accompanier. So, my partner and I volunteered with Peace Brigades International as human rights accompaniers – in my book, I refer to them as “…lighthouse beacons who could signal at signs of danger.”  We basically used our “standing” as Canadian citizens to try to prevent attacks against communities and individuals threatened with violence.

We lived in the department of Uraba, one of the most war torn areas of Colombia in a small town that was dominated by the paramilitaries. It was also an area that had rich natural resources that were desperately sought after by multinational companies. We accompanied communities that had been violently displaced so companies could have unrestrained access to these resources. The communities we accompanied were forced to live in internally displaced camps surrounded by the butchers who had sent them fleeing from their homes. It was an intense and brutal time, marked by a massacre of friends and colleagues perpetrated by the military and their paramilitary allies. My novel in many ways was an attempt to honour those folks and others who gave their lives to imaging a different world.

Just prior to going to Colombia, my partner and I and some friends had purchased a farm in rural Nova Scotia. After our volunteer stint in Colombia, we took a breather from the international solidarity work and moved to the farm, making our little attempt at creating and building an alternative community. I started working  at the Tatamagouche Centre on justice issues, and become  connected with the Breaking the Silence Network, which eventually took me to Guatemala. I was able to go to Guatemala a number of times, leading educational delegations exposing Canadians to the human rights genocide that had occurred there, and the current reality of exploitation by mining companies and  the communities which have resisted them.

Tailings of Warren Peace is the summation of all those experiences in some way. I originally set the novel in Guatemala, even though originally I had hoped to write a novel about Colombia. But that experience was still too raw. And Guatemala is a tapestry and embodiment of all that is beautiful, inspirational and life-giving, juxtaposed with all that is wrong and unjust, and so given the context and what was happening there, it became the canvas the story was written on.

Perhaps on paper, tying together stories in Cape Breton, Toronto and Guatemala seems disparate, but what larger point(s) does the geography of the book make?

It is much easier to see a correlation between corporate activities in Latin America where human rights violations are mounted with impunity, then being able to tie them back to our activities or the activities of the corporations that come from our communities and are supported by our economic contributions (through investments, pensions, etc).  But as I became more deeply involved and as time has gone on, it has become increasingly clear that the issues faced by folks in Guatemala are the same issues we are facing here (fracking as a recent example of this, where companies exploit resources and the health and well-being of the local community be damned). For instance, one of the Mine managers who was involved in the Westray mining disaster in Nova Scotia relocated to Guatemala afterwards. Toronto is the financial hub of the worldwide mining sector which has governed these businesses. So, you have a mining disaster in Nova Scotia, a subsequent mining disaster in Guatemala, strung together through the purse strings of the economic hub in Toronto – the links are clear.  I don’t think you can’t get a more visceral connection then that.

Activism and labour rights are two themes (among many others) that are very present in the book, why are they important to you?

For me, once I had been to Latin America, I couldn’t let it go.  And I believe once you’ve witnessed and experienced injustice, you can’t turn away.  Or at least, I couldn’t. I have felt most alive in my life when I have been engaged in struggles for justice.  And I have such profound admiration for people who courageously, at times joyfully, and at other times with deep sorrow, sadness and frustration, work towards creating a better world. For them, it’s not a luxury, a hobby or a pastime, it’s a question of survival.

Was it a challenge to write a nonfiction book that is strongly political? Does it become difficult to juggle the story, plot and characters as well as the politics?

I think it was at first, trying to ensure that I was really honouring the struggles and not diluting them for the sake of the story. But, in the end, it really was the story that carries it through, where the politics is the plot and is as integral to the story as the characters. I grew up on cold war thrillers that pitted the valiant Western world against the evil and corrupt Soviet empire and their minions. And yet, these were profoundly political books, even more so, they functioned as populist propaganda. And yet, I found them deeply satisfying to read, not for the politics, but for the story, the excitement and the thrill. So, I’ve felt for many years that we needed to develop a leftist thriller genre, one that would tell our stories. And if anything, I probably did dilute the story down from one that I could have told. Because the stories of rapes, killings and assassinations done under the auspices of prosperity and economic development are in fact far more stark and extreme than what I ended up depicting in my novel.

What do you want readers to take away from reading Tailings of Warren Peace?

That ordinary people can do extraordinary things, that we need a bit of magic and mystery to sustain our struggles, and that we can’t simply abide the injustices perpetrated by economic elites, be they mining companies, oil companies, insurance companies or investors, whether they are elsewhere, or our own backyard. And solidarity is a solution, and if all else fails, haunt the bastards…

We are positively THRILLED that Elizabeth Comack’s latest work, Racialized Policing: Aboriginal People’s Encounters with the Police, has been shortlisted for the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Manitoba Book Award for Non-Fiction!

The awards will be presented at the Manitoba Book Awards gala on Sunday, April 28th at the West End Cultural Centre. Doors open at 7:15 and the ceremony begins at 8:00, and the event is free to all. We’ll see you there!

In case you’re unfamiliar with Racialized Policing, the book is hugely important in understanding the ways in which colonialism continues in our country today and highlights the often problematic practices the police use in their interactions with First Nations peoples. This book should really be required reading for all Canadians.

“This book delves deep into the psyche of society’s attitudes towards racism, towards the racialization of issues, of social structures, and, importantly, of the police. It exposes the human element of justice, the attitudes and subconscious generalizations that culminate in differential justice, differential treatment, and the imbalance of socio-economic and criminal circumstances between peoples of Canada.” — from the Foreword by Donald E. Worme, QC, IPC

At the time of his death Nick was in the final stages of working with Fernwood to produce his memoir. Rebel Without a Pause will be published in the fall.

Hungry for Change is available now from our website and any fine bookstore near you.

Haroon will also be speaking at Saint Mary’s University on March 27, room L173, 7pm.

There will also be a launch in Toronto, and possibly an event in Calgary as well, so stay tuned for more information!