Author: Kendra Winchester

From 2000 to 2011, seven Indigenous high school students died in Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. Journalist Tanya Talaga investigates these deaths and discovers that each one of them moved from rural locations in the northern part of the province to attend high school. 

Talaga pieces together the students’ lives, trying to better understand why each student died. Woven throughout these students’ stories is the dark history of the residential school system across Canada and its lasting effects on Indigenous communities across the country.

She connects the seven students’ stories with that of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Native boy who froze to death while running away from a residential school. After Wenjack’s death, an inquest was called and it made four recommendations for improvement to residential schools. These recommendations were never implemented.

Now the residential schools have closed, but that created a vacuum where many Native Nations struggled to create brand new educational systems from scratch with little to no funding. As a result, many Indigenous parents living in rural, Northern locations felt like they had little choice but to send their middle school and high school-aged children to cities in the south. Removed from their families and communities, many of these students struggled to adjust to their new lives in the city.

Residential schools. The murdered and missing Indigenous women, girls, and 2Spirit people. The mental health crisis in Indigenous communities. Everything is connected. The atrocities of North America’s colonialist systems are an ongoing, ever-present devastating dark cloud over Indigenous youth. Talaga returns again and again with more evidence, copious notes, and first-hand testimonies illustrating her points. Talaga’s work on this book earned her the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and the RBC Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction.

I didn’t expect to be listening to Tiny Beautiful Things while flying across the country to visit family in California. But there I was, tearing up on a late direct flight as Cheryl Strayed dealt out her incredibly thought-provoking advice. 

Strayed began writing anonymously as Sugar for an advice column on The Rumpus over a decade ago. She answered letters requesting advice, often sharing intimate memories from her own life. She had a way of creating deep emotional intimacy and teasing free the subtleties of the letters she answered.

I have to admit, I struggle to find self-help books that I like. Perhaps this is a fault of my personal taste (feel free to send me recommendations for your favorites!), but sometimes I find a book like Tiny Beautiful Things that knocks my socks off and reminds me of how helpful this genre can be.

She answers many questions about relationships, parenting, dealing with loss, and friendship. But she gives advice in a way that validates these common and relatable questions. In one question, she answers a teenager about why it’s important to understand that your friends will inevitably date people they don’t like. She writes to a trans man who has had a difficult relationship with his parents. She writes to new moms and older moms. But whoever she’s writing to, she invests her whole heart.

Strayed’s columns remind me that I’m not the only one who struggles with navigating life’s ups and downs. We’ve all struggled with similar things. And during those times the answers might be staring us square in the face, but we still wonder if we are doing the right thing. I think this is why the book works. We all have moments in our life where we might know the answer, or maybe we just need reassurance. Whatever it is, Strayed seems to know just what to say.

In this 10th anniversary edition, Strayed adds some columns that she wrote for her Substack, the newest manifestation of her column. So if you’re like me and missed the Tiny Beautiful Things phenomenon the first go around, now is the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon. Plus, if you’re an audiobook fan, she performs the audio!

As a food lover who lives in the South, I’m always looking for more books that sit at the intersection of cuisine and culture. Founding Director of the Southern Foodways Alliance John T. Edge gives us all of that and more with his wonderful book The Potlikker Papers. Edge writes about how the South’s culture is reflected in cuisine. He takes us on a tour of the American South, along the way to describe the key places and why they have become landmarks for Southern Cuisine.

Edge is part of the new South, a growing cultural movement that aspires to make a better South, much in the vein of The Bitter Southerner’s famous campaign. The Potlikker Papers writes about Southern cuisine from this more progressive perspective, giving us the history of Southern food, both the good and the bad.

Edge gives a very broad overview of Southern food, describing the various communities that helped create modern Southern cuisine and illustrating how it will continue to evolve over the coming decades. Most importantly, he notes vital contributions of Black chefs throughout the years. He describes how Southern cuisine would not exist if not for these incredible taste makers who are in many ways the cornerstones of Southern cooking.

I especially love the audiobook, which Edge performs himself. There’s just something perfect about listening to Edge’s incredible accent as he describes mouth-watering dishes. I think it’s also important to note that The Potlikker is just an overview, one tile in the mosaic of Southern food. Books like, High on the Hog and The Cooking Gene are key texts about the contribution of African Americans to Southern Cuisine. And chefs like Edna Lewis have done incredible work on bringing Southern Appalachian foodways to the forefront of Southern Cuisine. I could go on, but I think you get the idea. 🙂

Back in grad school, I remember spending every possible moment pouring over texts, constantly mulling over ideas of why and how we read. Since then, I’ve been kept busy by a gazillion different things and haven’t had time to think much about ideas around reading. So when I saw Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, I had to pick it up and take advantage of the opportunity.

In her introduction, Castillo says, “When I talk about how to read now, I’m not just talking about how to read books now; I’m talking about how to read the world now.” In the rest of the collection, Castillo examines books, film, art exhibitions, and more. To her, “reading” means thinking critically about the art and media we consume.

Castillo also discusses how the world reads her as the daughter of Filipinx immigrants from a working class background. She argues that reading is political, that we bring our understanding of the world to our interpretations of literature, film, and other media. She pushes for readers to think beyond the buzzwords — like “diverse,” “inclusive,” and “positive representation”— to change how we view where literature comes from as a whole.

But Castillo doesn’t just discuss her ideas around reading; she puts them into practice. In the essay, “Reading Teaches Us Empathy and Other Fictions,” Castillo examines Nobel Prize-winning author Peter Handke’s Across, asking why Handke believes that his work is apolitical and should just be appreciated for what it is. In “Main Character Syndrome,” Castillo discusses the work of Joan Didion, pushing against the idea that a settler colonial writer can be “the” voice of California.

Castillo does not hold back her critiques of literary darlings. Instead, she boldly calls for all literature — including treasures of the modern literary world — to be viewed from an anti-imperialist viewpoint. We can appreciate Austen AND acknowledge that her family benefitted monetarily from the slave trade at the time.

While this newsletter will never do this collection of essays justice, I hope you will take the leap and pick up this book. But be forewarned, it’s not for the faint of heart. Prepare to be challenged.