Souvenirs: A Play for Survivors.

“What happened to me, the marks on my body, the memories, they are going to be my souvenirs.”

“Write to Life has never had an impact like it. There was rapt attention. There was laughter - but by the end, at least half the audience was in tears and all the performers near to it.”

Thus writes Sheila Hayman, coordinator of Freedom from Torture’s creative writing group, Write to Life, after the first performance of their play, ‘Souvenirs,’ based on their own experiences as asylum seekers.

While plays like The Asylum Monologues have previously taken refugees’ own words and brought them to a wider audience, the work usually been performed by professional actors. What makes ‘Souvenirs’ unusual is that it continues the practice firmly established by Hayman, of empowering their writers to perform their words themselves.

Write to Life, founded in 1997, is now the longest-running creative writing group for torture survivors in the world. Two years ago, during Refugee Week, they performed their poetry at Survivor!, a musical celebration at All Hallows Gospel Oak in north London. Last year, they performed poetry at Tate Britain that had been inspired by the paintings they found there. This latest venture represents a three-way collaboration between Write to Life, Ice and Fire and Tamasha Theatre. 

Although the collaboration is new, the links between the three groups are close. Write to Life’s founder, Sonja Linden started Ice and Fire in 2003 with a remit to explore Human Rights stories through performance. And Tamasha’s Director, Kristine Landon-Smith, worked with Write to Life in 2011, helping the writers bring real power to their performances.

Hayman recalls, “I met Kristine Landon-Smith by chance, when we were both chaperoning children at a dance performance. We found out about each other’s work, and she talked to me about the play, ‘The Arrival,’ based on the graphic novel by Shaun Tan. She was interested in involving ‘real’ refugees and asylum seekers, and I was preoccupied by the difficulties my clients often had performing their work. On the one hand, they desperately wanted to read their writings themselves, to a live audience, because what they write is usually very personal, and that gives it power. On the other hand, they were mostly shy, inexperienced and spoke English, which might be their fourth language, in ways that didn’t always do the writing full justice.

“We hatched a plot for Kris to coach the group in her unique technique which brings their native expressiveness to performance of any words. And I made a film of it, which turned out to be fascinating.

“It was perhaps an obvious next step to put this learning into practice, by developing a piece of authentic ‘biographical theatre’ to accompany the metaphorical sweep of ‘The Arrival.’”
And the result, that first performance, is better than any of them could have dared hope. The play ends with the actors gathered around J, who is seated next to her try of peas and beans. A stunned silence is followed by rapturous applause. Then an hour of queuing to buy booklets, getting them signed. People are talking to the performers, signing up to support Freedom from Torture.

“I said the world did not know, but now they do,” says T afterwards. “We have delivered a message.”

“When I saw the audience there, I just found myself saying it out to them 100 per cent, with my whole heart,” says M.

“I felt good,” agrees J. “Everybody was so attentive to what we had to say – we were all reduced to tears. I couldn’t tell how it would be, so I was nervous before. But once I was speaking, the nerves disappeared.”

“I’ve never felt anything like this before, since I started reading in public,” U says. “To be honest, I was going to cry. The women in front of me were crying, so I struggled to keep that between me and my reading. It’s something I’ve just never experienced before.”

“At some points, I was upset, reading the lines and recalling the scenes they described,” admits H. “Later on I just felt relieved, bringing it out, releasing the pressure. I’m definitely looking forward to doing it again. This has propelled us forward to our next public appearance.”

If you would like to see ‘Souvenirs’ for yourself, the final scheduled performance is at 18:30 on Sunday 23rd June, at the Rich Mix Theatre in Bethnal Green Road.

Members of Write to Life are identified only by their initials as the circumstances of their lives often remain precarious.

The full article was first published in the April 2013 edition of Words with Jam

Reaching Your Readers

Lessons in Marketing from London Book Fair 2013

First published on the Triskele Books Blog

I think most of us here at Triskele would agree the toughest thing we have had to take on for ourselves since going Indie is the dreaded marketing. And these days, it’s not just Indie authors that have to deal with it. Unless you are one of the tip-of-the-iceberg authors that the big publishers reserve nearly all of their marketing budget for, chances are, at some point, you are going to have to come out of your garret and do some self promotion.

Not all authors fit the stereotype of the shy, retiring type who would rather deal with characters on paper than readers in person. But even for those who relish a chance get out there and perform, it can be tough to switch from those familiar, introspective creative/editing modes into something a whole lot louder. So believe me, anything help we can get is more than welcome. And in these last couple of weeks we’ve found some diamonds.

First of all, there was the Booksellers’ webinar Metadata: Get It Right First Time.

Then, two of the highlights of the London Book Fair 2013, and the two events from which we brought home copious notes and a headful of ideas to try, were:

Joanna Penn – The Creative Penn – Advanced Online Marketing for Authors, and

Patrick Brown, Director of Community, Goodreads: Helping Readers Discover Your Books

All three of these have kindly made their presentation available on the web, and we have no intention of trying to duplicate them. But we thought we would share a few of the ideas that made us think, “we really have to do that!” And those basically split into two main areas – talking to your readers and (gulp!) metadata.

Talking to Your Readers

Let there be no misunderstanding, building the sort of author platform that has hundreds, or even thousands, of fans clamouring for your next book is a long, slow process. It’s not going to happen overnight. But you have to start somewhere, and there are ways to make the foundations for that platform more secure and longer lasting.

One of Joanna Penn’s key tips is not to let your potential readers slip from your grasp for lack of preparation. Make sure you have an email sign-up on your website / blog etc so that you have a way of contacting readers who have, say, shown an interest in your first book when you are about to release your second. (And if you write two different types of books, make sure that you keep two separate email lists, so that you are not telling the readers of your book on the banking industry all about your latest erotic novel!)

Goodreads has been – and I hope will remain, even after its controversial takeover by Amazon – one of the best ways of connecting with a community of potential readers.

One of the first things you should do is to set up an author profile page on Goodreads – and make that page as engaging as possible. Put a picture on there. Include a bio. Link to your website, Facebook and Twitter feeds. Include an RSS feed to your blog, so readers can see you latest posts.

And then get out there and talk! Talk about the books that matter to you. If star ratings make you uncomfortable, just leave a review. Engage in conversations with other readers – but not about your own books. The aim is to be the guest at a cocktail party that people want to talk to - not the double-glazing salesman that they slam the phone down on.

The right place to let people know about things like book launches, giveaways, book signings, etc, is the status update on your own page.

Goodreads Giveaways are a well-known marketing tool. Most people hope that they will lead to a spike in sales, or at least in reviews. In truth, it is probably more realistic to expect a spike in people putting your book on their ‘to read’ shelves, and to treat anything else as a bonus.

Currently, you can only give away physical books on Goodreads, not ebooks. You’ll need to decide on how many books to give away, and which territories you are prepared to ship to (so you don’t suddenly find yourself with a massive bill for postage and packing). You can, however, give away books from your backlist – say, as a way of drumming up interest for a new release – simply by leaving the publication date blank when you are setting up the giveaway.

Patrick Brown, in his talk at the London Book Fair, suggested that a month was the ideal time for a giveaway. Other indie authors have said this is much too long and that you only get people participating in the last few days, so I guess this is a matter of trial and error.

Listopia is the area of Goodreads that has ‘public’ list (as opposed to private lists set up by individual readers). Bear in mind that it’s okay to add your book to a list of ‘Historical Novels set in Revolutionary France’ – but not to a list of ‘The Fifty Best Fantasy Novels of 2013’.

And of course, you can always ‘talk’ to your readers directly. Technology these days makes it very easy to record podcasts and upload them to your website. These could be audio-samples from your book, or they could be you interviewing other writers. If this is your thing, then the potential is endless.

Metadata

Say the word ‘metadata’ and watch a roomful of people screw up their faces as if you’d asked them to make sense of the General Theory of Relativity. But really it’s something most of us make use of every day of our lives.

You may all be writers, but first you were readers. Chances are you buy, or at least search for books online.  If you go into a library or a bookshop and ask for a specific book, the librarian or bookseller searches for it in a catalogue. So what ensures that you find the book you are looking for?

Metadata.

Whatever catalogue you are searching, you need the title to be accurate and the author’s name to be consistently given (not J.K. Rowling in one place, Joanna Rowling in another and Jo Rowling in yet another). And that’s if you know specifically the book you are looking for.

Suppose you have written a crime novel about a female serial killer going on the rampage through the Norfolk Broads. What you would like to happen is that your novel comes up as a suggestion when a reader searches for, say:

Crime novels with female serial killers

Crime novels set in Norfolk

And maybe also, crime novels set in rural England, or crime novels set around boats or... Well, it’s up to you, really.

So this is where two things become very important.

First of all, there is the ‘short description’ of your book. This is NOT the place to put your blurb, but rather to put all information that will allow people to categorise your book.

Secondly, there are the key words. There will be various places to put this information, depending on where you are uploading to, be it Amazon, Nielsen or wherever. The important thing is to make sure that it is

Relevant to the way that a reader might search for your book

Accurate (you’re not pretending that the book is something it’s not), and

Consistent across all the places you are entering it

There are basically two types of keywords – the ordinary sort, which are one or two words in length (e.g. novella, crime fiction, young adult etc) and long-tail keywords, which are whole phrases like the ones I used above (crime novels with a female serial killer).

Joanna Penn has some great tips for finding the most effective keywords for your book.

Her first step is simply to brainstorm all the keywords / long-tail keywords that could possibly relate to your book. Next you use those keywords in two places to find out what people have actually been searching for - Google Ads and Amazon itself. Google Ads will tell you specifically about numbers of recent searches. Amazon doesn’t – but you can deduce the highest frequency searches by what appears via the ‘automatic fill-in’ when you start typing in their search field.

Once you have done that, you compare the results from the two sources and pick the TOP FIVE long-tail key words to include in your metadata. Joanna has plenty of evidence from authors who have followed her advice that this can have a direct and immediate effect on your sales.

Okay, that was probably the easy bit. There is another side to metadata that is slightly more arcane, because here you have to stop thinking like a reader and think instead about the publishing industry and how they have been classifying books over many many years. Like any big industry, they have standards and codes that can make it sound as if they are part of a secret society. But it’s really not that difficult, and all the information is publically available.

First of all there is the BIC Basic Required Information. This is simply the list of basic information about a book that a traditional publisher would be expected to supply. If you’ve filled in the form to obtain ISBNs from Nielsen, a lot of it will look familiar. The more of this information you can supply, and the earlier you can supply it, the easier it will be for all forms of search mechanism to find your books.

Secondly, and I suspect that this is something that a lot of Indie Authors may be missing out on, there are the BIC standard subject categories. These are simple codes which computers can recognise and that will identify whether a book is say,

Crime and Mystery [FF], or Erotic Fiction [FP]

Beyond these two letter codes, there may be further subdivisions. (Under thriller and suspense [FH], for example, there are spy thrillers [FHD] and legal/political thrillers [FHP]). You can identify short stories, or fiction in translation. You can indicate if your books is of gay/lesbian interest. You can add geographical codes to show that your book is set in a particular region or country, or a code to show what time period your historical novel is set in.

None of this mandatory, but using the codes wisely and well could increase your book’s visibility, which is what this is all about. I would suggest you take a look at the User Guidelines before you plunge into anything, but for fiction in particular, it is really not that complicated.

The Authors are Taking Over the Asylum: London Book Fair 2013

First Published on the Triskele Books Blog 

What a difference a year makes.

Last year, at the launch of the Alliance of Independent Authors, we sat high up in a room overlooking the exhibition halls at Earl’s Court and heard Orna Ross declare:

“Hello. We’re here. We’re at the London Book Fair and we’re here to stay!”

One year later, no longer a collection of individual authors, but a growing and supportive community, we were down on the main exhibition floor, overflowing the ‘compact and bijou’ space of the Author Lounge, and making our voices heard loud and clear.

No doubt about it, the publishing industry is being shown it can no longer treat writers as a commodity to be read and not heard. Book deals can’t just be concluded between agents and editors in the veiled secrecy of the International Rights Centre. Writers want to take control of their own body of work – and they are learning how from the likes of Orna Ross, Joanna Penn, Ben Galley, David Gaughran and other the other powerhouses behind the Alliance of Independent Authors.

Orna Ross

ALLi’s presence at the London Book Fair 2013 kicked off with a seminar from Orna Ross on Going Indie, which I callously forewent in order to see Kamila Shamsie in conversation with Oya Baydar. And there was a lot of other ALLi activity that I couldn’t cover. Mark Coker and Steena Holmes were at The Digital Minds Conference over the weekend. Orna Ross and Joanna Penn gave seminars in the Love Learning conference. And in the Author Lounge, audiences repeatedly filled and overflowed the available space for the scheduled panel talks, advice and workshops.

In fact, space became a major issue all round. On Monday, the audience for the talks was spilling out into the aisles outside, with people craning to hear and waiting in line in the hopes of getting a better spot for the next session as some people moved on. By Tuesday, the organisers had got twitchy about this. Those acting as gatekeepers, with their little clickers scanning our badges, were limiting the numbers coming into the lounge, and the security folk were moving people on if they even stopped outside to grab a quick photo. Many people missed talks they would have loved to attend, and it all led to an inevitable conclusion:

WE NEED A CONSIDERABLY BIGGER LOUNGE. 

(Wait till next year, guys. Orna has plans. And we all know what happens when Orna has plans ...)

That is not to detract from what we did achieve over the three days. ALLi launched its new book, Choosing a Self-Publishing Service – free to members and available to buy from Amazon as an ebook and (shortly) print version too. ALLi members were able to network one another, attaching faces, voices and the beginnings of real friendships to those we had previously known only by their Facebook handles. On Monday night, we celebrated ALLi’s first birthday in style, with food and drink provided by Amazon. (Now how’s that for recognition?) We turned out in force to hear the redoubtable Joanna Penn fire our enthusiasm for proper grown-up marketing strategies (about which more on this blog next week). And we had the opportunity, on Wednesday, to showcase our own work and to talk to new and aspiring self-publishers about what we do and why we do it.

I can’t tell you what a pleasure it was to be able to tell so many people about Triskele Books and about why we think the author collective is the way to go. Setting out as a self-publisher on your own is scary, as the seven of us all know. Having a team behind you, giving you support, sharing the burden of editing and (oh, lord!) marketing makes a world of difference. And by the way people’s eyes lit up as I talked, a lot of others are starting to think the same way.

AS ALLI EXEMPLIFIES ON A LARGE SCALE, SO TRISKELE SHOWS ON A SMALL SCALE – 

WE ARE BETTER WORKING AS A TEAM. 

And, hey, seeing our six published book displayed on a shelf on the New Title Showcase stand, their gorgeous covers from JD Smith Design standing out proudly and looking as professional as any at the Fair, was a pretty damn fine affirmation too.

Gained in Translation

“It is often said that something is lost in translation, but it is also true that something may be gained in translation.”

Elif Shafak, member of judging panel, The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize is unique in that the award is shared equally between the writer and their English translator, in recognition of their symbiotic relationship.

The translation of fiction into other languages can be very much a one way street. In many countries around the world, a high proportion of the books published have been translated from English, yet in the English speaking world, the proportion of books translated from other languages remains tiny. To make matters worse, translation into English is often an essential bridge to translation into other languages – so for a book in Finnish to be available in Farsi, it must first pass through the impossibly narrow gateway of translation into English.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize attempts to redress this balance by celebrating the very best of translation into English. This year’s shortlist includes writers from Africa, Spain, The Netherlands, Argentina, Croatia and Albania. (You can see the full shortlist and read the judge’s comments on each title here.)

Three of that judging panel for the award – Elif Shafak, Gabriel Josipovici and Boyd Tonkin were at the London Book Fair to discuss the short list and were asked about the general state of health for translation of fiction into English.

All spoke very highly of the standard of translation they had seen. “There is a kind of harmony, a dance between writer and translator,” Shafak said. “Reading these books made me aware of how much we owe our translators.”

Josipovici regretted that more truly courageous and experimental voices were not getting translated. Literature in translation should not be reduced to the literature of identity – a sort of fictional travelogue. (And indeed the shortlist bucks this trend by including a novel by a Dutch author set in Snowdonia and another by a Spanish author set in Ireland.)

“In terms of geographical spread there are still many areas that are still very sketchily filled in,” Tonkin said. He was particularly disappointed to see very few works translated from languages of the Indian subcontinent, despite the fact many such books are available in English in India.

Shafak commented on the gender imbalance of the shortlist, which is once again dominated by male. (Women translators, on the other hand, are well represented.) “Many women write fiction, and most readers of fiction are women. But when it comes to getting reviewed, when it comes to getting translated, what we see are male writers.”

One member of the audience noted that there were no writers in Arabic on the list and wondered how the Arab Spring was being reflected in fiction.

Tonkin quoted Doris Lessing – literature is analysis after the event. “To create fiction, you need time to acquire perspective. In the short run, it is perhaps better to turn to non-fiction. It could be a decade before we see the great novel of the Arab Spring.”

Another audience member asked whether the judging panel should be looking at the best of books in other languages – those that deserve to be translated.

“What an interesting suggestion,” Tonkin said. “In an ideal world, it would be great to be able to tell publishers, ‘here’s a list of what you’re missing.’ But I think it might be beyond our time and resources.”

Market Focus: Turkey

Another way in which the London Book Fair fosters an awareness of literature from other countries is through its Market Focus programme – or to use the term Kamila Shamsie would prefer, ‘Literature Focus’.  LBF aims to raise awareness of writing from one selected country through a programme of events and author interviews. In previous years, India, China and Russia, among others, have been guest of honour at the Fair, and this year it was the turn of Turkey.

Elif Shafak, the Turkish author who was on the judging panel for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, was author of the day at the LBF on Tuesday, when I couldn’t be there. But I did catch another Turkish novelist, Oya Baydar, in conversation with Kamila Shamsie. Only one of Baydar’s novels, The Lost Word, has been translated into English, and the conversation is conducted through a translator.

After publishing her first novel, God Forgot His Children, when she was still in high school, Baydar was drawn into politics. “It was unavoidable to be involved in left wing politics in the 1960s. We saw ourselves as revolutionaries and you could not be a part-time revolutionary.”

In 1980, she was arrested for using the expression ‘the Turkish peoples’ rather than ‘the Turkish people’ and left Turkey with a seven year jail term hanging over her. For twelve years, she lived in Germany and while there, she began writing short stories about Turkish people in exile.

“Living in exile made me realise that your country is your language and your language is your country. Not being able to speak my own language affected my thought patterns. It affected my ability to think.

“Many people in Turkey – the Kurdish, the Armenians – feel like foreigners in their own country. My experience has given me great sympathy with them. Since my return, I have worked in support of the Kurds.”

Even though the situation in Turkey much more relaxed, serious issues of freedom of expression remain. Baydar noted that, while it is easier to discuss the Kurdish issue, there are still heavy restrictions around any mention of the Armenian genocide.

“Saying anything slightly outside the ideological lines can lead to trouble. You may not go to prison any more, but you may lose your job as a journalist.”

Indeed, as the LBF opened, news came that the Turkish composer, Fazal Say, had been given a 10 month suspended sentence for ‘insulting religion’ on Twitter.

Baydar is optimistic about the future, but also fearful. “We do not know if the democratisation of Turkey will continue, or whether our dreams will be broken.”

Catriona Troth was tweeting from the London Book Fair on behalf of @TriskeleBooks.  You can also read more of her adventures on the Words with Jam blog.

Travels with the Library Cat: Toronto Bookstores

Sadly, since this article was first published in Words with Jam Magazine, Nicholas Hoare's Toronto store has also closed.

The day before I left England, I read a headline in the Bookseller’s Daily Bulletin. “Canadian bookseller announces closures.” Nicholas Hoare, one of Canada’s most respected independent booksellers, was closing branches in both Montreal and Ottawa. I knew, too, that this was only the latest in a long line of closures of independent bookstores in Canada. So I decided to see for myself how things were in Toronto.

I began at Nicholas Hoare’s remaining branch, on Front Street East. This is an elegant space, with gallery runs part-way along one side. Elsewhere, a slender set of library steps allows access to the highest shelves. Jazz music plays softly in the background.

Nicholas Hoare started 40 years ago in Montreal (1971) with a warehouse supplying libraries. They moved into retail a few years later, first with a shop in Montreal, then Ottawa, then Toronto.

“Our five most senior people have 140 years experience between us,” Hoare tells me.

The closures of the stores in Montreal and Ottawa have been forced on him by massive rent rises (72%, in the case of Ottawa and almost as much in Montreal). To some extent, he admits, he is the victim of his own highly individual approach. The shelving in the stores is a bespoke design, making it impossible to simply up sticks and move to another location. “I always thought I’d be taken out in a box,” he says.

He and his staff made the difficult decision to get out while still on top, focusing the business on the warehouse and on the Toronto branch. Like many of the independent booksellers I have spoken to, he believes the future lies in specialising.

“We are witnessing the demise of the general independent bookstore. Only niche stores are going to survive. And we are niche. Amazon and the big chains don’t carry the books we do. And we don’t carry bestsellers.”

Nicholas Hoare’s specialism is imported books from Britain.

How do they select the books they sell?

“We source books based on reviews. In England, we read the Literary Review, which is still astonishingly erudite. And in the US, we read the reviews from the American Libraries Association. When it comes to teen fiction in particular, they are absolutely on the button. When we see two recommendations coming from those different points, we know we are onto something special.”

I ask him what the standout books have been for him recently.

“The Hare With the Amber Eyes,” he says immediately. “We received that in proof copy, and we could see it was something special. Japanese treasure, smuggling, the holocaust… We were way ahead of the game, promoting the book in Canada.

“Going back a few years, we were the first to introduce Sue Townsend to Canada. I remember we jammed two switchboards with people asking, ‘Who is this woman?’”

The shop itself has the feel of somewhere very select. Every book is placed face out, reinforcing the impression that they have been individually chosen. A William Morris sofa and some deep arm chairs are arranged around a huge fireplace. A whole section of garden books is arranged as if in an art gallery, just at the point where a potted tree grows in the middle of the store. In the children’s section at the back, the shelves sprout turrets, like a miniature castle.

The arrangement of the books is eccentric. There is a section of controversial books about God – from Christopher Hitchens to Ten Popes that Shook the World. Old books are mixed in with new, fiction with non-fiction, the unifying principle being a theme that can take some working out. This is a bookshop to spend time in, and many people do - as their guest book, lying open by the sofa, testifies.



I move on to Ben McNally Books on Bay Street. McNally was previously the manager of Hoare’s Toronto branch, but the two fell out around five years ago and McNally opened his own shop a few minutes’ walk away. Given that one of arguments with Hoare was reportedly over the playing of background music in the store, I am mildly amused to hear classical music playing at a similar low volume.

The design of the shop, if anything, is even more imposing. Dark wooden shelves stand out against pale walls painted with a swirling, Art Nouveau design. There is a chandelier and a decorative archway leading to the small paperback section. Only one chair – a large leather armchair – perhaps reflecting the fact that many of their clientele are from the business district and often have little time to browse.

A fair proportion, but not all, of the books are arranged face out. The stock here is definitely denser than at Nicholas Hoare’s. But again there is the sense that it has been purposely selected – and with scant regard to current bestseller lists.

“I have to know everything that a British or American bookseller has to know, and then about Canadian publishing on top of that,” McNally tells me. He is passionate about providing books that no one else is interested in – books that are unusual, difficult to get or expensive to carry. “We are very persistent in pursuit of books people want. It gives us huge satisfaction when we track down something a customer has given up hope of finding.

“Sometimes we have to tell people it will cost them one arm, one leg, the birthright of their first child and take six months. But if they still want it, we’ll get it.”

They will deliver books to the local offices. They get to know their clients and will recommend books when they haven’t the time to browse. “I had one client who was on a long sailing voyage. He rang me to say he was ready to throw his Kindle overboard because there was nothing on it he wanted to read. He asked me to pick out half a dozen books for him and send them via a friend who was joining him for a leg of the journey. He knew he could trust us to find things he would want to read.”



I move on, into the University district, where I find the Toronto Women’s Bookstore. This not-for-profit store began 38 years ago as a shelf of books in a women’s resource centre. Their first shop was in Toronto’s Kensington Market, where it shares space with a feminist printing press and a self-defence collective.

Since then, the store has moved several times, before occupying its current location on Harbord Street. In the face of increasing competition from chain stores and others, it expanded outwards, embracing issues around racism, disability, sexuality and the environment.

The present owner, former employee and long-term customer, Victoria Moreno, took over two years ago, when the store was once again under threat of closure. She has added a tiny café at the back and opened up the courtyard behind as a pleasant seating area for sunny days. She’s also developed the store’s website and internet sales. In the basement, she says, are boxes of material relating to the store’s history, which she is beginning to delve through.

As well as books, the store sells locally made jewellry and crafts and has run courses in subjects from knitting to exploring bisexuality. They also run drama, music and language programmes for children.



Right across the street is the SciFi and Fantasy Bookshop Bakka Phoenix, now in its fourth home and celebrating its 40th Anniversary.

Bakka (named after Freman legend Frank Herbert’s Dune) was founded by Charles McKee in 1972 and is possible the world’s oldest continuously trading science fiction bookstore. Hopefully, it has now found its permanent home, as Ben Freiman (who took over in 2003 and added ‘Phoenix’ to the name), owns the freehold.

One of the reasons for the store’s success is apparent as soon as I walk through the door. Long-term employee, the Japanese-Canadian fantasy author Michelle Sagara-West, is holding forth to a customer, enthusiasm emanating from her like a heat-haze. Without drawing breath, she covers bad romantic tropes, the importance of finding at least one character in a book that you like, the problems with Buffy novelisations (“trouble is, too many people confuse ‘tough’ with ‘bitchy’”), Megan Whelan Turner’s The Thief and its sequels (“All of us in the store loved these books. Well, all of us except Ben, but he doesn’t do historical fantasy”) the joy of Terry Pratchett’s descriptive writing (“Except The Colour of Magic – I still can’t finish that,”) and the charms of The Night Circus.

“She’s only every hit a client over the head with a book once,” Freiman tells me, and they both dissolve into giggles. “It was a man who came in with two women,” Sagara says. “The women wanted some help browsing. As soon as the man had found what he wanted, he wanted to know if they were done yet. I picked up the book he’d just paid for and rapped him on the head. ‘You can’t rush them like that! They’re still looking,’ I told him.”

“What did he say?” asks the other customer.

“I think he was stunned,” Freiman says.

“The women both thought it was hilarious. One of them said, ‘See, even a complete stranger knows you deserve to be hit.’”

It would surely be impossible to escape from of shop like this without buying something – and probably without discovering some hidden gem of a book backed by a cast iron recommendation. Only watch out. “If you come back tell me you don’t like a book that I love, that’s really throwing down the gauntlet,” Sagara says. “You better be prepared for an argument.”



Freiman directs me up the road to Ten Editions, a tiny secondhand bookshop of the sort that used to line the Charing Cross Road, where every surface is crammed with books and boxes, and the aisles are almost too narrow to move up and down.

The current owner, Susan Duff has been there twenty years. “This was a bookstore well before that,” she says. “We have the vibes.”

She is squatting on a low stool, sorting books on one of the lower shelves. She wears a man’s tweed jacket over a heavy polo neck sweater, and with her mass of curly grey hair, she could be Margaret Atwood’s sister.

“Once upon a time, when people came in wanting to read about, say, Aristotle, they would want the original text, a couple of translations, history, criticism. Now they just want a specific text in a specific edition. If they need to read around the subject, they go on-line. It’s not as much fun any more.”



My last stop takes me north on the subway to Eglington, and Mabel’s Fables, a children’s bookstore that opened in 1988. Mabel herself is a marmalade cat (the second of that name) who graciously puts in an appearance and condescends to be stroked.

The ground floor of Mabel’s is for younger children, arranged by ages and stages. Lamps above each shelf are marked with guideline ages (easily seen by parents, not so easily by children.) Huge stuffed toys peek out from various nooks.

A flight of narrow stairs takes you to the upper floor, where there are books for older children. At the back is a wonderful story area, its walls covered in doodles and autographs from all manner of authors, Margaret Atwood included. As well as story-time, they run rhyme-time groups, language classes, writing workshops.

The store also has a close relationship with the children’s hospital, the famous ‘Toronto Sick Kids.’ Customers can buy books at a 20% discount, inscribe them with a personal message, and have them donated to the hospital.

The owner, Eleanor LeFave, has always been at the forefront of innovation. Currently, Mabel’s Fables is one of forty stores about to start trialling a new way of selling ebooks. Customers will be able to come in, browse the store, avail themselves of the expertise of the staff, and then buy a token for downloading the ebook of their choice – either for themselves or to give as a gift. The scheme is a colloboration between Canadian publisher Thomas Allen and Cormorant Books and will initially focus on short stories. The stories will be available exclusively to independent bookstores, who will receive a comparatively generous 40% of the sales revenue.

It was great to find that, despite everything, Toronto can still boast an eclectic range of independent bookstores.

 

Also Recommended:

Everywhere I went, staff were keen to recommend other indie stores. Here are a few I was told about but couldn’t make it to.

A Different Booklist, Bloor and Bathurst (Books for the African and Caribbean Diaspora)

Another Story, Roncevalles Village (International fiction, political non-fiction, and alternative children’s and young adult lit)

The Beguiling, Markam Street, (Underground and Alternative Comics)

Little Island Comics, Bathurst Street (The Beguiling for Kids)

David Mason Books, Adelaide St (Antiquarian and First Edition)

A Tale of Two Libraries

Originally published in Words with Jam.

From the outside, it looks exactly the same as when I used to cycle there from home as a child. A little white, weatherboarded house, surrounded by a picket fence. Like houses up and down this quiet street in the oldest part of the village, Thornhill Village Library still bears the small plaque telling passers-by who lived there in 1867, the year of Canada’s Confederation. The board swinging like a pub sign outside bears the same logo of a spreading tree.

Inside, though, it’s been doing some growing. Beyond the two roomsthat I remember, there’s a children’s library I brought my own children to, ten years ago. And now it seems to have sprouted another room beyond that. High-ceilinged and lit with tall windows that let in the warm, spring sunshine, this rooms is lined with non-fiction books. In the middle is a large island of computer desks and off to one side, a cluster of sofas and chairs just begging for someone to curl up for a good read.

The front of the library, the bit I remember from my childhood, is given over to largely paperback fiction. The spines sport large letters on squares of coloured paper. The colour indicates the genre of the book and the letter gives the first letter of the author’s surname, making it easy to find what you are looking for and, I imagine, to file things. Canadian titles are marked with a red maple leaf.

The children’s section has a double ring of shelves, with a rocking chair in the middle that looks perfect for storytime. There are little wooden stools, a doll’s house and some soft toys. On the back wall are photographs of pets belonging to the young library users. I spot a pig and a donkey in amongst the dogs and cats and rabbits.

The book I eventually settle down to read, on another of the comfy chairs scattered about, is Audrey Niffenegger’s graphic novel, The Night Bookmobile. This is the story of a woman who, at various points in her life, encounters a mysterious mobile library whose ever-expanding shelves hold a copy of every book she has ever read. It seems oddly appropriate in these surroundings – a library I return to every decade or so, which always seems to have grown a bit since last time I saw it and which holds so many memories of my own explorations in reading.

Librarians on the Picket Lines

Thornhill Village Library has survived its own turbulent times. When I was in high school, they build a large central library just two kilometres away. The little village library was considered redundant and threatened with closure. But the locals had other ideas and fought to keep it going. It survived as a paperback library, thrived and then expanded once more. It is now open seven days a week, including two evenings. As much as can be said of anything these days, its future seems secure.

The same cannot be said of libraries a few miles to the south, in the Greater Toronto area.

A year ago, with the support of a massive public campaign spearheaded by Margaret Atwood, Toronto librarians won a battle with City authorities to prevent the closure of branches. But any triumph they may have felt has been temporary. Mayor Rob Ford and his councillor brother (dubbed ‘the twin Fordmayors by Atwood) have come back with swingeing budget cuts and new terms of employment that would remove job security from large numbers of library staff.

The librarians responded by going on strike, closing every branch in the Greater Toronto Area from Sunday 18th March. For ten days they maintained a picket line in Nathan Philips Square, outside City Hall, walking in a good humoured circle around a band of musicians singing protest songs and periodically break into a chant. (‘Libraries work because – WE DO!’) One week into the strike, on Sunday afternoon, they held a read-in at the main Toronto Reference Library, inviting the public to ‘come and read a Canadian book.’ They were supported by the Writers’ Union of Canada, and writers including Susan Swan and Douglas Gibson joined in.

It was quite hard to guage how much public support they had this time round. The newspaper coverage was mixed, ranging from those who believe that the librarians action proved they ‘were only in it for the money all along’ to those who thought their quiet, dignified protest was perfectly pitched to disconcert the mayor and his brother.

Margaret Atwood was out of town when the strike began, working on a new book. But she emailed the Globe and Mail, voicing her support for librarians, as well as encouraging her Twitter followers to attend the weekend read-in. “People support libraries but sometimes they don’t understand that is takes people to make them run,” she said.

After ten days, the union concluded a deal with the Library Board that involved some compromise on both sides. But Toronto’s libraries reopened on 30th March with their workers in a better position than those in unions who had to deal directly with the City Council. Toronto still loves its libraries, even if the ‘Twin Fordmayors’ still don’t get it.

Vaclav Havel: For One Night Only

First published in Words with Jam

This is the story of a play which – for over twenty years – saw just one performance. A play written and rehearsed in secret. An act of defiance against a totalitarian state that almost (but not quite) succeeded. The story of The Beggar’s Opera, by Václav Havel, sometime president of the Czech Republic.

In 1968, when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague and the process of so-called ‘normalisation’ began, Havel was already a successful playwright. But as the Communist Party reestablished its position of absolute power, he along with thousands of others became a ‘non-person’. His books were removed from library shelves, his plays could no longer be performed and his name effectively vanished from public life.

Havel wrote The Beggar’s Opera in 1968, but it was four years later that he and his friend Andrej Krob concocted a plan to stage it. No professional theatre dared touch it and any professional actor taking part would risk their career. So through a network of friends, they assembled an amateur company of teachers and students, white-collar workers and mechanics. Copies of the play were typed out on the tissue-thin paper used for samizdat publications and passed round in secret. Rehearsals took place in people’s homes – never in the same place twice to avoid arousing suspicion. They called themselves ‘The Theatre on the Move’.

Rehearsing the play was one thing; putting it on in public was another matter. After two years of working in secret, they approached a ‘House of Culture’ in an obscure suburb of Prague and requested permission to put on a play.

If the title, The Beggar’s Opera, sounds familiar, then that’s no coincidence. This is the same story of Macheath, Peachum and Lockett first written by John Gray in 18th Century England, then reimagined by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil as The Threepenny Opera – and now given another twist in post-’68 Czechoslovakia. By calling it The Beggar’s Opera, they were able to persuade the authorities that this was simply a translation of an English classic, adapted slightly to remove the musical numbers. So effective had the state’s erasure of Havel’s name been that the company didn’t even hide his involvement: the minor officials in this out of the way suburb had never heard of him. Permission was granted, provided the performance was not advertised and no charge was made for admission.

Three hundred trusted friends, secretly invited to view the play, first had to find their way to the House of Culture in Horní Pŏcernice. Imagine a cross between a school auditorium and one of those characterless pubs plonked down in the middle of housing estates in the ‘70s. A place avoided by the locals because most of the entertainment provided was thinly disguised propaganda. An hour before the play began, half the audience were driving round in circles, not daring to ask for directions for fear of giving the game away to the authorities.

Just as the play was due to start, it seemed as if their worst fears had been realised. A man came out onto the stage. He lit a cigarette and stood there, blowing smoke rings out over the audience, his eyes travelling over their faces as if memorising them. The audience held its collective breath, fear catching in their throats. But it was a coup de théâtre: the man was Andrej Krob, Havel’s friend and the director of the play, reminding everyone – audience and actors alike – that they were always being watched.

But not that evening. No secret service men were in the audience or outside, taking note of car registrations.  It seemed as if the whole venture had been a resounding success. The play had been put on, under the nose of the authorities, and they had got away with it. The set was disassembled and the troupe retired to the Little Bears pub in the centre of Prague to celebrate. A second performance was planned for a week later. But their downfall came, not from spies and traitors within Czechoslovakia, but from their allies in the West.

An eyewitness account of the play’s performance was broadcast on Radio Free Europe out of Zurich, and then published in Der Spiegel. The authorities were furious, but to some extent their hands were tied. The Warsaw Pact countries had just signed the Helsinki Accord which, among other things, guaranteed a certain degree of respect for human rights. They could not be seen to respond too ruthlessly to the single performance of an obscure play. So reprisals against the members of the Theatre on the Move had to be discreet. No one was thrown in gaol or sent away to a camp. But passports and driving licences were revoked. Jobs, including Krob’s, were mysteriously ‘restructured’ out of existence. Children of participants failed to find places at university. Even people who were merely suspected of participation suffered. Havel’s play was not performed again in the Czech Republic until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

So what was it about this play that so threatened the Czech regime? After all, the story is familiar enough. Macheath the gallant highwayman, seducing the daughters of a fence and a gaoler, playing off the fathers against each other and dodging an ignominious fate at the end of a rope. But in Havel’s hands, it becomes an indictment of the conditions of living under a totalitarian state.

Aynsley Moorhouse has compared the totalitarian state to Jeremy Bentham’s design of the Panopticon: the ideal prison where each prisoner is under constant observation from every angle. And this, Havel argued, creates a situation where the truth is constantly distorted, where every action is done for appearance only and nothing can be taken at face value. In his essay, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, Havel cites the example of the greengrocer who puts a sign in his window that reads ‘Workers of the World, Unite!’ He does it, not because he believes in international socialist revolution, but because he fears the consequences of not appearing to believe in it. And this constant need to dissemble, Havel believes, causes people to shrivel from within until they lose their humanity altogether.

In Havel’s play, every character appears to be constantly and eloquently justifying their own actions – but nothing they say can be trusted or taken at face value. When, in a final twist unique to Havel’s version, the policeman Lockett is ‘revealed’ to be a criminal who has taken control, first of the police force and now of the whole criminal underworld, the audience is left to guess that he, too, may be the victim of a giant self-deception.

The message of Havel’s writing, and what made him so dangerous, was not simply ‘stop believing what you are told’ (few people did) but ‘stop pretending to believe’. Act like human beings again. Take the sign out of your window and face the consequences of being honest.

Maybe it’s a lesson we could all learn.

References:
• Václav Havel, The Beggar’s Opera, (translated by Paul Wilson), Cornell Press, 2001
• Paul Steiner: Introduction the The Beggar’s Opera, Cornell Press, 2001
• Václav Havel, ‘The Power of the Powerless’, 1978
• Aynsley Moorhouse, ‘Reframing the Theatrical Event: Václav Havel’s The Beggar’s Opera’, Transverse Journal, 2010

For One Night Only was originally published in the December 2011 edition of Words with JAM.