Latest news with #MatteaRoach
CBC
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
R.F. Kuang comes to Toronto to discuss her latest book with Mattea Roach
Social Sharing American author R.F. Kuang will join Bookends host Mattea Roach on stage on Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. at Koerner Hall in Toronto. The event, which is part of a series by the Toronto Festival of Authors, will be broadcast on a future episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach. Kuang is the New York Times #1 bestselling author of the Poppy War trilogy, the historical fantasy novel Babel and the satirical thriller Yellowface. She has received Nebula, Locus, Crawford and British Book Awards for her writing and is pursuing a PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale University. Kuang will discuss her previous novels and rise to success. She'll also dive into the inspiration behind her latest book, Katabasis. Katabasis tells the story of two graduate students with an intense academic rivalry who must put aside their feud to save their professor and get a coveted recommendation letter. To do so, they must travel into the depths of hell — a journey that is never without consequences — and bring up feelings they've so desperately tried to suppress. Roach is a Toronto broadcaster, writer and book lover. Now the host of Bookends, they appeared on the game show Jeopardy! in 2022, where they won 23 games, the most ever won by a Canadian contestant. Roach also won Canada Reads in 2023, championing Ducks by Kate Beaton. They are from Halifax.
CBC
02-07-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Louise Penny in conversation with Mattea Roach at a live Toronto event this fall
Social Sharing Mattea Roach will be hosting an evening in conversation with bestselling Canadian author Louise Penny on Nov. 28 at Massey Hall in Toronto. It will be broadcast on a future episode of Bookends with Mattea Roach and CBC's Live at Massey Hall series on CBC Gem and YouTube. Quebec writer Penny will answer Roach's questions in an on-stage interview and celebrate the Oct. 28 release of her latest Chief Inspector Gamache novel, The Black Wolf. The Black Wolf is the 20th mystery in the Inspector Gamache series and follows the investigations of the head of the homicide department of the Sûreté du Québec. In this latest adventure, Gamache and his team uncover and prevent a domestic terrorist attack in Montréal, arresting a man known as the Black Wolf. But the arrest only uncovers a deeper conspiracy, most notably a sinister plot to make Canada the 51st state of the United States. "When I wrote The Black Wolf, I worried I'd gone too far. I no longer have that fear," Penny said in a statement. Penny is a celebrated writer best known for her mystery series following Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. The book series includes The Grey Wolf, Still Life, Bury Your Dead, A Trick of the Light and A World of Curiosities. It has sold more than four million copies worldwide. In 2022, the series was adapted into an Amazon Original eight-episode series called Three Pines. Penny won the 2020 Agatha Award for best contemporary novel for the 16th book in the series, All the Devils Are Here. In 2013, she was named to the Order of Canada. "I'm beyond excited to chat with Penny as she celebrates the release of the 20th novel in her Inspector Gamache series," said Roach. "She is not only a talented writer, but also an amazing advocate for Quebec and Canada, and her love for her home in the Eastern Townships is evident in all her work." "I'm also so honoured to be bringing Bookends to the iconic Massey Hall for this live show. Massey has been the site of some of my fondest concert-going memories and getting to take the stage there myself feels like a great gift."
CBC
11-06-2025
- Sport
- CBC
Why Anishinaabe writer Kyle Edwards sees hockey as a ceremony
Before becoming a writer, like many kids in Canada, Kyle Edwards dreamed of playing in the National Hockey League. Edwards, who grew up on the Lake Manitoba First Nation and is a member of the Ebb and Flow First Nation, has complex feelings towards the game he loves — and how it doesn't always love Indigenous people back. Edwards' debut novel, Small Ceremonies, follows a hockey team of Ojibwe high schoolers from Winnipeg, who are chasing hockey dreams and coming of age in a game — and a place — that can be both beautiful and brutal. "There is just a hierarchy in sport, in the same way there is in the world, and I think a lot of times sports is a reflection, a mirror of the real world," he said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. Edwards joined Roach to share how sports reflect society and how hockey is its own type of ceremony. Mattea Roach: What kind of a pull does hockey have on you personally? Kyle Edwards: I think it was probably like my first dream as a kid, other than being a writer. I wanted to be a hockey player. When I was growing up, I wanted to go to the NHL. That did not happen. But I loved it. I loved playing the game growing up and I think I always had this sort of conflicting relationship with it just in terms of the different types of violence that are associated with it — mostly on the ice. I think it was where I experienced violence for the first time, both physically and verbally, but I love the game. I think it's very beautiful and poetic and I love how much it means to Canadians and Indigenous people. It's held on such a pedestal that I felt like I really wanted to write about it in this book. What was it like engaging in hockey as an Indigenous person growing up? It was difficult. I grew up on a rez, so you're constantly playing teams from small towns. There's this sort of racial aspect to it, the team from the rez and the team from this small, probably mostly white town and just the history of violence that is Canada, I think it just sort of creates this arena for different tensions and histories that sort of play out on the ice. That was difficult. As a child, there was a time where I just didn't want to be associated with it. But Native people in Canada, Indigenous people in Canada, we just love this game so much. It's really beautiful to see. It brings us together all over the country. There's Indigenous only tournaments all over Canada. Indigenous people in Canada, we just love this game so much. - Kyle Edwards I think we just fight through that. Hockey is known for being such an exclusive sport. It's very exclusive to people who can afford it. People who are of a certain social class. Indigenous people aren't often seen as part of that. But we really don't care in a lot of ways. I haven't been to a rez in Manitoba that doesn't have its own hockey rink and hockey rinks are not cheap. What is the kind of relationship between passion and violence that you wanted to explore in your novel? Passion and violence can be kind of closely related and hard to distinguish in this game. Small Ceremonies follows this team that's sort of being thrown out of the league because they're being perceived as too violent. But one of my biggest concerns while writing the book was that people are going to think this is unrealistic, that this could never happen in Canada. It has happened. This is probably the journalist part of me. It's not directly based on this, but around the time that I was going into university in 2017, there was this really good junior hockey team from this First Nation in Manitoba. They were really good. They went on one of the craziest winning streaks that their league at the time had ever seen. And they ended up going out to win the championship. The very next season, all of the junior teams from small white towns voted to separate from all of the teams that were based on First Nations, including Peguis, who had won the championship, to create their own league because they didn't want to travel to these teams anymore. This was only a few years ago. This all happened before I even started writing the novel. I remember reading that and I was like, "Wow, that's just so typical." You probably wouldn't expect that sort of thing. I wanted to evoke that same sort of shock in this story because I feel like there's going to be a lot of people reading this, a lot of Canadians in particular, who think that this is a type of story that would never happen, but it happens all over the country, and it happened not too long ago. The title of the book is Small Ceremonies. What does ceremony mean to you and to the characters in the book? Ceremonies can be anything, things that get you through the day. Definitely, hockey is one of those ceremonies. There are so many characters in the book that have little things that they cling onto on a daily basis that sort of help them just survive in a way. We think of ceremonies as these huge things, but I think they can be quite small. - Kyle Edwards We think of ceremonies as these huge things, but I think they can be quite small and hockey is a ceremony because it brings us together in the same way that pow wows and sundances do and other different ceremonial things within Indigenous cultures. There's this chorus of characters and each of them, I hope, has their time to shine in the book and they also have very distinct things — they do different practices and rituals that are just so unique to them.
CBC
04-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
How characters from Alison Bechdel's past shook her out of her memoir-writing kick
Nearly 20 years after her breakout memoir, Fun Home, American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is still unearthing new truths about that period of her life. But this time, she's taking a look at her personal story through fiction, with her new comic novel, Spent. In Spent, she explores the life of a cartoonist, also named Alison Bechdel, who grapples with her complicated relationship with capitalism, community and activism after the success of her memoir and its subsequent TV adaptation. "When I was younger, I did lead a more communal life," Bechdel said on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "I lived in a communal house. I went out and did political activities and was involved in my community. Over time, I really stopped doing that — and it's a bunch of factors. Part of it's getting older, part of it is being in a relationship, but a big part of it was that I was living very much on the edge until I was in my 40s, until Fun Home came out, and slowly saved my financial bacon." "Then I started making a lot of money, which was a very weird experience for someone who had formed their sense of self as an outsider and especially as a poor outsider." Bechdel, who is also known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For and books Are You My Mother? and The Secret to Superhuman Strength, joined Roach to revisit her debut memoir and how it shaped her return to fiction. Mattea Roach: You published your memoir, Fun Home, almost 20 years ago when you were 45. Now you're in your 60s. How has your relationship with the text evolved over the past nearly two decades? Alison Bechdel: It's funny to have this thing, this record of my life that is unchanging, like it's cast in stone. Even though I have found out lots of interesting information about various people or scenes in the book that would change the story if I were to write it now, it's done. This is the record and it's very odd to have to be constantly talking about it. The book was published almost 20 years ago, but I'm still talking about it as if it's a new thing to people. So that's a funny activity to get one's head around. How did it come about that you learned new information about some of the stuff that's depicted in the book? Was it a situation where people you knew read the book and said that's not actually how it was? I'll tell you one example of that, which is that I learned from my mother's best friend, that on the day that my father died, she had decided to not divorce him. Wow. Your dad died when he was hit by a truck and that was two weeks after your mom had asked for a divorce. And then there's some significant suggestion that it might have actually been intentional on his part. In this tumultuous time around between when I came out to my parents and when he died, which was just a couple of months, my mother had asked him for a divorce. And now I find out that she had been going to call that off. It just just casts her whole story into this really different light. It was already quite a tragic story, but now it's even worse, you know? Fun Home was made into this Broadway musical in 2015 and it won five Tonys. It's a very different work despite being adapted from your memoir. How did it feel to hand over a project that was so personal to be adopted for another medium? I didn't really know what I was doing. I knew I had sort of sidestepped an offer to option it for a film by asking for more money than they were willing to pay me. Which was a great relief. But then this offer came up for a musical and I didn't really have a connection to musicals. I've seen musicals, but I'm not like a big musical person. Somehow it seemed like it was different enough that I wouldn't mind if someone made a really bad musical out of my book — and the way that I would mind if it were a really bad film adaptation. I don't know what I was thinking now, but fortunately, that didn't happen. The people who made it did a very good job. It's a really good adaptation, but I always sort of think, "Wow, that was lucky." In my new book Spent, I explore what it would be like to really lose control of a creative project. Why did you want to explore this alternate path that you're grateful, in your real life, to not have gone down? Well, partly because once you become a writer in this world, everyone expects you to then somehow do something for TV or the great triumph is to get your book turned into a TV show and that just always strikes me as funny. Why can't we just make comic books that are comic books? I guess, obviously, because you make more money, but it's also just a cultural phenomenon. You know that if you're a writer, you have to grapple with this. Why did you want to revisit these characters from your weekly comic strips Dykes to Watch Out For who are now in late middle-age but are still living together in a communal housing situation? This book, Spent, was going to be another memoir. That's what I started doing after my comic strip. I retired the comic strip and began writing books about my life. And I thought that's what I was going to do forever because I really liked writing about actual life. Occasionally, someone would ask me, do you ever think you'll do fiction again? And I would just go blank. Fiction? How do you do that? And I couldn't even remember that I had actually done this fictional comic strip. But I realized early on in the work for this book that doing it as a memoir was going to be really boring. I just somehow didn't want to write about my actual life or actually read Marx or all the things I would have to do to intelligently discuss money or capitalism. In the moment that I threw that idea away, this other idea came in. What would really be funny is if I wrote about a cartoonist named Alison Bechdel who was trying to write a book about money and then it just all sort of sprang to life — and in that new vision, there were my old comic strip characters who were going to be my friends. It just was one of those lovely moments when something just comes into your mind fully formed, which hardly ever happens to me.
CBC
23-05-2025
- CBC
Vijay Khurana's novel asks what we can learn from young men who murder
In Vijay Khurana's novel The Passenger Seat, he tells a story about high school friends Teddy and Adam. Not yet men, but no longer boys, they set off on a road trip in search of freedom and self-discovery. But the further they go, the more lost they become, until they head down a road from which there's no coming back. The Passenger Seat draws on aspects from the 2019 real-life manhunt for two men from Vancouver Island who murdered three people in northern B.C. — with no traceable motive. "I don't think that I have specific answers about how young men behave in these ways," said Khurana on Bookends with Mattea Roach. "That's one of the reasons why I know that fiction is my home rather than something else. Because I'm less interested in answering questions than asking them, and I'm more interested in exploring something without necessarily having to come to a black and white conclusion." He joined Roach to delve into what questions he raises in The Passenger Seat and the threads of reality that shape his fiction. Mattea Roach: Your novel partly draws on these real events that happened in 2019 in British Columbia, where there were these two young men that committed this series of violent crimes that sparked a nationwide manhunt across essentially the northern reaches of this country. It was a huge story for us here and made headlines around the world. When did you first hear about it? Vijay Khurana: I think that I actually first heard about it, or at least it probably sort of entered my consciousness a little while after those events had sort of taken place. A few months later. I had the similar reactions to probably what a lot of people had — just sort of a sense of shock, but also a sense of sort of unsurprise as well, because it was sort of the latest in what is a long series of especially young men committing acts of violence. But for me, it also really kind of touched me in a very specific way because I had been writing a lot of short stories about male friendship and the way that young men kind of move through the world and perform their masculinity and things like that. So it really struck a note with me for those reasons as well. What was your engagement with writing about male friendship and masculinity? What was it about that kind of bond that you felt was rich territory for fiction? As a fiction writer, a lot of what I'm interested in is just something that I don't understand, sort of trying to use fiction to explore things that don't quite seem to make sense to me in the world. I would definitely not call myself a political writer or a writer who's interested in engaging in political issues. Of course, male violence is is a political issue. But for me, I was trying to get to the bottom of some aspects of masculinity that I saw around me and even that I saw in myself and that I remembered from being a young man, years earlier. What similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? - Vijay Khurana Especially these ideas of the performance of masculinity, the way men see themselves reflected in other men and the ways in which game playing can come into the way men treat other people. In terms of psychological games and power dynamics. I had this fundamental question, which was, I wonder if there's a way to use fiction to — not answer the question — but just to explore this question of what kinds of people would be capable of doing something like those two teenagers did. But then also a much more troubling and difficult question: what similarities might there be between those sorts of "terrible men" and the rest of us, essentially normal, if flawed men? I want to talk about the two characters specifically, these two teenagers, Adam and Teddy. It's the summer before their final year of high school. They're taking off on this unplanned road trip. They are similar and yet different in so many ways. How did you develop these two guys in parallel? I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I thought about the ways in which sometimes, especially as a younger person, you can be thrown together with someone who isn't at all like you, but there can still often be quite an intensity to your relationship. I started out with the desire to portray a friendship first and foremost, more than two individuals, and I thought a lot about my own friendships at that age. I wanted to, from the very beginning, I really wanted to play around with the idea of the passenger seat versus the driver's seat. So asking myself always, who's in control and who's along for the ride, who's being passive and who's being dominant. I think that Adam is, certainly on the face of it, the more dominant one. He has a clearer sense of his own masculinity, even though it's quite a dark sense because he reads these books that are aimed at influencing young men and he spends time in various corners of the Internet. And then Teddy is much more passive. He is unclear about what he wants from his own manhood or adulthood, and on the face of it at least, he seems to be the one who's more along for the ride. What is the draw for Teddy as this guy who, in many ways, seems like he's more set up for success. What is the appeal of Adam for Teddy? Why do they end up drawn together in this way? Yeah, Teddy is a handsome kid whose parents are well off enough. He's by all indications a fine student, but I think that one thing he gets from Adam is almost a reason or an excuse not to sort of firmly cross the line into manhood or adulthood. Because I think he's quite afraid of that. He's afraid of what his relationship with his girlfriend might mean if he began to take it seriously. It gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him. - Vijay Khurana And he's afraid of where he might be in five or ten years. I think that, for him, being friends with Adam, who quite firmly rejects a lot of what you might call traditional ideas about what a young man might do after high school, it gives him an excuse to reject the kind of manhood that he feels is maybe being offered to him.
