Monday August 11th / Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren at Perfect Books in Ottawa

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Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren, hosted by Rachel Weldon
Perfect Books
Monday August 11th
7:00 PM – 8:30 PM
258A Elgin St, Ottawa

In writing that speaks to the here and now, two protagonists, in very different ways, seek connection as an antidote for hopelessness.

Erin Brubacher and Jacob Wren read from their recent novels: These Songs I Know By Heart and Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim, and converse on the intersections between literature and performance making, and the personal and political. Hosted by Debaser's Rachel Weldon.

-Erin Brubacher, These Songs I Know By Heart (Book*hug Press): Seeking and searching; making art; making new friends; getting divorced; falling in love; becoming a stepparent; surviving miscarriage; enduring the pandemic; valuing lakes, lilies, and mosses; and celebrating the quiet moments between people. A novel about living inside the unknowing: surrendering control and finding joy in the free fall of it all... It’s about love.

“This book left me feeling less alone.”
— Aimee Wall, author of We, Jane

-Jacob Wren, Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (Book*hug Press): In these pages, real-world politics mingle with profoundly inventive fabulations. This is an anti-war novel unlike any other, an intricate study of our complicity in violent global systems and a celebration of the hope that underpins the resistance against them.

“A knowing knot of courage and its opposite, and a defiant work of desperate grace.”
— Eugene Lim, author of Search History

start over again

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I'm in some sort of madness where I can't seem to stop writing books. It's like the last push of madness before I die, which I have decided to call a trilogy. The performances we made are so ephemeral. It feels to me like they never even happened. Some of the books are now out of print and those also now feel like they barely exist. It's actually only the book I'm writing at this moment that feels alive to me. But, also, it's like my writing practice restarted in 2014. Starting with the book I published in 2014, all my books are still in print. I've been a writer for thirty-eight years, but in my current trajectory I've only been a writer for eleven years. It's like I found a way to start over. And I am searching for a way to now start over again. (And, of course, all this writing must also have something to do with wanting to have something to do other than doomscrolling the current state of the world.)



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Francesca Albanese Quote

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“And to the Palestinians and those from all corners of the world standing by them, often at great cost and sacrifice, I say whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter—not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors, but as the newest verse in a centuries-long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, colonialism, and today more than ever neoliberal tyranny.”
- Francesca Albanese


From Francesca Albanese's remarks to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, at the Hague Group Emergency Conference of States in Bogotá, Colombia.



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changing around (and unchanging) the various titles

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Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim (2024)
Desire Without Expectation (2027)
Faithful Unbeliever (2030)

I now seem to spend a significant amount of time changing around (and unchanging) the various titles of the books I’m working on. I mostly do so here. (It also might be worth mentioning that I now think of these three books as some sort of strange trilogy based loosely around questions concerning the desire for utopia.)


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Some favourite books of 2025 (so far)

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[I do a list at the end of every year. And sometimes I also do a shorter list in the middle. Not all of these books were published this year, but this was the year I read and enjoyed them.]

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore – Touching the Art
Raja Shehadeh – We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I
Vivian Blaxell – Worthy of the Event: An Essay
Sarah Schulman – The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity
M.E. O'Brien & Eman Abdelhadi – Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies Novel


Bonus:
Some passages from The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity by Sarah Schulman
Some passages from Touching the Art by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore



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NEVER STOP ACTING FOR PALESTINE

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Next Wednesday, 5pm, join us for a popular gathering at métro Mont Royal, at the square, a live speak out and recording for broadcast on Radio alHara of poets, political activists and musicians speaking out and playing for Palestine! Thank you to Léon Lo for working on this poster design!

At this gathering we will hear poetry from Alejandro Saravia, community activist Summer Alkhdour, educator Sarwat Viquar, poet Jacob Wren, an anarchist marching band project Fanfare d'occasion featuring many awesome folks, plus many more, I hope to see you there!

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I haven't read this book...

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I haven't read this book. The reason I'm posting it is I grew up at the tail end of the Cold War. And perhaps the Cold War thing I heard most often was that the great difference between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was that in the U.S. you were allowed to protest as much as you wanted but in the Soviet Union protesting got you sent to the gulag (as I believe is described in this book.) I know the Cold War ended a while ago, and differences between the two systems (now both "capitalist") are no longer held up as having any meaning. But with the current hype around "Alligator Alcatraz" - which I'm sure is just one of hundreds of such "prisons" the U.S. is about to build - I can't help but feel this is the final endpoint of the Cold War, the real race to the bottom, where instead of people in the former Soviet Union now having the right to protest, people in the U.S. who effectively protest will be sent to gulags in great number. The existence of the Soviet Union in some aspects kept domestic U.S. policy on its best behaviour. Now, with any threat of communism in the past, the U.S. will finally do at home what their foreign policy has imposed on so many other countries over the last hundred years.

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"Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

fourteen years ago

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I've been thinking a lot about this bad poem I wrote fourteen years ago: Obsessing over the ramifications of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012. (A moment in history.) The first line was: “In the bright light of day, the United States becomes a lawful fascist state.” You can find it here. 


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So I don't forget this day...

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"With this vote, Congress makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history, with more money per year at its disposal over the next four years than the budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, US Marshals, and Bureau of Prisons combined."


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“Because it is lucrative for many.”

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“Companies are no longer merely implicated in occupation – they may be embedded in an economy of genocide,” it said, in a reference to Israel’s ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip. In an expert opinion last year, Francesca Albanese said there were “reasonable grounds” to believe Israel was committing genocide in the besieged Palestinian enclave.

The UN report stated that its findings illustrate “why Israel’s genocide continues”.

“Because it is lucrative for many,” it said.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/1/un-report-lists-companies-complicit-in-israels-genocide-who-are-they

 

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