Rebecca
And Bec — two very different sisters who come together each week to reframe problems big and small with you, our dear Reframeables.

Natalie
And why do we call you such a term of endearment?

Rebecca
Because we’re all in the process of reframing and being reframed as we reorient life through the stories we tell.

Natalie
This week, we are reframing kid lit with Jael Richardson.

Rebecca
Jael wears many hats as the author of books like the YA hit Gutter Child and the memoir The Stone Thrower, that was so popular it was eventually reformatted as a children’s picture book.

Natalie
Jael is also the executive director of two literary festivals: The FOLD, and The FOLD Kids, which celebrate diverse authors and storytellers. These festivals are changing the literary landscape in Canada for the better.

Rebecca
We also talk about families, competition, faith, and, of course, books.

Natalie
So let’s reframe kid lit with Jael Richardson.

Rebecca
Well, we interviewed Leah McLaren, the journalist who had written that really…

Natalie
Yeah, kind of prickly…

Rebecca
Memoir about her mom. So I feel like sometimes you end up talking to people who have more contentious relationships with their parents. So when there’s a lot of fondness and love, it’s just too boring.

Jael
Yeah. No, and it actually was too boring at the beginning. That was one of the problems with the book, was I actually wrote it while I was in grad school, and I did it as my thesis. And so my whole family came to hear me defend the thesis. And one of my profs said, “I’m glad you’re all here because you need to hear this.” And he said, “You need to take the elevator down another level,” which is like, “You need to go deeper into the stories.” He said, “Because you start off being so loving that there’s really nothing to read if everything’s great at the beginning.” And what makes a really good memoir is like, “What were the problems? What were the questions? What were the things that weren’t quite enough? And how did you get to the point that it was good?” And so that was good to get permission to do that in front of my dad, because it was like, “Ok, I need to tell about how we hardly spoke when I was in middle school and high school. I was almost terrified of you,” and kind of intimidated to invite him to my games and stuff like that, just because he was just this huge…

Natalie
Figure?

Jael
Thing. Yeah.

Natalie
Oh, that’s fascinating.

Rebecca
And it does seem like sometimes… it was interesting. I was out for drinks last night, and we just started talking to the bartender, and she was a soccer player. And I was saying, “Oh, we’re just about to take my daughter to piano.” And she was like, “Oh, I would have loved to have done music.” And she was kind of an elite soccer player, and apparently her dad was a soccer coach as well, and it seemed like what was sort of being revealed but sort of unspoken, was that maybe there was not a lot of expression in that family — like, not a lot of emoting.

Natalie
It was about the doing.

Rebecca
It was about being excellent at soccer. That’s what I picked up in all… There was a lot of sort of under the surface stuff. It’s weird because I was bringing all my baggage to it, thinking, “Oh, I haven’t taught my kids about sports. They’re not very sporty.” But she was coming kind of with her own…

Jael
It’s true. I mean, I realized it as a grown person — like, I almost don’t know how to do anything without competing. And that’s a product of being a sports family. I just make almost everything a competition — even, like, with myself. “Can I do the laundry twice as fast today?” You know, it’s just in everything. And it wasn’t until my staff kind of were like, “You know, not everything has to be a competition. Like, we can just do things for fun.” And I’m like, “But what’s the motivation then?” It was so entrenched that I didn’t realize you could actually operate from a different perspective. And raising my son, he’s 13 and a pretty high-level basketball player, I try and tone that down a little bit.

Rebecca
Right? Even though it’s in you, right?

Jael
Bring out a board game and we lose our minds. Lose our minds — like, Monopoly? It’s over. Nothing is chill at my house.

Natalie
I kind of like that you’re owning it too, though, because I mean, it’s like one thing to sort of say, “Let’s bring different perspectives to the table,” and then there’s also just being who we are.

Rebecca
Like, it’s not a bad thing to be.

Jael
Yeah, going to games night is stressful for me because I don’t know how to enjoy a game that I’m not winning. I genuinely mean that. And I can get there, but I do have to mentally coach myself to be like, “It’s just a game, and just because she’s winning does not make her an awful person, or a greedy person, or whatever. This is a board game.”

Rebecca
“And I’m not a bad person for losing right now.”

Jael
Yes. Yes, it’s wild. People are like, “Oh, let’s have a games night.” I’m like, “Who’s going to be there?” You know, “Can I do this?” Because my family, I can just forgive and move on. But yeah, it’s a lot. It’s a lot.

Natalie
So just to give our listeners a little bit of context, who is your dad? Because this is kind of a big deal, and how I even came to learn who you were was through your father.

Jael
Yeah, so my dad is Chuck Ealey — who most people do not know by name, but if you’re a CFL fan, you’re like, “Oh, I know that name,” or at the very least, “I’ve heard it,” especially if you’re up of a certain age. And it’s because he was the first black quarterback to win the Grey Cup, and he was also MVP that year, and yeah — that’s the main thing for which he’s known in Canada. He also is the winningest quarterback in college football history. So it’s like one of those rare facts if it comes up on a football game and you’re like, “Yes, I know the answer to that one.” He’s won more games than any other college quarterback before or since, and it’s because he went undefeated for all three years as a college quarterback, and then he went undefeated as a high school quarterback. So we were just talking about competing and why my family is very competitive — this probably has something to do with it. I’m sure a psychiatrist would have plenty to work with, just from that description. Because he’s also just a really great dad and all that good stuff, but yeah, that’s how he’s known.

Natalie
That’s a big part of it. And so then you wrote a memoir that was your grad school thesis, but then it also got turned into a kids book — so it’s like two stories.

Jael
Yeah, I wrote it when I did my MFA in creative writing. So I worked on that as my thesis, and it was called The Stone Thrower. And initially that was the only plan — actually, my only plan as a writer was to put out The Stone Thrower. I didn’t know I was going to be a writer when I started, or even when I went into my MFA program. I just knew I wanted to write this book about my dad. And I figured the only way I would actually complete something was if I was getting graded on it, and if I had to, like, have a specific deadline. So I went into this MFA to do the book, to write the book, to finish it with the hopes of becoming a prof, and sort of staying in academia. And then as I was writing Stone Tower, once I was done, I kind of realized, “Oh, I have another idea for a book — like, this isn’t going to stop here.” And that’s really when I started to realize I wanted to be a writer and I was going to be a writer. And then the children’s book came out of that whole thing — sort of realizing I was going to write more, and my editor and a teacher from a school in my neighbourhood sort of said, “You know, this is a great book. I would love to have something to share with my elementary students.” So that’s how I turned The Stone Thrower memoir into The Stone Thrower picture book.

Rebecca
And the illustrations are so beautiful.

Jael
So the illustrations is a hilarious story. So when you’re writing a children’s book and you’re not the illustrator, you don’t have actually a say in who the illustrator is going to be. So I got picked up by Groundwood Books. They were going to publish the book and they were like, “We’d like to pair you with Matt James.” And I didn’t know who Matt James was, but they gave me his books to take home. And I’ve told Matt James this story, so if he’s listening, I think he knows this already. I was kind of like, “Oh, ok.” It wasn’t how I pictured it. I had sort of pictured these very Afrocentric historical books about black figures, and even as I say this, people generally know what I mean — like these pretty realistic paintings. And Matt James has this very abstract way of illustrating.

And so I took his books home and I was reading them to my son, who was about four at the time, and my son was obsessed with the images. He’s like, “Look at the baby’s face,” and, “Look at the way the hand is.” He just loved looking at the pictures. And that’s when I was like, “Oh, Matt James illustrates for kids, and that’s who the book is for.” And what I love about The Stone Thrower is it looks so different from most of the historical texts that you see, and I really love that. I love that aspect of it, that it sort of illustrated the way kids kind of dream and think, rather than the way I think, maybe, or the way I picture history. And that’s one of the great things about doing a picture book, is that you do have these two artists coming together and interpreting the same text or story from two different angles. One as, you know, putting words to it, and the other one putting illustrations to it. So it’s really exciting to see your work illustrated, after you’ve written it, by someone who’s just like, “Here’s how I see your story,” and I love them.

Rebecca
I think he brought kind of a whimsy to it. That is interesting.

Jael
Whimsy’s a great word for his illustrations. There is a whimsical quality to all of them.

Natalie
Well, and interesting, too, that there’s actually, strangely then, a whimsy to a very serious story. But with the rock throwing, when we were picturing our own dad throwing stones at passing trains in the east end of the city…

Rebecca
Yeah, we have this stone throwing in our history, too. Different, but yeah.

Natalie
As a kid, right, growing up in this little Irish block where they had just come over. Their parents were all working. Our grandfather, he was a caretaker for the TDSB for 40 years, you know what I mean? So my dad didn’t grow up with his parents around much, because they were working shift work. So it was just a very different… his childhood was a little bit solitary in some ways. So the stone throwing experience is different, right — I mean, very different from the two very different stories.

Rebecca
Your dad had purpose for his aim.

Natalie
Yeah, our dad was more just being perhaps a little…

Jael
Yeah, I think he was sort of aiming at the end when he was throwing it, but I don’t think he really… people ask him all the time, like, “Were you doing that thinking it would make you, like, a better quarterback or whatever?” He’s like, “No, I was just bored. Like, the train’s passing. I have nothing to do. I started throwing stones, and I just, you know, used the train as a target.”

Rebecca
Yeah, so maybe it’s quite similar.

Natalie
I like it.

Rebecca
So I’m deep into Gutter Child. I think it’s really brilliant, and also so devastating. I had to stop at the chapter where May was about to get her collar put on — and I don’t want to spoil anything, but I was like, “Oh, this is dystopian, but so real.” Can you just talk about what you were trying to do with the book — or what you did with the book?

Jael
I think for me, after researching my dad’s life and after looking into his story and after thinking through the things he faced in the 60s in particular in the States as part of the Civil Rights movement — you know, that was one of the triggers. I remember when I was in university, and they talked about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. being shot in 1968. And I was like, “What? My dad was 18.” And it was the first time I had done the math to figure that all out. And I was just around the same age, realizing how much that would have impacted his life, his way of seeing the world, to have watched all the news on that on TV, and all the protests. And I think Gutter Child was really born out of thinking about what it’s like to grow up in a world that’s designed for your failure. That’s really where the laws are built without you in mind, and to actually punish you for whatever — for being you.

And I wanted to really recreate a setting where that was happening. And the reason I chose dystopia was because I was really interested in the experiences of the black community, but it’s so complicated in real life. You know, it’s complicated by where you live. It’s complicated by where you were born. It’s complicated by socioeconomic status. And I really kind of wanted to keep the things I wanted to think about and just ignore the things I didn’t want to think about. You know, I didn’t want to debate the difference between being from Nigeria or being from Ghana. I didn’t want to debate the difference between being from an African country and being black in Canada. I just wanted to talk about some of what I feel are the universals of the black experience in the world and the diaspora of blackness.

And so a dystopia allowed me to kind of pull those apart. And two of the main things that were right from the beginning and that stayed till the end and that are kind of central focus is the idea of these scars — that from birth, Sossi people are physically scarred. Some of them end up living in the gutter, some of them end up living other places, but there’s this sort of physical scarring that’s happening. And then I also wanted to explore the idea of debt. Each Sossi person is assigned a debt at birth, and the debt can kind of grow exponentially. The reason I wanted those two things was I wanted to talk about what it’s like to be physically visibly different, and also what it’s like to sort of carry a certain amount of weight inside your body.

And I wanted to talk about those two things in relation to characters who were not quote unquote ‘black,’ because I think some of the things about those experiences are true in other colonized communities. You know, I’ve had people read it who are South American and are like, “That reminded me of what my family has been through and this sort of story.” The caste system in India. And so dystopia really allows you to kind of pull in essential pieces and leave out nitty gritty details so you can kind of focus on the question that’s on your mind, which for me is: what happens when you grow up in a world that’s designed for your failure? When do you know about it, and what do you do about it? Those were really the sort of central questions that Elimina, the main character, kind of navigates us through. She’s been pulled out of the world to kind of live differently, and then she’s reinserted into the system. So she has to learn what it is, and then learn how she’s going to make choices about it. And along the way, she meets different kinds of Sossi people who are living different kinds of lives, and that is going to help inform some of the choices she makes.

Natalie
That’s a really beautiful distinction of the difference between what can happen when experiences get conflated, which is problematic, and can happen when we read literature. But at the same time, here you’ve presented it in a way that is much more possibly unifying. And I think that that’s a really great take, especially when so many people are using your text in teaching. And as somebody who’s come out of public education for the last 20 years, it’s a very interesting thing to see really, really nuanced texts come in to the classroom in a way that is very modern, as opposed to always having to look to a past to bring forward stories into the now, if that makes sense.

Jael
Yeah, and that’s the thing. One of the things that I’m most happy with is for me, this story is very much rooted in the black experience. It’s about what I saw, what I experienced — but there was a big question about whether, you know, the book would be about black people specifically. And the characters are all described in a way that, if we were putting labels on them, ‘black’ would be appropriate — but I did not want to use that term in the book. There’s so many things that come with that. If they’re black, is everybody else white? And if it’s a black and white issue, are we speaking about what’s happening now? And it becomes very siloed, I think, when I put those labels on in the writing process.

Potentially decided not to, and one of the benefits of doing that I saw when I did a school visit and seeing the young people talking about Sossi characters and mainlanders was so freeing, was so helpful, but I realized how much easier it was for all of them to talk about Sossi folks and mainlanders and gutter folks and people from the hill because they didn’t have to use terms that they had used for themselves or for their fellow classmates. You know, a black student could talk about mainlanders and not feel like they’re offending all the white students in the class, and a white student could talk about Sossi people. There was such a freedom, and also for students who are from neither of those communities, there was a freedom to connect it to their own lives and their own walks and their own stories. When you only describe the colour of people’s skin as how it actually is (“It was brown,” “Their hair is this way or that”) it actually opens up the number of communities that feel they’re represented in it.

And that was something I didn’t actually think about, but I was so grateful for afterwards, because we got into a pretty heated conversation about the Sossi and the mainland characters. One person was saying one of the mainland characters wasn’t so bad, and another person was like, “She’s terrible, like, come on.” You know, and there was this argument — but it didn’t have to be like, “White people are bad, or black people…” You know, it was very, like, removed and engaging as a result. I’ve joked around, I think I might write dystopia all the time because it just gives you so much freedom to step away from the things that can kind of be hard — in the way that it’s ok for things to be hard, but if that’s not the focus of the conversation, if you’re not trying to grapple with the specifics of black and white race relations (which I wasn’t), putting those terms on, it can sort of pull attention away from what you are trying to talk about, which is about systems that oppress certain communities.

Natalie
You were just on CBC Kids. We saw you on there for… not Gutter Child, but actually something new. In that today we’re reframing kids lit specifically, this is interesting, right? Because you were on there for your very beautiful book (and I’m just making sure that I’m getting my title right) Because You Are. And it was so lovely, because you were talking with a puppet, and it was just such a neat experience to watch it all kind of go down. But as moms ourselves, we’ve experienced what it’s like to have conversations, big conversations, with kids and find different ways into big conversations. And with your son, it was through those drawings that he was able to show you some sort of form of learning — of like: this is what a kid sees. So was there a big takeaway from that experience on the CBC Kids puppet convo?

Rebecca
Or just fun to talk to puppets?

Jael
The thing about me that most authors are like, “Oh, ok,” — I lean on the extrovert side for sure, sometimes heavier than others, and I also really enjoy public speaking (and that’s rare for most authors), but it’s because I studied theatre at university. So for me, going on CBC Kids, going on live TV is not such a big deal, and talking to a puppet, it was super fun. I mean, my dad, when I told him I was studying theatre, was like, “What are you going to do with a theatre degree?” And now every time I do something like that, I’m like, “I’m gonna do this, dad.” I’m gonna do CBC Kids and talk to a puppet and everyone will think I know what I’m doing. Yeah, no, it was really fun to do that. I think puppeteering itself is like an art that people just don’t appreciate, I think, the amount of work and effort and just physical demands — like literally the puppeteers lying on the ground with their arms straight up in the air and then moving their hand and doing multiple takes. So I definitely had the easier job. It was a lot of fun. I could do that all day, every day, to be honest. Yeah, no complaints.

Rebecca
You are super engaging, because when I watched it, I was like, “Oh yeah, she could be an actor, or she’s a writer — but she’s both, really.”

Natalie
You were engaging with that arm with a really big topic. I mean, it was like being beautiful comes from what we say and do — in a world that’s really focused on outward beauty and interpretations of beauty and whatever that means. So even that, what was the experience like talking about that message in that way?

Jael
Yeah, I think the hardest thing is Because You Are is written as a letter to my younger self, and I was recently in a school talking about it. And what’s hard is that it’s a lesson I learned in my forties. You know, I turned 40 almost two years ago, and on my 40th birthday I was like, “I really like myself.” Like, “I really like the way I look, I really like who I am, I really like what I’m doing with my life. I’m really happy with myself.” And I did not think that of myself at any time before that in that fullness. There was always something about me that needed to be fixed. I almost always wanted to be smaller and thinner, and it wasn’t until lately that I realized that this is the body I was given, and it’s doing good work. It’s doing all the good things — and even if it’s not, it’s made for me. And the only reason I look at it and think that it’s not is because of all these things I see on TV, because of all these things I read in magazines, or that I watch or take in — commercials that tell me I need anti-aging cream, or whatever it is they’re selling me. And I just thought, “I will not spend the second half of my life doubting how I look or who I am. I will actively practice loving myself.” What kind of difference would it have made if I had known that at four, at six, at eight, at ten, at 12, at 16? What kind of difference would it make if I repeatedly heard that my body was absolutely ok, no matter what size it was? What kind of thing would that have changed in me? And that’s kind of where the inspiration for the book came about. So one of the challenges is just thinking about how to reframe that for kids — how to make sure a four-year-old and a six-year-old and an eight-year-old understand what that really looks like in their day-to-day.

I was doing a school visit recently and I said, “You know, you might be at the point where you look at yourself in the mirror and you think something should be different about you — the colour of your hair, the texture of your hair, the clothes that you have available to you. And what are the things you need to start doing, even now, is practicing that message in the book, which is: you are just enough exactly as you are. You are just enough exactly as you are, and that the most important thing is actually to put that aside, to say that, set that aside, and to focus on the things you do, the things you say. Because if we spent as much time caring about others and about what we could do for others as we do obsessing about the way we look or about the way we should look or about the way we don’t look, the world would be drastically different. And that’s really like a message we can give a kid at any age.” You know, my son is 13 and gets all caught up in, like, what shirt he’s wearing with his pants and what length his shorts need to be. And I’m just like, “If you spent as much time checking in on your neighbours, checking in on your friends, sending a WhatsApp message or whatever social media platform you want to use to say, ‘Hey, how are you guys?’ you would be a drastically different person in the best possible way.” And just trying to encourage him to remember that outward focus rather than like self, inward, obsessive focus.

Natalie
Jael, you just summed up our whole podcast — like, that’s the whole thing that we… no, but seriously, that’s what we’re trying to do with Reframables, is like when we consider the tagline of ‘socially conscious self help,’ it’s the idea that we’re looking at the world… obviously, you have to start with self-care in that we have to love ourselves to be able to love others, but if the lens is constantly turned outwards, there’s so much more we can learn and see and do, because it’s not so always on the interior, and the interior tends to be a bit more actually these days about the exterior. So there’s something really big.

Rebecca
But does that also come from you’re a faith person?

Jael
Yeah, very much. Very much. I think there’s so much for me about my faith that plays out, but I think it’s also what I’ve learned from being a person of faith, from believing in something bigger than myself. You know, you don’t necessarily have to be a person of faith to recognize this, but you recognize all the things that are telling you to be something else. To be different, to change the way you are, to change how you are perceived so that people like you more. Those messages are constant. They are constant. And one of the things about being a person of faith is that you learn that God made you exactly as you are. And that’s a message that I think has helped, but I have to actively practice saying that, and actively practice repeating what that actually means to myself in the mirror because there’s so much that has already told me what I’m supposed to find pretty, what I’m supposed to find admirable, and they’re not necessarily pretty or admirable things all the time. And so you really have to sift out the messages.

It’s been amazing to me — when I read Because You Are recently at an event, reading it to an outdoor festival event, there’s parents and grandparents. I’m reading this story, and there is a grandmother who is tearing up as I’m reading. And the kids are like, “Oh, this is great, we read a story,” but this grandmother was tearing up. And I think it’s because I know for a lot of women, especially like my mom’s generation, these ideas that you are actually ok, that when your hips spread out or your belly is a little bit rounder, these are ok developments and growths. These are evolutions of beauty. These are just not things they were told often enough. And I think that that really hits a lot of women in particular because there’s so much targeted at us in particular to make us feel like we should look like somebody else or be a different way, and that as we get older, we fade in beauty. And quite the opposite is happening — we enhance in beauty because we’re not just beautiful in who we are physically, although that’s part of it. It’s also that we are just wiser and that makes us inevitably more beautiful. And these are things that I think yeah, in reframing, whether it’s faith or something else, you have to actively reframe what you see when you look in the mirror.

Because guaranteed you’ve seen things that have told you to look some other way, to be some other way. And I hope the book helps not just reframe things for kids — I actually think a lot about moms and dads reading the book to their kids, and reframing how (I think about this a lot) how often we tell someone, a young girl how pretty they look in a dress. Like this is something you hear all the time. You put a dress on, or for me, when I would straighten my hair, “Oh, don’t you look pretty today!” And it was just such an inherent practice. And so then you’re like, “I’ve got to put the dress on. I want to be pretty today as well. I want to be pretty the next day. I’ve got to put the dress on and straighten my hair.” And I hope that dads, moms, grandparents, aunts, uncles, when they read it, remember how to reframe the praise we give kids. I think with my niece (I have one niece, and all the time the book is dedicated to her), I say, “You know, you look so smart today. Like, there’s something about you — I just see how clever you are today.” And I just really try and avoid using the word ‘pretty’ at all. And it’s so hard. It’s so hard. It comes so naturally, and everything else has to come with such intention. But I just don’t want her chasing that kind of accolade, at least from me. I want her to know that I always see her as smart and clever and brilliant and curious. These are the kinds of compliments I try and give her.

Rebecca
Do you think we could just start that now at any point? My daughter is 14, and I’ve thought about how I’ve said that to her. “You’re so beautiful.”

Natalie
As a way to remind her of the wonder that is her, but…

Rebecca
I tried it because I want her to feel that, but then on the day I don’t say it, now what’s happening to her? She’s thinking, “Am I not beautiful today?” That was sort of what you’re saying. Can we just start using different language? Is that what you would say? Just change your language now?

Jael
Yeah. I do think change your language, especially with young kids. I think my son always got, “You’re so tall,” and I think he very much identifies with being tall. And there may come a time where he’s not the tallest, or as tall, and like, it’s slightly different, but it comes from a similar kind of like, “This is my identity.” I think with older kids, there’s the great opportunity to have deeper discussions about, like, “What do you think pretty means? And when someone says you’re beautiful, how does that make you feel? Does it depend on the person, or do you believe it?” And I think there’s a really great opportunity to actually tailor what you say to your kid based on what they give back to you in answer to those responses, and that’s super exciting. Because I think some kids are like, “Oh, that word means nothing to me.”

Rebecca
Yeah, right.

Natalie
I like that.

Rebecca
Elsie would be like, “No, mommy, no, no. Stop talking,” and she’ll kind of get really… so I just have to sort of talk through her.

Natalie
In, like, slight embarrassment.

Rebecca
She’ll put out that she doesn’t want to have big conversations. I have to come at them in pieces.

Natalie
Yeah, slightly from the side.

Rebecca
Uh-huh.

Jael
Sometimes as parents, we get really excited about a topic and we’re like, “Let’s dive, child. Let’s go right in there and get at it.” And I’m like that. I’m like, “Ooh, it’s the sex talk. Let’s go!” You know? And my son’s like, “I don’t know who you are or why we’re talking about this right now.” I think it’s also just gauging where your kid is at. I feel like at some point a girl is thinking about these issues in particular — actually, I shouldn’t say just girls. I think nonbinary, I think boys, I think they’re all thinking about these things at some point. And what you really want is to let them know that you have thoughts about it when they have questions, and that you’re ready when they have questions. Because they will. They will be like, “What do you think about this?” Or you’ll start to see them dealing with it. You’ll start to see them changing their clothes 17 times before they go out the door, and you’ll start to see them caring about things that they didn’t care about before. And it’s like, “You know, what’s on your mind when you’re doing this?” And that will kind of get you into a deep topic without being like, “And now it’s time to talk about…” You know? I think us extroverted moms can be a lot with that sometimes.

Rebecca
I know, I know.

Jael
I’m podcasting, and I want to use it on my daughter.

Rebecca
Yeah, exactly. My husband, just yesterday, he was like, “Yeah, you love conflict.” That’s what he said. “You love it.” I’m like, “Do I?” And I was like, “I don’t know if I love it, but I love thinking we’re going to get somewhere with this conversation.” That’s what I love.

Natalie
Yeah. I see that.

Rebecca
And he interpreted it as me loving going at something, so anyway.

Natalie
That’s interesting.

Rebecca
I have to take that to my therapist. Tell us a bit about The FOLD, and The FOLD Kids. Obviously you know what you’re doing when you’re speaking to kids.

Jael
Yeah. I started The FOLD, which is the Festival of Literary Diversity, in 2016. That’s when we had our first festival. The idea for it came about in 2014. I had just published The Stone Thrower. It was out in the world, nothing had happened. It had sold, like, itty bitty amount of copies. And I was kind of like, “Wah-wah, this is not good.” And I’m writing a book and like, “Why? Nobody’s going to read it.” And I started noticing patterns at literary festivals, which were predominantly white at the time. The audiences were definitely predominantly white — mostly older as well. And when I say older, like 60-plus, which is excluding a large portion of the population. And so I was just really thinking about what these festivals were doing and who they were serving and what I could do about it.

And a friend wrote an article about something that was happening in the States along similar lines — a festival that was predominantly white, and they were sort of saying, “You need to diversify your lineups.” His article was essentially that we need the same thing in Canada. We need more racialized editors and publishers and festival directors. And I’m reading this article and I’m like, “I don’t want to do any of those other things, but festival directing — this sounds interesting.” And at the time, I had worked as an event planner at a university, and it was definitely a skill set I had, in terms of planning events and executing them. It came naturally. It was something I loved doing. And so the natural conclusion was start a literary festival. And I remember meeting with my agent and she was kind of like, “Oh, that’s ambitious.” And I was, like, ambitious — that’s the right word. Because it wasn’t that it was impossible, it was that it was ambitious. It would take a lot of work and ingenuity and all these sorts of things. And I was like, “I got that.” I got ambition and I got the things. So I started working on it.

We started the first festival in 2016 in Brampton. So we were based out of Brampton and focused on diverse authors and storytellers. The first year had maybe 500 people, and it went really well. It was small, but it was great. And it’s grown exponentially since then. We have sponsors — like Audible has been a sponsor for the last few years. I have two full-time staff now. I’m full-time. And then part of our evolution was to say, “Ok, we’ve been doing this festival predominantly for young adults and up. We did a couple kid’s events at those ones.” But it was so hard to do an event where you wanted parents to bring kids, and you also wanted those parents to go to events because they ultimately had to choose, like, “Do I take my kid or do I go by myself?” You couldn’t do both. And so we started doing the kids festival in the fall to really be able to bring a full lineup of kid lit authors to Brampton and eventually virtually, and to allow people to engage in the content with their kids with that particular focus and lens. And kids content is so vast — there’s, like, zero to 16. 18 is technically a child. And the content for that age category is just so dramatic, it’s so different. So there’s a lot that goes into it.

And so for the last three years, we’ve been doing FOLD Kids book fest. Now we do it in November — first or second week of November. And it’s a way of really bringing marginalized authors (mostly Canadian, because I think Canadian authors have a particular challenge, and then Canadian authors from marginalized communities have a challenge on top of that challenge) together to kind of present to classes to provide professional development for teachers. So we have a session this year on teaching climate change from an indigenous perspective. We have a session on approaching anti-racism with kids. And those are for educators to help get them around some of these topics that are being discussed with more insight that they might not get from their traditional PD programming.

Rebecca
So that’s coming up.

Jael
That’s coming up. Yes. It’s November 8th to the 12th. 8th is the first day. And the way we’ve done it now (we do both FOLD and FOLD Kids this way) is we actually do three to four days of virtual events, and then a few days of in-person events. And the focus for our virtual is classrooms and teachers. If you’re in Ontario in particular, the times are designed to sort of fall within your school day. There’s after-school professional development courses and then there’s evening events that are kind of bonus. And the great thing is you can watch those live, but whether you couldn’t watch them live in Ontario or you’re from outside the province where the time zone is different, you can also watch them on-demand until mid-December. So there’s the opportunity to not just watch live, but if you prefer to sort of prepare your class, do a little bit of like a work-up, watch it yourself before you show it, there’s that opportunity as well through the on-demand features.

Rebecca
So that basically is a full-time job for you now?

Jael
Yup, full-time job. It’s a lot because we technically do two festivals a year, which is a fair bit. When we finish FOLD Kids, we turn right into FOLD. When we finish FOLD, we turn right into FOLD Kids. Which can be a bit exhausting, but there are sort of slower times and busier times in both of those events. We’ve figured out a kind of a pattern of getting that done. But yeah, it’s my full time job. I never thought I would make all my money off writing books — that was never a delusion that I had, thank goodness. But I thought I would be a prof. I thought being a prof would be how I would do writing. And I actually found it really difficult to be a prof and a writer because I just got so invested in my students that I would like… I was just in. I was in their lives. I was like, “Tell me about your childhood.” And then I was like, “I’ve gotta make sure you pass this course.” I was just so invested in them as people. And writing then became like this exhaustive task to do on top of it. Where I find with planning the festival, I’m always thinking about books and writing. Even the busiest time of year, I get a chance to hear from authors about what they’re going through and thinking about what challenges they’re facing and how the festival can help. And that really helps my own writing. That’s been the perfect balance for me.

Natalie
I just gave a talk, actually, at the TDSB’s Parent and Caregiver Conference, and it was all about narrative humility. And I wanted to read this little quote to you and see if it kind of resonated for you with what you’re doing with the FOLD, so: “Narrative humility means understanding that stories are not merely receptacles of facts, but that every story holds some element of the unknowable. It reminds us that there are larger sociopolitical power structures that marginalize certain sorts of stories and privilege others.” And then I basically advertise the FOLD in my talk. That’s what I did — because I used the FOLD as a resource to send off to the parents who were listening as just a way to do that in their own practice of just time at home. Like we tell stories — sometimes, you know, we turn to stories when we’re getting everybody ready for bed. But what does it mean to be really thoughtful about what stories we bring into our homes, which ones we find ourselves in? What does it mean as a parent or a caregiver to even share their own story with their child and be vulnerable in that way? Anyways, I was just wondering if that at all… did I marry the two in some way?

Jael
Well, it’s so funny. You nailed it. You nailed it. And it’s funny because when I wrote The Stone Thrower, one of the big motivations for that book was that my dad didn’t tell these stories. That I had heard all these stories from other places, but my dad had never talked about them. And so I definitely think that’s true. And I also think in certain cultures and communities (I’m thinking of most indigenous communities, many African communities), storytelling is everyday. If you go to an African home and a party, there are stories being told in such delightful ways that it is clear it’s been a practice that they’ve carried for generations. And I think the interesting thing about literature, about books and about talking about them, is it gives us a chance to share these stories over and over and over again, and to share them in different spaces and communities.

And oftentimes when we talk about FOLD and FOLD Kids Book Fest, there’s this idea that people need to see themselves in books, and the value of seeing yourselves in books. And that is critical. I honestly did not understand what I was going through and thinking through and evaluating and what it meant to be black until I started reading black authors — some of whom challenged me to think differently, some of whom affirmed what I was already thinking. And so there is that value in a diverse array of books. But oftentimes it is as important (sometimes more important, although I hesitate to say that) to have diverse books in very monolithic communities, in communities where everyone is largely the same or looks the same, because it is the only way that they become introduced to communities that are not represented around them. And there’s a real danger in believing you’re the centre of the universe and that your causes, concerns are the majority causes and concerns, when all your friends, all your neighbours, all your church members looks the same as you. And so I think that books are helpful in both of those ways. And I always challenge families, parents, librarians, teachers — this is our central question at FOLD, from day one until today and forever, is: who’s missing? You know, when you look at your bookshelf, when you look at the authors that you’re reading personally, or the authors that your kids have been reading, or the kinds of stories your kids have been reading, who’s missing, and what are you going to do about that?

I think especially, and I’ll say this is from the Christian community, there’s so many stories we try and keep away from our kids. So many things we were told not to talk about, as though that’s going to make us better humans — I don’t know. But I think it’s much more important to think about the stories that are missing and to actively read those stories and to share those voices as a way of reminding our kids that there are different types of families that operate in different ways and that our job is to care and love folks. And that is what we get from empathy, from reading. And the great thing about reading, too, is it allows you to learn and engage with a community you might not be familiar with from a distance, and allows you to process things about what you know and don’t know about them from a distance — as opposed to meeting them in the grocery store and being like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how this…” You know?

For me, when I don’t know about a particular group or community, I will read a novel or a work of nonfiction by an author from that community, and it always changes me. It always transforms me. And that’s the power of literature that I think you were talking about — this idea of the unknowable becoming knowable, in a way, from books. And also recognizing that even as you learn about a community you might not be familiar with, there’s still something you don’t know about them — probably a lot you don’t know about them. That there’s almost a continual unknowableness about it that allows you to say, “Ok, this is what I know, and I’m also ready for what I don’t know.” As opposed to being like, “I read this book, I now know everything about every, like, Cree community.” There’s a real benefit to recognizing the constant unknowable nature about any given community.

Rebecca
What are you reading right now? Any good book that you want to share with us that’s really kind of living in you, or changing you? That’s a hard one on the spot, I know.

Jael
That’s a hard one on the spot because I always feel like I’m going to pick one of them and be like, “Oh my gosh, but I forgot to mention this one.” I know, it’s the pressure I feel. I feel like all my friends are listening and being like, “What book are you going to say Jael?”

Rebecca
Or, “Pick mine.”

Jael
I think… there’s an author I’m really excited about. Her name is Suzette Mayr, and she’s actually shortlisted for the Giller. I interviewed her about the book The Sleeping Car Porter recently, but I also had already read one of her books, and I’m going kind of backwards in her life to read a book. Her first book was about three women who get in a bucket that goes over Niagara Falls. So I’m really excited to find that book and read that one. Her last name is M-A-Y-R — pronounced ‘Meyer.’ So I’m very excited about that. Probably my most meaningful favourite book is The Break by Katherena Vermette, and everything Katarina Vermette read. So I would also say the other one that’s really changing me is she wrote a book called Strangers, which is like a follow-up to The Break, but you don’t have to read The Break to read Strangers. And it’s shaping my next book, so that’s probably one that’s very much on my mind constantly, is Strangers by Katherena Vermette. She’s a Métis writer.

Rebecca
Have you taught her? Have you read her? Because I feel like I’ve learned about her from you.

Natalie
I’ve taught her. Yeah. That’s exciting. You know when you just feel seen when somebody else is, like, into some of the same… it’s like “Yes!”

Jael
“Yes! That!” Yeah.

Natalie
Oh, that’s so fun. Exactly — that. Ok, we have a fun speed round thing that happens at the end of our episode, every time.

Jael
You know, when I hear ‘speed,’ I hear ‘competition.’

Rebecca
Yes.

Natalie
Yes. And our questions are famously not very speedy, so we’ll see how you roll. Ok, so here we go: what is the first (or what is the last) new skill you learned?

Jael
Oh, I know. Accounting. I have learned to file my taxes and organize my taxes for tax season properly, and it is life-changing. I’m just thrilled. Honestly, I’m 41 years old. My dad did my taxes when I was a kid. My husband did my taxes after that. And about three years ago, I said, “I’m a grown woman. I need to figure this out.” And it has not been an easy go at all. I have made plenty of mistakes. I’m learning to reconcile on a month-to-month basis and file everything along the way. And I’m almost there — I’m like 85% of the way there, and I’m very excited. I’m going to file my taxes on time this year for the very first time in history. No penalties anymore.

Rebecca
Ok, what’s a common myth or something people misunderstand about your profession — which I guess we can say the writing profession, unless you want to do running a literary festival.

Jael
Nobody knows what a festival director does at all, so they have no misconceptions about it. Like, “Is that a job? What?” So I think for a writer, definitely people think either that we, like, sit up in our offices all day and just hole away in these rooms filled with books, or that we like doing that — neither of which is true for me. I actually hate writing. It’s very difficult for me to write for more than two hours straight without some kind of shake up of where I am, or eating something. So I think the misconception is that we really like it and that that’s a thriving place for us — and I know some people, it is. For me it is not. And I would rather be writing a book in a coffee shop or a library than in my own home, because I think it’s also the idea that there’s things happening around me — allow me to feel like I can make more progress on my writing. Whereas when I’m in my office, all I can see is how messy my office is.

Rebecca
You need to be competing with someone.

Jael
I know — and like, people do things and these things would work for me. Like, you go on a Zoom call with a friend and you sort of talk about what you’re going to work on and then you work on it within the call and hop back on at the end. Some people call them ‘writing sprints’ and stuff like that. There’s different ways. But I could do a writing group where that was the primary thing was just that at a certain time, we always go in, we talk a little bit, then we write, then we talk a little bit, and that’s the framework. I can do that.

Rebecca
Right.

Jael
Because if there is a competition, I’m like, “If you’re doing it, I can do it.”

Natalie
Exactly. That’s it. We do it together, so it does — it helps. There’s no question. Ok, what is the most fun thing you’ve done today? And in that it’s only 2pm, we could spread this out and allow you to say something else that’s fun later on.

Rebecca
That you anticipate.

Jael
Oh, today is not exciting because I’ve been traveling so long that I really have to sit at my desk all day and do work. Can I cheat and say yesterday?

Natalie
Go for it.

Jael
So yesterday I was in Winnipeg and I flew home in the afternoon, but my friend took me to McNally Robinson Bookstore, which is the largest independent bookstore in the country. And that was life-changing. It was so nice. It was like a Barnes and Noble and a Chapters-Indigo — like the vibe you get in those spaces where you can sit there and work and read and eat and shop and get books and all of that in one place. But it was an indie bookstore, and the owner came out to meet me and all the shop people, and there were author pictures on the wall, and I was like, “One day my picture will be on this wall.” You know, it was really like a manifesting moment along with this just really meaningful experience.

Rebecca
And that’s in Winnipeg?

Jael
That’s in Winnipeg, yeah. Here, I feel like you’re going to love this: it’s in a plaza next to a Winners. Like, I would never leave.

Rebecca
Yeah, just the back and forth.

Jael
There’s no reason to go anywhere else. Winnipeg, people complain about winters. I’m like, “Just go to the bookstore and the Winners, back and forth and back and forth. Forget the winters. You have nothing to worry about.

Natalie
You’re covered.

Jael
The McNally’s and Winners.

Natalie
Done.

Rebecca
You know what, in my family, everyone would love that. Something for everyone.

Jael
Right — there’s a café, you can go eat, then go shop some more, read some more. It has everything.

Rebecca
Yeah. Why is there ever any complaining from Winnipeggers?

Natalie
Seriously.

Rebecca
You have it all.

Jael
I will tolerate nothing from them from now on.

Rebecca
Ok, almost there. How would your siblings (we didn’t get to if you have siblings or not) or your close friends describe you, in three words?

Jael
Ok, so I have two siblings, an older brother and an older sister. They would describe me as energetic, creative — but they would probably use the word ‘different.’ “She’s different.” And I think they mean is that I’m creative. And they might describe me as dramatic. It used to be dramatic all the time, because I actually studied theatre, so I was like, “Ok, that’s not very creative.” And I feel like the outgoing one also covers that. But something about bookish — like, if we combine the outgoing and the energetic as being kind of the same thing and the creative / different, I think the other one would be, like, bookish writing. Some descriptive word that means those things. Bibliophile.

Natalie
Ok, so then, next question: what do you need to be creative?

Jael
Inspiration. So all of my book ideas, or at least my best ones, I’ve lately tried to write things that were not from inspiration, and they suck. So I think I need to feel like that prompting, that inner prompting. When kids ask, like, where you get your inspiration from, with Gutter Child, for example, I knew. As soon as I finished Stone Thrower, the idea for Gutter Child came about. I started picturing the ex-scars. It was instantaneous. And there was a point in which I thought, “I’m not going to finish Gutter Child. It’s a terrible book. Like, this is a stupid idea.” And I literally put it away and said, “I’m going to write something else,” and nothing else came to me. Like, nothing. I could not write anything else. So I ended up opening up the Gutter Child file and just saying, “Look, I’m going to finish this terrible book because I won’t get anything else until it’s done.” And sure enough, as soon as I finished Gutter Child, the idea for the next book came. And I already am getting closer to the end of the next book, and I feel the book after that coming. So, yeah, it’s always, like, the inexplainable, the God factor, all of that.

Rebecca
Ok, last one. What’s for dinner tonight?

Jael
I do not like to cook. I do not like to go grocery shopping. I genuinely maybe hate them both, doing them. So the thing that has saved me as of late, instead of dumping all my money into Skip the Dishes, is I do HelloFresh. I do book boxes. So, truth be told, there are three options for dinner, and I’m not sure which one, but it will be one of those three. Normally I unpack it and I sort of plan out what I’m going to make on what day. But I wasn’t here on Tuesday when the box came, and I don’t remember what I ordered, but there are three packages in my fridge. I’ll pull out all three, and I will pick one of those options. It’s probably a chicken burger or something.

Natalie
Jael, thank you so much for spending the time with us. This has been so much fun, and I hope that you now get to go take a nap because you’ve had a long haul, but we’ve loved it.

Jael
Well, I will say, too… I should have said being on this podcast is actually, definitely, and I’m not even saying that — if I had to pick from today, the best thing about today, it’s definitely doing this podcast. Yesterday, unequivocally the bookstore. So I cheated on that question because I forgot about how much fun we were having.