Writing With a Broken Tusk
Writing With a Broken Tusk began in 2006 as a blog about overlapping geographies, personal and real-world, and writing books for children. Since March 2024, Jen Breach (writer, VCFA graduate, and former student) has helped me curate and manage guest posts and Process Talk pieces on this blog.
The blog name refers to the mythical pact between the poet Vyaasa and the Hindu elephant headed god Ganesha who was his scribe during the composition of the epic narrative, the Mahabharata. It also refers to my second published book, edited by the generous and brilliant Diantha Thorpe of Linnet Books/The Shoe String Press, published in 1996, acquired and republished by August House, now part of Reading Is Fundamental, and still miraculously in print.
Posts on this site reflect personal opinion and commentary protected under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the First Amendment of the US Constitution.
Hell, No, Don’t Go: Canadian Stories (and American Avoidance) of Vietnam War Resistance
As we near the 51st anniversary of the fall of Saigon, marking the end of the Vietnam War (known in Vietnam as the American War) we find ourselves looking into the abyss of the war with Iran. This one’s been declared by an American president for reasons at best unclear, at worst whimsical and thoughtless. It makes more sense than ever to look back upon that 20th century war with two names.
Last year, I attended a talk by Joline Martin about her nonfiction book, War Resisters: Standing Against the Vietnam War. The book offers a contemporary perspective on the struggles and triumphs of the American Vietnam war resisters who crossed the border into Canada and settled on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They are an invisible minority and Martin’s book sheds light on how it felt for them to leave friends and families. She recounts the compassion they encountered, the hurdles they overcame, the heartache that resulted from their life-changing decisions, and what they contributed over the years to their new home.
Alone Together: The Magic of Shared Reading—Part 2
The Ink Book Club calls itself Democracy in Action. From their web site:
Why a democracy book club? Thomas Jefferson may never actually have written that “An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people,” but the NEA’s 2004 Reading at Risk report did come out and say that “a well-read citizenry is essential to a vibrant democracy.”
We endorse that position wholeheartedly, and we’re taking that as our starting point. But while building democracy is a big part of the reason we read newsletters like this one, it’s only part of the reason we read overall. Books are paths to understanding ourselves and others, and to understanding the world, and they can also be a balm in troubled times.
Eclectic as my reading fare tends to be, I probably would not have picked up, of my own accord, the book they selected for discussion. It’s Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, an argument for a politics of abundance as opposed to one of scarcity. But since Anand Giridharadas was suggesting it, I figured I’d give it a try. I’d really enjoyed his India Calling, part family memoir, part travelogue, and I like the posts on The Ink! Substack, so I picked up a copy and got to work.
Caveat Auctor
When John Zubrzycki’s history of Indian magic was published in 2018, Michael Dirda of The Washington Post wrote a grumpy review with a scattering of admiration. Dirda’s criticism cited typos, misspellings, garbled sentences, redundancies—in other words, slovenly editing
Here’s a grudgingly admiring snippet, the annoyance aimed at the publisher, Oxford University Press:
Oxford’s delinquency is particularly annoying because Zubrzycki, an expert on South Asian history, clearly worked hard to produce what is, despite its textual irritations, a valuable and entertaining book.
Histories No One Taught Me: the Story of Yasuke, African Samurai
African Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan by Thomas Lockley and Geoffrey Girard is a deep dive into the story of a little-known historical figure: an enslaved man from East Africa transported by the Portuguese to Japan, left behind there with a Jesuit mission. He came to be known as Yasuke, and fought alongside feudal lord Odo Nobunaga to become Japan’s first foreign-born samurai.