I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.

I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.

It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\

What’s on your bedside table this summer?

I like Bowinn Ma a lot. She is the British Columbia Member of the Legislative Assembly representing North Vancouver-Lonsdale. She’s a good person, attuned to local urban needs, and has all the right approaches to policy making. in her second term, she is now the Minister of Infrastructure, a perfect job for an engineer with an abiding interest in how people move around well. She has recently been the champion of some legislation that I vehemently disagree with, but that’s politics. On June 27, her constituency office was bombed at 4:15 in the morning. It was a small device that went off. It happened a week after Minnesota state speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were assassinated, and another left wing Minnesota state senator was also shot. I have not heard any ongoing conversation in my circles about the fact that one of our MLAs had her office bombed during a time of political violence in North America. This strikes me as NOT OKAY.

Barak Obama spent an hour talking to Heather Cox Richardson, during which he dropped this line that “the system has been captured by this with a weak attachment to democracy.” Here’s the clip. Here’s the full interview. I appreciation Richardson’s commitment to the grass roots, but it’s not just the case that bottom up is the only way we make change. Bottom up vs top down is not a moral position. Bombing an MLA’s office and assassinating democratically elected representatives is also “bottom-up” change making. Democracy moves very slowly, which is its feature. But the public square has developed incredible potential to reinvigorate that, except that the tools of democratic engagement and grass roots conversation have alos been captured by “those with a weak attachment to democracy.” I don’t have answers, and Obama’s ideas sound old now, but in essence, I don’t know what other choice we have. We are quickly losing the ability to deliberate together, and that is the essence of democracy.

The guy who inspires me the most in this space of democratic renewal these days is Peter Levine, whose work I often share. Here he is in conversation with Nathaniel G. Perlman on The Great Battlefield podcast. He recently shared work on trust in institutions from CIRCLE which studies youth engagement in civic life. There are some good lessons in here for people working to keep robust democratic engagement alive, and especially making the generational hand off. I’m of the mind that one way to generate trust from citizens in democratic institutions is to bootstrap it by institutional leaders working from a basic stance of trust in citizens. The CIRCLE study is important work. If you work in a democratic institution, including education, media, government, and other organizations essential to a functioning pluralistic society, it’s a must read.

Community Foundations are a powerful group of civic institutions in this country. I have worked with many, including my own local one here on Bowen Island, and the Vancouver Foundation, the largest in Canada. Their work is important, influential and essential, especially as we enter a new period of austerity. A story this past week surfaced on how community foundations in Canada are working to support local journalism so that news on local issues can be properly covered. As a person who lives in a community with a great local newspaper, this is fantastic to see.