Each of the essays in this engagingly provocative collection about the morals of writing explores an aspect of what writers do, but you don’t have to be a writer to consider the same issues. You just have to be human.

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Families, on the other hand…

The 1970s were a tumultuous time to be growing up in Montreal, with the rise of the Quebec independence movement, the coming to power of the Parti Québécois, many Montrealers migrating to Toronto, the 1976 Olympics. Disco, free love, and counter-culture revolutions combined with more women entering the workforce and easier access to divorce. Oren Safdie saw his parents break up and get back together again before parting ways for good, but Ken Dryden and the Montreal Canadiens remained steadfast in his life, lifting his and everyone else’s spirits by winning six Stanley Cups in nine years.

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Eating the Urban Wild leads readers on an unconventional food tour through the wild corners and everyday streets of Montreal. Natalie Doonan reimagines what it means to eat locally, inviting us to experience food not as the consumption of a single dish but as part of a vibrant, entangled ecosystem. From waterfowl hunting on the Lachine Rapids and sturgeon fishing in Lake Saint-Louis to Verdun’s cooperative gardens and aquaponics initiative, beekeeping, community cooking classes, independent grocers, and even fast-food restaurants, this work brims with sensory detail. We hear the voices of hunters, fishers, foragers, biologists, and the author’s own family and friends – all of whom reveal unexpected ways of relating to food. From these neighbourhood practices emerges a broader political and ecological resonance.

Against the backdrop of colonial-capitalism, ecological degradation, and accelerating extinction, Eating the Urban Wild highlights communal efforts to cultivate biodiversity and imagines systems beyond extractive and industrial models, positioning food not as commodity but as relation. Poetic and intellectually rigorous, this work frames eating as communication across boundaries: between humans, animals, landscapes, and even the divine.

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Rum was cheap and plentiful. Intimately connected to the West Indian slave plantation complex, rum shipped to early Canada and around the Atlantic World was part of the early modern expansion of intercontinental trade known as the first globalization. Canada in the Age of Rum shows what happened to the vast quantities that came to Canadian shores. Rum was especially important to workers in the early Canadian staples industries. Fishermen and fur-trade voyageurs drank rum in massive quantities, supplied on credit and at grossly inflated prices by their employers, an arrangement that served to claw back wages and ensure the profitability of enterprises that would not have been viable otherwise. Traders deliberately sought to get hunting peoples hooked on rum in order to ensure a steady supply of pelts – alcohol was not so much a commodity for sale as it was a gift used to induce hunters to conform to the ways of the capitalist economy. However, Indigenous people drank rum in their own ways and for their own reasons; and when drinking became a serious social problem, they organized to resist it. The story ends in the 1830s when the combined effects of the temperance movement and the rise of whisky led to a sharp decline in rum consumption.

This brilliant history follows the thread of a single commodity from West Indian plantations to Newfoundland, Quebec, and the west, revealing rum as a critical lubricant of the social life of early Canada and its particular version of early capitalism.

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In a series of reports from the front lines, philosopher-journalist Todd Dufresne provides an urgent analysis of the knowledge and morals that are fuelling this revolution. His manifesto outlines the links between Western values, capitalism, and climate change, rejecting the “pathology of politeness” afflicting mainstream climate activism and warning that the systemic violence of post-capitalist society will be met with violence. Dufresne champions the radical critics of capitalism whose ideas, courage, and exuberant energy have the power to forestall the social murder of humanity in service of short-term profits for a tiny, irredeemable elite.

A fearless – and fearsome – account of the world-historical social and material conditions confronting us, The Future Belongs to Those Who Fight is a call to support utopic realism: a vision that embraces empathy, freedom, community, and universal human rights. It lays out what may be the only path to a world worth living in: left populism

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Each of the essays in this engagingly provocative collection about the morals of writing explores an aspect of what writers do, but you don’t have to be a writer to consider the same issues. You just have to be human.

The post I Made a Promise I Could Not Keep: Speculative Essays appeared first on Read Quebec.

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