The Human Cost of Big Industry: Kazim Ali & Kerri Arsenault 

Kerri Arsenault, Kazim Ali and Catherine Bush

The Human Cost of Big Industry: Kazim Ali & Kerri Arsenault 

Kerri Arsenault, Kazim Ali and Catherine Bush

6:30pm

Sunday, October 24, 2021

“Places do not belong to us. We belong to them.” Join memoir authors Kerri Arsenault and Kazim Ali as they explore questions of land and power, the environmental impact of 20th century industrial practices, and remembering lost connections to the places we belong. Arsenault’s investigative memoir Mill Town is set in the rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of Arsenault’s family. In Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and Memory of Water, Ali searches for a small Manitoba town where he spent years as a child, only to find the local Pimicikamak community facing debilitating environmental destruction.

Interviewer: Catherine Bush

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Reading

“Places do not belong to us. We belong to them.” Join memoir authors Kerri Arsenault and Kazim Ali as they explore questions of land and power, the environmental impact of 20th century industrial practices, and remembering lost connections to the places we belong. Arsenault’s investigative memoir Mill Town is set in the rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of Arsenault’s family. In Kazim Ali’s Northern Light: Power, Land, and Memory of Water, Ali searches for a small Manitoba town where he spent years as a child, only to find the local Pimicikamak community facing debilitating environmental destruction.

Interviewer: Catherine Bush

English captioning is available for this video. Please click the ‘CC’ button in the video toolbar to turn it on.

Conversation
Reading

Featured Authors

Kerri Arsenault
Kerri Arsenault is the Book Review Editor at Orion magazine and Contributing Editor at Lithub. Arsenault received her MFA in Creative Writing from The New School and studied in Malmo University's Communication for Development master’s program. Her writing has appeared in Freeman's, Lithub, Oprah.com, and The Minneapolis Star Tribune, among other publications. She lives in New England. Mill Town won the 2021 Maine Literary Award for non-fiction and is her first book.

Read more about Kerri Arsenault

Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali is a poet, editor and prose writer, who was born in the United Kingdom to Muslim parents of Indian, Iranian and Egyptian descent, and raised in Canada and the United States. He is the author of seven poetry collections, two novels, and three works of non-fiction. He teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

Read more about Kazim Ali

Catherine Bush
Catherine Bush is the author of five novels, including Blaze Island (2020), a Globe & Mail Best Book and Hamilton Reads 2021 pick, and The Rules of Engagement (2000), a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book. Her books have been shortlisted for the Trillium and City of Toronto Book Awards. Her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, Brick, Emergence, Noema, and Best Canadian Essays. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of Guelph and lives in Toronto. She can be found online at www.catherinebush.com.

Read more about Catherine Bush

6:30pm

Sunday, October 24

What to read

Mill Town by , Northern Light: Power, Land and Memory of Water by ,
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