Virtual Summer Book Club: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard in Conversation with Jónína Kirton

A must-experience event. Three of the most revered authors and contemporary thinkers in Canada discuss essential questions of the 21st century.

When the world entered pandemic lockdown in spring 2020, Robyn Maynard, influential author of Policing Black Lives, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, renowned artist, musician, and author of Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, began writing each other letters—a gesture sparked by a desire for kinship and connection in a world shattering under the intersecting crises of pandemic, police killings, and climate catastrophe. These letters soon grew into a powerful exchange about where we go from here, and into one of the most anticipated books of the year, Rehearsals for Living.

In this special event to celebrate the launch of their collaboration, the writers join beloved Red River Métis/Icelandic poet, author, and facilitator, Jónína Kirton. They’ll share their razor-sharp perspectives on histories of slavery and colonization and their ongoing legacies, and explore what a different way forward looks like. More than simply an engaging discussion, this event offers a new possibility for how we order our world — and an invitation to both demand and create it for our shared futures.

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Rehearsals for Living is a captivating and visionary work—part debate, part dialogue, part lively and detailed familial correspondence between two razor-sharp writers. By articulating to each other Black and Indigenous perspectives on our unprecedented here and now, and reiterating the long-disavowed histories of slavery and colonization that have brought us to this moment, Maynard and Simpson create something new: an urgent demand for a different way forward, and a poetic call to dream up other ways of ordering earthly life.

“What a pleasure and honor it is to read two such probing and principled minds in conversation and collaboration. Maynard and Simpson dare to confront the most wrenching challenges of our omnicidal times, while finding joy and love along the way. A beacon of a book.”

—Naomi Klein, author of No Is Not Enough

“In their inspired act of ‘writing together, walking together, witnessing these times together,’ Robyn Maynard and Leanne Simpson illuminate in essential ways the entwined lives of Black and Indigenous peoples. Rehearsals for Living honours legacies of courageous revolt against the ongoing histories of dispossession, incarceration, and violence. It is a book of relation, radical generosity, and care – a book, too, of running children, and the colour of the sky, and of ‘holding within [ourselves] that nascent shimmering of possibility.’ Above all, it is a book that poses and answers these most urgent questions: ‘how are we going to live and how are we going to live together?’”

—David Chariandy, author of Brother

 Prices include all taxes and fees. A copy of Rehearsals for Living ($32 value) is included in your ticket price, and can be picked up at or shipped through Kidsbooks. 

This is a virtual event. 

Presented in partnership with SFU Continuing Studies.