Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a renowned Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist, who has been widely recognized as one of the most compelling Indigenous voices of her generation. Leanne is the author of seven books, including her 2021 novel Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies, which was named a best book of the year by the Globe and Mail, and was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for fiction. It’s the first book i’ve ever read with a dialogue between two authors, written in the form of a letter. Not only does it feel like i’m learning something new from the two as they dissect very real racial, spiritual and ecological plights, but I get to learn more about their friendship and the lives/communities they’ve worked hard to uplift. Award winning author, poet, musican, educationalist and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Link opens in a new window has been described as 'one of the most compelling indigenous voices of her generation'. Her work breaks open the intersections between politics, story and song—bringing audiences into a rich and layered world of sound, light, and sovereign creativity. Leanne, you write to Robyn that it's never enough to just critique the system, a name or oppression. We have to create the alternative on the ground in real time. How important is this building of the alternative?

When I read Emergent Strategy earlier this year, I remember sitting with the wisdom of Octavia Butler referenced by Adrienne Marie Brown throughout. I remember repeating to myself: "Everything you touch, you change. Everything you change changes you. The only everlasting truth is change. God is change." And although I knew that envisioning change was essential to radical abolitionist work, it was hard to find comfort in change as a constant. It might be the Virgo (or mental illness) in me, but I didn't really know how to find peace in continuous world-changing, world-ending, and world beginnings.Abolition was at the core of this book. No more policing, prisons, capitalism, land abuse and title. A return of land and a return of community. No more individual gain at the core of interaction. Gift economies and reciprocity. Homelessness and sharing not hoarding. Limiting use and honouring all parts of this world beyond the human. No more change from within. Abolish it and start anew. Listen to the folks who have been resisting and rehearsing other ways of living in perpetuity. left to right: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (Credit: Nadya Kwandibens) and Robyn Maynard (Credit: Stacy Lee Photography) Across the pandemic-imposed distance, Leanne and Robyn begin a new iteration of the practices they’ve enacted in their labors and loves for years—this origin rises in letters, in which they take account of (and consequently bear the physical, emotional, and intellectual burdens of that accounting) the intimate and public violences committed by our governments upon our peoples, lands, waters and non-human relatives. In these letters, Leanne and Robyn constellate our brightest wounds and scars, but refuse to waste their energies of love and imagination on fixing or salvaging the Nation/State. Instead, they reorganize the trajectories and shapes of those constellations—retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again. ” The pace is slow, and I had to take out the book from the library twice to make it through the whole thing. It's a bit like reading a calculus text book. Not enjoyable, lots of struggles, important lessons, you want to put it down but then you'll fail the class. As a musician, rehearsal is what you spend most of your time in. You spend most of your time engaged in that repetition, in that space — a kind of safe space, because there isn't an audience and it isn't a performance. I like this idea of coming together and trying to make or build something with a group of people in real time, and then practicing it as a way of generating the knowledge that we all need to be engaged in these little making practices. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, "Practice makes different," which I really like a lot.

In our group work and play, we practice living in the here and now. The work evolves out of the work that we do together, we co create from the efforts of the group participants. Rehearsals for Living explores our dynamic relationship conundrums in engaging and revealing ways, helping us to release patterns of behavior that are no longer working for us. We practice new ways of responding. We learn to become fluid, connective, and responsive to ourselves, the people in our lives, and society. . The exchange grew into their new book Rehearsals for Living — an urgent demand for a different way forward that offers new insights into where we go from here.I've read a lot of books about activist issues. I think they're important, and teach me to question myself and our collective culture, and fight for change. These books are not easy, fun, or enjoyable to read. They're hard. Really hard. They present uncomfortable truths, force you to challenge ingrained assumptions, and present you with startling stories and statistics. This book falls in that category. Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, activist, musician, artist, author and member of Alderville First Nation. Her work often centres on the experiences of Indigenous Canadians. Her books include Islands of Decolonial Love, This Accident of Being Lost, As We Have Always Doneand Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies. Why Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson wrote Rehearsals for Living

Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson authors of Rehearsals for Living in conversation with Suzanne Morrissette and Alia Fortune Weston

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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." Although the book is a blueprint for change, it also questions the value of hope. Simpson forces us to re-imagine the idea, writing that her Nishnaabeg ancestors have never needed hope to survive. Instead, “the absence of hope can be a beautiful catalyst.” Tenacity, anger and despair, as well as love, respect and joy, can all be motivators. Colonialism is a world-ending event, destroying cultures, languages and ways of being, but her forebears struggled against it, continuing to “world-build anyway.” This is a useful prescription for all of us as we attempt to move toward a world that is freer, and safer, for everyone.

Rehearsals for Living is a finalist for the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for nonfiction. The winner will be announced on Nov. 16, 2022. Robyn Maynard: The title has so many different meanings. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who wrote the foreword for our book, describes abolition as "life in rehearsal." And that's really a way of thinking about the kind of world that we want to live in — about the kind of world that freedom could mean. Maynard’s first letter was written a few months before the pandemic’s onset, and Simpson’s last reply came shortly after the 2020 U.S. election. Both are lyrical, compelling writers, and their early letters are infused with the energy that defined the early months of COVID-19. “People are revolting for wildly imaginative things: for worlds radically transformed, for the end of policing, the end of prisons, the end of ICE and the CBSA, of militarism and colonialism,” wrote Maynard in May 2020. Reading that line now is almost painful; by November 2020, Simpson wrote, “We aren’t banging pots and pans every afternoon in support of health care workers. No one is baking sourdough.” If you find yourself, in 2022, crushed by exhaustion and despair, you might ask yourself: is there any hope left to truly change things? As an invocation for collective resistance, the book succeeds, but it’s also powerful when the authors share the small details of their lives – Simpson’s meditative nighttime runs with her daughter, Maynard effortfully tolerating the spider on her stairs – that ground their ethics in the reality of daily living. At times, their dialogue wades so deeply into critical theory that the epistolary structure is obscured. But when Maynard writes, “I miss you, Leanne,” in the midst of one didactic letter, it is a heart-rending jolt of intimacy. Please join us for the Lansdowne Lecture with Rehearsals for Livingauthors Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson.This Lansdowne lecture is online, free and open to the public. It is co-hosted by the School of Social Work, School of Indigenous Governance, and the Centre for Indigenous Research and Community-Engaged Research (CIRCLE) at the University of Victoria. The beautifully named Rehearsals for Living is a gift conjured by a pair of brilliant scholars during the dark days and months of the pandemic, lit by a powerful resistance movement, fueled and rendered magical by a profound and challenging dialogue that offers ways to collectively think and be and act in a chaotic world.” Working for two decades as an independent scholar using Nishnaabeg intellectual practices, Leanne has lectured and taught extensively at universities across Canada and the United States and has over twenty years experience with Indigenous land based education. She holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba and is member of Alderville First Nation. The epistolary form allows a vulnerability and closeness that wouldn’t have been possible in any other genre. The book, however, still manages to be immensely scholarly, journalistic, historical and theoretical all at once. Both writers use the intimacy of their domestic lives to reflect on the larger political and social phenomena around them. Rehearsals for Living by Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Published by Knopf Canada.