Happy Book Birthday to REHEARSALS FOR LIVING by Robyn Maynard & Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, out today from Knopf Canada!
“A balm for despair, Rehearsals for Living . . . takes stock of our collapsing society and imagines what we might build from the wreckage. . . . A polyphonic work of critical scholarship that radically reframes the concept of survival to map a feminist, abolitionist, and anti-racist path to the future. . . . Maynard and Simpson have crafted a powerful argument that communion is both necessary and generative, and that the possibility of a better world exists as long as we are able to imagine it together.” —Quill and Quire (starred review)
“This book must be read for its future vocabularies, its political intimacies, its careful assemblage of the materials of our activisms, and its generous and fulsome thinking.” —Dionne Brand
“Illuminate[s] in essential ways the entwined lives of Black and Indigenous peoples . . . [Rehearsals for Living] 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.’” —David Chariandy
“Across the pandemic-imposed distance, 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 . . . retelling stories again and anew, of who we have been and might yet be again.” —Natalie Diaz
“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
“Rehearsals for Living is an epistolary that captures that urgent project of what it means to be human and imagine freedom in times of terrible danger. Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tap into Black and Indigenous ways of knowing and world-making that require a fundamental disordering of the forces of destruction and the re-ordering of life and the beautiful struggle to get free.” —Nick Estes
“A masterclass in literary form, ethical orientations, and collective futures.” —Harsha Walia
While chronicling the continuing unfolding calamities of settler colonialism and racial capitalism with care and razor sharp clarity, Simpson and Maynard point readers to portals to different futures through the infinite possibilities of Black-Indigenous resistance. Give yourself the gift of allowing your heart and mind to overflow with the beauty and promise of Rehearsals’ visions.” —Andrea J. Ritchie
“Rehearsals for Living actualizes friendship as correspondence, modeling a mode of togetherness that we can practice, learn from, and revise.” —Katherine McKittrick
“An intellectually fierce dialogue about our colonial present by two of the most renowned scholar-activists working today. In a time of incredible uncertainty, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Robyn Maynard show that the shared and divergent histories of Black and Indigenous communities are foundational to the building of a better world for all.” —Glen Coulthard
“This necessary book is a model—through the shared process of two brilliant thinkers it gifts us clarity to see rehearsals otherwise and elsewhere.” —Ruth Wilson Gilmore, from the Foreword
“[We are] flooded with big books and little books . . . showing us how capitalism, racism, prisons, patriarchy, walls, and war are killing the planet. But this book is different. How Maynard and Simpson came to understand the world we must abolish and the world we need to build is through communing.” —Robin D. G. Kelley, from the Afterwor(l)d
A revolutionary collaboration about the world we’re living in now, between two of our most important contemporary thinkers, writers and activists.
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.
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.
Robyn Maynard is the author of Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (2017), a CBC, Toronto Star, and Globe and Mail national bestseller. Policing Black Lives was designated one of the best 100 books of 2017 by The Hill Times, and is the winner of the 2017 Errol Morris Book Award. It was also a finalist for The Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers; an Atlantic Book Award; the Mavis Gallant Prize for Non-Fiction; and the Concordia University First Book Prize. It received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, as well as glowing reviews in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, NOW Toronto, Maclean’s, and the Ottawa Citizen. It was translated into French as NoirEs sous surveillance: Esclavage, répression et violence d’État au Canada, and won the prestigious Prix des libraires award in 2019.
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson is a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer, musician and member of Alderville First Nation. She is the author of seven books, including the newly released non-fiction A Short History of the Blockade, and the novel Noopiming: A Cure for White Ladies. Leanne has also released four albums including f{l)ight and Noopiming Sessions, and her new work Theory of lce.
Robyn Maynard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson are represented by Chelene Knight and Marilyn Biderman.