[00:00:12.220] – Speaker 2
Well, everyone, welcome to the Shaping Our World podcast. My name is Chris Tompkins, and my goal is to invite you into a conversation that will leave you more confident in understanding and inspiring the young people in your life. Each episode, we talk with leading experts and offer relevant resources to dive deeper into the world of our youth today. Today, we have Jael Richardson on the show. Jael is an award-winning author, speaker, and the founder and executive director of the Festival of Literary Diversity, Canada’s first festival dedicated to celebrating diverse authors and storytellers. She’s the author of several powerful books, including The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lessons, A Father’s Life, which is a memoir inspired by her father, CFL quarterback Chuck Ealey, as well as her debut novel, Gutter Child, which explores themes of injustice, identity, and resistance through a young adult lens. She’s also written three children’s books that dive into topics like self-esteem and identity. Jael is passionate about representation in literature and the power of storytelling to help young people understand who they are, where they come from, and what’s possible. In schools, libraries, and communities across the country, she’s helping shape the way we talk to kids and teens about race, history, and belonging.
[00:01:26.080] – Speaker 2
I’m so excited for you to listen into this conversation because Jael brings both heart and clarity to some big topics and offers a hopeful vision for the next generation of readers and leaders. Before we meet our guest, a quick word about an opportunity at Muskoka Woods. Starting as a staff member here, I found it to be more than just a job. I discovered a pathway to personal and professional growth. We are committed to intentional staff development, providing training, and building a network that can propel your career forward. Imagine working where you’re nurtured to grow with access to amazing facilities and staff care events. If you’re seeking a role that prepares you for what’s next, visit jobs.muskokawoods.com for more details. Now, let’s get into the heart of our show. Jael, it’s great to have you.
[00:02:20.440] – Speaker 1
Thanks for having me.
[00:02:21.680] – Speaker 2
I’m really excited for this. We were talking beforehand, and Jael and I go way back. I’ve known her since she was young and have watched her career and all the things that she’s up to.
[00:02:32.860] – Speaker 1
Chris, are you saying that I’m not young anymore?
[00:02:35.000] – Speaker 2
No. Yeah, that’s the journey. Yes. I’m really looking forward to diving in to some of these topics with her because fascinating young woman that we have on the show. Looking forward to it. Jael, as we jump in, what shaped you when you were growing up? What were the biggest influences in your life?
[00:02:54.140] – Speaker 1
It’s always really fun to think back what is so recent, but what is quite far away now feels like what my life was like as a child and how who I was as a child has shaped where I am now. I was thinking about this, and I think there are three main things that shaped who I am or who I was as a kid. One was definitely my faith. My parents took me to church all the time. I was a part of youth groups all the time. That Christian upbringing was very much a part of a lot of the key decisions I made in those early years. I think sports as well. I have two older siblings, and both of them were very active in sports. I was very active in sports, so I was always going to their events, going to watch them play sports, and then going to my own sporting events. I played soccer and I played basketball, and I did those at a recreational level and then at a rep level. It was a big part of my summers and my school year. Then I think the last thing is just books and art and those things that actually in my family make me unique.
[00:04:08.020] – Speaker 1
I think most of my family, sports was the thing. For me, theatre, books, music, they became big parts of my life and some of the choices that I made about my extracurriculars, I would say. They became big places where I started to figure out who I was.
[00:04:26.420] – Speaker 2
Well, again, I witnessed your life sometimes at a distance, but sometimes up close. Even for our listeners, as you’ve been talking to add, family is also even was growing up a big influence. You mentioned that in each of your three things. I know is a big part of your life today, your family, and even where you live and stuff like that. Tell us a little bit about what’s shaping your world today, more from a personal side. Let us get to know what are your hobbies. Tell us a little bit about your life.
[00:05:00.980] – Speaker 1
Yeah. I am an author, and I also started business. I run a literary festival. Obviously, art, literature, that’s become a big part of my life. Reading books, writing books, all that stuff. My faith still remains a big part of who I am and how I see the world. I really am shaped by a sense of wanting to care for others, wanting to fight for social justice and what’s right. That’s become a big part of my day. Then one of the biggest pieces right now when we talk about family is that I’m a mum to two kids. I have a foster daughter who came our way later in life, and then I have a biological child who is 16, and he’s attending school in Florida. I’m from Brampton, but I spend most of the year in Florida right now because that’s where he goes to school. That’s where he’s playing football. That’s become a really interesting thing. I think any moms or parents or even grandparents who are listening, when your child is at that teenage years in particular, you really have to build your life around them in some ways, or I have chosen to do that.
[00:06:24.180] – Speaker 1
I think it’s because I saw he’s growing up so fast and he’s about to go to college. For these last four years of high school, when we were choosing, it was like, these are the four years I have left to really shape his life, and I want to make sure he’s at the centre of it. In starting a charitable organisation and writing books, there was a lot of times I was really busy and it was great. But I knew from raising two foster kids and also from watching my siblings that the teenage years are actually the hardest in terms of their need for you. You think that they’re going to be the easiest because they can drive or they can do all these things, but there’s this weird reliance that’s very time sensitive. It’s like they need you or they don’t. But when they need you, they need you. I just said, Okay, for these four years, I’m going to pitch my life around you and then come back to my own life at some point, hopefully. But yeah, that’s probably this most significant shaper of my world right now is Eden.
[00:07:29.560] – Speaker 2
The For those listeners who don’t know, because we have listeners from all over the place don’t know where Brampton is, it’s a suburb of Toronto. Toronto, that’s your home, that area, and you now reside in Florida for your son’s school, and you’re back and forth, and you have two places. You’re navigating. Sometimes people worry about driving to another town for soccer practise or band or whatever. You fly down to the south of Florida. Yeah, that is shaping your world for sure. I want to dive into your work, Jael, You’ve written across many genres, from a memoir, The Stone-thrower, to dystopian fiction, Gutter Child, children’s picture books, like with the Stone-thrower and Because You Are. All these books also deal with themes of race, power, inequality. What do you hope young people, especially from those underrepresented communities, take away from your work? Like, holistically, why do you write about these things? What’s the big vision behind the topics that you choose to dive into?
[00:08:30.560] – Speaker 1
Yeah, writing has become my way of asking questions or grappling with questions. I think some people go to writing to tell people how to live or to tell people this is how you should see the world. And I go out writing to figure the world out. In all of the books I’ve written, they all stem from, especially the adult books, they stem from a significant question. The Stone Thore, which was about my dad’s life, was like, Why do I not feel Black enough? Why don’t I feel Canadian enough? What is behind that? Where am I from? These kinds of questions really shaped writing a memoir about my dad’s life. With Gutter Child, which is a dystopia, I had the question after writing the memoir, what happens when you grow up in a world that’s designed for your failure? When do you realise it and what do you do about it? I really wanted to, after studying my dad’s life, question and interrogate why people make the choices they make. I hoped to come to conclusions, usually at the end of the book. The memoir probably does come to some conclusions. The novel, not so much.
[00:09:41.580] – Speaker 1
I had more questions than answers. The picture books are a little bit different. So Stone Thrower Because You Are, and then I also have The Hockey Jersey. They were all commissioned, actually. I was asked to write all of them. The picture books came from more of the question of what books or stories did I feel like were missing when I was growing up? What kinds of stories would I like to add to the body of books that are available to kids? The Stone Thrower, I wrote the memoir, and then people were like, Can you make something so I can tell this story to my kid? But Because You are was a fun one because it was when I turned 40. I looked at myself in the mirror on my 40th birthday, and I was like, I love everything about myself. I love what I’m doing. I love the way I look. I love my body, the way it is. Part of that was like, I’m going to commit to those phrases more than maybe I believed it. But I believe these things, these are true, and these are things that I can hold on to.
[00:10:39.220] – Speaker 1
What would it have looked like if I knew those things when I was younger? Because I would not see those things were true when I was younger. I wrote, Because you are, to remind us that we are made to be who we are. The power of saying, I love myself exactly the way I am, is such a powerful countercultural thing to do, especially as a woman. It’s a thing that you’ll walk out in the world and be like, Look, the world’s going to tell you the exact opposite. As soon as you turn on the TV, as soon as you As soon as you pick up a magazine, you’re going to hear the exact opposite in your head. If you don’t commit to that thought, that belief, that trust in yourself, you’re going to be subject to all kinds of I’m not good enoughs. That’s what writing did for me.
[00:11:30.700] – Speaker 2
I love all of it. I love, especially at the end, where you’re talking just even around identity. I think there’s a lot of adults in us listening who are still grappling with some of that. But then we look at our kids and we’re like, What can we do to help? I want to get into that in a little bit. But to do that, I want to walk through some of your books and stories, and I want to start with the Stone thrower. Before we get into that, we could probably take a whole 40-minute episode to talk your dad’s story. But as Cole’s notes as you can, can you tell our listeners about who Chuck Ealey is and what about his story you found compelling enough to write about?
[00:12:12.240] – Speaker 1
So my dad is Chuck Ealey. He was the first Black quarterback to win the Grey Cup, which is the Super Bowl of the Canadian Football League. And the Canadian Football League, I’ll just say very quickly, is really special. A lot of people are maybe more familiar, especially if they don’t live in Canada, with the NFL. But the way the Canadian Football League works, that I’ll just say as a CFL kid that I learned later in life is, when there’s the Grey Cup, all of the teams show up at the Grey Cup. Obviously, the two teams that are facing each other cheer the loudest or they’re the most excited. But it’s a showcase of all the teams. To win the Great Cup is not only special because your team wins, but it’s a really special moment. My dad was the first Black quarterback to win, and he also went undefeated in high school and college. He was in high school and college in the ’60s and ’70s when America was- In the US, right? In the US, yeah. He was in the States. He went to school. He grew up in Portsmouth, went to school in Toledo for college.
[00:13:18.060] – Speaker 1
But at a time when Martin Luther King was speaking out about the civil rights movement, the civil rights movement in itself was at its peak and doing some of its most transformational legal work in terms of abolishing things like Jim Crow. My dad’s story in itself is fascinating because he’s this undefeated quarterback who accomplishes all these great things, and then the NFL didn’t want him. That was a story in itself. But when I wrote the book, it was also about the backdrop, what was going on at the time, and how incredible it was politically for him to be doing this. On top of that, his personal story. He had a brother who passed away while he was in college. He met my mum while he was in college in a really fascinating way. I wanted to write the story, one, because it was fascinating, and I thought everybody should know about it. Also, two, because I think that my dad’s an only child, my mom’s an only child. There’s this sense of what happens to stories if nobody writes them down, what happens to these people who’ve shaped our culture and if we don’t tell what they’ve done.
[00:14:33.680] – Speaker 1
I think it was just important to us as a family. I’ll say my brother actually started the book and then was like, I think you would do better at this. I actually wrote it, but he recorded a bunch of things before I started. It was just about saying, We need to write this down. We need to share this.
[00:14:50.820] – Speaker 2
I love the title, The Stone Thrower: A Daughter’s Lessons, A Father’s Life. I think what I love about it, it’s a memoir about your dad’s experience, as you mentioned, but also what it meant for shaping your own identity. I would love to just know, what were some of the more powerful lessons you learned from his story as you were a young person trying to figure out your world, and now then going back and learning about his world and seeing what did you pull away from this experience of diving into his story a little more in-depth?
[00:15:24.400] – Speaker 1
Yeah. One of the things that I think was most powerful is I remember being a teenager and just being really annoyed with my dad all the time. He was never there because he was working. When he was there, it’s like he didn’t know things, and I was just so annoyed with him all the time. I remember being very annoyed. In looking into his life and realizing what he had been through, that he hadn’t had a father who was there for him when he was a kid, that his mother had been such an influential person in his life. At the time when I was writing it, I didn’t know. But I can tell you right now, now that I’m raising a teenager, I just have so much more grace and appreciation for who he was, who he is, what he did, and what my mum did as well. I think oftentimes my mom’s story gets slotted into the background because she’s been the homemaker who’s always been there. She’s always been present at things. I think I learned a lot about what it takes to raise kids, how difficult it is. I think that was part of it.
[00:16:27.560] – Speaker 1
I think I also came to understand a little bit about race and politics. My dad, politically, was a bit behind the scenes. He wasn’t the person that was leading the marches or organising or He at one point thought he might have to join the military, but it wasn’t like, I want to go serve my country. He was just like, I got to find a job. I got to get paid. I didn’t know how to wrestle with that. I didn’t know how to understand that. I think realising how much my dad was carrying and the way as adults and as parents, we have to make choices about what we can take on. My dad’s goal was to get his education, to get a good job, and to take care of his family. I think in the midst of this chaotic world time, that was his project, that was his mission, and he excelled at that. I think that that’s something that I learned from looking more closely, understanding the specifics of his own journey.
[00:17:31.760] – Speaker 2
I think we all realise to varying degrees just how much we’re shaped by our genealogy and our family’s story. I actually don’t think we spend probably as much time unpacking and understanding who we are today because of how we were raised and how our parents were raised and their stories as well. How’s that shaped how you’ve parented now?
[00:17:57.840] – Speaker 1
It’s been really… It’s probably Probably the pivotal question I face almost every day. I think because you love your parents, and on one hand, you want to say to parents who’ve done so much for you, Everything you did was perfect, and you were great, and I love you. On the other hand, you have to say, Oh, there are things that I’m going to need to do differently. I think that I wanted to take a more political role in the world. I think that also comes from a position of privilege. My dad did so much to take himself and our family. He grew up in the projects extremely poor. We’re now in a position where all three of his kids, we’re doing well. From a position of privilege, it’s like, Okay, we’re not in that struggle. What struggle am I going to help or improve or take a larger role in. I think for me, politically, it became very important to speak out about issues that matter, to speak up for people who are marginalised and maybe don’t have platforms or spaces to speak out for. I think when we talk about our faith, I just have such a deep faith in God and who God is and how Jesus lived.
[00:19:07.480] – Speaker 1
For me, that models how I want to live my life. But in growing up in Christian culture or church, you can be exposed to, and you’re often exposed to some really hateful rhetoric as well. Having to understand what from my faith do I take, do I practise, do I live out, but also what from my faith do I need to crack, do I need do I need to address? Do I need to confront? One of the things that I’ve learned a lot is part of Christianity can be about being very submissive and accepting things the way they are because that’s the way it’s supposed to be. But Jesus, the disciples, they were subversive. They were challenging what was being done. They were questioning. I want that to be my life, my legacy. I want to question the things that I want to push against the things that are wrong, and I want to teach my son to do the same thing. I think my family does that now as a group, but I think my parents were very early Christians, and I think they were like, These are the rules Follow the rules. This is how you live.
[00:20:16.660] – Speaker 1
This is right. This is wrong. Now I think we’re all, I would say my parents as well as my siblings, we’re all like, Okay, but these are causes that you push for. These are people you fight for. These are things that you don’t just sit back and accept because people say they’re so. You question them, you fight for people who maybe don’t have a space. That’s been something that, I hope, defines my parenting. With my son, I’m very much like, you don’t take anything as law without praying and questioning and pushing, especially when you know it’s wrong. When you hear someone talking about something in a hateful way, I don’t care What group it is. It’s never okay. How do you push against that? How do you question that? What are the right ways? What are the moments where you might have to pause a little bit? That’s been a big part of my parenting.
[00:21:12.860] – Speaker 2
I love how You’ve been able to use storytelling and for the people reading, listening to stories, to really tackle some of these big topics, race, identity, social justice. What have you learned about the importance of storytelling to wrestle some of these things down, not just for ourselves, but also as advocates for it? What would you say to young people about how they could use storytelling or listening to stories to dive deeper into some of these themes themselves?
[00:21:46.260] – Speaker 1
Storytelling is so powerful. It occupies everything that we consume, whether it’s the makeup that you’re going to buy or the team you’re going to support or the musician you’re going to back. There’s storytelling involved in all of it that says, this is a person who’s worthy of support, or this makeup is new and it’s going to transform you. Storytelling is a part of everything that we consume. It’s how people convince you to vote for a particular party. It’s how people convince you of almost anything. It’s through a story. I think understanding the power of storytelling, both as a creator and as a consumer, is so important. Because now that I know how stories are told, I look at political ads in a very particular way. I look at who they’re trying to attract and why they’re trying to attract them and with what tactics. I learn something about their character, their their integrity or their lack thereof. I look at ads the same way. Who are they using to get me to think like, this is what beautiful looks like, and why do I like that or not like that? I think storytelling is really powerful.
[00:22:58.950] – Speaker 1
When you understand that it’s operating in everything you do, including the tweets that you read or the posts that you read. Or TikTok is a perfect example of where storytelling is really just being used very powerfully. You can use it to your advantage, whether that’s to manipulate or to share or to make change, you can also be used in that way. I think that that is the critical piece for young people. The thing that I am trying to teach my son in particular is to understand why he feels the way he does about certain things and why he wants to support this particular athlete versus this particular athlete. I’ll give an example. We talk a lot about Michael Jordan versus LeBron. Always the debate about who’s the goat. It’s so interesting because for him, Michael Jordan is the greatest, and it’s this very isolated, like look what he did with his championships. When we talk about LeBron, my husband’s argument is always about the story that LeBron told over his career, not just playing, but as a man and all these sorts of things. That storytelling is not only how they convince each other that the other person is wrong, but it’s also how we develop empathy, how we create care.
[00:24:15.340] – Speaker 2
I love, too, that in telling even your dad’s story, we talk a lot around here when we talk about issues, that it’s one thing to have an issue in an organisation, have a policy on something. It’s another thing when you’re talking about a person, a real person. A lot of these race, social justice, they can be topics that for young people or for anybody are harder to wade. They become ideological things when you put a face to it. I know your dad. So thinking about race in the ’60s, and that wasn’t that long ago. It’s one thing for me to intellectually that, to hear about it. It’s another thing to know your dad and know what he walked through. It takes a different form and allows us to enter in, I think, in a much different way. So that’s what I love about storytelling, particularly a biography on your dad and what he walked through and then how this relates to our lives. I love that. I think that’s so helpful.
[00:25:21.680] – Speaker 1
It’s huge. I remember the first book I read by a trans writer, and I remember reading the story about this trans woman, and It was fiction, it wasn’t non-fiction. The experiences were so different from my own at the beginning in particular, and I was so struggling with it. Like, oh, my gosh, what is happening and why? I don’t understand. And there was language between the trans characters that I wasn’t familiar with, that I had to break down and understood. I put it down for a little while. I picked it back up. I finished it. When I got to the end, I was in tears because the character’s journey led to a place that was very similar to my own about questioning their faith and their place in the world and their right to be here. It was this overwhelming empathy and this overwhelming understanding that this community that I didn’t understand, that I didn’t know, suddenly felt like people I understood and knew deeply. And that, to me, was one of the most powerful moments with a book I’ve ever had. And it just showed me me what books can do. I think it’s also been a huge motivator for me why I continue to read and write books because I see how they can change and transform who you are, what you believe, how you care for people.
[00:26:45.660] – Speaker 1
And they do it in a really powerful way because you’re alone when you’re reading. You’re consuming the story by yourself. You’re wrestling with your own prejudice. You’re wrestling with your own misunderstandings. And then you finish it and you’re wrestling wrestling with the question of who you are and how this changes you. It’s such a unique art form for that. It’s why I push people to read books. You don’t know something about a culture. You see a conflict going on in the world. Read a book by a person from that space, from that culture, and allow yourself to wrestle with what you like and don’t like as you finish the story.
[00:27:25.980] – Speaker 2
Let’s take a moment to talk about Muskoka Wood CEO Leadership Programme. This isn’t just a summer programme. It’s a stepping stone for your future. Teenagers can earn a grade 11 high school credit or complete community service hours, all while developing leadership skills in a supportive environment. Our team of passionate staff ensures every CEO has a remarkable and educational experience. Interested in joining this July or August? Find out more at mascokawoods. Com. Jael, you’re an advocate for equity in the literary world through your work with the Festival for Literary Diversity that you founded in 2014. Through your support of The Peel district School Board’s recommendation that classrooms reevaluate their reading lists and remove some classics in favour of books that more accurately reflect the cultural diversity of the modern classroom, particularly where we live in the Toronto area, which is really significant significant. For young readers who rarely see them in books, how can we as adults, caregivers, educators, even libraries, people that have the ability to make some of these choices and shifts, how can we actively make decisions that help shift that experience for young people?
[00:28:47.400] – Speaker 1
I think I’m a big believer, as I mentioned, about how powerful books can be, but how also individual they are. I think that one of the things that the school boards have been that are at doing now is giving students a bit more choice and also removing the these are great books and therefore should be read forever and ever and giving more room to books that are either more recent or by a wider range of voices, including Indigenous authors, to get a better understanding of where we actually are in the world. I, for example, am a big advocate for reading more contemporary stories because it helps our ecology. It not only supports publishers and booksellers that are here in Canada, it supports authors who are here, and that makes a huge difference. I think that that just understanding the ecology and wanting to keep Canadian literature alive and vibrant and growing and improving, that’s one way. I think another thing that I ask parents, teachers in particular to do is to ask the question of who’s missing. We do this a lot at the at the Festival of Literary Diversity, or Fold, as we can call it, we ask the question, who’s missing?
[00:30:06.580] – Speaker 1
We encourage people to look at your bookshelf, look at your good reads list, look at your story graph, wherever you track what you read, and ask who’s missing. Ask what kinds of stories and storytellers are you not reading? Are you not reading women? Are you not reading women of colour? Are you not reading queer voices? Are you not reading Muslim voices? And really look at the places, especially, I would say, if you feel you have particular, like prejudice or you don’t understand or a lack of clarity, is to find books by authors from those communities that are going to give you a better understanding of something that maybe isn’t so much a I don’t like or I hate, but more of a I don’t know about that. I think that when adults do that, parents and educators do that, it allows us to encourage young people to do that and to also trust young people to be able to choose the kinds of books that they want to read without fear. Because that’s another thing that was happening in school boards, still is happening in school boards, is the banning of books that are about topics that either, for whatever reason, feel like students or kids shouldn’t have access to.
[00:31:18.660] – Speaker 1
I think it’s really important to just understand that books are a place where people can ask questions, and they should be encouraged to do that.
[00:31:27.940] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I love that. Some something is seem strange or foreign or you don’t understand to read something by an author that represents that thing that you’re like, I don’t really get. I think that’s so helpful. I think for young people, they may experience some of that in a school. But as adults, we can continue to encourage that, too, by the things that we watch and what we talk about and who we refer to. But I also want to talk about the emotional and psychological impact that representation can have as a young Black girl like yourself growing up, seeing people that can model for you what it’s like to grow up to become that. And that can happen in literature, it can happen other places, to be quite candid. In the camping world, It’s pretty white. Our world’s changing where we have a lot… The kids that are coming to camp are more diverse than ever. And we’ve made it a real point to try to recruit a much diverse level of staff because how cool would it be for kids of maybe non-white backgrounds to see people that represent them on staff? Even for someone like me who’s really aware of topics and sensitive to that and can enter into conversations, it’s very different than if Damon was here and having that conversation with the young Black camper.
[00:32:48.850] – Speaker 2
Can you talk about the importance of representation for young people to see people that look like them and have their shared experience in positions of authority or writing books or stars in TV shows, whatever that looks like?
[00:33:03.800] – Speaker 1
It’s huge. I mean, there’s two sides of it, too. The one side says, I need to see myself represented. And the other side is, for example, you use the example of Kamik, for white kids to also see kids and leaders from marginalised communities leading, organising, being in charge, that is also an important lens. There’s these two things that happen when you have leadership and you have people in your life who are from different backgrounds and communities. It literally changes everything you understand about the world. We don’t realise that when that’s not happening, there are a lot of biases a lot of assumptions, a lot of things that are going wrong, both for the kids who are not seeing themselves represented and for the kids who are only seeing themselves represented. As a kid, I was reading a lot of books by white writers, and I loved reading. But I also grew up with very little understanding of what it meant for me, why it was important for me to be Black, to understand Black culture, to understand the journey my family had been through to get here, to understand the uniqueness of being a Canadian whose family is American and whose roots are deeply embedded in a very troubling American history and troubling Canadian history.
[00:34:24.280] – Speaker 1
All of that was really important, and I wasn’t getting any of that from the books I was reading, from the shows I was watching. I actually remember at a time being like, I don’t know if I want to be Black. I don’t know if I want that term used for me. I don’t know how I feel about other Black people, to be honest, because I wasn’t around a lot of the Black people. As I started to read books, I realised it wasn’t Black people who were a problem or my Black community. It was the fact that I had so little access and so little understanding. As I read Black authors like Deon Brand and Lawrence Hill, it literally awakened a part of me that had been sleeping, that had been locked away. It was why I was able to start looking at myself and really believing that I was beautiful, that I was competent, that I was capable, that I was powerful. All these things happened because I started to understand and gain more confidence in who I was and who I deserve to be and who I deserve to see in books. I think one of the examples I always give about the power of this is I met an author very early on who wrote a play.
[00:35:30.600] – Speaker 1
Her name is Janet Sears, and she wrote a play that really transformed my thinking about the world. I could quote parts of it right now because it was just so powerful. She came to my school in university, second or third year university. I stood at the back and waited at the back of the line so that I could talk to her the longest and not feel rushed by other students wanting to talk to her. I fumbled through the most awkward conversation. It was not well thought out. It was not organised. I didn’t make a lot of sense, but I just wanted to be around her. I wanted to hear her speak. I wanted her to talk to me. Fast forward about 10 years later, and I started doing school group visits and high schools. Whenever I went to a high school, it could be predominantly white, it could be mixed, whatever. There was always a group of about three to four girls, always girls of colour, usually Black girls, who were me. They were just standing there. They did not know what to say. They would sometimes ask for a photo. They would ask me to sign their notebook or some scrap piece of paper they found on the floor.
[00:36:34.800] – Speaker 1
But really, there was this same sense of, I want to be near you because I think I want to be you, but I don’t really know how. That is why I keep writing. That is part of it. I also feel like the opposite has also happened. I’ve been in front of groups of students who are predominantly white who’ve been like, Why did you write this book? This is really heavy. I don’t know what to do with it. I’ve been able to say, Great. Keep thinking about it. Those are the things that I think are really powerful about representation. I think I never saw Black writers in my classroom, and that impacted me as a Black person But it also influenced my white peers as well to not see that in a way that they probably don’t notice as much, but is equally damaging, I think.
[00:37:25.260] – Speaker 2
Given all of that, what stories do you think today’s youth need the most right now and why?
[00:37:33.860] – Speaker 1
I think they need a range by a range of people. I think that we have often thought, Oh, my goodness, we don’t have enough Black writers, we don’t have enough queer writers, or we don’t have enough Muslim writers. Let’s tell the story of immigration from a Black perspective, a Muslim perspective, a queer perspective, or let’s story the story of coming out from a queer perspective and these very intentionally telling, if I can say that, stories. But I think what young people need is romance by a Muslim author, thriller by a Muslim author, romance by a queer author, thriller by a queer author. I think we need that range in all of those social or community-based groups because everybody accesses content a little bit differently. Everybody is changed by different types of things. I think the idea that you should always read trauma to learn about a group is what gets us into further problems sometimes. My big advocacy with Fold is just every single area, every fiction, readers, mysteries, romance, literary fiction, poetry, children’s books, non-conviction and fictionalised, should be by as many different kinds of writers as possible, because I think it allows young people to grow up in a world where they I can be anything.
[00:39:02.820] – Speaker 1
That is the thing that I think we want our young people to believe, to feel that they can be anything, that they can change the world. That comes in a variety of forms. One of the things I’ll share is we had an author, Zarkha Nawaz, who’s a Muslim author. She wrote the Little Mosque on the Prairie, was her television show from a while back. It was this really funny show about a mosque that shared a building with a a Protestant church, and all the conflicts that happened in this small Saskatchewan town. She had been part of a study where they had basically shown that episodes of that show did more to transform people’s Islamophobia than things like Friends or 24, these places that reinforce stereotypes or that just make you laugh for laughing sake. That tackling these really hard issues through comedy actually changed people more than documentaries in a way. I think that that was a really interesting thing to learn because I think we often take the approach of like documentaries. We will tell the truth and the truth will change people.
[00:40:13.600] – Speaker 2
Yeah, give them the facts.
[00:40:14.960] – Speaker 1
Give them the facts. But oftentimes that can create even more polarisation and getting people to laugh. I mean, when you laugh with people, it changes things. It was really interesting to think about that and to think about the different types of stories that could really improve our situation.
[00:40:34.300] – Speaker 2
It’s clear listening to you, your belief in how important stories are and writing and reading. I think all of us as adults on some level, have probably been shaped by books and the things that we’ve read. Sometimes it’s hard to get kids into that. What can you encourage parents, educators, communities? How can we better support young people in developing a love for reading and even a sense of agency in what they read to critically think about, Oh, I’d like to… Because you’ve had such good insights. How do we, as parents, help that and inspire this love of reading so that stories can continue to shape young people as they grow up and mature and explore the things that matter most to them in the world.
[00:41:21.000] – Speaker 1
Yeah, I think it’s like most things. I’ll give you an example of fitness. We want all of our kids to be healthy. For some kids, that means they’re going play sports and do that. For some kids, they’re going to dance. For some kids, they’re just going to walk or play outside or just do things that keep their body moving. I think understanding that there’s a range of ways to consume stories and that it doesn’t have to be like, I read 100 novels a year. With my son, I’ll give an example. Eidon was not a particularly good reader. It didn’t come easy to him. He didn’t love it. I would buy stacks of books and they would just sit there. But things he did love to read were the Ripley’s Believe It or Not books. He loved graphic novels. He loved Sports Illustrated. It was about facilitating the process of reading and consuming stories in whatever way he was most likely to take it in. Now, he’s not a huge reader, but when he has reading assignments for school, he knows how to read, he knows how to understand the story that’s being told. He’s really good with audiobooks, and he can use them in combination.
[00:42:27.220] – Speaker 1
I think when we’re trying to raise up readers readers, and when we’re trying to raise up, even perhaps more importantly, critical thinkers, it’s about thinking about reading in a lot of different ways and making sure that we don’t give up on it. We would never say exercise or physical activity is not important and just sit around and do nothing. We would find a way to make it accessible for the child that we have. I think with reading, it’s the same thing. I would also encourage something that I think is really important is kids like to listen to music and not hear about the words, not hear the words sometimes, or they like to watch reality TV where things maybe are happening and we’re not paying attention. I think whenever you get an opportunity to dig a little bit deeper into what is this song really about? Or what are they really talking about when they say, I don’t care if I ever get married, or I don’t care about this, it’s asking those questions, where are those things coming from? Because that’s the storytelling. People telling stories, and we can just take them in or we can question, do they really mean that or do they mean that they don’t want the marriage their parents had?
[00:43:38.820] – Speaker 1
You can get into really important conversations by understanding that stories are being told around us all the time.
[00:43:45.600] – Speaker 2
Yeah, I think that’s really good. I think even to add to that, for parents of young kids, this is like a two for the price of one thing if you read books with your kids because you can the story together, you can find things that you like, and then you’re also spending time together. I know a lot of parents who really get into series with their kids, and the kids can’t wait, and they’re asking, even at older ages, Can you read with me? I think that’s a great way to inspire the love of reading and also do what… We talk about so much in this podcast of just presence with our kids and being around and being involved and be interested, and not just you picking the book, letting them pick books that you read together. We might learn a few things, too, along the way. Then this is just a little personal one, Jael, for me is I love stories, I love movies. Probably years ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago, I made this personal declaration that I would not watch a movie that has a book about it that I wanted to watch until I’ve read the book first.
[00:44:53.190] – Speaker 2
Love that. And so all these go back to Lord of the Rings and to all these other things that I was like, Yeah, the movie’s out, I have to read the book first. I could tell you that has shaped so much of my fun reading. Movies would come out, Monuments Man and Warhorse, and all these movies that I knew were based off of books. I’m like, Oh, I got to read that book first.
[00:45:16.140] – Speaker 1
You are way better than I am.
[00:45:17.900] – Speaker 2
I’d see a movie advertised as a trailer, and I’d go out and buy that book. I’ll tell you, it shaped… I’ve read things that I never would have found on my own. All the Light We Cannot See is one of my favourite books, and Netflix had that series come out. I read the book long before it came out. I actually didn’t know the series had come out because I knew it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. I read it, and then it came out, and I was so excited to tell other people about the series and to watch the series because I knew the story. We know there are very few movies that are better than the books. There is few. Yeah, but the movies do bring it to life. That’s It’s just the thing I’ve learned. How do we find things, little rules, little habits, little things that we can bring in that expand the things that we read and consume so that our landscape of the world is broader and we’re more enriched because of it?
[00:46:15.390] – Speaker 1
I think when you’re saying reading to your kids is a big one, too, because I think it’s all about building the habit of reading as a way of calming down. We did it before you didn’t go to bed. It builds this habit that this is the thing that calms you rather than being on your phone or whatever it is. I think that’s a really good habit to get in. I think one thing I’ll say about that is don’t hesitate to read or allow your children to read lower-level books longer than you might think. There’s nothing wrong with reading a 10-year-old picture book. Sometimes I see parents push the chapter book, like you’re ready for this, and maybe they are, but that process of being able to read with you and beside you and to you or you to them is really special. It’s really sweet, and I think, hold on to it, make it a habit, and do it as long as you can.
[00:47:04.220] – Speaker 2
Well, and if your parents have young kids and you want a place to start, Jael’s got two really good children’s books that you can go. Two. Do you have three?
[00:47:12.780] – Speaker 1
I have three. Three.
[00:47:14.120] – Speaker 2
Three children Stone’s Books, great place to start. Start with the Stone thrower after this conversation. We’re going to wrap up and land the plane. And we always look for an encouraging word for parents and a bit of a charge. But I thought A little different slant for this one. I’d love for you to share a moment you’ve had with a young reader at a school or a festival that reminded you about why what you do is so important, that can be an encouragement to other parents who are working with kids and getting them to engage and read or wanting to expand their view of the world or just be encouraged by where young people are at. Can you tell us a story or something around that?
[00:47:52.740] – Speaker 1
Yeah. Two come to mind right away, and they’re similar, and they both made me cry. One, we were in a school and we were doing a presentation, and we had a number of middle-grade students. There was about 200 middle-grade students in the auditorium. We introduced the authors. When we introduced this one author from Ghana, we said where in Ghana she was from. There was a little boy, a Black boy, who stood up and was like, I’m from there, too. He was just so excited that he could hardly sit for the rest of the presentation. Of course, right after he went up and talked to her, and she was so excited to talk to him. It was this sense that you could tell how much it meant to him to see his community represented in a space that he hadn’t seen before, not in that way. Similarly, we were at an event where there was a young girl with cerebral palsy, and she was at the event with her family. My colleague, who helped start the fold, Amanda Leduc, was there, but she was off somewhere else, and Amanda also has cerebral palsy. So this girl came up to me and she was like, I really love this event.
[00:49:05.300] – Speaker 1
I’m so excited. The mum explained that she had cerebral palsy and that she wants to be an author. I was like, Oh, do you want to meet Amanda? She has a similar background. Amanda came over and they had this similar gait. It was like looking at a little Amanda and Amanda looking at a grown-up version. You know what I mean? Those moments brought tears to my eyes because they weren’t scripted, they weren’t planned. We didn’t know. But I know from my own experience that those kids are likely still talking about those moments today.
[00:49:38.370] – Speaker 2
They’ve shaped their whole life. Yeah. So encouraging, Jael. It’s been a great conversation. There are some pretty heavy topics that you tackle and ones that even as adults, sometimes we feel uncomfortable or not knowing how to really access. This is the world our young people are living in, Race, identity, social justice, political things that even with access to news are much more… Young people are surrounded by this stuff, and they’re pretty significant. I love what you do to help us wade into that through story. For all of our listeners, I’m a bit biassed, but please pick up The Stone Thrower and read the story just for Jael’s perspective, but also to learn about Chuck and a great Canadian hero. It’s been great having this conversation. Thank you for all you do and for what you shared with us today. Really inspiring.
[00:50:37.380] – Speaker 1
Thanks, Chris. Good to be here.
[00:50:46.140] – Speaker 2
Well, that’s it for today’s episode. If you found Jael Richardson’s perspective on storytelling, representation, and inspiring young readers meaningful, and you want to hear more conversations like this, head over to muskokawoods.com. You’ll find a blog post for every episode of Shaping Our World, filled with key takeaways, highlights, and a link to listen again. And while you’re there, check out how Muskoka Woods is creating life-changing experiences that help young people grow in confidence, character, and connexions. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe and share this episode with someone you know would love to hear.
