Note: Transcripts may contain errors. If you wish to re-use all, or part of, a transcript, please contact CBC for permission. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print. Copyright © CBC 2020

The Current Transcript for October 12, 2020

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: theme]

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: I think I found myself in the church in some sense. I was incredibly faithful, I was incredibly pious and yet the politics at my church I think started to wear on me and I started to pull away.

MATT GALLOWAY: The Ghanaian-American novelist, Yaa Gyasi, hit paydirt with her first book, Homegoing. Her new novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is equally powerful. In 30 minutes, our conversation about faith, science, addiction and fiction. And then it is a Thanksgiving weekend like no other. No better time then for a familiar story from Stuart McLean and The Vinyl Cafe. At a time when people would normally be gathering at home though, we begin with a homelessness crisis across this country, one exacerbated by COVID. Winter is coming and there's work to be done. Good morning and Happy Thanksgiving. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

[Music: theme]

Pandemic is creating a new type of homelessness, says outreach worker

Guest: Raquel Winslow, Andrew Bond

MG: For many Canadians, this has been a Thanksgiving weekend like no other and that is especially true if you live in a region where COVID is still spreading. But for Canadians who live in tents or in shelters or who are otherwise homeless, COVID has made a difficult situation even worse. Raquel Winslow knows all too well what it's like to live on the streets. She joins me now from Coquitlam, British Columbia. Raquel, good morning.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Good morning.

MG: How are you doing?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I'm better. Better than I've been for a while.

MG: That's great to hear. Take me back to this summer, in June of this summer. Where were you living?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I was in Port Coquitlam, not too far from where I am, and I was probably out of the main town. I was in the main township and then I was a little bit outside and I was homeless.

MG: Where exactly were you living? When you say you were homeless, where were you?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: By like a mall area where there's like a Home Depot and a Wal-Mart and every kind of like big shop you could think of.

MG: If you had to describe what that area was like, I mean, where that street was, where the parking lot was. How would you describe it? Paint me a picture.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: It was a highway leading up to it and then a turn off and there's like a Boston Pizza. It was quite a busy road when this, the COVID hit, it was pretty strange because everything kind of went like it was like 30 years earlier, it seemed. Like the cars were really gone and the buses were empty and but up there was a big, big town centre. This was always a lot of people and it was interesting, but it was a bit scary and crazy, I'd say.

MG: How did you end up with nowhere to live?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Well, this started in 2014. I met somebody and got into a relationship and the person turned out to be just a tad crazy. And quickly, I, you know, was reacting to his crazy-making behaviour. And I ended up losing my kids and having, of course, your baby bonus goes, your home goes and your ,you don't have anywhere. But I found a place to live in like a harm reduction, they call it, because it was low rents. And they they basically they were keeping people off the streets and they were able to operate. The cost for them went up over the past three years, so that got harder and harder to keep. But our property got sold we lived in and to build apartments because Port Coquitlam is becoming a very big centre and a lot of people are moving in and they're building and building building and all the small houses were being torn down. So our house was torn down and that's finding a place, the rents had gone up that previous two years and the rents basically, you know, one whole rent would be all I had for a month to live on. So it was kind of hard thinking of how I was ever going to get out of that situation.

MG: Could you have ever imagined before this happened that you would have ended up homeless?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: No, no. I don't think anyone who knew me would think think that. I mean my life was around my home, my kids, grocery shopping. That was my big day out going grocery shopping. And I always brought one of my children with me. So I have identical triplet boys and a younger daughter, ten months younger and older daughter. But one, you know, one would always come with me and have a day with me and to be homeless and to not know where I'm going to sleep, I was terrified.

MG: Do you remember the first night that you were out?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I had a close friend who was with me, which is good. And I was in his friend's den the first little bit, like the first week or two. So it kind of eased that transition a little bit. But it quickly became like very overcrowded and cold and when that person left the city, it was I don't know, it was just. You're always worried about like, because the, you know people call the police because you're sleeping and you want to go somewhere where you feel fairly safe in a parking lot or in a place that's not so open. And they, of course, would not want people in front of their shops or their stores. And it was, you know, you start to feel like you're like less than a person. And, you know, I know, you know,they're just doing their jobs to try keep their business going. But it really plays on you and you get lost in it and you stop focusing on what you need in your life and just trying to get through that day. It's really horrible.

MG: I was gonna say what does it feel like to feel the way that you described that, less than a person?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: That's been, I only recently when I came in here, I started to try not to say like so I go in around saying I'm not even a person anymore because it feels like the way that another whole topic should be the ministry and Child Services. But the way they operate is so opposite of what you would think it should be to help children and families be healthy. You don't, when your children are taking and for me, that is who I am. It's part of me. I feel like I can't walk down the street with my children, I'm not free. If I can't even have a home or afford to pay rent where I was born and where I lived my whole life, you start to feel like you're a burden. And it's like, you know, every, I have a mother, I have children and you wonder if people know what you carry with you when you're walking around and you never quite feel like you belong. It's very, it's horrible.

MG: You met a police officer who helped you while you were out on the streets. Tell me a little bit about that.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Oh, there's several who are actually really good. But one day I was hanging round the supermarket in Port Coquitlam, me and my friend, and they were there for some other reason. And they kind of were standing around in the alley and they were talking to us and he said, oh, do you remember who I am? I said, I didn't remember his last name, but I said Glen. And he said, yes. And he said, do you know about the shelter that just opened in Coquitlam. I said, no, I don't know about a shelter. He goes it's for COVID and right away, I'm just like my mind, just wanted to, like, just beelined, find the mental health building, which is where you go to apply for the, it's called the Phoenix Project. And I was just like ecstatic because I was like all the days I'm thinking how are you gonna get out of this. I broke down in the parking lot I was in and had people who live in the area come up to me and ask me if I'm okay and can they help and give me clothes or give me money or food, and they save your life when they do something like that. But then to know that I may have a bed and a room of my own after six years, I mean, you really value that when you don't have it. You just you can't imagine waking up and you know, I made an umbrella with a tarp and was living like it was my little igloo. And it's amazing when he said that. I was like this might be my answer because you pray and you send your thoughts to your kids and you're just like something's got to give, right? And that was my give moment.

MG: Where are you living now?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I'm in Coquitlam, in, it's called ERC. It's a shelter put up for us, people like myself because of the numbers were really rising in the tricities area. And I have my own room. It's a hotel that they took the second floor to run this program, and it's run by an already existing society that works out of Surrey. At first I was a little bit like I didn't think I was going to get help and it was kind of, you know, this is not going to be anything. And then you realize everybody's learning and they're all new here too, the people running it. And it was like you connect with a few people and they start to have your voice for you, if you can't, if you you know, if you're having days where it's bad and they talk to the higher up staff. And it's just started to work and people are starting to, you know, trust that maybe there are people here who want to do something more than just give you somewhere to sleep at night. And it is. They gave me their word yesterday. Sandra, we're not gonna let that happen. You go back on the street, we're going to help you. We're going to help you do this and get where you need to go so you can have your life back and I was like, I think I feel safe for the first time in a while.

MG: That's amazing. I mean abd part of this, it's wild because COVID has had all of these awful consequences, but one of the things that's happened in some ways is that it sounds like the response to COVID actually helped you in the situation that you were in.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Yeah, it did. It's a shame, it took something like COVID for people to see that people need a home and that we're all the same people. We all have a mother. We all were born somewhere and we were babies at one time. But for me, it's like it was my chance to be noticed because there's not a lot of services in our country right now. There really has been a just a stripping of the basics and which is a shame. And this is giving a little bit of that back because of that happening. Right?

MG: As you mentioned, I mean, the numbers of people who are out on the streets are rising, not just in British Columbia, but right across this country. Knowing what you know, what is it that could be done to help other folk who find themselves in this situation that you were in?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I've always found being somebody who had, you know, low poverty, low income, and I had was blessed with triplets 16 years ago and the resources and the help was not there the way it should have. I think having outreach workers that don't rely on so much of this policy thing. We have to learn to see people as humans and stopping held because of a blanket treatment. Blanket treatment can kill families because people don't notice the individual. I mean a whole bunch of individuals makes Canada, Canada. We all together make this wonderful place. If we stop seeing the individuals we can we can have a lot of them lost because I didn't fit into a lot of places with me and my four kids and my oldest daughter when she was home. We were different and we needed a lot of different rules or different treatment because I was not your typical mom with one or two kids. It's about services. It's about getting Canada back to being the place that says we're all here in this, whether you have money or whether you're not, the bigger ones will take care of the smaller ones, you know? Be like a family, just a bigger family. That's I think we're losing that in our country big time.

MG: If I was to talk to you a year or two down the road, where would you want to be?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: I want to be wherever my kids are and they every day I just said to them yesterday cause we hadn't been talking a bit cause I had no phone and they were getting back to school. And I said, you know, I've never been away. You've been with me every day, don't you realize you saved my life every day. Because knowing they're there, I have to go back. I have to get back. It doesn't matter how many times I try to go past or through the ministry and how it works and all the different and the thing is, the housing. Getting a home to live in is where what I need now. And that was I was so afraid I'll never find it. And with people like yourself and Sandra and this project, I think I'm going to have it now. I think it will come when we work together. I want to be where they are. I want to just be living and life and making sure that people know when you walk down the street and you see somebody, whether they're drinking or they're a bum or if you think they're a bum or they're begging, whatever they're doing, they're somebody's child. Somebody gave birth to that person and you should treat them as that, you know. Don't ever look at them as anything else because we're all just people. And we gotta start noticing that because it's just it's too big a consequence, if we don't. You know, we get places where it takes a virus like this for us to start treating each other like human beings. That shouldn't happen in a place like Canada. It just shouldn't happen.

MG: Raquel, I wish you the best of luck, and I hope you do OK. It's great to talk to you. Take care of yourself.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Can I say hello to Jacob, Matthew, Megan and Zoe. And my mom.

MG: Those are your kids?

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Yeah, those are my kids.

MG: That's fantastic.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Yeah. Thank you so much for doing this.

MG: Raquel, thanks. Take care of yourself.

RAQUEL WINSLOW: Yeah. Thank you. Bye.

MG: Bye-bye. Raquel Winslow is somebody who was homeless. Now she has a place thanks to the efforts of the Phoenix Society. And this morning, she was in Coquitlam, British Columbia. As Raquel mentioned, there are people who are living rough right now in every part of Canada. Eric Jonsson is a street outreach worker in Halifax. He's seen a lot more people on the street since COVID began. We met up with him as he was handing out sleeping supplies, including a sleeping bag and a tarp.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: Almost every week it seems like I'm meeting somebody new I'd never seen before and who has probably never been homeless before. But we're seeing not only more people, but a whole new, I don't know, type of homeless person where it's not people who've been homeless for a long. There's a lot of people who are newly homeless and the main driving factor is there's just no place for them to live. You know, a lot of people historically have faced a lot of different barriers to being housed. So that's often, you know, mental health, addiction, physical health. But the thing that I've noticed is we still have that, we still have way too many of people who face things like that, but it just seems like there's also just people who are primarily homeless purely due to economic factors and just the fact that they cannot afford rent. Everywhere you look oro everywhere I look, at least I see a place where last year or six months ago, there wasn't somebody sleeping, but now there's people in every park. There's people on so many different benches, on just so many random little nooks and crannies all over the city that once you start to look for it, you see homelessness everywhere, which I think, you know, I've been doing this for about 10 years or so, and in previous years I've never, you really had to look. But now you don't have to look very hard to find people who are homeless in Halifax right now.

MG: Eric Jonsson is a street outreach worker in Halifax, speaking with our producer, Mary-Catherine McIntosh. Dr. Andrew Bond has been listening in. He's medical director of the Inner City Health Associates in Toronto and has been working to get people off the street and into homes for years. Doctor, good morning to you.

ANDREW BOND: Good morning, Matt.

MG: It's interesting in hearing Eric say, yes, there are more people, but there's also a different type of people who are out on the streets, people who are newly homeless. What do you make of that?

ANDREW BOND: What we know right now, that there's a number of things that are happening at the same time, which is making this situation right across the country incredibly complex, one, we know that we're facing a increasing affordability crisis and both in terms of housing prices that are and rents going up, but also the income support, despite the benefits coming through with serve, have been difficult to get to people who are on the streets and so the ability to match income to available, affordable places is certainly a huge challenge that's increased throughout COVID. We know that now the moratorium on evictions has across provinces starting to be lifted. And that's really putting pressure on thousands of people right across the country. And, of course, with COVIDover the last now over seven months, really just spreading throughout the the community is also shelter systems across the country that people are often voting with their feet when they're not able to get shelter space that has adequate social distancing or or resourcing to keep them safer with hygiene supplies and supports that many people are opting where they don't have any other options to to go the streets, to go to tents and encampments, to try and get as much distance as they can to keep themselves safe. So it's very much a self protective practice that's happening amidst an economic crisis at the same time to do one's best under these deeply complex and difficult circumstances that are terrifying for so many people.

MG: And you see that across the country. I mean, I think of the city that I live in and the neighbourhood that I live in. There are tent encampments in many of the parks because, as you say, people don't feel safe within the shelter system. When this pandemic began, you came up with a plan that has been used across this country. Just tell us about this.

ANDREW BOND: Sure. So at the very beginning, we certainly saw the foreshadows in in Eastern European countries. And even as some early evidence around homeless population within China as well, that we knew that there was going to be a disproportionate risk, experience and adverse impact on people who are experiencing homelessness. The plan that we work together with our population health team and partners to put in place was to ensure a few pieces. One was that there was adequate social distancing or isolation that could be available for people knowing that we would not be able to create that largely within the existing shelter system. That's the only way to do that would be to create standalone isolation facilities for those who are either exposed or those who were found out to have COVID to try and keep them safe and supported during that time. So ensuring they had adequate health and social supports, but also ensuring that we have them in the space that doesn't expose other people to ongoing spread as well, so that those who are still in the shelter system or other species have somewhere space to be. So having isolation facilities was absolutely critical. And right across the country, starting in February and March, we were fortunate enough, along with many municipalities across the country, to receive provincial funding and others, as well as federal a large federal release of funds that were fairly unrestricted to allow us to do this kind of work and development for isolation, but also to really advocate for the need for outreach, testing and surveillance within the shelters as well so that we can find cases as soon as they were were present in the shelter system and then quickly support and move them to the next most safe place that we possibly could. That was very critical. Relying on the reactive approach to testing where people had to show up or book appointments, for example, wasn't something that was going to be viable at any point for most people through homelessness just due to the general overall safety and the social chaos that people already in life outside of COVID, that wasn't going to be a viable strategy. And so we need to bring that into play. And then we needed to make sure that we had a very robust system that's never existed before for people to end homelessness across the country, to ensure that the housing homelessness sector was connected as much as possible to the health care sector. Generally, there's been patchwork ability of some organisations across the country to get that kind of connexion and coordination between the two sectors. But there's unlike a long-term care sector, there isn't a mandated, well resourced supports in both the health and social supports for those who are living within the shelter system. And we need to really put those in place early to ensure that as people move from shelter to health care and back out into isolation facilities, that we had a system in place that could as much as possible steered people through the challenges of moving from one place to keep them as safest course.

MG: One of those challenges has been making sure that people feel welcome. We've heard stories of tensions in neighbourhoods where homeless people have been moved or were modular housing has gone up. How do you, we only have a minute or so left, but how do you go about addressing that to make sure that people feel welcome?

ANDREW BOND: Yeah, absolutely. I think anytime you move any group of people into a new place, to a new community, there's bound to be relationship challenges and sort of relationship building needs to happen. And the. It happened well, there needs to be trust, respect and confidence in what's happening in that space. So certainly there needs to be transparent, regular communication, very strong reflection and feedback from the community to ensure that they know what's happening, but also can voice any of their concerns and to be able to have that incorporated into plans and then to really make sure that we have the resources and supports in place in those facilities so that people feel that these are the kind of support we will need to stay in a safe place to keep the community and the individuals there safe. They need to have confidence that that that that support system is in place. And so that needs to be articulated very clearly and fairly regularly. And then to have an ongoing relationship building process that we can recognise that nonetheless are going to. She perfection right out of the gate and that we're going to need to actually work together to keep working for people. But I think everywhere across the country, we know that no one wants someone to have had the kind of experience that Raquel has had and as mentioned earlier, that we can work together to actually deliver the kinds of support that need to be in place. So as long as we really keep those communication channels opening or open and ensure that we're working together and thatpeople know that there are the resources going in to provide mental health and social supports and primary care.

MG: This is vital work, Doctor. It's great to hear what you're doing about it. Thank you.

ANDREW BOND: Thanks so much.

MG: Dr. Andrew Bond, medical director of Inner City Health Associates in Toronto. The CBC News is next. Then, a conversation about faith, addiction, race and more with the author, Yaa Gyasi. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

[Music]

Yaa Gyasi hopes her new book 'champions' the science we need to navigate the pandemic

Guest: Yaa Gyasi

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current.

[Music: theme]

MG: Still to come, your Thanksgiving meal may be smaller this year, meaning there may be more fruits and vegetables still in your garden that you can't finish eating right now. What to do with everything you've grown? Turns out more and more Canadians are taking up canningAnd we will hear from some of them. But first, a literary superstar shines in her sophomore novel.

[Music: theme]

MG: Her best-selling debut novel, Homegoing, was a sprawling work of historical fiction that traced the descendants of two sisters from 18th century Ghana to the present day. And it made Yaa Gyasi a rising star in the literary world. Her second book has been eagerly anticipated, and it's now here. It's called Transcendant Kingdom. It's the story of a Ghanaian family in Alabama wrestling with addiction, depression, grief and faith. It's fantastic. I spoke with Yaa Gyasi in September. Here's our conversation: This novel is set in Huntsville, Alabama, which is one of the places that you grew up in. Tell me a little bit about growing up in in the deep South.

YAA GYASI: Well, it was an interesting experience. My family moved to America when I was two from Ghana and then we lived in Ohio, Illinois, Tennessee and then Alabama, and we moved to Alabama when I was nine. And I think Alabama was the place where we had the fewest gun hands around us. There is only one other family in those early years of living there. So I think it was the first time that I wasn't surrounded by gun a community. I went to a predominantly white church. I attended a predominantly white school, and that was also different from the other places that I had lived. So I think that Alabama was the first place that I kind of gained some awareness of the differences around race and ethnicity and started to feel myself, I think as different from the people around me.

MG: Did you feel welcome in the community?

YAA GYASI: In some places, yes, in other places, no. I found my church to be particularly hostile and surprisingly hostile in some regards, but I did kind of quickly make friends, both at church and at school and within those friendships, I felt welcome. But, you know, I certainly understood that there was something different about my family, that we were being viewed in a different light, whether or not it was made explicit. I was still getting the sense of our difference, our isolation.

MG: The church plays a really important role. Gifty, the protagonist, grows up in this family that is surrounded by the church. And it's a Pentecostal church, which is is the church that you grew up in as well. Tell me a bit more about what the church meant to you.

YAA GYASI: Well, I was really active in the church as a child. My family had always attended, even in those early years in Columbus, Ohio. We were members of the African Christian Church there, which starts almost like a kind of soft landing from immigrating from Ghana. There is the church with half and half Nigerian. And we spent much of our time there at the time. I got to our church and Huntsville again. There were fewer and fewer Ghanians. There were no other black people at the church when we first attended. And then subsequently, there is one family. But I found the church to be a place that that I really kind of I don't know. I think I found myself in the church in some sense. I was incredibly faithful. I was incredibly pious. I had a deep and abiding belief in God. And yet the politics of my church, I think, started to wear on me. And I started to kind of pull away from some of the other beliefs that were being displayed there.

MG: There's a scene in the novel when giftee saved, when she she stands up after much encouragement and she wonders when she's going to do this and stands up and goes to the front of the church. Do you remember that moment in your life?

YAA GYASI: I do. Yeah. And I had a very similar moment to the one that that giftee experiences in the novel there. I was saved quite young. And I remember walking down to the front of the altar. I remember the pastor's hand resting on my head. I remember seeing all of the congregants stretch their hands out and that feeling of warmth and light and acceptance and joy I think I still hold on to. I remember it quite well.

MG: And yet you described earlier on, you described the welcoming in the church in some ways as being hostile. Tell me a bit more about that.

YAA GYASI: Yeah. It's a difficult thing to reconcile because, you know, the feelings that I had about God didn't quite square with the way that I was being treated in the church. I think I often felt like it was a place of alienation for me. I didn't have, especially in those early years before one of my close friends moved to Huntsville and started attending that church. And I was always just very lonely. I would I would bring these books from the library and just kind of sit and read it by myself in the corner. And there is just no there. There didn't seem to be kind of a welcoming spirit for me. And so it was a place where I felt isolated and kind of judged, though I didn't I couldn't put a finger on what where the judgement was coming from at the time. I was so young.

MG: In the novel, Gifty pursues a career in neuroscience and she wrestles with this tension between science and faith and whether there is any shared space at all or whether they are two diametrically opposed kind of forces. What is it that that interests you the most about that tension?

YAA GYASI: Well, I think, you know, Gifty says at some point in the novel that she grew up in a church that was distrustful of science, and that is true of me as well. When I started writing this book, I was thinking about a woman who sees the world through an incredibly kind of intellectual and kind of methodical lens, but who grew up with this value system that feels as though it shouldn't make sense. It shouldn't kind of comply with the with the lens that she has grown to accept. And yet it does. I think both religion and science, at least the science that they giftee practises, are attempting to ask really big transcendent. Questions attempting to kind of reconcile things that seem irreconcilable and and explore the mysteries of the universe. And that's no small thing. And though Gifty has pulled away from the church of her childhood, she still kind of holds on to that desire to uncover these mysteries. And so they felt compatible, narratively compatible.

MG: There's a line in the book which it says at a certain point, science fails. What happens when science fails in the context of that relationship between science and faith?

YAA GYASI: Well, I think when science fails, you have to kind of you just kind of have to relinquish the desire for control, the desire for answers. So we see Gifty who is attempting to uncover answers for these questions that frankly have no answers. She wants to understand her grief. She wants to kind of make sense of all of this senseless things that have happened in her life. And she's hoping that the brain will kind of locate this this grief will locate the answers to these questions. And she says at one point that she realises that the brain can tell her perhaps what or how or where. But it can't tell her why. And I think this is the failure that she's trying to get at. It doesn't satisfy the whys of these questions that she has.

MG: This book appears at a time when people are in the midst of an unprecedented, we overuse that word, but it does feel unprecedented moment. And there is this tension, a real life tension between faith and science during the pandemic. Do you think that people are grappling with this in a different way now, given the stakes that are at play in the world that we're in?

YAA GYASI: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think here in the States, there has been this kind of long standing tradition of being distrustful of science. We were seeing it with the anti vaccination movement. You're seeing it with, you know, distrust around climate change. And now we are seeing it with that, with the pandemic. A lot of misinformation, a lot of distrust. And I think this book is attempting to grapple with science, rigorous science, slow moving and searching science and science that is attempting to give us answers to big questions. And I hope that after reading it, if there are doubters left to kind of think of science as as, you know, just kind of something that you do in elementary school and then forget about that has no bearing on our on our lives today. But that doubt can be set aside. I hope that it is a book that that champions, again, rigorous, conscientious science as a thing that we all need in order to kind of make sense of this time that we are in. And in order to get answers to these difficult these difficult questions, these difficult problems that we are trying to address right now.

MG: Gify says that the idea of belief can be powerful and it can be intimate and can be transformative. Having grown up in the church, what's your relationship with faith now?

YAA GYASI: I think I, well, I still have a lot of family who are still in the church. And so that feeling that that gift he talks about, there is one that I that I have seen and witnessed firsthand. I know how much faith matters to the people in my life as a way of kind of processing, processing and traumas, as a way of giving them hope, as a way of allowing them to kind of move past difficult circumstances and I respect and honour that as far as how faith works in my life. I'm no longer a believer and yet I can't seem to kind of throw it all away. I still have this kind of, I suppose, interest in in the mysteries of the universe, interest in the idea of God. But I haven't stepped in a church in decades. So I think you know some of it has been lost.

MG: Is there anything that you miss about that? I mean, that's a profound choice in somebody's life.

YAA GYASI: Yes. And there's so much that I miss I miss that feeling that I described of that day when I walked up to the altar. I miss that warmth in that light. I miss that kind of assuredness that there is someone greater than myself looking out for me, you know, kind of guiding my hand, guiding my steps and making sure that things would work out for me. I miss that confidence.

MG: What was it that drove you away?

YAA GYASI: Well, there were a lot of things. But I remember a specific moment when I was probably a freshman in high school. So like 14, when I had gone to this youth service and there was a visiting youth pastor who came and he told us that the night before he had had this vision, two tornadoes coming to destroy the earth and one was homosexuality, and the other was abortion. And at that point, I remember thinking there are so many things that are wrong with this planet, with this country. Those surely those cannot be the two things that are going to destroy the earth. And I just I couldn't stomach it. I remember I went into the office, I called my parents. This was before I had a cell phone, so I had to use the landline in the office. I called my parents and I asked if they could come pick me up and I never went to another youth service again.

MG: You talked about loss and the loss that Gifty experience is. One of the reasons that she turns to neuroscience is that she's trying to understand this issue of addiction, depression as well, but largely the concept of addiction. And this comes after her brother becomes addicted to opioids. He's in a sports injury and it leads him down a path that we've seen play out in Canada and in the United States and around the world, certainly over the last couple of years. Why did you want to write about the opioid crisis?

YAA GYASI: Well, there were several reasons, but I think mostly it was about the fact that around the time that I was writing this novel, I was reading so many really beautifully sensitive and nuanced and complicated and complicating reportage about the opioid crisis. Reportage that that was interested in kind of looking at it as a health care issue as opposed to a criminal issue. You know, articles and essays and documentaries that were following the lives of people who were suffering from opioid use disorder. And and talking about the pharmaceutical industries role and its complicity in it. And I was so moved by all of all of this reporting. But at the same time, I felt like there is a lot of hypocrisy to it because it felt like the shift was occurring just as this epidemic was and was mostly impacting white, rural and suburban people here in the States rather than the longstanding epidemics that mostly affected black people and cities. And so I wanted to write a book that addressed the crisis, but that did so from the standpoint of people who were, in my opinion, getting left behind and the conversation around the opioid epidemic. So Nana is at the centre of this and I wanted to give him as much at that nuanced, careful, humanising attention as I was seeing in the essays around white people who were suffering from opioid use disorder.

MG: And Nana is Gifty's brother, who is a star basketball player who goes through this injury and then becomes addicted to opioids. And in doing the research for this, you sort of hinted at this, but what do you think we don't understand about this crisis?

YAA GYASI: I think there's so much that we don't understand about this crisis. I think that the research that really struck me was that the neuroscience aspect of this, this book and I was lucky enough to have a friend, too, who researches addiction and depression. She researches the neural pathways that reward seeking and kind of just going through it with her and thinking about the fact, you know, we hear it's sad and I don't think it fully resonates always, but that these addictions, they do rewire the brain. And so it's not just a person's inability to stop, to change. It is that there is a brain function that has changed and that makes it really, really impossible just to stop, difficult to stop. Relapse is a part of addiction, and I think we have to kind of change the way that we think about it.

MG: As you mentioned, race plays into this as well. And for Nana. I mean, he's a star basketball player and the people in Huntsville love him when he's a star. When his star begins to dim because of addiction they turn on him in many ways. We're in the midst, in addition to this pandemic, we're in the midst of this reckoning around systemic racism and anti-black racism. What is it like to have a book like this appear in a moment like this.

YAA GYASI: Well, it's you know, an incredibly powerful experience to be able to release a book. I think that is attempting to grapple with just not just, I think, institutionalised racism and the way that kind of forces beyond your control start to direct your path, but also internalised racism where you kind of see the way that that character is kind of take on the messaging, about the about who they are or who they can be. And I think that that is a piece I think that I'm that I'm interested in. And seeing people have conversations around as they read this book and as they grapple with their own relationship to race and racism. And so it's been it's been a challenging time, but also, I think, one that feels for the first time in a while, I think Pam's full of promise, full of the opportunity for real and substantive change to be made.

MG: What's the role of black writers and black storytellers in this moment? One of the things that's happening, it seems, is that people are getting certainly more opportunities, but those narratives that might have been overlooked are now being recognised and being celebrated and being published. What's the role of storytellers like yourself in this moment, do you think?

YAA GYASI: Well, I deeply believe that that books, that literature that any kind of just any kind of writing has the capacity to change people's lives, but I also recognize that that work is slow and often, you know, ineffable, hard to describe, hard to, hard to make, tangible. I think what fiction does is it allows us to kind of think about the lives of these characters, people who are experiencing what Dr. Lauren Michelle Jackson has called the weather, the environment that is racism. So it's not, it's not necessarily this kind of one of those books that is going to tell you what to do, how to kind of change your life and your actions in order to address the ways in which you are implicated in racism. But it's a book that will demonstrate what the lived experience that some of these characters are. And I hope that by seeing that by seeing the lived experiences of those characters who do attempt to kind of be quarraleries to real people that that it will in some way kind of the route itself into the minds of people who are reading. And hopefully the changes can come from there.

MG: Can I ask you about success? Your debut novel comes out and it's a huge success. Homegoing as a book that's read all around the world and people love this book and then they wonder, oh what's she going to do next? What is it like to deal with that kind of success for your first novel?

YAA GYASI: Well, I mean, it's wonderful. It's so much more than than most debut authors get.And I always say you write your first novel in the dark for many years, wondering if it is ever going to see the light of day. So the fact that I'm going saw light and not just any light, but such bright light still astonishes me. But it did, I think, add this added layer of pressure to my life. You know, I was suddenly so much more aware, so keenly aware of the fact that there are people who who want to read the things that I write. And so I felt this kind of this newfound responsibility to write the kind of stories that I could be proud of having my name on. And that that pressure, I think, kind of crept into my thinking, my writing life in a way that it had never before. And so it took me it took me a while, I think, to find my ground, to find my footing with this novel. It took me several false starts to dig into it. But I think once I did, I was able to quiet all of that noise, both good and bad noise around Homegoing's publication and just devote myself to to writing this work. That was completely different and that felt new and fresh and free. And that was a great joy.

MG: There's a lot that's in this novel and one of the things that really stands out is the relationship between Gifty and her mother. And the way that you portray that relationship is is incredibly sensitive. It's very delicate. There's some edge to it as well, just as there would be in any family dynamic. Tell me a little bit more about that and about about crafting that relationship.

YAA GYASI: Sure. And, well, I love reading novels that centre around mother daughter relationships. I find them really fascinating. And these relationships, to be known, is just ripe for exploration. There's a book that came out not that long ago called My name is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout that I thought did so beautifully. And so I was hoping to kind of enter into that conversation with this novel. And in it, Gifty and her mother have an incredibly difficult relationship. They are two people who see the world as differently as two people can see the world. And yet they are so similar in ways that they they can't admit to themselves. And so, you know, Gifty's mother, who for most of Gifty's childhood was working really long hours, was not really there for her in the ways that Gifty needed her to be and finds herself in this position suffering from depression and in need of Gifty's care. And so we think that the element that I was really trying to get at is that at some point, you know, if we are all lucky enough to have our parents live to old age. We will have to take care of them. And so what does that that role reversal look like when you find yourself mothering your mother? And so that's that's the point where we meet Gifty. She's mothering her mother and it's hard work, but it is really loving and deeply, deeply intimate work.

MG: The expectation from readers, perhaps, is that given the moment that we're in, the writers that we love, will write about that moment. And it might be immediate, it might be down the line. Can you imagine yourself writing about the time that we're in right now? Or is it something I mean a bit like, you know, reading pandemic and plague books that you would want to flee from and not occupy yourself with at all right now?

YAA GYASI: Yeah, I can see myself writing about this moment at some point in the future, but I can't imagine doing it right now or right away. It feels too close and also I think as we are still within it, I feel like there, I haven't really fully processed it as no one has, I'm sure. And so I think it will take many years for me to understand what this moment has meant to me in a way that allows me to write about it.

MG: We'll wait for that. In the meantime, this is a wonderful novel and it's a real pleasure to speak with you. Thank you again.

YAA GYASI: Thank you.

MG: Yaa Gyasi is the author of Homegoing. Her latest book is Transcendant Kingdom. I spoke with her in September. Coming up after your regional update, we will hear from Canadians canning this year's bounty, which leads nicely into an episode of The Vinyl Cafe about Morley's favourite gardening moments. That is all coming your way in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

[Music]

The Vinyl Cafe: Morley’s Garden

MG: Hi, I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current. On this Thanksgiving Monday, we are no doubt missing much of what makes a day like this one so special. Because of the pandemic there won't be as many family gatherings with the big turkey dinner and all the fixings. So we thought we would bring you something familiar. A special Thanksgiving treat from The Vinyl Cafe. It's a story about the importance of family, which feels perfect for the moment we're in right now. Here is the late, great Stuart McLean and Morley's Garden.

SOUNDCLIP

STUART MCLEAN: Some people love spring, some love summer, some even love the cold, dark nights of winter. Morley travels with those who believe these lingering days of autumn are the sweetest days of the year. I love mornings like this, she said, staring out the kitchen window at the blue thin sky. But it is a perilous partner, autumn. For if winter is the warm hearth and summer sweet sorrow, if spring hopes eternal, autumn is the season of wistfulness. For autumn as an idler, holding on, holding on, holding on like the last leaf, holding on to the bare branch. And it conjures up the lingering emotions which of course lead right to the path of wistful things, which too often leads straight to melancholy. If you pointed this out to Morley, she would agree with you. That's true she'd say, but I like the sadness of it. Never feels really sad. And she's right. If autumn is the season of sadness, the dawn of regret, it is sweet rugrat brushed by sadness, maybe, but not by sorrow. Autumn, maybe a horse clip clopping down a cobblestone alley. But that's a poet sitting in the saddle. And he has a bottle of wine in his pockets at Mali and probably a bag of roasted chestnuts. So on a recent Saturday morning, after she'd made her coffee and stood by the kitchen window and said, I love mornings like this, Morelli went happily out the back door and said about the wistful autumnal business of digging up her garden, putting it to sleep for another year. She was wearing a baggy pair of khakis and an old sweater, a canvas jacket and canvas gloves. She looked like a prall, though. If you asked her morally would tell you that she is the most amateur gardeners. I don't know a thing about it, she'd say. Haven't a clue. She'd been out there for an hour, maybe two, digging in the dirt, loading up the wheelbarrow, pulling things out and throwing them in the compost. She started in the corner by the garage with the impatiens, the corner where she had the vegetable patch when the kids were small or tried to the vegetable patch never worked out. She still has the bottle of orange oil somewhere, maybe in her basket of tools. She leaned back on her thighs and flipped a shaggy root ball into the wheelbarrow. She thought vegetables might be a way to engage the kids. And she was right. Stephanie would fly home from school, run into the back yard and cheque to see if something had happened in the six hours she'd been away. Stephan had been obsessed for some reason. The only thing that came that year was yellow peppers. Nothing else. Not even zucchinis. Go figure. And the peppers came slowly, painfully, slowly. Gardening was supposed to be soothing. It wasn't soothing that year. All Morley did that year was frat. Mostly, she was fretting that harvest wouldn't come soon enough to sustain Stephanie's interest. She tried egg shells and coffee grounds, carted them out to the vegetable patch every morning, feeling foolish about it. She did it because her grandmother did it. Her grandmother would walk out in her robe and curlers after breakfast, spread egg shells and coffee grounds on the garden and drop toast crusts around for the birds. Her grandmother had a beautiful garden. To be safe, Morley added crusts and then the ants appear right out of the blue. One morning, she got up and there were ants all over the peppers, an infestation. Someone told her orange oil would do the job and orange oil was organic and safe. Back then, organic and safe seemed like an important thing, the most important thing. Of course, everyone believes that at the starting line. Everyone begins the race organic and safe. We all believe in our hearts that poison is for wicked witches and chemical companies, the kind of folks who don't care about children and pets and God's good earth, let alone butterflies. Believing that our garden will be now and forever more, so help us God, organic and safe, until comes the autumn of the aphids. The summer of the squash bug. The moment of the bean leaf beetle. And a switch flips. And there you are, just like everyone else, smuggling home jars of Raid from the hardware store, sneaking shamefully into your organic garden early in the morning, when no one will spot you, who cares about the butterflies when you're up to your knees in aphids? The butterflies aren't your problem. The only thing you care about are the cut worms. And if you see one more cut worm, just one, you are going to Central America next winter to one of those countries you read about and you are scoring some DDT and let's see how the cut worms feel about that. Yeah, that's pretty much how organic gardening goes. Anyway, Morley was just getting going, so when the ants appeared, she went to the gardening store and she got orange oil, not Raid. And she applied at the way the guy at the garden store had told her to apply it. And then she went in for lunch and then an hour later, she came out full of hope and her pepper plants were scarcely standing. They were brown and droopy and barely alive. And all she could think was Stephanie would be home from school in an hour. So she rushed back to the garden shop and she bought new plants, ones with peppers on them, bigger than the one she just murdered. And she got home and got them in the ground just before the kids got there. It was the miracle that Steph had been anticipating the peppers almost double their morning selves. And you know what happened? Stephanie didn't even notice the miracle of the peppers. And you know why? Because there was a pile of dead ants in the backyard. Stephanie and Sam spent what was left of that day trying to save the ants. Now, when that didn't work out, trying to attract the remaining live ones into their aunt hospice. And that's when Mary Turlington appeared. Not back then, not during the massacre of the peppers, I'm talking about the recent Saturday now, when Morley was in the backyard resting on her haunches, thinking about the peppers, and she looks up and there's Mary, all fresh from tending an altogether different sort of garden. Mary, her neighbour, is well, well, Mary's many things. And amongst the many things she is Mary is a scrap booker. She prunes her collection of mementos with a topiary intensity. Most people take pictures of their family. Mary actually prints them. She prints them and mounts them and frames them and turns them into books and wall displays. And Mary had spent that morning running her hands through the rich loam of her son Adam's adolescence. Adam, who just left for college. I wanted to do something special, said Mary. But what she really wanted to do or what she wanted to do that Saturday morning was show someone what she had done. And there was Morley on her knees in the garden. Obviously not busy. So Morley put down her trial and got off her knees and set off for her neighbours with a sense of impending doom. Not, as it turns out, unjustifiably. By the time Morley had left the Turlingtons, an hour and a half had passed and she had not only seen Adam's memento book, she had seen his photo montage, his memory box, his report cards, and watched a one hour video tribute. When it was finally over, Morley leapt up. Sit down, said Mary. There's a video for each of the twins. When she did leave, Morley felt both relieved and resentful, but most of all, guilty. Morley had pictures, of course. She'd taken pictures along the way, but she had no idea where they were. In boxes she thought. For the last few years she hadn't printed anything. They were all on the computer or maybe in the camera, though she wasn't sure where the camera was or the boxes, for that matter. She was back in her garden now sitting at the picnic table that sits under the pear tree, thinking that the morning which had begun with so much promise had disappeared. This wasn't the way she wanted the day to go. This wasn't wistfulness, this was melancholy. She sat back and wiped her four head with the back of her gloved hand. She went inside and made tea. There was one last section to do the corner at the back. She had given it to Sam the summer. He was nine. She'd bought him a garden set for his birthday. A real one with a real shovel and a real rake, not plastic. And he had insisted on planting everything with his dye cast Tonka backhaul. He'll be given a bean at school, one single been at the Earth Day celebration. It was like a fairy tale. He planted it in a Dixie cup. And when it sprouted, he brought it home and replanted it with his Tonka backhaul. It did way better than any of her carefully attended to plants. Way better. Her beans were stringy and tough, his were fat and juicy. When she asked him why, he said he spoke to his plant every day. Plants need love, he said. Also, they need carbon dioxide. So if I run out of words, I just breathe on it. He also pees on it, said Stephanie. That was an accident, said Sam. It took years, but slowly, morally learnt how things worked. She learnt the deal breaking importance of the son. She learnt that from the sunflowers for three summers, she had planted her sunflowers along the garage in the shade and she couldn't figure out why they never grew. And then one day they were in the car sitting at a stoplight. And just before the light changed, Stephanie said, Isn't that what you're trying to grow? And there was the craziest sunflower you have ever seen growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Morley moved hers from beside the garage to beside the house where they got more sun and ever since, she has grown mammoth sunflowers. Each August, she delights in their prayerful passage from towers to penitents as they slowly bowed their heavy headed way back to the earth. The September Saturday they roast sunflower seeds has become a family festival. Morley was back outside now. She was in the back corner of the garden, pulling dead bits from under the rhododendrons. One summer, she kept finding stashes of stuff back there. Little piles of vitamin pills and cooked vegetables. One night after dinner, she saw Sam slipped surreptitiously out the back door and watched him kneel by the rows and begin pulling stuff out of his bulging socks. It was about an hour later as she was finishing up and she had her hands deep in the dirt, that she found something hard. She dug around it a bit. The hard thing. And when it was loose. She tugged on it and pulled it out, a metal mud ball. She brushed it off. It was a small yellow backhaul. That night at supper, she said to Sam, I found something of yours. She'd washed it off. And she was pretty proud of herself. It was the sort of thing that Mary might have put in one of her memory boxes. She thought Sam was gonna love it. He didn't care. He didn't ignore it. He looked at it. He smiled. He said, I remember that truck, but he didn't take it. He just left it on the table. Later that night, she walked by Sam's bedroom and saw his collection of comic books on his bureau. And it occurred to her that he had saved what he wanted to save and that he had a whole life ahead of him to take pictures if he was going to be a picture taking sort of guy. Next afternoon, she was giving the garden one last sulk and she went out to move the sprinkler and she saw Sam coming down the driveway and she said, could you give me a hand? And she pointed to the hose and said, pinch hit so I can move the sprinkler. And as he walked over and picked up the hose, she said, you know, the key to a good sprinkling is the hose, not the sprinkler. You buy a good hose, an expensive one with brass connectors and you can get a cheap sprinkler. The fancy rotating ones are unreliable. Sam just stood there waiting patiently until his mother was holding the sprinkler in her hands before he let go. When the water hit her, she froze for an instant and then she dropped the sprinkler and jumped back. But it was too late. She was already soaked and he was already running for the house. And so she stood there dripping and laughing and wondering if she would ever learn. And thinking this as she went inside, thinking that Mary may have her boxes and her books, but she had her garden. Her memories were planted in a backyard scrapbook. And while it would certainly fade away, it would only fade in autumn when fading was its job. When the apples were ripe, the geese had taken wing and her sunflowers were dipping their golden heads.

[Applause]

MG: Stuart McLean and The Vinyl Cafe.

Preserving your pandemic harvest? Start slow with something you love, say experts

Guest: Ana Stoica-Constantin, Johwanna Alleyne

MG: I'm Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio One. Sticking with the gardening and harvest theme.

SOUNDCLIP

MARIO CARLUCCI: This is Mario Carlucci. I'm at my mom's South Ottawa home. This is the home I was born in and the garden, the backyard garden is where we grow a lot of stuff tomatoes, beans, peppers, radicchio, lettuce, you name it. Today, I snipped all sorts of grapes from the vine that my dad planted here, probably close to the time that he built the house in the early 70s. And we're to make jam with the grapes. We're also making pickled egg plants. And so this is day two of a three day process. And it's a technique where you pickle and then preserve the acreage in oil. This is something I watched my family do growing up. At first you watch and, you know, you kind of internalize the processes and the ritual. Now, my mom, while she's still the leader, we look to her for guidance in a lot of these things.

FEMALE VOICE: [Foreign speech]

MARIO CARLUCCI: It's pretty special to know that my mom and dad learnt from, you know, the people that came before them and I'm learning from them and now trying to pass down these practices to my kids and hoping that, you know, they internalize what we internalized. And I don't think it took the pandemic for us to appreciate these rituals. But it surely has a firm that this is something that is special and it sustains us now, the way to sustain people for hundreds of years.

MG: That is CBC Ottawa digital journalist Mario Carlucci. You can see more of his food adventures. Don't do this on an empty stomach, by the way, because you will be made hungry. You'll find him on the Instagram food blog, ThisItalianKitchen. All one word. It's @ThisItalianKitchen. Mario's family has been canning for decades. But for many people, this is a new pandemic hobby and because of the boom in canning, there have been reports of shortages of mason jars and lids, essential things for preserving your summer bounty for the fall and winter months ahead. Ana Stoica-Constantin embraced canning after she ditched Toronto and headed north to Parry Sound, Ontario, at the peak of the pandemic. And Johwanna Alleyne teaches canning courses and is the owner of Mojo Jojo Pickles in Edmonton. We spoke earlier this fall. Johwanna, it's interesting listening to Mario. He's talking about how this is a family tradition that you grew up watching your family do this for decades and then you figure out how to do it yourself. Is that how you got into the canning world?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: No, I am a retired dark room techniques, and that's how I got into the science of canning.

MG: A dark room technician.

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Darkroom technician. So [unintelligible], acid, timer. I'm really good with those things, but I've always been food led and I was on a board for Slow Food here in Evanston. And one of the process that Slow Food celebrates is canning, mainly slow, artisanal single making things. So I started doing the canning bees for Slow Food. And I loved it. I think at the end of my dark room career, we were doing everything digitally. And I really miss making real things that you can hand to a person and share.

MG: What about for you, Ana? How did this end up something that you end up doing in the midst of a pandemic?

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: Actually, a little bit of both of the stories we've heard so far. You know, my family's originally from Romania. So when they immigrated to Canada in the 80s, they brought with them all of this pickling tradition and canning traditions. So I grew up watching my grandparents make barrel folds of pickled, whole pickled cabbages, so that we could make cabbage rolls every Christmas. And, you know, roasting eggplants and peppers and canning them every fall. So that's what I grew up with. But as I got older, it kind of shifted a little bit for me. You know, I have a background in the sciences. For me, it turned into a world of exploration and experimentation. And I started playing around with all of the flavours that I liked and flavours that I found in Ontario, things of like the peaches and the stone fruit and the apples that come out every year. And just discovering new things. I mean, even here in Parry Sound, I'm discovering flavours that I hadn't been exposed to before. And it's just this whole world that's opened up and there's so much potential in it. It's just super exciting to me.

MG: We've seen people we've been talking about your victory gardens and pandemic planting. Are you canning things, Ana, that you've grown yourself in the midst of? As we say, these unprecedented times.

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: A little bit. Yes, actually, I'm very lucky here that when I moved up here, it was with my fiancée and he built me a bit of a garden up here. And I could plant tomatoes and peppers and beans and zucchini and things like that and could really play around with bigger finding out the fruit and the vegetables that I really liked. So we've been pretty lucky. The summer's been pretty good. So I have been able to can some of those things and play around with those. But I can't really grow enough of a bountiful harvest to really put up everything. But so I've been getting things from grocery stores and farmer's markets and things like that as well.

MG: Johwanna. You're the expert in this. Are you seeing that people are getting into canning and preserving, putting food up for the first time?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Oh, completely. I didn't know that pickles were an essential service, but it seems [unintelligible] Everybody needs a fresh food. I think we've all appreciated just going down a little bit. And fresh real food and good flavour and the comfort of good flavours become really important. So, yes, everybody's cooking.

MG: And that means that the supplies are really hard to come by. Right. I mean, there are these stories of mason jars being sold out on PEI, but this is spreading across the country now beyond that. Johwanna, what do you need to be able to do to start doing this? Because it's an art. But there's a science to it as well.

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: There is truly a science to it. And I tell beginners to really get a good recipe. I can't stress that enough. People, they were saying, but you've watched people do it, but you've never done it yourself. Right. But starting spot and I think a really good recipe is a good spot. And with your canning jars, Bernardin is the Canadian manufacturers, the big Canadian manufacturer of catting drugs, they have a website that has really well tested recipes. So you can really count on. And a secret is that your mother's secret Jojo recipe is probably the Bernadin recipe anyway. So it is a great resource.

MG: What do you have to get right? I mean, if it's a science, there are things that can go wrong. So you need to make sure that there are certain elements that are included in what you're putting up, right?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Yes. With pickling, the amount of acid that the jar, the amount of water overall that's in the jar is really important. And how you fill your drawer and the processing time, which is really the backbone of a canning recipe.

MG: If you don't get this right and the acid, it can be measured in the P.H. levels, if you don't get this right, what can happen?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Well, the botulism is one of the big fears in a jar.

MG: That would be bad.

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: That's not good. But one of the things is spoilage. Like on a jam jar just at the top of it, you'll see mold and fungus growing, black spots. Peaches and nectarines will get a little air bubbles if you don't pack the dry properly and then you'll see it spoil there quietly. Or if you're really a novice canner, you haven't submerged that jar in the water, sometimes you can see exactly where in the jar the water went to the line above it is spoilt.

MG: Have you had any disasters?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. We make thousands and thousands of jobs a year. But there was a year where we ran into a process resistant bacteria in pickled carrots. And they would be absolutely fine. When I go into my car and when I take them to market, they would be cloudy. And when we opened it, orange foam.

MG: Oh.

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: Which just copiously spilt from every jar.

MG: Not what you want. Ana, what have you been making? Tell us what your other favourite recipes that you have.

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: Oh, definitely. You know, a couple years ago I was experimenting with hops off is not that I particularly love them, but I had just on a whim purchased some hot pepper plants and grew them and so I decided to turn into hot sauces. So I made a Ontario peach and habanero hot sause one year, which turned out really well. And this year I'm really playing around with some of the flavours that I'm finding up here in northern Ontario, you know, really new to me. But things like chokecherries and hawthorn berries and making jellies out of those. And so that's really new to me. But just something that I've been playing around with up here and, you know, pickling ramps in the spring foraged sustainably and appropriately, I might add. That's an important thing for us here in Ontario. But, yes, just playing around with those kinds of new flavours and definitely making mistakes along the way. I mean, there's definitely places where I've put in too much acid out of fear of botulism and just had jams that have been incredibly tart and sour or putting far too much salt in a brine for my pickles. But, you know, you kind of learn as you go and make those changes moving forward.

MG: Johanna, just before we let you go, if there's somebody who they have this enormous garden or a small garden, that they have too much stuff to eat right now. Maybe it's tomatoes, maybe it's cucumbers and they want to put some of this up. What's the first step if somebody is going to be getting into this world for the first time?

JOHWANNA ALLEYNE: I see that you don't have to take the whole weekend and you don't have to do all 100 pounds. Start with single jars. Make one or two jars. Something that you can be really proud of, a precious. Start there. You'll catch on pretty quick. That jar is going to disappear really fast.

MG: Ana, for you. What's your advice for getting into this in the first half?

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: You know, I say start with flavours. You like flavours you know you love and start, you know, as as Johwanna mentioned, start small. Just make a little bit. Get a little basket of peaches, a basket of cucumbers, something that you know you'll like. Something you know you'll eat, and start there.

MG: And when we're in the depths of winter and perhaps as the pandemic continues, you'll be thankful that you actually took those steps.

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: Absolutely.

MG: It's great to talk to you both. Good luck and thank you.

ANA STOICA-CONSTANTIN: Thank you.

MG: Ana Stoica-Constantin is a beginner canner in Parry Sound, Ontario. Johwanna Alleyne is the owner of Mojo Jojo Pickles in Edmonton.

MG: And that is it for The Current for this Thanksgiving Monday. Stay tuned to CBC Radio One. Q is up next. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for joining us on this Thanksgiving edition of The Current. We'll be back tomorrow. Until then, enjoy the rest of your long weekend.

[Music: theme]

Provide Transcript Feedback

CBC would like to acknowledge the support of the Broadcasting Accessibility Fund.

Oct. 12, 2020 episode transcript

Social Sharing

More from this episode