Review: Against the Grain

O'Reilly profiles an array of outstanding trailblazers

Back in October, ad man Terry O'Reilly presented his latest book, Against the Grain: Defiant Giants Who Changed the World at the Vancouver Writers Festival in Granville Island. He is well known among CBC Radio listeners for his show, Under the Influence, where he talks about different aspects of advertising through actual case studies.

Against the Grain profiles 19 people who were trailblazers in their respective fields, and in particular when others either criticised them or scorned them.

There's Gustave Eiffel who was a brilliant engineer and owned his own iron-production factory, but Parisians hated his design for the Eiffel Tower. Nevertheless, he persisted and was smart enough to sell shares to fund the tower as well as take in revenues from entrance fees and from the restaurants and cafes on the structure.

Another is Suzanne Simard, who saw how clear-cutting and planting new trees didn't necessarily mean a new forest would grow back in a healthy way. She discovered that in the forest, there are "mother trees" that other trees depend on for nourishment, and that they communicate with each other through an underground network. Simard also found some tree species have a symbiotic relationship, like the paper birch and Douglas fir. 

However, the forestry industry didn't believe her until her findings were finally published in a peer-reviewed publication. She wrote her first book, Finding the Mother Tree, and has just recently published a follow-up, When the Forest Breathes.

Interestingly O'Reilly includes former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, more for his positive election campaign in 2015. Refusing to do the usual attack ads against his opponent, incumbent Stephen Harper, Trudeau instead offered a more hopeful and optimistic vision if he was in charge and won over a lot of young voters. 

Taylor Swift is also a good choice to profile, though many people under the age of 50 already know all about her. But O'Reilly found her a fascinating business person who genuinely loves her fans and finds ways to interact with them on her terms. 

Some were bused to Swift's home where she made cookies and took pictures with every single one, or made hospital visits, and donated to the food bank of every city she holds a concert in. In addition, following her Eras tour, she gave out millions of dollars worth of bonuses to everyone from the musicians and dancers to the truck drivers hauling all the equipment for the shows.

I enjoyed reading the chapter on Roger Neilson, the former head coach of the Vancouver Canucks in the 1980s. Turns out he was a baseball fanatic more than a hockey one. His interesting obsession was to memorise the rule book and find creative (and sometimes funny) ways to get around them, or use it to call out the opposing team to his advantage. 

The Canucks were in the Stanley Cup finals in 1982 and it was Neilson who inspired fans to wave white towels during the games. I remember that clearly in high school, as a classmate's father was a big Canucks fan and she told us about the white towels.

Against the Grain was written very similar to the way O'Reilly presents his radio show, and when reading the stories, you can almost hear him reading them too. 

However, there are some stories with complicated concepts to explain, like Simard's theories on forests and Katalin Kariko on developing mRNA vaccines that helped protect people against Covid-19, that O'Reilly kind of glosses over their scientific importance. He's good at giving context to advertising giants like Albert D Lasker and Bill Bernbach, but science is O'Reilly's weak spot.

Nevertheless, Against the Grain is a good roundup for fascinating individuals who were determined to follow their instincts or beliefs despite the chorus of criticism against them. In particular Richard Williams' story of manifesting Venus and Serena Williams into champion tennis players even before they were born is a crazy fairy tale that really came true. Definitely an example of someone going against the grain.

Listening to the Wickedly Funny Margaret Atwood

A lively conversation with Atwood (left) and Off on stage

This evening we had the opportunity to listen to the one and only Margaret Atwood speak at the Orpheum Theatre in Vancouver, the last event of the year as part of the Vancouver Writers Festival.

The Orpheum was almost completely full, save for a few seats here and there, and as my friend remarked, a lot of white people... 

In a way it's a bit surprising, as we all read her dystopian novel, The Handmaid's Tale in high school in the mid to late 1980s, and has since become a highly rated TV series. 

Atwood, 86, is arguably the biggest Canadian writer, with over 50 novels, graphic novels, short stories, poems, children's books, the winner of the Booker Prize twice, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Governor General's Award, and the Frank Kafka Award among others, and a champion of Can Lit, but also writers around the world, and co-founded PEN Canada.

Some of her books include Cat's Eye, The Edible Woman, Alias Grace, Oryx and Crake, and children's books like Princess Prunella and the Purple Peanut, Rude Ramsay and the Roaring Radishes, and Up in the Tree. 

Joining her on stage was Carol Off, the former CBC host of the current affairs radio show, As It Happens, as they talked about Atwood's latest work, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts.

The pair seem to be good friends already as they shared barbs with each other. At one point Atwood talked about how she and her friend were underpaid when they did puppet shows for children's birthday parties and demonstrated with her shawl how she manipulated the fabric to make into a character.

Off put her hand under her velvet blazer and talked in character, to which Atwood quipped it looked like a "talking tit" to great hilarity in the audience.

While Off tried to get Atwood to expand more on her answers, it was obvious the author would rather people buy her big thick tome than reveal too much, from how she grew up a lot in nature as a child because her father was an entomologist studying insects, to remembering that she wore a white crochet dress with wooden buttons when she met the love of her life William Gibson, and how they lived on a farm with a peacock that was desperate to mate...

Over an hour later time was up and Atwood got a standing ovation from the audience, some of whom clutched copies of her book after the event.

Listening to Ad Man Terry O'Reilly in Person

O'Reilly (left) with moderator Kathryn Gretsinger

This afternoon went to Granville Island again -- and had a nightmare of a time trying to find parking -- to get to another Vancouver Writers Festival event. I managed to find a spot in a nook by the water front, where a car was just pulling out to leave. What luck, though where I parked my car was at the opposite end of where I needed to go... can't have everything!

I got to Waterfront Theatre as the line was forming outside and was luckily sheltered from the rain. About 10 minutes later we were invited inside before the start of listening to Terry O'Reilly, who has written a new book called Against the Grain.

O'Reilly is well known among CBC listeners who have been tuning in every week for the past 20 years to his various iterations of his show that basically talks about marketing and advertising. It was first called O'Reilly on Advertising, then The Age of Persuasion, and now Under the Influence. 

His book is about mavericks

Each episode has a theme and in half an hour the professional ad man tells several stories around the topic, taking listeners behind the scenes of how campaigns are crafted.

It is quite ironic that a show about advertising is on the non-advertising station of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, but O'Reilly has a massive and loyal following for two decades, and archives that have been downloaded some 70 million times.

He told the sold-out audience how the show is produced, that while choosing the theme is easy, making them into reality is difficult. He has three researchers who are each assigned a show to work on, finding out more information on various campaigns. 

O'Reilly says they compile about 100 pages in notes, which he then writes into a script, records it and then he listens back, gives suggestions on corrections, then they listen again a few more times before it is sent to the CBC.

His whole family is involved in the business, his wife is his executive producer, and each of his three daughters work on the show too, though he didn't explain what they did, only that they have their own talents.

O'Reilly's fourth book talks about mavericks who forge their own paths to success. He talked about NHL hockey coach Roger Neilson, describing him as a devout Christian who never swore professionally, but was an avid reader of the rules of hockey and would "skate" around them. 

One example is that when he would take his goalie out, Neilson instructed him to leave their stick behind lying on the ice in front of the net so that opposing players would have a harder time flicking the puck into the net because there was no rule about that. But after Neilson did that, the rules changed.

O'Reilly also talked about his popular radio show

Another person he raves about is Taylor Swift, who he points out re-recorded all her albums -- usually a performer will only re-record a few hits. She produced a film about The Eras Tour and had it in the theatres while her tour was on simultaneously. 

Critics thought it would lead to weaker ticket sales for her concerts, but the result was the exact opposite. O'Reilly said he had to revise this chapter many times because Swift was doing something new every few weeks.

He also talked about former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's campaign in 2015, how the Liberals only had 36 seats, and managed to not only sweep the Liberals back to power, but with a massive majority at 184 seats -- with hardly any professional political experience. 

O'Reilly says he had done a lot of political advertising and it's usually negative attack ads on the opposition. O'Reilly wasn't involved in the campaign, but heard Trudeau insisted that his ads would be positive, which was completely unheard of at the time, and that helped propel him into power.

In 90 minutes it was great to get insight into how he produces his show every week, and learn more about his book, which I will definitely read at some point!

What is Enshittification and What to Do About It

Doctorow (right) at the Vancouver Writers Festival tonight

The Vancouver Writers Festival started earlier this week that features over 85 events talking books with authors, workshops for aspiring writers, and encouraging kids to read and write more.

I just came back from a book talk with Cory Doctorow, Canadian journalist, author of fiction and non-fiction and activist in the tech realm about his latest work called Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.

He is quite the prolific person, who says his anxiety keeps him up and so he channels that nervous energy into producing a lot of work. In 2020 alone he published four books. What was I doing in that same period?!

The crowd at the Arts Club Theatre in Granville Island was all excited to hear what he had to say and you really had to focus because he said so much because he added context and explanation to be able to answer questions or expand on an idea.

While he and the moderator sat on stage, above was a giant screen and on it were projected hilarious Photoshopped collages poking fun at the tech world, with lots of sh*t emojis, and how the world is going to sh*t.

Back in 2022 he coined the word enshittification, which was declared Macquarie Dictionary's word of the year in 2024. According to the dictionary, the definition is: "The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking."

Sound familiar? 

Twitter, or rather X is a good example, so is Facebook, Google, and Amazon.

On Facebook we used to see pictures our friends posted or their dogs or their trips and birthday parties, but now we see more ads from companies promoting products and services we don't want. Or how you look for something on Amazon and the first things it lists are items that aren't what you want but you have to keep scrolling down forever just to find something resembling what you want; meanwhile for the company selling on Amazon, they are constantly undercut by the behemoth making it less feasible to do business online.

This is enshittification.

Doctorow says part of it is due to monopolies these tech companies have on us; they suck us into buying their products and services and we're so invested it's hard to get out, or we can't gain more control over our gadgets like iPhones.

He says on the App Store there used to be an app where people could post information they had about ICE agents to warn others to avoid being "kidnapped and sent to a gulag", Doctorow says. But now Apple has removed this app, presumably to comply with Donald Trump...

Meanwhile Doctorow also talks about companies like John Deere that have agricultural machinery that practically all farmers use and fix themselves. But now these machines are so hi-tech that they can't be turned on or work again unless a John Deere technician goes to the farm to type in a special code to unlock it, and each visit costs thousands of dollars.

At one point Uber was toying with the idea of charging people more if their phone batteries were low on power. That's because Uber found that those customers were more willing to pay for surge pricing. It denied this and then later quietly dropped this extra charge all together.

The other problem is that Canada does not have enough competition nor regulation to rein in these companies. Doctorow personally blames former Conservative heritage minister James Moore for not doing enough to help consumers have more control over technology they use.

While Doctorow thinks we should have fixed things a decade ago, he says now is the time to act. The Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) is up for renewal and Canada should demand more instead of just rolling over to get any deal from the US. 

He says the average person can get off Twitter (or X), but are others going to join you on another platform? It's hard. But Doctorow says it's time to become an activist and join a movement to oppose enshittification of companies and demand that governments give us back control of the technology we use. Write to your Members of Parliament about this issue, and support the Canadian anti-monopoly project, Civic Open Media, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, he says.

"The way you get rid of them [people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk] is by fixing the politics, not by reforming or replacing Elon Musk. The problem with Mark Zuckerberg isn't that the wrong person is the unelected social media czar for life of 4 billion people. The problem is that that job exists. We don't need to fix Zuck. We need to abolish Zuck," Doctorow said, to applause and cheers in the audience. 

The Need for Conversation in the Age of Rage

Off (centre) and Williams discussed their books on Friday

On Friday I went to a stimulating discussion at Granville Island as part of the Vancouver Writers Fest about the political and social divide, how disinformation is driving us as a society apart and how we can try to bridge the gap again. The answer? By talking to each other again.

Entitled "Listening in the age of rage", two authors, Carol Off and Ian Williams tackle this very timely topic in their books, At a Loss for Words: Conversation in an age of rage, and What I Mean to Say respectively. 

Off analyses six words

Off was the host of the CBC Radio current affairs show As It Happens and in her over 25,000 interviews, she began noticing, towards the end of her time there, that the people she interviewed, used words as weapons, something that wasn't so prevalent before. So she began examining six words: democracy, freedom, truth, woke, choice and taxes.

She gives the example of freedom and it was during the freedom convoy protests in January 2022 that the protesters kept using the word "freedom". Off says the protesters wanted freedom from society, freedom to do whatever they wanted, the freedom not to care for anyone else.

Meanwhile Williams is a Giller Prize-winning author and professor who has observed how there are two polar opposites, but most of us in the middle are too timid to speak for fear of being cancelled, but he says we need to listen to others and also stand our ground otherwise the middle will be lost and it will be even harder to find any kind of commonality.

He also talked about as a professor, he is expected to "care" more for his students than before. However, he is constrained by university protocols that he should care, but not get too involved, but at least show some empathy.

Off jumped in and said she guest lectured some students about her book and was annoyed that the students believe everyone is entitled to their own opinion and that these opinions are all valued. She said she lost it, and ranted then did that mean that Vladimir Putin's opinion that Ukraine should be annexed should be valued and talked about other dictators. She had a point. It was going too far.

Williams encourages active listening

In addition, she said these dictators do not appeal to rationality, but emotion. When all rationality is gone, all people have left is emotion, and used Donald Trump's silly statement that in Springfield, Ohio, the Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs. The media went there to check, and no, they were not eating people's pets, but it was Trump appealing to people's base emotions of feeling these immigrants were taking away jobs and invading the country.

This analysis helped the audience have a better understanding of how and why people think this way, but perhaps still not quite comprehend how people can even have this kind of bizarre thinking, but this is how dictators can control people, by appealing to their emotions not their rationality.

In the end Off and Williams encourage people to try to stop this by actively listening to the other side to try to understand where they come from and to question them about where they got their information from, to see how credible it is, or to show rationally that their argument has no basis.

An audience member asked about being part of the left, but there are disagreements within the left that he was not doing enough and pouring guilt on him. Williams suggested that he stop thinking this way, that he had done what he could do, or that he has other ways of promoting his point of view otherwise it gets too exhausting to defend yourself when you should be banding together to fight against the right.

The discussion was a lot to take in but it made people in the room realise we are all in this together and we each need to do our part to bridge the gap. So start listening and analysing what words really mean these days!

Review: Ru with Kim Thuy

Kim Thuy's novel Ru was adapted for the screen in 2023

As part of the Vancouver Writers Fest, this evening had the chance to see Kim Thuy again -- in person and on the big screen! In 2009, her book Ru was published, described as a novel about her impressions of her family fleeing Vietnam as refugees and then making it to Quebec, Canada.

She explained after the film screening of Ru that she wrote about her own memories and did not consult her parents about what happened -- it was how she remembered it. 

Ru became a bestseller, originally in French and then translated into English which got even more people reading the novel.

Thuy was 10 years old when she came to Canada

Before Thuy became a writer she was a restaurateur and one of her regular customers was a man she thought had no friends, and read books, but in fact he was reading scripts. He helped her get her story published and then he bought the rights to turn the book into a film.

The film opens showing 10-year-old Thuy, her first name Tinh, in a wealthy home in Saigon, with her grandmother, parents, two younger brothers and an uncle. Her father was a deputy minister in the government. But Communist soldiers charge into the house, ransacking it, and the family has to leave. 

They flee onto a ship, then a small boat and make it to a refugee camp (in Malaysia, but it's not explained in the film), and from there the family is chosen by the Canadian government to go to Quebec because Thuy's parents can speak French fluently.

But when they arrive, it's in the depths of winter and they've never seen snow before. Thuy later said when they arrived she was overwhelmed by the snow, but also they were very unhealthy, having lived in a refugee camp for months, sleeping next to the open latrines so they had a lot of infections, lice in their hair, diarrhea. 

However, the small town they went to welcomed them with open arms, giving them a reception and paired up families with a sponsor family who helped them get set up rent-free for the first three months, helped them with furniture and integrating into Canadian life.

The family landed in Quebec in 1979

And this, Thuy says, is what makes her so grateful for this sponsor family and everyone, including her first teacher in Quebec, to help her to learn how to be Canadian.

Her parents had a rough time starting over, as her dad began working as a food delivery person for a Chinese restaurant, her mother a seamstress in a clothing factory. 

In one poignant scene, an elderly Vietnamese man who shovels snow tells Tinh that he used to be a judge and nearly had his brains blown out. But when the soldier ran out of bullets, the former judge looked up at the sky and for him it was his ticket to freedom. Which is why he kept asking her about the colour of the sky. 

When the filming began, it was all shot in Montreal and they could not go to Vietnam nor Thailand because of Covid-19. Thuy was named associate producer in the film, but she says she was only given this role so that she could be on set because of pandemic restrictions.

Thuy recalls when she stepped onto the set of the home, she began crying because it brought her back to when she was 10 years old, and made us the audience realise that she still hadn't fully processed her trauma. She said the most emotional scene for her was the car driving along a stretch of road in the snow, which to Thuy says demonstrates how far her family had come, and she found it unbelievable that they had come from Vietnam and were now in Canada.

Thuy (right) is grateful about being in Canada

She also says it was at the age of 50 that she first expressed anger, being in touch with emotions she had repressed for decades because her family had to live with Communist soldiers in the house, so they didn't dare say anything that would incriminate themselves; she was forced at school to denounce her parents and grandparents for playing music, or reading books and such. So it was best to keep quiet about everything.

These days she's very open, emotional, lively and grateful for everything that has happened to her in her life. At the end of the family the post script says her parents retired, and her brothers became an actuary (for Sun Life) and a dentist.

Someone asked what Ru means, and she said in French it's a small stream at the top of a mountain, which eventually becomes a river, while in Vietnamese it means a lullaby, lulling a child to sleep. So to her both words were beautiful images she wanted to convey.

Ru

Directed by Charles-Olivier Michaud

116 minutes

Based on Ru by Kim Thuy

8 Authors Talk About Finding Joy in Turmoil

The eight authors with Abdelmahmoud (front) at the Playhouse

The 37th Vancouver Writers Fest officially kicked off today and this evening I attended one of the first events with the intriguing title: Finding Joy Amid Turmoil.

It was held at the Vancouver Playhouse and understandably sold out with attendees wanting to find out from eight authors how to find job amid turmoil.

CBC Radio Commotion host Elamin Abdelmahmoud was the emcee for the evening and he's funnier than he is on the radio. He explained that the festival changed its format for the grand opening event, which usually entailed a talk with a Giller Prize author.

But for some reason that did not happen, and the next suggestion was to present something on Alice Munro, but that was soon nixed, as it was revealed by her daughter that she was sexually abused by Munro's second husband, but did nothing about it.

So Abdelmahmoud joked that tonight's event was Plan C.

We appreciated this third option. Eight authors came up one by one to give their interpretation of finding joy amid turmoil.

Kim Thuy talked about how her family was very poor when they came to Canada from Vietnam, and how they scraped together money to put food on the table. But she and her uncle spent C$12 on the French novel, The Lover. She described how he explained the words to her and she would read the book over and over to the point where she could do dictation perfectly, down to the commas. 

As a 14-year-old she didn't make many friends because she talked like the book, "Your face, devastated".

Tanya Talaga is Anishinaabe and Polish, and talked about her latest book, The Knowing, researching her family's Indigenous stories, and told us how she gave a talk to high school students and reframed Canadian history from the point of view of aboriginals, how their land was arbitrarily taken away from them by the British. But she sees hope in the next generation who understand, but also embrace their indigenous classmates.

Irish author Roddy Doyle also talked about his 14-year-old self being beaten by the priest with a leather strap at school. Doyle still vividly remembers the searing pain, but says it was worth it because they had made fun of the priest for his sexual urges that he displayed during class (rubbing himself against the desk). One day the boys left chalk marks on the desk so that there would be white marks on the priest's groin area...

Heather O'Neill explained she did research for her book, The Capital of Dreams, spending time in Gaza just before the October 7 attacks. She read entries from her journal of her observations, some funny incidents, mostly at a human level.

After a short break the talks continued with John Valliant, speaking with no notes, but weaving a true story about when he first heard about the September 11 attacks, trying to process this shocking news, and then his nine-month old son crawling by and giving him joy. He also talked about how months later, cellist superstar Yo-Yo Ma was performing at the Orpheum and Valliant was amazed at how people were not concerned about their safety, but there for the concert. He said Ma was only focused on making music for people to enjoy, much like what we were doing right now.

Sadiya Ansari's book is Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and May Grandmother's Secret Life, where she described how her father only saw his mother twice, 18 years apart due to partition between Pakistan and India -- thanks to the British. 

Ukrainian journalist Andrey Kurkov wasn't able to make it -- his flight was delayed and he was in Portugal. But another author, Conor Kerr, who is part Ukrainian, read an excerpt from Kurkov's book, The Silver Bone, about the Ukraine-Russian war going on now. He described what it was like to celebrate New Year's Eve in Kiev, unsettling, but trying to make the most of it.

Finally Bill Richardson came on stage. He still talks like his CBC Radio days, linking together bizarre facts and stories. He joked that he was doing a Ted talk, having researched that while we all know Elizabeth Taylor the actress, in history there have been numerous other Elizabeth Taylors. He recounted some of their lives that were hilarious when he read them out. At one point there is Elizabeth Taylor the actress with a tiara on her head in a room full of balls. Richardson explained he had asked AI to find a picture of her in a ballroom. Ha ha.

His Elizabeth Taylor yarn went on a bit long, but he had us laughing, with joy.

The picture above (from left to right): Bill Richardson, John Valliant, Conor Kerr, Roddy Doyle, Sadiya Ansari, Tanya Talaga, Kim Thuy, and Heather O'Neill