Words Worth is happy to partner with the WPL to bring authors Kim Echlin and Ray Robertson for a conversation about truth, storytelling, and independent thinking in turbulent times.
In Tell Others, Storytelling in a World of Turmoil, Echlin explores how stories help us resist silence and make meaning in a troubled world, while in The Right to Be Wrong, Robertson champions the importance of open dialogue and the freedom to disagree. Together, their books offer powerful reflections on how we speak, listen, and seek understanding today.
About Tell Others, Storytelling in a World of Turmoil
From the internationally bestselling author of The Disappeared comes a profound meditation on the cultural impact of storytelling and testimony in five intimate and illuminating essays.
In this moving collection, critically acclaimed novelist Kim Echlin examines how we turn to literature to measure our lives against the darkness of our time. Tell Others explores how literature resists silencing and repression with truth and imagination.
Echlin skillfully blends her lived experience in different parts of the world—teaching in post-revolutionary China, researching war crimes in the former Yugoslavia, studying under one of Canada’s most respected Elders, Basil H. Johnston—with wide-ranging reading that offers solace and highlights the possibility to transform outrage into understanding and resistance.
Looking to her favourite writers—Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Ma Jian, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name a few—Echlin grapples in fresh ways with tyranny, war, sexual violence, and censorship to bear witness to the past and look to the future. Written in characteristically unsparing and evocative prose, Tell Others is an invitation to all readers to acknowledge histories that are difficult to see and to make meaning from the stories that buried bones tell.
About Kim Echlin
Kim Echlin is the award-winning author of Elephant Winter, Dagmar’s Daughter, Under the Visible Life, and Speak, Silence, winner of the Toronto Book Award. Her novel The Disappeared won the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Award and is published in 20 countries. She serves on the board of PEN International.
About The Right to Be Wrong
When did moral certainty and intellectual omniscience become compulsory attributes that every citizen is expected to possess? Why does it seem as if everyone now needs to be on the same side and careful about what they say and think and do? Passionately argued, coolly critical, irreverently humorous, The Right to Be Wrong is a vigorous defense of independent thinking in an increasingly conformist, intolerant, and fundamentalist world.
About Ray Robertson
Ray Robertson is the author of nine novels, seven collections of non-fiction, and a book of poetry. His work has been translated into several languages. Born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, he lives in Toronto.