{"id":25429,"date":"2019-12-18T19:10:54","date_gmt":"2019-12-19T00:10:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=25429"},"modified":"2019-12-18T19:11:03","modified_gmt":"2019-12-19T00:11:03","slug":"gibb-brings-down-curtain-on-one-book-one-aurora-2019-with-author-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/gibb-brings-down-curtain-on-one-book-one-aurora-2019-with-author-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Gibb brings down curtain on One Book One Aurora 2019 with author talk"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It has been a whirlwind year for Toronto-based author\nCamilla Gibb.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In addition to her novel, Sweetness in the Belly,\nreceiving the big screen treatment with a film adaptation that made its world\npremiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this past September,\nher story of Lilly, a young English orphan sent to live in Harare, Ethiopia,\nhas been a focal point for many local booklovers as the 2019 selection of the\nAurora Public Library\u2019s One Book One Aurora campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout the year, the Aurora Public Library (APL) has\nspearheaded a full year of programming exploring various themes contained\nwithin the book, from evocative talks, to film screenings, to photography and\nwriting contests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Book One Aurora 2019, however, culminated last month\nin a special author talk given by Ms. Gibb herself in APL\u2019s central Living Room\nspace. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI want to thank [Reccia Mandelcorn, APL\u2019s Manager of\nCommunity Collaboration] very much for really thoughtful, creative programming\nyou have developed around this book,\u201d Ms. Gibb told Ms. Mandelcorn and the\npacked audience. \u201cI think programs like this are kind of remarkable in the\nsense that they use a book as a starting off point to talk about issues and\nideas, and I think that is how a book wants to carry on living in the world as\na form of conversation and [in a world of] big box stores, something we pass\nfrom hand to hand, or participate and share in the context of a book club.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In sharing her story, Ms. Gibb spoke about the origins of\nSweetness in the Belly itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The roots of the story began to form when Ms. Gibb was\nstudying for her PhD in social anthropology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She developed an interest in the Muslim world from a\nrelatively young age, swept up, courtesy of her mother\u2019s partner who grew up in\nLebanon, by a world that seemed a little bit mysterious and just out of her\ngrasp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was curious enough that once I got to university I\nstarted studying not only anthropology but also middle eastern studies,\u201d she\nexplained. \u201cI knew that I wanted to learn the language, so in my third year of\nundergraduate at the University of Toronto, I went to Cairo and spent a year\nliving in this heaving, seething metropolis of 18 centuries of history and it\nwas a vastly overwhelming place where I couldn\u2019t have felt smaller.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She lived in a university residence at this time primary\nof Arab women and this environment further stoked her interest \u2013 and her\ntravels, which eventually took her to Ethiopia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book was a success and its most recent chapter \u2013 the\nfilm \u2013 took her back to Ethiopia and back to the life-long friends she made\nduring her time there, many of whom served to inspire her book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis book has had an interesting life,\u201d she said. \u201cTen\nyears ago, it was optioned for a film and it took ten years for a very\npassionate Canadian producer to pull it all together. I wasn\u2019t asked to write a\nscript. I would much rather have it done by someone who was a professional\nscreen writer. I came in at quite a late stage, read the script and I saw this\nhappening, which was quite surreal. This thing had to be [filmed] here in the\nplaces that I have been. It was in that context that I got to have these really\nwonderful reunions with friends and family and people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the resulting product, the film, also courted\ncontroversy with an early synopsis of the film released just prior to TIFF,\ndescribing Lilly as a \u201cwhite Ethiopian\u201d woman portrayed by Dakota Fanning\nsparking, despite its inaccuracy, a lengthy social media discussion on cultural\nappropriation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think our conversations around appropriations have\nbecome so much more sophisticated and complicated,\u201d Ms. Gibb told the APL\naudience. \u201cWhat happened in advance of the screening at TIFF was some\ncontroversy because a press release came out saying \u2018Dakota Fanning plays white\nEthiopian.\u2019 They had been really careful around the wording, but this was a\ndisaster, a three-day twitter storm where a lot of work had to be done. She is\nnot a white Ethiopian. The director is Ethiopian, but the director is not a\nMuslim.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more on One Book One Aurora, including some of the work resulting from this year\u2019s reading campaign, visit onebookoneaurora.com.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Brock Weir <\/strong><\/p>\n\r\n\"Facebook\"<\/a>\"twitter\"<\/a>\"mail\"<\/a>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It has been a whirlwind year for Toronto-based author Camilla Gibb. In addition to her novel, Sweetness in the Belly, receiving the big screen treatment with a film adaptation that made its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this past September, her story of Lilly, a young English orphan sent to live […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":25426,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","category-general_news","category-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/12\/2019-12-18-04.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3D2k4-6C9","publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 13:53:07","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}