{"id":30537,"date":"2022-01-06T12:06:39","date_gmt":"2022-01-06T17:06:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/?p=30537"},"modified":"2022-01-13T21:48:36","modified_gmt":"2022-01-14T02:48:36","slug":"apl-picks-debut-novel-for-one-book-one-aurora-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newspapers-online.com\/auroran\/apl-picks-debut-novel-for-one-book-one-aurora-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"APL picks debut novel for One Book One Aurora 2022"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Reading can help us learn about ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So says author Linda Rui Feng, whose debut novel, Swimming Back to Trout River, has been selected by the Aurora Public Library for its 2022 One Book One Aurora campaign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One Book One Aurora (OBOA) is an initiative spearheaded by the Aurora Public Library (APL) to get the community all reading collectively from the same page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the coming weeks and months, free copies of Swimming Back to Trout River will be available in small lending libraries around Town to read, return, or pass along to other readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A full year of programming centred on the themes of the book will be rolled out over the next 10 months, culminating in an author talk at APL this fall. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Swimming Back to Trout River, which was critically acclaimed upon its release, begins in a small Chinese village the summer of 1986, centred on Junie, whose emigree parents to North America promise to collect her by her 12th<\/sup> birthday. Four interwoven stories come together to share a slice of the immigrant experience \u2013 and secrets we keep from ourselves and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am very excited to be connecting with readers at a very ground-up level and to be able to be involved with the reading process,\u201d Rui Feng tells The Auroran. \u201cIt always feels like a privilege and it really brings home why we write.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Swimming Back to Trout River being her first book, Rui Feng says she is still learning \u201call the ways a book goes out to the world\u201d without her, and all the different ways her novel resonates with readers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What strikes a chord with one reader might be very different from what hits close to home for another, a phenomenon she describes as \u201cwonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe way they are feeling the world of my characters makes me feel happy \u2013 they can live in basically a collaborative world and that is always really exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When she sat down to write the book, she wanted to tell a story about immigration \u2013 both the experience of leaving a home country and planting roots in another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wanted to think about the tension between wanting to go to an \u2018elsewhere\u2019 and a very powerful urge to stay put on the other hand. It was an idea I had been thinking about for a long time. Because this is my first novel, I didn\u2019t really have a feel for the scale of the project. I started off imagining two characters most visibly \u2013 Momo, the father in the story, and Junie, who starts off as a ten-year-old child. At some point, the story grew to encompass other people\u2019s lives and other temporalities, other distant memories. That is when I thought a short story probably wasn\u2019t going to cut it!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a good thing Linda Rui Feng expanded her vision for the story as the novel was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize. She says it is \u201chumbling\u201d for her name to be placed alongside authors like Miriam Toews and she still feels like \u201cpinching herself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen readers tell me something in the story makes sense to them \u2013 and one reader told me she was very moved by the story and couldn\u2019t quite articulate how \u2013 makes my writing worthwhile and really makes my day,\u201d she says. \u201cA couple of themes that always animate me is the theme of secrets \u2013 secrets we keep from our families, keep from ourselves, the secrets that just cannot be allowed \u2013 and how they resonate across time, whether these secrets are sometimes necessary or whether they are sometimes detrimental; and that is an open question, of course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAnother thing I am interested in is working at the \u2018macro\u2019 \u2013 history that gets buffeted by large-scale gigantic forces in society \u2013 as well as the \u2018microhistory\u2019 of people\u2019s lives. In my book, I deal with some large historical sources, such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, but I am interested in how those forces come to fruition within individual lives and often unremarkable lives. I love that reading something that is really outside our own experiences and can help us learn about ourselves. Really participating with lives that are removed from ours, even through a book, is something that is very valuable for anyone at any point in time \u2013 particularly during the pandemic when our world is, by necessity, shrunken smaller and smaller. Even today, we are shrinking back to a smaller radius and I would encourage readers to fight that shrinking world by picking up my book!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To find out where you can pick up a copy of Swimming Back to Trout River, take part in myriad activities throughout 2022 related to the book, and to learn more about One Book One Aurora, visit onebookoneaurora.com. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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

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