A Feast of a Conversation with Author Hugh Brody

Ask anyone, from any country, any culture, what they do around the kitchen table, the coffee table or the dinner table — other than eat and drink — and almost without exception they’ll associate food with storytelling.

A dinner party, a wedding, an iftar, a potlatch, a seder, a backyard barbecue, a celebration of life. Lunch with an old friend, or a new one. An elaborate annual thanksgiving dinner or a hurried breakfast as a family scrambles to start every day. Every meal is an opportunity for telling and hearing stories.

At Upstart & Crow, our purpose is not just to sell books but to get stories into the world in as many ways as we can. We’ve been called “Vancouver’s literary living room” but why not its literary dining room too?

Hence, The Long Table.

The idea is simple. Invite eminent or emerging thinkers, artists and authors to share a meal with friends, colleagues or critics in our studio on Granville Island. Record the ensuing conversation and share it as widely as we can, so people everywhere get to eavesdrop on a friendly chat with clever people about important issues of the day.

Basically, we invite you all to dinner, but you don’t have to bring anything, you don’t have to help with the clearing up and no one needs to be a designated driver.

Every few weeks, we clear off the three centrepiece book tables in our store, join them up to form one long table, set places for a dozen or so guests and, with the assistance of technically capable people, wire the table for sound.

We interview the star of the show and have others join the conversation, all the while eating delicious food provided by our restaurant partner, Jamjar. The storytelling often goes long into the night, but we keep the recorded part to about an hour — the perfect length for a podcast. By the next morning, we’ve done the dishes and returned the tables and books to their rightful places. The leftovers last us for days.

How we decided who would be our guest on our inaugural The Long Table podcast is, well, a bit of a story.

A few weeks ago, at the same time as we were brainstorming the idea of The Long Table, a new book came to our attention, Hugh Brody’s Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic (Faber & Faber). Brody is a brilliant anthropologist and filmmaker whose work Ian has followed for decades. Brody published Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier in 1981 and later The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World. He is famous for his respectful and meticulous work with Inuit peoples in the Arctic, for his seminal contributions to Indigenous land-use mapping and for his participation in the Berger Inquiry that mercifully put an end to the Mackenzie Valley pipeline back in the 1970s.

Brody’s beautiful new book is both memoir and an object lesson in the importance of listening, something that in these noisome times seems like a lost art. Having devoured Landscapes of Silence, Ian remembered that he had Hugh’s email address because Hugh had participated in a celebration of life for Thomas R. Berger earlier this year that Ian had been asked to help organize and host. He emailed Hugh in London in late August.

Hugh,

I just finished 'Landscapes of Silence.' What a beautiful book, what a profound meditation. What a journey. As it happens I was married last weekend and an old friend and colleague from my Ecotrust days gifted me the three original volumes of the "Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project." I put that down to more than a coincidence...

One of the first things I read when I moved to Canada from Australia in 1981 was 'Maps and Dreams.' It had a huge influence on my work.

And these days, among other things, I co-own a bookstore in Vancouver, where we will sell your new book and, perhaps, have you come sign books or even do a small event with us…

For me, this confluence of events and interests seems uncanny but wholly logical, almost inevitable. Forgive me if I am projecting somewhat (!) but your new book gave me so much hope among the sadness, a welcome voice in the void. Thank you for that, and all you’ve done.

As it happens, Hugh was scheduled to visit Vancouver in October to participate in events at the Jewish Community Centre and Pacific Cinematheque. He agreed to join us for dinner at Upstart & Crow. Together, we invited Coast Salish artist and advocate Jada-Gabrielle Pape of the Saanich and Snuneymuxw Nations and renowned documentary maker Gary Marcuse, for what turned out to be a reflective, powerful and confronting discussion that explores the harms of silence and the reasons behind it, whether in family dynamics or the ongoing colonial project in Canada.

Our guests spoke to knowledge versus wisdom, information versus stories and the deep need for changing what is listened to, amidst the silence.

And now everyone can listen to the first episode of The Long Table. Feel free to share it far and wide.

Here’s where to listen to The Long Table with Hugh Brody:

On Apple Podcasts

On Spotify