Episode 110: Weird Era feat. Amanda Leduc

About Amanda Leduc: AMANDA LEDUC is a disabled writer whose most recent novel, The Centaur's Wife, is "an exquisite magical world, perfectly rendered, for [a] dark and wonderful story about the dream life of outsiders and the disabled" (Heather O'Neill). Her non-fiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space was nominated for the 2020 Governor General’s Award. Her essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US, the UK and Australia, and she speaks regularly across North America on accessibility and the role of disability in storytelling. Amanda holds a Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of St. Andrews. She has cerebral palsy and presently makes her home in Hamilton, Ontario, where she lives with a very lovable dog named Sitka, who once ate and peed on a manuscript. (Everyone’s a critic, it seems.) About Wild Life: Amanda Leduc’s dazzling new novel follows two walking, talking hyenas as they interact with humans over decades. Blurring the line between human and animal, these strange messengers reveal what is possible when the cages that contain us are broken. In 19th-century Scotland, young Josiah is banished by his father for seeing the divine in the animals around him and sent to Siberia with a small Christian mission to purge such nonsense from his soul. Miserably scrubbing the chapel floor one night, Josiah is visited by what he thinks is God in animal form. When his saviours, a hyena and her mate, rescue him from a natural disaster that kills the other missionaries and then bring him safely home, he founds a religion based on his belief that God granted speech to the hyenas as part of a divine plan to heal and exalt the human race. The hyena pair, Barbara and Kendrith, aren't so sure that Josiah has it right. But with their beautiful strangeness, they utterly transform the people they encounter over succeeding generations. As Josiah's church gathers adherents, more and more animals start to speak to humans—from signing baby gorillas to seductive alligators. At first one or two rebellious pets make a break for freedom, but then comes a mass exodus of all animals held captive, forcing people to contend with a wildness in themselves they have spent millennia denying. The end of this remarkable fairytale is both joyful and devastating, completely dissolving the boundary between what's "human" and what's "animal."