The power of words . . . and pie
Miriam Toews is looking forward to tucking into a slice of butterscotch cream pie.
She’s standing at a microphone at the home of her hosts, BookThug publishers Hazel Millar and Jay MillAr, recounting what brought her to this salon series on the west side of Toronto. You guessed it: pie.
“Each author gets to request one,” she tells the crowd of fifty or so beaming literary enthusiasts. “Why on Earth would I say no to that?”
Toews proceeds to read an unpublished piece, a short story/poem hybrid that’s made up of a deeply personal list of questions for diagnosing mental illness. The audience is stunned silent, not daring to shift in the collection of garage sale chairs they occupy, for fear of breaking the spell.
Poet Phil Hall also reads, from a slim volume, Bottom, that the couple’s independent publishing house has prepared for the occasion.
He announces he’s 22 years sober, and plunges into stirring poems about his dark years, “a lost Brothers Grimm horrific pathetic lowdown all true.”
A relaxed Q&A follows, then it’s time for dessert. Coffee is on inside, the sound of laughter fills the air, and the kitchen table is groaning under the weight of homemade pies: two kinds of apple, blueberry, plum, date and, of course, Toews’ prized butterscotch.
Hazel and Jay say the HIJ series, which they founded in 2014, is inspired by a defunct journal from the 1990s they produced as students at York University.
“It was all printed on my computer,” Jay explains. “The covers had hand-stamped decorations, ridiculous things like that.
“I would sew them together by hand. I made just enough copies to hand out to all of the contributors and keep one for ourselves.”
“When we decided to do a house reading series, we thought, ‘This is an opportunity to bring the journal back,’ ” Hazel says. “We make a journal for each event.”
In the past 15 sessions, the down-toearth literary power couple has drawn marquee writers such as Brian Francis, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Brecken Hancock and Kate Cayley.
André Alexis, who read from his now Giller award-winning Fifteen Dogs before it was published, delighted all by performing a poem translated into dog-lish.
“He was in our living room, making all these dog noises,” Jay recalls. “Our cat was going bonkers.”
Since the couple often serves pie to friends and colleagues, they decided to incorporate that into the monthly series.
“We’ve made pretty much every kind of pie,” Hazel says. “One of the funniest kinds was for (author) Pasha Malla. He requested what he described to Jay as Dream Pie — a pie he’d dreamt about. It may have sweet potato or pumpkin, he wasn’t sure. So I took it as a challenge, almost like a conceptual poem. I emailed him: ‘I’m going to make this conceptual pie happen!’ He wrote back and said, ‘No, no, this is an actual pie.’
“Turns out it’s called Consuela pie. It’s Portuguese. It actually does have sweet potato in it, and pumpkin.”
“It was so heavy, we put it in the oven and I had to set an alarm for three in the morning to take it out.” Jay adds with a laugh. “That’s how thick it was. It took that long to cook.”
Hosting the free salon series clearly brings the couple a lot of joy.
“It’s an opportunity for us to take a break from being publishers, and just be lovers of books,” Hazel explains.
“Because that is at the very core of who we are, and why we do what we do. It’s an opportunity for us to think about our favourite authors and invite them to our home. We think of it as our little fan boy and fan girl moment.”
“And it’s always just been this delightful excuse to get together and have some pie,” Jay adds. “Hazel and I really like pie.” Tara Henley is a Toronto journalist. The next reading is being held on Sunday — for more information see the website bookthug.ca/hijhouse-reading-series.