Rice says he and David plan to keep their conversations informal and unscripted, just as they would be at an in-person book club, so that their conversations will be accessible to all. As well as paying for recording equipment and web-hosting costs, they also plan to use it to pay guest hosts an honorarium and fund book giveaways for listeners. The funding was approved in January, Rice says. “And I figured, why not record these chats that we have? We’ll bring in other friends too and make that accessible to everybody else.”Īs they resumed their conversation about how they could make a podcast like Storykeepers work, they discovered an Ontario Arts Council grant that could help them cover the overhead costs that they’d been planning to pay themselves.

“It was an opportunity to talk about books, because I do that on a regular basis anyway,” Rice says. She brought the podcast idea up with him again last fall, thinking he might have more time for a project like this since stepping back from his broadcast journalism role at the CBC last May to focus on his literary career. “It’s our responsibility collectively, as readers and as writers, to make sure that those stories go forth for future generations.”ĭavid, the Ottawa-based author of Original People, Original Television: The Launching of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network and a member of the Chapleau Cree First Nation in northern Ontario, first raised the idea of teaming up on a podcast about Indigenous books years ago when Rice was also living in Ottawa, but the timing wasn’t quite right. “We are all story keepers in various senses,” says Rice, the Sudbury-based author of Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press) and a member of the Wasauksing First Nation near Parry Sound, Ont. Storykeepers, a new monthly podcast about Indigenous literature by co-hosts and authors Waubgeshig Rice and Jennifer David, aims to bring conversations about Indigenous books to a wider audience in an audio book-club format.

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