Book Launch | The Long Sixties with Joan Kuyek and Lib Spry`

Octopus Books welcomes Joan Kuyek and Lib Spry to celebrate the Ottawa launch of The Long Sixties: Stories from the New Left, edited by Jim Harding.

Sharing their stories as lifelong activists, Joan and Lib will reflect on their victories and defeats, their personal and political challenges, and how their perspectives deepened and changed along the way. Join us for a conversation on how the lessons of the past can help inform our ongoing fight for a more just and equitable future.

This event will be held at the Great Canadian Theatre Company in their upstairs lobby. Light refreshments will be served and the theatre’s bar will be open for beverage sales. Doors open at 6:30pm, program begins at 7pm.

About the book

In The Long Sixties, seven veteran political activists from the sixties, all still engaged in campaigns and organizations across Canada, tell their stories of transformational activism. This book provides hope, chronicling the significant gains — in advancing peace, international human rights, Indigenous rights, women’s and 2SLGBTQ+ rights, workers’ rights, and environmental protection. Weathered voices open an intergenerational conversation about social solidarity and transformation to address the grave crises we face globally and nationally, including climate catastrophe, escalating warfare, extreme wealth inequality, ethno-nationalism and a heightened continental threat to Canada’s sovereignty.

Joan Newman Kuyek is a writer, researcher and community organizer living in Ottawa. In 1965-70, she worked with the Kingston Community Project (KCP), which was instrumental in getting changes to the Landlord and Tenant Act and establishing the first Legal Clinic in Ontario. She has been an organizer all her life, living in Sudbury from 1970 to 1999 and then in Ottawa as community-focused mining activist. In Sudbury, she helped organize Women Helping Women, Wives Supporting the Strike and Better Beginnings Better Futures Project. She was also a founding National Coordinator of MiningWatch Canada. She is the author of many articles and four books that share her learnings form these experiences.

Lib Spry has been theatre-maker for over sixty years as a director, writer, producer, educator, and translator, specializing in political, non-traditional, clown and physical theatre. She is a recognized teacher of Theatre of the Oppressed. She has founded three theatre companies: Theatre Agile (2011 to present), Passionate Balance (1989-1996) and, with Shirley Barrie, the award-winning Straight Stitching Productions (1986-1993). She has published in Canadian Theatre Review, Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada, alt.theatre, and has a chapter in the book Playing Boal. She is presently working on a solo show It’s in Our Bones, and ¡Unsettling!, a life-size board-game for settlers to look at their relationships to Indigenous realities.

Co-sponsored by Fernwood Publishing.

This event is free and open to all. Please RSVP to help us know how many guests to expect.