R.B. Young
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Learning the Two Row Wampum Treaty

2/22/2021

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What's the banner the marchers are holding in the photo here? What do those two purple stripes symbolize? If you're a non-Indigenous North American, you can be forgiven for not knowing; your education failed you.

The photo itself is from a 2019 protest for Indigenous rights that took place in Toronto. So, do you know the answer?
Protesters carry the two row wampum at an Indigenous rights march in downtown Toronto, 2019. (Photo: Justin Brake/APTN)
(Photo: Justin Brake/APTN)

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Review: The Only Good Indians

1/22/2021

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In The Only Good Indians, Stephen Graham Jones marries the horror genre with an indigenous slant to storytelling and theme. So, the book succeeds as a chilling horror story but also a meditation on respect and compassion for animals: I found it hard, emotionally, to read the character Lewis's initial killing of a young elk. That scene wasn't overdone, just unflinching in its details.

Here's a handful of other fiction elements that really work in The Only Good Indians: Standard third person point of view tells most of the story, but Jones's judicious use of second person viewpoint (narration with "you," not "he/she" or "I") for the elk-spirit was deliciously creepy:


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Kirkus reviews Crimes of Disrespect

1/19/2021

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The reputable Kirkus Reviews has released its opinion on my novel Crimes of Disrespect. In a nutshell, its judgement is this: "A well-paced, topical whodunit." Read the full review.

Kirkus Reviews is American book-review magazine founded in 1933. It previews thousands of books per year. In 2014, the company established the $50,000 Kirkus Prize.

Crimes of Disrespect is my debut mystery novel. It is currently available online, in print and e-book form, on Amazon. Worldwide availability -- in brick-and-mortar bookstores and other online booksellers -- is scheduled for April 1, 2021.
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(Re)Launching Write Ideas

12/3/2020

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R.B. Young's school photo, circa 1971.
This is my blog, welcome to it. Admission: over the years, I've probably had a half-dozen blogs; they've each lasted for three posts -- or perhaps six, at best.

But I will regularly write here. I will! It'll take more discipline than I had as a schoolchild; goofy, Hardy-Boys-obsessed kid that I was.

Part of the reason I've found a blog hard to maintain was my vlogging, which I was doing around 2018, under the channel title Write Ideas on YouTube: www.youtube.com/rbyoung.


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    Author

    R.B. Young is the author of the novel Crimes of Disrespect and of short stories in Canadian and American literary journals. He lives in Kingston, Ontario.

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