You're invited to "The First Thirty", my interview on Junction Reads

Catch me on Thursday, February 13 at 7 p.m. EST (that’s 4 p.m. PST) for a great reading and live interview about When We Were Ashes, my debut novel published by Goose Lane Editions. This is a live interview via Instagram, so check out @junctionreads and click on their “live” icon in your stories feed at interview time. Hope to see you there!

An invitation to a live Instagram interview with Andrew Boden, author of When We Were Ashes, a novel published by Goose Lane Editions.

You're Invited to the Book Launch for My Debut Novel, When We Were Ashes

You're cordially invited to the book launch for my novel, When We Were Ashes, published by Goose Lane Editions! If you like the cello, I hope to have a cellist there, too!

When: Wednesday, October 2, 2024 at 7 p.m.

Where: Black Bond Books at 4118 Main Street, Vancouver

Feel free to invite friends and family, too. All are welcome!

If you'd like to purchase When We Were Ashes, it’s available from Amazon.ca, Indigo-Chapters and Goose Lane Editions. My novel goes on sale September 10th.

Take care and hope to see you there!


Peace Shall Return—Reading Ben Okri

In Ben Okri’s astonishing story “And Peace Shall Return,” an alien cartography expedition explores earth twenty thousand years from now, when our planet finally shows signs of “quiet regeneration.” There’s plenty of anthropological commentary about humanity—us on us, as such stories give authors free reign to do. Near the story’s end is a passage so brilliantly stunning, it’s hard not to quote it in full:

“From all the evidence we have, they seem to have worshipped things. They seem to have been oddly limited in their philosophy. Their images were of themselves, and they saw everything only through themselves. Unlike older civilizations we have encountered in the universe, civilizations that died out hundreds of thousands of years ago, this one showed, in the magical interlude of its existence, no especially astonishing conception of the universe, of the almost infinite possibility of it all. They seemed, on the whole, a rather parochial and tribal species, bedeviled by ideas of race and gender. Not for a single moment during their relatively short history did they grasp themselves as part of a universal order. This sense of nobility entirely eluded them as a species.”

It’s also difficult not to read that passage and feel very small, feel as if our species had grandly messed up on a cosmic scale. But Okri’s observant and critical aliens make very clear that that doesn’t have to be so. There’s a “universal order” out there, a “cosmic nobility” that we could plug into if only we rose above our own “passionate identification with what was smallest in [ourselves],” as Okri writes a little later. 

Can a writer (or anyone else for that matter) connect to that universal order, connect to what is greatest in us?  Express that connection in words, if needed? If so, how? I think of novelist Doris Lessing’s Shikasta; Rilke and Eliot’s poetry; Rumi and Saadi’s mysticism, among others. There’s hints of a cosmic nobility threading through our species, but how to know it, focus it for our planetary betterment, strengthen it as a way to avoid perhaps our epitaph?—“They thought themselves dust, and to dust they returned.” Okri’s alien cartographers leave earth on that dismal note—not without sorrow, they add—to continue on their mapmaking journey to planets that “once bore witness to the serenity and the magnificence of being.”

That could be us.

PS—You can read Okri’s story in Short Stories of Apocalypse published by Australia’s Emergence Magazine.