That sounds very, very painstaking.
Oh my God, yes. But rewarding. And it's funny that the day job came first, because this is what I wanted to do.
How did your family feel about you going and doing this?
Um, they were a little bewildered, concerned for my career — and just concerned. But now I think they're proud. I hope they are. You'd have to ask them.
How did your sister [Lauren Kirshner] get involved in the project?
Well, she's an incredibly accomplished writer. She has a book coming out next year; M&S [McClelland & Stewart] is publishing. So I just felt — she writes so beautifully about the ache of being a teenager and a young woman that I thought she would be perfect for it.
I was looking onI Live Here's website, and it looks like you're soliciting videos from people.
I hope so. Yes, one day I would like that website to be an online community where people can share their witness and stories. Right now, my priorities are really, really focused. My goal is to get this book into as many schools as possible.
As I was reading the books, I was thinking how this would be wonderful to see in a curriculum.
So basically, that's the goal, because it's not a marketing tool. It's just that when I was in school and university, and the end of high school, that's when I really began to be interested in this kind of stuff. So I feel like this is a new way of teaching this stuff. So, Loyola is teaching it to professors there. The goal is, I'm going to basically start this program with the book, and basically a student will be selected by a professor to represent the book and form these book clubs and ideas about how to collect material from your own community, creating miniature versions of the books that are local. So, yeah, that's my goal, because I feel like students really have the loudest voice.
