Nearing the one-year anniversary — if such a term applies — of my dissertation defence, I am taking this opportunity to mark the occasion by chatting about an author I’ve spent around a decade of my life studying: Douglas Coupland.

In this episode, I talk about teachin’ Coupland’s novel JPod (2006) in a third-year Canadian literature course. Of note, from the episode: feeling unprepared but doing things anyway; forms of reading and how they’re validated in teaching and learning spaces (what about skimming, skipping, scrolling?); and teaching a difficult text which includes material that’s tough to navigate using traditional methods of literary study. And more!

• You will likely be able to order JPod from your local bookstore. In Saskatoon, I like Turning the Tide and McNally Robinson.
• If you want to read more about the topic of JPod, paratext vs. text, and the “interstitial material” that interrupts the plot of the novel, I have an article on that very topic.
• Emmy Lee Wall’s “Douglas Coupland: A Selected Chronology” in Douglas Coupland: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything provides an extensive list of Coupland’s written and visual work, as well as other events and milestones, up to 2014.
• You can find more about Gérard Genette’s theory of paratext in the book Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. See this piece for more on how paratext affects literary value and shapes meaning (and check out the other pieces in CanLit Guides for more teaching resources!).
• Check out Paul Martin’s Sanctioned Ignorance: The Politics of Knowledge Production and the Teaching of the Literatures of Canada and Lorraine York’s Literary Celebrity in Canada (for more on literary celebrity and citizenship), both of which I refer to in the episode.
• Read âpihtawikosisân’s / Chelsea Vowel’s piece “Beyond territorial acknowledgements.”
• For the Land Acknowledgement videos created by Stryker Calvez and Rose Roberts at the University of Saskatchewan’s Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching and Learning, click here.

The podcast music is by Dyalla Swain, whose work you can find here. The podcast graphics are by @muskrathands.

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**Read the transcript for this episode here.**