Catherine Hernandez (she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter.

She is a proud
queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese and Indian descent and married into the
Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim Wong-Chu Award for the unpublished
manuscript; was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Awards, the Evergreen Forest of Reading
Award, the Edmund White Award, and the Trillium Book Award; and a finalist for Canada
Reads 2022. She has written the critically acclaimed plays Singkil, The Femme
Playlist and Eating with Lola and the children’s books M Is for Mustache: A Pride ABC
Book and I Promise. She recently wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation
of Scarborough, produced by Compy Films and levelFILM. It was the 1st runner up for the
coveted People’s Choice Award at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival, won the Shawn
Mendes Foundation Changemaker Award, was nominated for 11 Canadian Screen Awards and
won 8, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. The film won the Panavision Spirit
Award for Independent Cinema at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival and was named
#3 of the 20 Greatest Toronto Movies Ever Made by the Globe and Mail. She is the creator of
Audible Original’s audio sketch comedy series Imminent Disaster. Her second
novel, Crosshairs, published simultaneously in Canada and the US and the UK, was shortlisted
for the Toronto Book Award and made the CBC's Best Canadian Fiction, NOW Magazine's 10
Best Books, Indigo Best Book, Audible Best Audiobooks and NBC 20 Best LGBTQ Books list
of 2020. Her third children's book, Where Do Your Feelings Live? which is a guide for kids
living through these scary times, has been commissioned by HarperCollins Canada and will be
published in winter 2022. Her third novel, The Story of Us, about the extraordinary friendship
between a caregiver and her elderly client, will be published in winter 2023 by HarperCollins
Canada. She is currently working on a few television projects and her fourth novel.
Scarborough follows the lives of three children who inhabit Toronto’s low-income east end.
Bing, who lives under the shadow of his father’s mental illness while his mother works tirelessly
in a nearby nail salon. Sylvie, who, along with her family, rides the waves of the shelter system
and the complications of special-needs education. And Laura, whose history of neglect with her
mother is destined to repeat itself with her father.

A sense of community is built once a family reading program is established in the

Kingston/Galloway area under the compassionate direction of childhood educator Ms. Hina. The
program’s goal is to increase literacy on a provincial level. But amidst acute poverty and rampant
drug use, Ms. Hina soon realizes the neighborhood’s people would be more interested in learning
– if only they had full stomachs. Told over the course of an entire school
year, Scarborough explores the positive impact of neighbourhood programming amongst
Toronto’s poor and its devastation when the very governments who established these programs
come and go.
Praise for Scarborough
"From the Rouge Hill waterfront via the 54 bus route, to the little strip mall on Lawson and
Centennial to the National Thrift on Lawrence and Kingston, to the mural on the Warden Station
underpass (Jamaican patty in hand), this is a town coloured by its people, brutal when it’s rough,
comfortably home when it feels like it or when it doesn’t. And this is a story on the reckoning of
privilege and the acceptance of difference. Simply put, it’s a lot."
-- Sadaf Ahsan, National Post

"From Ms Hina’s epistolary battle with her supervisor to the tragedy of an apartment
fire, Scarborough is an engrossing read that’s a lot like its cover. Hernandez sets us running
down that subway corridor, anxious for what comes around the next corner. Heartbreak, to be
sure. But also unexpected joys and big lessons. Highly recommended."
--Jerry L. Wheeler, Out in Print

"Scarborough is raw yet beautiful, disturbing yet hopeful. And though it often feels relentless in
its bleakness, it also gives voice to people whose stories are often unheard, making this an
important book that deserves a wide audience."
— Kathy Sexton, Booklist

"Hernandez writes not from the vantage of 'them over there' but from 'us' and 'we'...
This is a crucial book for Toronto, and a shining example for writers concerned with the cultural
tensions of the now.
--Jonathan Valelly, Broken Pencil
Reviewer: Asam Ahmad

Spooling Disparate Threads: a review of Catherine Hernandez’s

Scarborough

In Scarborough, Catherine Hernandez’s new novel, a cacophony of voices intermingles to create

a unique portrait of the many disparate communities that make up one of the largest and poorest
suburbs in Canada. Hernandez carefully weaves many different characters from many different
social locations and demographics to tell the story of Scarborough, and while the novel suffers
from the weight of so many disparate threads, there are many beautiful gems here that make this
book worth reading.

The narrative opens with a brief scene of Laura, a young white girl, escaping an abusive home in
the middle of the night with her mom. Throughout the text, Laura is neglected by those who are
supposed to care for her and finds meaningful moments of intimacy and connection with
strangers and caregivers around her. Laura’s story opens and closes the narrative; her fate places
her at the centre of much of the narrative thrust of the novel.
gravitational centre of the novel, however, is the community drop-in program for young children
at the Rouge Hill Public School. We are introduced to the centre via an exchange of letters
between Hina Hassani, the hijabi woman who has been hired to run it, and her boss, Jane Fulton.
These letters are dispersed throughout the novel, detailing the growing tensions between boss
and worker, as Jane continually overwhelms Hina with demands for more (unpaid) labour from
her office in downtown Toronto. Hina takes care of many of the kids who appear in the novel,
including main protagonists Laura, Sylvie, and Bing. The centre works as the physical and
metaphorical heart of the book, and many of the characters meet each other there. Hernandez
expertly communicates the difficulties of working in a large non-profit, as well as the joys and
exhaustions of frontline work.
But Scarborough is not a straightforward novel in terms of plot and exposition. Hernandez gives
us brief glimpses of each character’s life in small vignettes, before moving on to new characters
or returning to previous threads, and we are introduced to an abundance of voices almost
immediately. Some of these voices work better than others. Sylvie and her mom are trying to
survive life in a shelter, along with Sylvie’s younger brother Johnny, who has a learning
disability and may be hearing impaired. At the shelter, we are briefly introduced to Mrs. Abdul,
who jealously guards the shared kitchen, and Mr. George, an elderly Ojibwa man who breathes
through a hole in his throat and is tasked with looking after Sylvie and Johnnie when their
mother needs to take care of urgent errands. There is also Edna, the Vietnamese mom who
manages a nail salon and whose son Bing is on the verge of coming out; Winsum, a West Indian
restaurant owner tired of explaining spice levels to white people; Cory, a former white
supremacist who deeply despises all of the racialized ethnicities around him and, as Laura’s dad,
is also usually too drunk to take care of his young daughter; Victor, a young Black artist harassed
by the police; and many others.
Because Hernandez wants to tell so many different stories, sometimes it feels like we are only
getting brief and perhaps superficial glimpses of some of these characters’ lives. The only
narrative for Victor revolves around him getting harassed by police officers as he paints a mural,
which reads as little more than a story ripped from the headlines, without adding anything to who
Victor might be or what other forces have shaped his life beyond his interactions with the police.
Similarly, Winsum is given a single chapter detailing the events of one Christmas eve and then
disappears from the narrative.
The novel suffers from this gamut of voices, and sometimes it reads as if Hernandez felt
obligated to represent every single kind of ethnicity found in Scarborough—sometimes to the
detriment of the voices she has already introduced. To me, someone who grew up in
Scarborough, many of these stories felt familiar, but they also seemed to crowd each other out.
Perhaps the form is meant to convey what it is like to live in Scarborough, shaped as it is with so
many different facets.
The narrative fleshes out the stories of Sylvie, Johnny, and their mom, as well as Bing and Edna,
more than others, and these are some of the best sections of the book. Bing is a gifted student and
his connection with his mom is beautifully rendered. Sylvie’s dad is injured before the narrative
opens, and we are never given the full story of what happened to him, or his relationship with the
family. Characters who look and sound like Sylvie and Bing rarely appear in Canadian literature,
and I wish Hernandez had spent more time detailing the histories, contexts, and interiority of
these characters’ lives.
Reviewer: Trevor Corkum

Catherine Hernandez brings her keen gifts for observation and compassion to bear on her
dynamic first novel, Scarborough. Set largely in the Scarborough neighbourhood of
Kingston/Galloway, the novel explores a compelling cast of adult and youth characters who
congregate in and around a family literacy centre in Rouge Hill Public School.

Hernandez’s novel is an ensemble work, narrated in first person by community members,

young and old. We meet Sylvie, a Mi’kmaq mother, and her daughter Sylvie who live in
supported housing; Laura, a nervous Caucasian girl, and her racist father Cory; Edna, a Filipina
salon worker, and her artistically-inclined son Bing. At the heart of the novel is Ms Hina, a
newly-recruited community worker, who runs the neighbourhood literacy centre where
children and their caregivers gather for stories, food, and social support. It’s Ms Hina who
watches over her young charges and comments, through notes and emails, on the personal
details of their lives.

Hernandez is intimately familiar with Scarborough. Impeccable research renders her

characters’ lives complex and truthful. The neighbourhood is expertly portrayed through
precise physical locations, community landmarks such as parks and playgrounds, specific
corner stores, and strip-mall restaurants. However, it’s the astute rendering of the community’s
social relations that provides so much of the novel’s strength. Hernandez demonstrates the way
power operates intersectionally across markers or race, gender, sexuality, age, income,
employment, and ability. One of the strengths of such a large cast is the ability to observe
markedly different characters interact with one another. A character may wield privilege and
power in one situation — owning a store or business, for example, with the right to deny
service — but experience visceral oppression or abuse in another, replicating the complicated
webs of oppression and power that underlie our relations in large, complex cities.

Here’s Winsum, for example, a neighbourhood business owner, set to relax and unwind in her
restaurant on Christmas Eve:

All you gotta do is take off your apron, put on a nice dress, and sit at the table in
front of the counter instead of behind it. And ta-dah! All of a sudden, you’re at a
restaurant that doesn’t belong to you. No explaining to white people how spicy this
is or how spicy that is. No checking the expiry date on bottles of Ting or wiping
down the tops of Chubby pop drinks. No dealing with malfunctioning freezers. The
only task I had was to wipe away enough frost on the restaurant window so the
“closed” sign could be seen, loud and proud for the holidays.

While Winsum is one of a number of cameo appearances in the novel — community members
who only grace the page for a brief scene or two, yet add depth and texture to the book — it’s
the core group of younger characters who provide the emotional heart to the book. One of the
most vivid young characters is Bing, the gifted and sensitive Filipino boy. We empathize with
Bing as he obsesses over his longing for a popular boy in his class. We feel his internal
emotional turmoil as he struggles both to emulate the boy he believes he should be, but also to
let down his defenses and express the person he is inside. He observes and protects his
hardworking mother and struggles with the burden of responsibility he feels. While much of
the conflict in the novel is external, it’s Bing’s inner conflict, between competing versions of
himself, which reflects his complex internal map of stigma and shame.

Structurally, the novel is innovative. In addition to rotating voices, Hernandez uses emails
between Ms Hina and her supervisor to reveal how power and privilege operate in the
workplace. Ms Hina’s workbook notes and email correspondence create a three-dimensional
portrait of a complex woman dedicated to her job and anchored in her commitment to the
community. We root for Ms Hina and are horrified by the passive-aggressive communication
from her boss. The uncertainty of her employment situation lends this particular storyline a
palpable tension that builds over the course of the book.

My only small quibble with Scarborough is the occasionally awkward tone of a couple of the
younger voices, particularly Laura, who sounds almost too eerily self-aware for such a young
child. Any author writing adult fiction and providing first person commentary from children
has to make particular choices about voice. Err on one side, and the voice becomes naïve and
cliché. On the other, the voice sounds inauthentic. Hernandez does a great job generally — in
particular with Bing, but at times the wise and eloquent reflections of Laura and others are at
odds with their observed actions.

None of this, however, takes away from Hernandez’s success. This is a novel that will be
rightly celebrated by folks in Scarborough and further afield. It’s a celebration of community, a
sensitive and compassionate portrayal of how lives are irrevocably changed, moment by
moment, through small acts of kindness or cruelty. It’s a novel that deserves to be read widely.
Catherine Hernandez is a proud queer woman of colour, radical mother, activist, theatre
practitioner, and writer. She is also the Artistic Director of current performing arts. Her plays
include The Femme Playlist, a one-woman show; Singkil; Eating with Lola (first developed by
fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre); Kilt Pins; and Future Folk, which was collectively written by
the Sulong Theatre Collective. She is the author of the children’s book M is for Mustache: A
Pride ABC Book and her plays Kilt Pins and Singkil were published by Playwrights Canada
Press.

Hernandez recently received the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writers’ Award
and was shortlisted for the Half the World Global Literati Award for her debut
novel, Scarborough, which was written after she spent years working with Scarborough children
as a home daycare provider. Scarborough is currently a Toronto Book Award Finalist, and
Hernandez will be in Vancouver for LiterAsian and Word Vancouver events this September.

Scarborough begins with a unique and moving dedication: “I was fifteen. You were four. / I
taught you drama in a Scarborough community centre. / You were surviving neglect. /
Wherever you are, I hope you are safe / And know I loved you enough to write you this book.”
Are you willing to share the story behind it?

At fifteen years old, I was a volunteer drama teacher at a Scarborough community centre. The
centre was tight on funds and staff. My manager wanted me to focus on teaching drama games to
kids who had particular difficulties being part of the general population of summer camp kids.
One child was a survivor of neglect. She was a young girl, four years of age, whose mother
abandoned her, and whose only next of kin was her grandmother who didn’t want her either. Her
symptoms were so acute that I still remember teaching her things like brushing her teeth in the
centre’s washroom.

The last time I saw her, she was on the subway with her grandmother. I introduced myself and
this woman did not want to have anything to do with me. She clearly did not want to share space
with me or her granddaughter. When they got off at Main station, it was a crowded platform. I
remember seeing this woman walk as fast as she could down that platform trying to lose her
granddaughter. My heart sank. The last image I had of her was this four-year-old girl trying her
best to catch up with her grandmother. I think about her a lot. I hope she is alive. I hope she is
safe. When you do frontline work, that’s all you can do sometimes: hope.

In addition to your art, you’ve also taken on projects like spending twenty-four hours in a
lifeboat filled with dirty water to raise funds—and awareness—for recurring disasters in
the Philippines, with Operation Lifeboat. Would you also categorize your writing as a form
of activism?
I am a proud queer brown woman. Me simply existing is an act of resistance. Everything I do is
resistance. That includes my writing.

I know you did a number of interviews with members of the Scarborough community to
inform this work—what stands out for you from those conversations? Going into them, did
you already know what your novel would be about, or did their words help shape the
themes?

I can’t disclose my interview conversations, unfortunately, due to privacy reasons. The purpose
of interviewing is being open-hearted to how the material will reveal itself. You don’t go into an
interview expecting the interviewee to fulfill your idea of what you want to write about. I try to
remain open-hearted at all times.

You use a multitude of viewpoints to tell this story (I think I counted nineteen if we include
every name from the Ontario Reads Literacy Program administration). How did you
arrive at the decision to tell the story this way? And out of all these voices, do you have a
favourite, or one that particularly resonates with you?

Scarborough—the place—is a neighbourhood of characters. That’s how I grew up: people telling
you stories all the time. The book had to be the same in flavour.

The one voice that people seem to be connecting to is Bing and I have to agree with them. I
wanted to author into being the possibility of a queer femme who has an ally in their own mother
and has support in being who they are. Bing is my dream come true.

You made a point of ensuring the diverse voices in your novel were authentic by engaging
community members to check out your cultural references. You also made sure that you
recognized those efforts. Why was this important to you?

Again, I can’t disclose the nature of those conversations due to privacy, but I can say this: It is
imperative that when you are writing about a culture that is not your own, you check with
someone from that culture and you pay them—either through an exchange or through money—
for their time. It’s not their job to check you. It’s your job as a writer to do your due diligence.
Be open to being wrong. Be open to making changes. Then thank them. Otherwise it’s cultural
appropriation.

What feedback have you been receiving from the Scarborough community about this
work?

All of the Scarborough folks who have approached me have done so with a great amount of
gratitude for capturing their neighbourhood with sensitivity and honesty. This was such a relief
to me as I wanted folks of all income levels to feel seen, to feel honoured and respected.

I was interested in the thread of Sylvie telling this story about Clementine the orangutan,
and understand you even went to the Toronto Zoo to conduct orangutan research. I
wonder if you could speak to the significance of this story?
Funny enough, I did that research way back in 2008 for a story that never came intro fruition.
When writing the book this story suddenly had a place: The true story of when an orangutan had
managed to use a piece of plastic as a raft to swim to the other side of its moat. I wanted to
include this in Sylvie’s narrative because I thought of Sylvie as this magical little girl who
dreams of escape, who dreams of another world but can only get there through storytelling.

Jennifer Amos is a writer based in Kingston, Ontario. Her work has appeared
in FeatherTale, The New Quarterly, and has been longlisted for the CBC short story prize and
shortlisted for Room‘s Annual Fiction Contest.
1. The novel uses multiple narrative voices, letting us hear the perspectives of children,
parents, and teachers. Why do you think the author chose this approach? How does it
affect you as a reader?

2. Many of the characters retell or recount the stories of others. The children recognize
resilience and love in adults, for instance. How are the characters interconnected by
overlapping or parallel stories?

3. How does the novel demonstrate economic disparities? What does the email
correspondence between Ms. Hina and her supervisor suggest about the differences
between downtown Toronto and Scarborough?

4. How does it feel as a reader to have children as narrators? Do their limitations in

language or maturity affect the story?

5. What are some of the structural challenges that the characters face in trying to get their
basic needs met? For example, what obstacles does Sylvia’s family run into as they try to
get medical care for her brother? Why does Ms. Hine feel the need to offer food at a
program based on literacy?

6. Is it possible to keep school and politics separate as Jane Fulton suggests to Ms. Hina?
And, is it desirable to keep them separate? Why or why not?

7. The concept of heteronormativity refers to how our society assumes that heterosexuality
is the norm. This is reflected in everything from our assumptions (e.g. that little boys will
grow up and marry girls) to popular culture (e.g the preponderance of heterosexual
characters in TV and the movies). How does heteronormativity influence the lives of
characters like Clive (Lorna’s husband) and Bing? How does it influence their ability to
live their “truth”?

8. Bing and his mother Edna remember the night of Bing’s performance with small
differences. How does memory shape the novel? Does it make characters biased or
untrustworthy narrators?

9. Why do you think the author chose to divide the sections of the novel into seasons? How
does this affect you as a reader?

10. Although there is tragedy toward the end of the novel, many of the children and adults
gain community support and strength. What are the stories of resilience and of change in
the novel?

11. What kinds of systemic changes would be needed to address the challenges faced by the
characters in Scarborough? Are there efforts that you know about? Do you feel a desire to
get involved in creating change?