Newmarket farmer’s market
Every summer, the Writers’ Community of York Region (WYRC) holds a book fair (The Bookshelf) at the Newmarket Community Centre & Lions Hall, next to the farmer’s market. The fair showcases over 40 local authors, publishers and artisans through readings, discussions and a tradeshow that features writers’ works in a variety of genres from science fiction and fantasy to mystery, inspiration, science, history, self-help and children’s literature. I participated in this year’s festival on July 7, 2018.
Reading from “Water Is…The Meaning of Water”
Nina at her book table
At the Reading Lounge onstage in the adjoining Farmers’ Market, I read from my Amazon-bestselling “science-for-lay public” book Water Is…The Meaning of Water. As children and their parents played in the main water feature behind me, I introduced the term “limnology” (someone who studies freshwater) and talked briefly about the meaning of water with an audience eager to learn.
“We can’t live without it, so maybe we should start respecting it; this beautifully designed book by a limnologist looks at water from 12 different angles, from life and motion and vibration to beauty and prayer,” said Canadian author Margaret Atwood when she selected Water Is… as her first pick in the New York Times ‘Year in Reading.’
Each of the 12 chapters completes the phrase “Water is…” with terms that evolve from science into philosophy and spirituality; terms such as “magic”, “life”, “motion”, “communication”, “memory”, “rhythm”, “vibration”, “beauty”, “story”, “wisdom”, “prayer”, and finally “joy”.
The book is, after all, a celebration of water.
I first shared some history on the making of the book. I shared that the pursuit of this book was oddly serendipitous and “entangled.”
Nina and son go hiking
“Early on, during the research and writing of this book, I discovered that this project on water had become a gestalt watershed for all the important moments in my life. Places I’ve been. Things I’ve learned. People I’ve met and with whom I’d had surprising discussions and realizations. All spanning many years. And many of them totally unrelated. And yet, now, with a sudden flood of context, their significance has transcended into a new fabric of meaning through surprising connection. Like puzzle pieces cooperatively arranging themselves into a symbiotic pattern of synchronicity.”
Writer and philosopher Jake Kotze suggests that, “Synchronicity happens when we notice the bleed-through from one seemingly separate thing into another—or when we for a brief moment move beyond the mind’s divisions of the world.” Synchronicity and serendipitous discovery, like metaphor, appear when we change the way we look at things.
“Serendipitous discovery comes to us through peripheral vision. Like our muse, it doesn’t happen by chasing after it; it sneaks up on us when we’re not looking. It comes to us when we focus outward and embrace our wonder for this world. When we quiet our minds and nurture our souls with beauty. It is then that what we had been seeking naturally comes to us. Like a gift.”
For my reading, I chose several summary quotes that appear at the end of each chapter of the book. These quotes were also featured earlier this year in “Morphology”, an art exhibit in Mississauga that honored the creation of a marsh park as part of Jim Tovey’s vision for the Lakeview Site and the Waterfront Connection:
Quote from “Water Is…” on display at Mississauga Civic Centre
Wonder Woman Respects Water
“Respect water!” says Wonder Woman (aka cosplayer Jes Tongio). Wonder Woman was careful to point out with her wise Amazonian sword of Athena (goddess of wisdom)—forged by Hephaestus—that “Water Is…” provides a doorway to wonder and responsible action.
Wonder Woman (Yes Tongio) with “Water Is…”
Other Authors at The Bookshelf
Clair McIntyre and Merridy Cox
I met and visited with other fellow writers, including Clair McIntyre, author of YA/fantasy, and crime writer Joan O’Callaghan.
Fellow authors who read at Reading Lounge included Douglas Smith, award-winning author of “Wolf at the End of the World”; and A.A. Jankewicz,
A.A. Jankewicz with Nina Munteanu
fantasy author of Q16, and who’s short story appears in the Water Anthology I edited for Reality Skimming Press; and Gabriela Casineanu read from her bestselling book Introverts: Leverage Your Strengths for an Effective Job Search.
Claudiu Murgan read from Decadence of the Soul; he is launching his recent science fiction novel Water Entanglement next month.
Myth Hawker Travelling Bookstore was also at the festival. Specializing in Canadian authors, Canadian content, and Canadian small press, they carry an extensive list of local Canadian authors wherever they go across Canada.
The Immigrant Writers Association (IWA)
Gabriela, the two Andreeas, Nina and Claudiu
The IWA was also represented, along with member-writers Gabriela Casineanu, Andreea Munteanu, Claudiu Murgan and Andreea Demirgian.
The Immigrant Writers Association provides programs, activities, and services that empower and support immigrant writers in their journeys. According to their website, the goal of the IWA is to “encourage immigrants to express themselves through writing, to bring more awareness, compassion, and peace into the world.”
As second-generation immigrant daughter to German and Romanian parents, I recently joined the IWA. I look forward to mentoring new writers and providing workshops and lectures to share my experience as a writer, editor, and teacher of fiction and non-fiction.
M.J. Moores, chair of the board and founder of Bookshelf
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist, limnologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit www.ninamunteanu.ca for the latest on her books.
“I write SF about a near future ‘Gaian’ world too, and at times felt I was reading a prequel to my own novels, but that’s not why I rated this collection so highly. I did so for two reasons. First, because the science was so interesting, combining visionary metaphysical speculation with AI corporate tech in scenarios that often seemed chillingly possible. Second, because of the author’s focus on the effects of these developments on human beings with complex pasts and desires. Jealousy, lust, loneliness, grief and love are all drivers of these taut and fascinating narratives…”–Amazon Review
Evolution is the language of destiny. What is destiny, after all, but self-actualization and synchronicity? If evolution is the language of destiny, then choice and selection are the words of evolution and “fractal ecology” is its plot.
On the vertical argument, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamark developed a theory of biological evolution in the early 19th century considered so ridiculous that it spawned a name: Lamarkism. His notion—that acquired traits could be passed along to offspring—was ridiculed for over two hundred years. Until he was proven right. Evolutionary biologists at Tel Aviv University in Israel showed that all sorts of cellular machinery—an intelligence of sorts—played a vital role in how DNA sequences were inherited. When researchers inserted foreign genes into the DNA of lab animals and plants, something strange happened. The genes worked at first; then they were “silenced”. Generation after generation. The host cells had tagged the foreign genes with an “off switch” that made the gene inoperable. And although the new gene was passed onto offspring, so was the off switch. It was Larmarkism in action: the parent’s experience had influenced its offspring’s inheritance. Evolutionists gave it a new name. They called it soft inheritance.
I teach writing at the University of Toronto and fiction writing at George Brown College in Toronto. A question I’m often asked is how I get my story ideas. I always start by sharing my favourite example of how I came to write my historical fantasy 
Intrigued by this little known order of religious crusaders, I pursued the premise of an alternative consequence: what if the Teutonic Knights had NOT underestimated their enemy and won the Battle of Grunwald? Would they have continued their catastrophic sweep of Northeast Europe into Russia and beyond? Would they have claimed the whole for Germany’s expansionist lebensraum movement, fueled by its sonderweg—a dialectic that would ultimately lead to the killing fields of the Holocaust? What if the success of the Teutonic Order helped consolidate a united fascist elite, ambitious to conquer the world? What if Nazism sprang up 100 years earlier than it did in our current reality?
Spanning from medieval Poland to present day Paris, 
across a story that stumped my super CSI powers of deduction was a real treat.”
were incredibly strong and involved you in their lives. The flow was fun & fast-paced. Merci, Nina. Great book!”
Nina Munteanu is an ecologist, limnologist and internationally published author of award-nominated speculative novels, short stories and non-fiction. She is co-editor of Europa SF and currently teaches writing courses at George Brown College and the University of Toronto. Visit 
She imagines its coolness gliding down her throat. Wet with a lingering aftertaste of fish and mud. She imagines its deep voice resonating through her in primal notes; echoes from when the dinosaurs quenched their throats in the Triassic swamps.
Emilie Moorhouse of 
“…In an interesting scarcity future in which we follow the fate of a character abandoned by her mother, water itself becomes a character. In the second paragraph we’re told that “Water is a shape shifter,” and in the next page we encounter the following description: “Water was paradox. Aggressive yet yielding. Life-giving yet dangerous. Floods. Droughts. Mudslides. Tsunamis. Water cut recursive patterns of creative destruction through the landscape, an ouroboros remembering.” These descriptive musings cleverly turn out to be more than metaphors and tie in directly to the tale’s surprising ending.”—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, 
Water Is… The Meaning of Water
But Joshua is a spirited creek – in spite of all it has been through, Joshua Creek is among the top two urban creeks for healthy water quality, and is still inhabited by a variety of aquatic animals like small fish and insects. Joshua Creek is home to forests, wetlands and thickets with around 150 plant species, and provides an important natural habitat corridor for the movement of birds and other animals, including migratory species. Rather than exclusively shrinking, there are also areas of Joshua Creek that are actually in the middle of regrowing their forests, and in spite of everything, Joshua still retains some beautiful gems of natural areas.”
Saryn and Nina discuss some of water’s controversial properties and the claims about water and how geopolitics plays a role in this. She brings in her own career as a limnologist and how she broke away from her traditional role of scientist to create a biography of water that anyone can understand—at the risk of being ostracized by her own scientific community (just as Carl Sagan and David Suzuki were in the past).
Nina responded with, “The why of things and hence the subtitle: the Meaning of Water. What does it mean to you… That’s what’s missing a lot of the time. We are bombarded with information, knowledge and prescriptions but the subliminal argument underneath—the why—why should it matter to me—is often missing. That becomes the sub-text. And it’s nice when it comes to the surface.”
Nina Munteanu’s “The Way of Water” and the anthology in which it appears was recently praised by Emilie Moorhouse in Prism International Magazine, in a review entitled 
“The Way of Water” (La natura dell’acqua) was translated by Fiorella Smoscatello for Mincione Edizioni. Simone Casavecchia of SoloLibri.net, describes “The Way of Water” in her review of the Italian version:
“The Way of Water” will also appear alongside a collection of international works (including authors from Greece, Nigeria, China, India, Russia, Mexico, USA, UK, Italy, Canada (yours truly), Cuba, and Zimbabwe) in Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso’s 
Nina Munteanu’s near-future speculative short story “The Way of Water” in Bruce Meyer’s (editor) “Cli Fi: Canadian Tales of Climate Change”, published by 
A bilingual print book by 
” ‘The Way of Water’ is to be ‘a shapeshifter,’ says Nina Munteanu in her dystopian narrative, where she draws a dark scenario and, unfortunately, not too improbable in the near future. In the universe of the story water has become a very precious commodity: rationed consumption, credits (always of water) accounted for and debts collected…The Chinese multinationals have exchanged the public debt of other states with their water reserves with which, now, they can control the climate, deciding when and where it will rain. Who understands this dirty game has been silenced, like Hilda’s mother, a limnologist, inexplicably arrested and never returned; like the daughter of two water vendors, mysteriously disappeared, after having decided not to bow to economic powers: Hanna, who now prefers secure virtual identities to evanescent real appearances. Water. The two, like the covalent bond of a complex molecule, develop a relationship of attraction and repulsion that will first make them meet and then, little by little, will change into a tormented love but, at the same time, so pure as to cause Hilda at great risk, to make an extreme decision that will allow Hanna to realize the strange prophecy that the internal voice, perhaps the consciousness of water, had resonated in the two women for a long time.
“The Way of Water” will also appear alongside a collection of international works (including authors from Greece, Nigeria, China, India, Russia, Mexico, USA, UK, Italy, Canada (yours truly), Cuba, and Zimbabwe) in Bill Campbell and Francesco Verso’s 
47 Uma a (also called Horus) was colonized in ancient times by the Khonsus, a raptor-like biped race with mind-probing capability. It is also the home of the ancient migrating trees, ammuts (giant flying insects), and the weeping mountains with their narcotic boiling seas used by the giant apophus to attack and set its millions of babies to devour Rhea in Book 1.
You can also listen to the Podcast 
