Visit the link to let the shop know what you look for when you walk into a bookshop.

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Hey Team,

I am opening a bookshop.

You may have noticed some changes to the page. If you’re here because of TikTok (and why else would you be?), you may be thinking this isn’t what you signed up for. You’re probably wondering where all of the book recs and reviews are, or why I’m trying to change everything up on you.

Let me try to explain:

I, along with my partner, Chantelle, am opening a Brick-n-Morter bookshop here in Regina, SK Canada. I was going to say, “I’m thinking about starting a bookshop”—or—”We’re hoping to start . . ..”—or even—“We’re trying to . . ..,” but I’ve decided none of those sounds as determined as I am to do this, so I’m not leaving room for questioning.

We are going to open The Black Bird Commons, which, if you stick with me, is going to be much more than a bookshop.

History

This has been a dream of mine for many years, for as long as I can remember.

Regina is not a bookish town. We have two used bookstores, one that has thousands of titles, but is organized haphazardly. The shelves are a mess, and they’re way too cramped together, and you have to look for an hour before you find anything you want. The owners know where everything is. If you ask them, they’ll take you right to it, or to where it would be if they had it. But I don’t always want to have to ask for help. Sometimes I just want to peruse the shelves and happen upon some gem or another. The store just isn’t set up for this kind of book shopping.

Plus it’s all used books.

The other store is only open for 4-6 hours a week, and it’s hidden. If you don’t know it’s there, you’d never find it. You can also make an appointment to visit, if the owner has time.

Confession: I’ve never been there.

Other than that, we have a place that’s called a bookshop online but which mostly sells crystals and gems and mood stones and jewelry and incense and trinket boxes and New Age ephemera. It’s all beautiful, but to call it a bookshop is stretching things in my mind. They do have a small section of shelves. There are books on the shelves. But they all have to do with crystals and gems and mood stones and jewelry and incense and trinket boxes or New Age ideas.

And there is a Christian bookshop. There has always been a Christian bookshop in Regina, but, as you can imagine: the selection is limited.

The only place to buy books, or at least books that I’m interested in reading, has been Indigo, Canada’s largest (or only) book chain. I love it. My favourite place in Regina. When I saw my books on the shelves there, I nearly cried. I’ve spent more time in the shop—if  you combined all the years I’ve been visiting—than in some of the houses I’ve lived in.

It is not, however, the type of bookshop I’ve dreamt of opening

In 2020, a little shop opened. It was more like something I’ve dreamed of opening, a small shop in the centre of Regina’s Cathedral neighborhood. It’s owner seemed to like reading and was knowledgeable about books. She was willing to host author readings—something Indigo never does, for some reason—and smaller events in collaboration with the Saskatchewan Writers Guild, SK Arts, even the public library sometimes.

But opening a shop in 2020, not even a month before the pandemic shut everything down, could not have been easy, and in the end, it proved too hard. They put up a good fight, but they were forced to close their doors last year.

So once again: Regina is without an independent bookshop that sells new books.

In 1998, I was fourteen-years-old. I was already a reader, but I was doing it in secret, thinking it wouldn’t earn me any “cool guy” points if people knew I actually liked it—that’s another story for another time. But when Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan) is reading books to the kids that come into the shop, or when she’s reminiscing about her time twirling around the shop, as a child, when her mother ran the place, or near the end of the film, when she’s distraught because she had to close her shop (as a result of a big chain bookstore opening down the block) and she’s crying in Fox Books but still helps a customer find a book they're looking for, even when the kid working there has no idea where to find it—probably because he’s been pressured to sell candles and purses more than he’s been encouraged to learn anything about the books they’re carrying—I thought: I’d like to be Kathleen Kelly.

Or something like her.

In 2006, I was living in Calgary, a big city one province to the west of us. Really, I was living at a weird Bible college in the woods outside of a town—a hamlet!—called Caroline, but Caroline had here than 1,000 people living there, and one shop, which was barely a shop. I had to drive thirty minutes just to get a cold, if I ever wanted one. So I’d spend every spare minute I had in Calgary, driving around, exploring a city much bigger than any I had spent much time in.

Calgary had more bookshops than I could count. They had several Chapters/Indigo stores, of course, but they had at least half-a-dozen used bookshops, some of which I could get lost in for hours upon hours. And they had so many quaint, independent New bookshops, all of them similar—in some way—to The Shop Around the Corner, Kathleen Kelly’s shop. There were cute little children’s bookshops, with even cuter little kids’ toys and puppets and puzzles. They had shops that specialized in Canadian or local authors. They had one shop that had nearly every single book I ever asked them for. Of course, Calgary had more than a million people living there—even back in the early aughts, and Regina was somewhere around 125K—but I started wondering why Regina had never had a good and sustainable Indy bookstore.

I think it was then when I started daydreaming—fantasizing, really—about opening a bookshop.

The shop would sell books that I love, and somehow, everyone in town would love the same books. It’s walls would be covered in art. It would sell ceramic mugs. It’d sell coffee and tea that was named after famous authors—The London Fog, for instance, would be called a Charles Dickens. It’d have unique mugs that made people say, “What kind of place is this?” and when they left, they would run to tell all of their friends about the sweetest bookshop they ever did see.

It was a busy shop. I ran it on my own, back then, and I’d lean on the counter and talk to curious patrons about new books that I’d read, or old classics I had unearthed. We’d share ideas along with our Charles Dickenses. Authors from all over Canada made sure they stopped there when they were on book tours. I published book after book--my own work--and people trekked to the shop to buy them straight from the author. I had a cool signature.

But in 2006, I had no idea how to start a shop. Or a cafe. I didn’t even like coffee back then. I thought starting a business was for other people, actual adults who knew what they were doing.

Twenty years later, I still have no idea how to start a shop. Or a café. But I’ve realized there are no actual adults who know what they’re doing.

Today

So I’m going to do it. With the help of Chantelle. She and I have been talking about the idea for a few years now. She’s an artist, and she’d love to open some sort of studio where people can meet and create together, a place where she can create her own art—mainly ceramics—while showing others the joy of creating. And while a bookshop is not a studio, The Black Bird Commons will be more than a bookshop. We’re in the process of organizing an Adults Only Scholastic Book Fair, probably as a fund raiser for the shop. We’ll have Bring Your Own Craft nights. We’ll have an Artists’ Show-n-Tell night, where artists, whoever fancies themselves an artist and wants to share something they’ve created—visual, audible, textual, whatever—can stand before other artists and share their shit.

We’ve got a full-fledged menu of drinks: The James Baldwin (Espresso); The Stephen King (Red Eye); The Eileen Myles (Breve), and many more (including, of course, The Charles Dickens). We’ve even got some alcoholic drinks named: Everyone In this Room Will One Day be Drunk (B-52), The Bell Jar (Lemon Drop), A Sally Rooney (Guiness), A Tim Blackett (Original 16—a local pilsner). We’re planning to have a full or part time liquor license, at least for these themed events.

These are all tentative ideas, nothing finalized, but you can see we’re working on things. We’ve registered for some wholesale merchandise ordering, websites for wholesale booksellers. We’ve got some weird mugs that should make people say, “What kind of place is this?” and run out to tell their friends. We’re ordering art from Indigenous artists all across Canada to fill the walls of the shop. 

The book selection will feature everything from a Black Voices section to a Latinx section to a full Queer authors section to an Around the World Fantasy section. And It will have a dedicated Canadian authors section, focusing on Indigenous and prairie authors, as well as Saskatchewan authors, and—yes—Regina and Treaty 4 authors.

In this cultural climate in which over 10K books have been challenged or banned over the last year, we are determined for the shop to be a beacon of hope for these voices that are so often silenced.

Historically, bookshops have functioned as a community commons, a place where people can gather and share ideas, to learn from one another, and to share space with people not like themselves. Studies have shown that simply the presence of Indy bookshops causes surrounding businesses to be more successful, and for surrounding property values to rise in their respective neighborhoods. Bookshops are consistently listed as "adding significant value" when neighborhood citizens are asked to judge nearby businesses.

On top of that, working at the public library here, I have found so many people who love to read, obviously, but who tell me they’re devastated that our only Indy shop had to close, that they wish there were places to find books they actually want to read, that they're so grateful for the libraray, but that they use it more than they’d like because they don’t want to buy from huge corporations like Indigo (or more regularly: Amazon). Similarly, the library is indicative of the importance of gathering places. The library is used on a daily basis, not just to find books, but as a gathering place. Friends meet for lunch, people with nowhere else to go congregate there, and yes, some of them even start reading books. Newcomers visit for English classes, to apply for permanent residence, to find books in their own languages. Our Family Games & Puzzles program on Saturday afternoons is one of our most popular. Daycares bring their children every day of the week. The puzzle table upstairs is always surrounded by patrons. It is the one place in Regina where nearly everyone feels like they can go and just be--be free to sit and relax, free to have a chit-chat in quiet, free to find new ideas and experiences, to find things they never even knew they would enjoy.

We need more of these spaces. And while I’ve wanted to sell books since I was fourteen, now that I’m forty, I’m realizing that curating a space where all peoples feel safe and welcome and free to be themselves while also (maybe; hopefully) providing opportunities for them to develop a new or renewed love of reading, or to meet and make new friends, or to read quietly while other nerds mull around, or to show someone the puppet they’ve made, or to sit with other crafters while they knit, or to sing karaoke without fear, or to sip from a super weird mug—That sounds like something I--Chantelle and I both--want to be a part of.

Wouldn’t you? 

Let's start it ourselves.

If you’d like to be part of building this space and this community (a large part of which will still be online), you can do so here on Bindery. You can also check out our Patreon:

patreon.com/TheBlackBirdCommons . Our Patreon has even more opportunities than here on Bindery, and more Benefits for you.

You can also find us on Facebook @ The Black Bird Commons, and Stay tuned for Insta and TikTok pages.

Any and all are welcome, and Any and all subscribers to any of these pages help; even the free subscriptions are helping to build the kind of community we want.

To me, this feels like something big. Like it could change a lot of things, a lot of people.

Come join us.

You can contact us @ theblackbirdcommons@gmail.com if you’d like to work more directly with the shop.

Current Fundraising Goals:

Stocking Shelves – Approx: $20,000

Commercial Espresso Maker - Approx: $18,000

Furniture and Shelves – Approx: $10,000

5 Tap Kegerator – Approx: $5,000

General Supplies – Approx: $ 5,000

 Note: Posters are Mock Drafts. These are not real events (yet).