Kirshner writes about rough lives

Mia Kirshner, most recently seen as Jenny on “The L Word,” is also an author, and I Live Here is not just another Hollywood starlet story.

It’s about her trips to four messy and malignant parts of the world — the Russian republic of Ingushetia; Burma; Juarez, Mexico; and Malawi — that have large disenfranchised populations. Kirshner tells the stories about the women and children in these places through journal entries, collages, photographs, paintings an more with the help of co-authors J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons.

The trips were made over a six-year period. Kirshner, 33, told the Los Angeles Times she wanted to do something that mattered after working on a show after Sept. 11, 2001, made her feel “pretty dead inside.” (She’s also been on “24,” and “Wolf Lake.”). She first organized a benefit for Afghan women, and then decided to focus on “people who are in war or displaced or living, basically, in an extremity.”

“I did this in the most foolish way,” she said recently. “I spent my savings on the book.

“But, you know, it’s worth it. And I also felt like I didn’t really want to ask for outside funding until I knew I was proud of the material.”

Source: kansascity.com

The unvarnished truth

Actress Mia Kirshner’s book gives voice to the oppressed and displaced.

Mia Kirshner wants you to meet some people, people who have been forced from their homes by war or economic necessity, people living in the darkest corners of the world.

And she wants you to care about them the way she does.

The L Word actor and sometimes Vancouver resident has been to places most of us wouldn’t dare to go: a Chechen refugee camp in Ingushetia, brothels in Thailand filled with girls escaping genocide, war zones where children carry automatic weapons.
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Refugee life explored in “I Live Here”

Much too often, the pain in the world goes overlooked; much too often, the hunger of people is unnoticed; much too often, human suffering is pushed to the wayside. As you open “I Live Here,” the quote “there are too many stories” resonates throughout the four books that are enclosed in the cover of this moving composition.

“I Live Here” by Mia Kirshner, J.B. MacKinnon Paul Shoebridge, and Michael Simmons is a moving documentary of the lives on refugees and people who have been displaced from their homes by wars or fear for their lives. The authors of the book had to travel to all corners of the globe: the war in Chechnya, ethnic cleansing in Burma, globalization in Mexico and AIDS in Malawi, telling the heart-wrenching stories of these people.
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Dear Diary

Most journals are about our own little problems. But Toronto actress Mia Kirshner travelled to four desperate parts of the world to bring back the tales of the most vulnerable people, Gayle MacDonald writes

For the past seven years, Toronto actress Mia Kirshner has been obsessed with self-financing and publishing her debut book, I Live Here, a harrowing tribute to the overlooked victims of war, corrupt governments and crippling disease.

“I worked on the book - all the time,” says Kirshner, a gorgeous, dark-haired slip of a thing who started acting as an extra in low-budget television and saw her career take off after nailing roles in Love & Human Remains and Exotica.

“I drove my friends and family insane because they said it’s all I talked about. I know it’s true, and I’m sure, very annoying to be around. But it literally has been an odyssey, an obsession for me. Because once I saw how many people have sacrificed so much … well, I became obsessed,” she says with a smile.

Kirshner says all this while in town last week to present her so-called paper documentary at the International Festival of Authors. The 33-year-old explains that she became fixated with the idea of the four-part book - which took the actress and many collaborators to some of the most ravaged places in Chechnya, Myanmar, Juarez, Mexico, and Malawi - after 9/11.
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