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

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.

Kirshner talked to people and wrote down their stories and her own thoughts and with the help of local collaborators such as J.B. MacKinnon (The 100-Mile Diet) and Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons (both of Adbusters Magazine) created a collection of highly unusual books collectively titled I Live Here.

Comic artist Joe Sacco and writer Ann-Marie MacDonald also lend their skills to the project.

What these volumes contain may shock you. A woman photographs her abortion. A young girl writes a letter to her rapist. A mother takes pictures of places her missing daughter used to be.

I can hear Kirshner wince over the phone when I use the word shocking.

“It’s not shocking, it’s the truth,” she said. “It’s not there for shock value, it’s really a testament to the bravery of the people living these lives.”

The credo stencilled on the inside jacket of the book neatly encapsulates Kirshner’s philosophy: There are too many untold stories.

“I know that it’s really overwhelming to think about every woman in Burma or every woman killed in Juarez,” Kirshner said. “But the book isn’t really about them, it’s about you and what you do. If something moves you, do something about it. If you take one action it has a domino effect that will ripple through the community in ways you can’t even imagine.”

Kirshner has followed her own advice. Most of the stories are hand-printed, some are told in graphic story form, like extended panel cartoons. Photographs, mostly amateur, tell stories of lives destroyed and hint at dark chapters still unfolding.

Each of the four volumes is dedicated to stories from a troubled corner of the world: Malawi, Mexico, Burma and Ingushetia.

Kirshner finds the treatment given the world’s crisis zones by professional news organizations “dry.” Small wonder young people don’t read the news. As a result, North Americans tend to think of refugee communities as distant and foreign, not our problem, she said.

But the stories in I Live Here, she said, aren’t about “them” they are about “us.”

“The challenge was to make the stories emotionally relevant,” Kirshner explained. Depicting people’s lives and struggles visually is more impactful emotionally than reams of text could ever be.

“In order for people to do something they need to be moved, it needs to resonate with them on a personal level,” Kirshner said.

Some people will seek out the books because they already share Kirshner’s concern for the world’s displaced and downtrodden, but that will not be enough to satisfy her. “I really think this book should be in high schools and universities,” she said. “That’s where I started to develop my own social conscience and social awareness.”

That her father was born in a camp for displaced persons after the Second World War may also have contributed to her personal interest in the topic.

Mia the activist/writer and Mia the actor live mostly separate lives. She began travelling and collecting material for the book seven years ago, long before her acting career took off with the success of The L Word.

Her two lives intersect in one important way: “The L Word paid for the book to be published.”

“Some people buy houses, but I was really happy to put my savings into something like this,” she said.

Kirshner makes not a penny from the sale of the book. All of her royalties go to Amnesty International.

“It’s really important for people to buy the book and if they like it or think it’s important to e-mail all their friends and tell them to buy it,” she said.

Source: The Vancouver Sun

“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.

Mia Kishner, actress turned social advocate, came up with the idea for the book. “I had a day job, but I felt uninspired at work; not really plugging into my environment. After Sept. 11th, I was frightened…frightened by my own level of ignorance. From there I started research and put the idea for this book together,” she said.

This book is not a typical documentary. It combines stories with photography and art by renowned artists Joe Sacco, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Phoebe Gloeckner and Chris Abani, among others. Trying to describe this book accurately is nearly impossible because of its individuality and uniqueness. It is truly something you have to pick up and read yourself. The stories told are those that no person should ever have to experience yet inspirational in a way. “I asked people to tell their most personal experiences,” Kishner said. “In spite of these terrible conditions that people have been forced to live in, not by choice, the grace in which they function under is something that one can’t help to be completely inspired by.”

The book is only one small part of a larger movement sponsored by the I Live Here Foundation. The foundation is “dedicated to telling the stories of the silenced and unheard people through a series of books and other media projects about our world.” Another facet of their mission is to bring creative writing programs to the areas in which their members travel. This is in the hope that they will facilitate creative communication between strangers. This book is the first multimedia project, and it is going to be released in concurrence with a creative writing program being started at the Kachere Juvenile Center prison in Lilongwe, Malawi. Many of the prisoners in Kachere are orphans who do not have any families to take responsibility of them, making the cells overcrowded and the conditions heinous.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The foundation are already working on a second book project, which is in the funding stages, will focus on locations such as Iran and Colombia, and with that will come a writing program in brothels all along the Thailand/Burma border. If you would like to learn more about these projects, visit i-live-here.com. You can view the whole book here with detailed background information. It is hard to read this book and not be moved and impassioned to stand up and help.

The first book is Ingusheia, which is located on the border of the Russian republic. There are approximately 15,000 children who live as refugees there. In 1994, Chechnya tried to declare itself independent from Russia, which led to a “dirty war” against Chechnya. There was a great loss of life. Although Moscow in Russia has declared the war over, many people fear to return to their homes. Imagine not being able to return to a life at home because of fearing for your life.

Burma is located on the Thailand border. Many Burmans flee into Thailand due to a dictatorship that has plagued Burma since 1969. There has been much upheaval due to the governing system in place. Sadly, the Thai government is in no hurry to help facilitate a fix for this problem, since the refugees on the border provide much of the manual labor, domestic work and sex trade that is seen in Thailand. Michael Simons, one of the authors of the book, spoke about his trip over to Thailand.

“Mia and I both took three week trips to the region separately. I collected as much material as I could for the stories,” Simons said. “The stories are theirs. Some of the visuals were created by them, and other visuals were in collaboration with artist back at home.”

In Ciudad Juárez, located right across the border from El Paso, Texas, the center of factory productions, drug trafficking and the disappearances of women. Many of the women who come to work at the factories end up disappearing, only to be found a while later murdered with signs of rape and torture. Many cry out for a stop to the violence, pleading that so many murders could not be possible without the police and authorities turning a blind eye.

The fourth and final book is set in Malawi, Africa. AIDS has a strong grasp in Africa. Malawi, one of the poorest nations in Africa, has become the center for refugees to come to when displaced by this terrible disease. “AIDS turns villages into ghost towns, orphans children, and empties schools and hospitals of children,” according to the book. In the capital city, Lilongwe, one in five is infected with HIV. Due to the high death rate in Malawi, there are 41 coffin shops in a single district. The demand for coffins is so high that deforestation of soft pine in Malawi is a growing concern.

Shoebridge described the overall appearance of the book as something that he was most proud of.

“The book was very labor intensive. All the pages had to be put together by hand,” Shoebridge said.
This book is visually stunning and emotionally moving. “The thing that this book points towards is we are connected by these stories,” Kishner said.

It is so important to understand the world in which we live in; that we are all interconnected one way or another. “College students, high school students junior-high students are the most important people that I want the book to reach because you guys are the very people that will have the energy and drive to go out and talk about this- to start a grassroots movement,” Kishner said.

The book is now on shelves and all the proceeds from the book go to Amnesty International. Go pick up a copy today, or go look at it online, and make a small difference in the world around you that is in desperate need of some change.

“These stories are about us.”

Source: etownian.com

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.

“I realized then how incredibly ignorant I was to the most vulnerable. With all due respect to journalists, the way the popular media is structured - and the way in which they respond to events - they pay attention to the big ‘explosions’ but often turn a blind eye to the quieter stories - the harder ones to reach.”

Kirshner, whose parents immigrated to Canada from post-Holocaust Europe, set out on her own dime (including a hefty bank loan) to find those hidden stories. The end result is an innovative, moving montage of graphic novellas, paintings, collages, the victim’s own stories, photographs and the actress’s own journals that recount the plight of Karen refugees and child soldiers terrorized by the Myanmarese (Burmese) military Junta, or the stories of mothers in Juarez, where 400 young women have been raped and murdered while the government and police do nothing.

“I chose the places that personally touched me,” says Kirshner, who splits her time among Los Angeles, Paris and Toronto.

“On one of my last days in Malawi, I got lost, and ended up in a gas station where a young woman offered me the use of her cellphone,” she adds. “She told me she became pregnant by a man who she thought she was going to marry, but he left her with HIV, which she has subsequently passed onto her daughter.

“But she was just this incredible model of grace. She didn’t feel sorry for herself. She is supporting her family. She is somebody who just gets it. Someone who is literally sucking the marrow out of the day in the best of ways.”

In 2001, Kirshner began by doing mock copies of her book. She then started mailing out letters to a bevy of creative strangers, never mentioning her “day job” as an actress, whose most recent stints include The L Word and Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia.

“I certainly understand the cynicism that accompanies my job, but ultimately I’m quite grateful to it because it paid for this. The film and TV stuff just happened to me. I’ve always wanted to write a book. I’ve always been a little restless and felt I wasn’t using the tools to pursue what I’m truly passionate about.”

So she pushed and prodded. She has co-written I Live Here with J.B. MacKinnon, Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons. It also features the work of renown comic-book artist Joe Sacco, who contributed a graphic novella about Chechen refugees (Kirshner flew him there, and covered his expenses), as well as fiction by Toronto writer Ann-Marie MacDonald.

Kirshner grew up near Casa Loma in an average Jewish middle-class neighbourhood. She went to high school at Jarvis Collegiate Institute and studied Russian literature at McGill University in Montreal, before quitting to move to Los Angeles (she is soon leaving that city to set up permanent digs in New York).

She describes herself as an “incredibly average” student, who was “ostracized” by public-school educators who thought she had “an unusual way of thinking.”

But one teacher - whom she had the fortune to meet at an alternative school - believed in her and supported her writing. “She was amazing and she always told me to ignore everybody and just go for it,” says Kirshner, who thanks this woman in her book. “It’s my goal for this book to get into schools. And I hope it inspires kids go into their own communities to look for the hidden stories.”

To pay for subsequent books, (she already has plans to go to Pakistan and Iran), Kirshner says, she will keep on acting. It’s a means to fund this odyssey she can’t quit. “When they handed me the final version of the book, I burst into tears. I was so happy. So proud, and so honoured.

“Once you start, it’s like a passion. This is the very beginning for me. I could not stop at four.”