Blog
To put it simply, because I’m not that interested in myself. Which isn’t true, of course – what poet isn’t obsessed with themselves – but perhaps I'm not that interested in the front-facing, autobiographical concept of ‘Guy Elston’. Memory, identity, the cause and effect of life and its happenings – it’s all a sheer mountain face, senseless. I need an angle, a longer way round.
I hope that readers will take away the idea that just because we are capable of doing a thing, doesn’t mean we should do the thing. We need to use our own critical thinking and ethical judgement to determine our way forward and make decisions in a complex world. We live in an era of marvels where so much is possible. But just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it serves any kind of public good. We shouldn’t do it just because we can. This applies to genAI, it applies to resurrecting dire wolves (which were not resurrected at all, not really), and it applies to deep-sea mining. And of course, it applies to the central premise of my novel – adapting humans to live in the ocean depths.
The core inspiration of the story does come from my lived experience of coming from a family of Muslim women who are incredibly accomplished in many different fields and my attempt to reconcile this with the image of my faith in the West of being incredibly misogynistic and oppressive towards women. An image that has been a part of Western culture for hundreds of years but came into prominence as a part of the incessant drumbeats successfully justifying wars against Muslim Majority countries for the past few decades.
The work of a good book or a good art or an et cetera is to make it harder to live, to invite the reader to stretch beyond the settled narratives and reduplicative forms to which they’ve become habituated, an injunction ever the more keen in a world so stricken with capitalist call and response, itch and scratch, that the moral obligation to look longer, allow greater complexity to be revealed, and not categorically to encapsulate one’s satisfaction by acquiring the product of an echo is the greater.
This novel began in an antique store when I fell in love with a reproduction poster from May 1874. The splendid horse, young Netherby, was available as a proven foal-getter at $4 a single leap. I was charmed by the poster but also intrigued by the idea of a farmer advertising his horse’s services in this way. I began to wonder about the farmer and gradually Larkin’s story revealed itself and the novel unspooled.
The 16th and 17th century encounters between Indigenous people in Turtle Island and merchant sailors coming from Europe constitutes the meeting of two very different ways of seeing and living in the world, two very different approaches to trade. The French, Dutch, and English who arrived at the mouths of rivers flowing into the Atlantic were the envoys of a new way of making wealth. These were not aristocrats who stood to inherit their fathers’ land and properties, they were sailors from Europe’s emerging merchant class who were looking for trade goods and resources—spices from Asia, minerals from “El Dorado,” manufactured items from China or India. They had recently developed the capacity to navigate across huge oceans, and they were learning that they could become independently wealthy by exploring the world’s coastlands and islands and bringing back objects they could sell at home.
y novel began as a book about the hidden lives of wealthy retired people living in a fictional small town in Ontario that had transitioned from agricultural to a winery- and tourist-based economy. When one character with a past in wartime Germany emerged, threads opened up that I turned into storylines about the responsibility to remember and be accountable for atrocities in World War 2.
Like a lot of people, when I moved here, I was amazed at the sheer scope of a sparsely populated landscape, as well as its natural beauty, and it really captivated me. It still does. I wanted to share that feeling. Second, given that fact, I felt that while there is a great body of literature about northern Ontario, there can always be room for more!
Frontenac House Press has published a gorgeous reissue of Bruce Hunter’s award-winning novel of love, disability, and wildness, In the Bear’s House(May 23, 2025.)
Set in 1960s Calgary and Alberta ‘s backcountry, this reissue of In the Bear’s House tells the story of a creative young mother, Clare Dunlop, raising her deaf son against the insurmountable odds of poverty, mental illness and hardship. In the Bear’s House is ultimately about listening to the wild and the wilderness, and what we lose when it’s gone.
We are honoured to have Bruce join us to answer a question about the rebirth of his much-loved story.
The longer form definitely comes naturally to me, though it’s not something I set out to do, so much as a reflection of how I think. I’ve learned to see my own intuitive approaches more clearly, and how to amplify or deconstruct them, challenge or upend them. Something particular that I’ve realized is that as I write, everything is somewhat of a spiderweb; ideas emerge connected to several other ideas, which connect to one layer, then another, and so on. It’s part of what feeds me electricity as a writer: this instantaneous, sparking interaction between narrative, symbolism, philosophy, psychological and emotional interiority, history, and commentary, and I find that it means the story will probably need more breathing room.
Talk about wonder! Paula Meehan's work came to me in the mail as a request for a book review! Poet and editor R.T. Smith certainly kept channels open for synchronicities, and I'll always be grateful for that request. I think currently we're suffering from the Cartesian dualisms inherent in our capitalist version of modernity, and we've got some horrendous fixes floating around. Paula's beautiful work combines a compassionate, progressive politics (for lack of a better word) through a thoroughgoing critique of the class exploitations underwriting modernity as we know it.
These two words—insistence and wonder—speak to the paradox of making poems. There's got to be a willfulness involved in showing up to the blank page or the page with scattered lines and notes for a poem. I have to be insistent about that time and space. If I'm not, if I let the business of life's obligations take over, then there's an emotional and physical insistence that arises.
Like many writers, I started out writing stories but very quickly discovered that a story I cared about deeply was trying to be a novel, so I plunged headlong into long-form fiction and never looked back. That unwieldy story became my first novel, Minus Time. I felt like the novel was my natural breath as a writer. A few years ago, I became intrigued by the wild and meaningful compression of flash fiction – the opposite of a novel. I started writing stories again more intently during the pandemic at a time when I felt exhausted and unable to start a new novel.
We are beyond thrilled to be welcoming many time award-winning author, Anthony Bidulka to our blog to talk to us about his compulsively readable and utterly absorbing new mystery thriller, Home Fires Burn (Stonehouse Publishing, June 1, 2025). Anthony is a Canadian legend of the mystery thriller genre who writes from places and perspectives that you don’t often see represented on the page.
May is National Short Story Month and we’re kicking it off with a brief and salient interview with award-winning multi-genre writer Sharon Berg, author of many books, including the short fiction collection, Naming the Shadows (Porcupine’s Quill 2019). Never one to shy away from tough conversations, we ask Sharon about writing difficult subjects as a necessary part of the responsibility we bear for one another.
Speech Dries Here on the Tongue (edited by Hollay Ghadery, Rasiqra Revulva, and Amanda Shankland) is an anthology of poetry by Canadian authors, published by The Porcupine’s Quill, exploring the relationship between environmental collapse and mental health.
It’s been listed as a book to read by Quill & Quire and CBC Books, and we’re honoured to have one of the editors, Amanda Shankland, join us for this Power Q & A to talk about where this anthology started for her.
Saad Omar Khan’s gorgeous novel, Drinking the Ocean (Wolsak & Wynn, May 6, 2024) is a tender and absorbing story of love, family, and the complexities facing Muslims in the West. It has been named one of the 49th Shelf’s most anticipated fiction books of the year and is also one of the most anticipated books within our community.
Moving between Lahore, London, and Toronto, Drinking the Ocean is a story of connections lost and found and of the many kinds of love that shape a life, whether familial, romantic or spiritual.
We became aware of American poet Alex Gurtis through his work as a literary critic and then further familiarized ourselves with his work in the literary community—specifically, his work uplifting Canadian authors. Then, we learned more about his poetry, and our interest was doubly piqued. We picked up his chapbook, When the Ocean Comes to Me (Bottlecap Press, 2024), and were blown away.
