Power Q & A with K.R. Wilson

Q: You’re novel Stan on Guard: A Two-Part Invention, was just released by Guernica Editions. Why write a novel about an immortal? Hasn’t that been done to, um, death?

A: Historical fiction can be pretty earnest sometimes. Making my narrator immortal meant I could approach each historical period through his jaded, present day perspective and give him a wry, anachronistic voice that has made him enormously fun to write. And to read, I hope.

About Stan on Guard: A Two-Part Invention:

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

As their stories braid together toward a final reckoning they take us through, among other things, a subversive retelling of the Odysseus story, the resistance of pagan Lithuania against Papal crusaders, the decline of Friedrich Nietzsche in a German clinic, the arts scene in belle epoque Paris, and the descent of Europe into the horrors of the Great War.

Strap in.

 Stan On Guard is the follow-up to K. R. Wilson’s tragical-comical-historical novel Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millennia, which was long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal for Humour.

About K.R. Wilson:

K. R. Wilson’s novel An Idea About My Dead Uncle won the inaugural Guernica Prize in 2018, and his novel Call Me Stan was long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal. His work has appeared in various literary journals and the flash fiction anthology This Will Only Take a Minute.

Excerpt from Into the D/Ark by David Elias

The Ark loomed before her now, a green monolith in a sea of white, like a land mass all its own that by its sheer size was able to alter the course of the storm.  Martha watched the snow sweep up onto the wide plane of its sprawling roof, slide in wide swaths along the incline until it crested over the peak in swirls and eddies, sifted down the far side to cascade gently over the edge, settle along the wall in a long line white.

Standing there was a little like the Grand Canyon, or Niagara Falls or the Rocky Mountains.  The sudden comprehension of scale.  Of what it meant to feel small.  She moved toward the near wall, out of the wind now, and stepped up onto the snow bank, sharp-edged and hardened, through the veil of snow drifting down off the roof and into the hollow, sheltered space, a few feet wide, between the green wall of the Ark and the snow.  Flakes showered down from the roof in crystal hisses, cascaded over her like a white and powdery falls as she walked along until she reached the corner of the building and stepped around it, back into the wind.  Stayed close to the wall until she came to the same small door she remembered from her last visit, tried the latch and when it offered no resistance, pushed it open far enough to step inside.

The world changed instantly from blinding white to blinding black.  Light poured in through the open door like an invasion, a violation of what must have been, until a moment ago, total darkness.  Martha waited for her eyes to adjust, her breath visible in smoky clouds that vanished beyond the sharp straight lines of the light’s boundaries.  It was very cold inside, much colder than outdoors.  There was a heaviness to the cold in here.  A weight of something sucking heat out of her body.  A dampness.  In the hollow quiet, the yawning dark, an eagerness to swallow up everything - light, heat, sound.  Martha took a few steps in, listened.  The only sound the snow sweeping across the long slope of the roof, washing over her like the glassy whisper of sand on a wide ocean beach.

The darkness beyond the edge of the light from the doorway seemed liquid, to be flowing away from her as she strained to push the boundaries of her vision deeper into it.  Snow was streaming in through the open door now, fanning out over the dirt floor like a white luminescent bridal veil, and as it grew, reflected more and more light into the chamber, up into the rafters, until Martha could make out a faint skeleton of trusses and beams overhead, like the ribcage of some oceanic leviathan that had swallowed her whole.

She walked through the widening pool of light until she reached the edge, stopped, a little unsteady on her feet, swayed from side to side as though she might have descended below the decks of a massive wooden vessel at sea in a storm.  Now and then a creak came down out of the rafters as the Ark shifted and groaned in the wind.  A tall oak timber, stripped of its bark, rose up before her like the mast of a ship and disappeared into the rafters above.  She ran her fingers along its surface, slapped at the smooth wood with a satisfying smack, like a hand on naked flesh that echoed into the vast chamber.  A ladder leaned against the far side of the timber, climbed along it to where the light hardly reached.  Next to it hung a set of ropes that led up into the rafters.  A dark mass on the ground, not far from the base of the ladder.  The vague shape of a figure crouched low.  The indistinct shadow of someone crumpled into a kneeling position.

Martha drew closer and saw that it was a human shape, perched on its haunches, utterly still.  And then she could make out the long black coat, the wide-brimmed hat, brought her hand to her mouth, leaned in closer to examine her brother, touch a finger to his hands, translucent and pale as snow, clasped before him, fingers entwined, as though praying, follow the faint pattern of frost over his face, lifeless eyes turned up, as though in a moment of exquisite, frozen rapture.

She straightened and put one hand on the ladder to steady herself, followed his gaze up into the rafters to try and see what it was her brother had been so fixated on but the darkness there was impossible to penetrate.  She stepped onto the first rung, pulled herself up onto the second, turned to look up but still the dark would not yield.  There was something up there.  She thought of climbing back down but then she remembered the box of wooden matches she’d picked up on her way out, knowing she was coming here, fumbled through her pockets and brought them out.  With one arm locked around the wrung of the ladder she slid open the box and took out three matches, bunched them together, scraped them along the side of the box.  An orange light burst forth and she climbed, head down, watching her footfalls as she ascended the ladder, held up the burning matches and found herself at eye level with a pair of naked blue feet, one resting over the other, a spike driven through both, turned her wide eyes up long enough to see Clarence, head resting on his chest, arms spread eagle, staring back down at her.  The matches burned her fingers now and she cried out, launched herself backward through the air, arms wide, like a diver.

Bring home Into the D/Ark by David Elias, published by Radiant Press, 2025.

About Into the D/Ark:

Rose Martens struggles with the aftermath of a terrible fire that has left her sons, Jake and Isaac, horribly disfigured. The boys have gone to live in an abandoned house they’ve named Bachelor’s Paradise, where they spend all their time watching American network television. Their father Clarence works day and night in his blacksmith shop, producing bizarre metallic creations no one can make any sense of. Martha Wiebe returns to the stifling conformity of the valley to discover that her brother Abe, a preacher, has abandoned his congregation to devote himself to the construction of “The Ark”, a massive and mysterious edifice whose purpose he will not divulge. When the first major snowstorm of the year roars into the valley, it unleashes a chain of bizarre events that the valley may never recover from.

Praise for David Elias:

“Winnipeg writer David Elias fashions scenes that are literally breathtaking: sometimes because of the sheer beauty and insight of the passage; sometimes because of the bone-chilling tenor of the description. Both aspects demonstrate the potency and reach of Elias’s writing.”

— Winnipeg Free Press, October 12, 2008, Marjorie Anderson, (Review of Waiting for Elvis)

About David Elias:

David Elias is the author of seven books, most recently The Truth about the Barn: A Voyage of Discovery and Contemplation, published by Great Plains Publications. It was featured in the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top titles for 2020. His most recent work of fiction is an historical novel, Elizabeth of Bohemia: A Novel about Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen. It was published in 2019 by ECW Press, and was a finalist for The Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction at The Manitoba Book Awards. His previous works have been up for numerous awards including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, the Amazon First Novel Award, and The Journey Prize. His short stories, novel excerpts, and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies across the country, and in addition to writing he spends time as a mentor, creative writing instructor, and editor. He lives in Winnipeg, Canada.

Excerpt from Honeydew by Ben Zalkind

The four subversives dug into their backpacks with nervous, twitching fingers. They unzipped the vinyl and openedthe lunchboxes fully to allow themselves full range ofmovement. A pair of nitrile gloves was balled up at the bottom of each of their floppy packs. With as little motion as they could manage, they pulled them over their fingers and up to their wrists.

“We’ve done it all,” Honeydew continued, his froggishvoice pinched with the exertion of shouting. “Who made space tourism possible? And who built the Agora District in downtown Bonneville with robot rickshaws, stop signs that give you directions, and tons of brand spanking new jobs?”

“You did,” the crowd chanted. “Ho-ney-dew! Ho-ney-dew!Ho-ney-dew!”

The nerd emperor  in the electric blue earthsuit thrust hisgloved hands in the air. “But you didn’t just come here to hear me boast like a proud dad about all the great stuff my ace Substrate employees have done. You want the swag.”

He turned to meet a young woman handing him a T-shirtcannon. One-handed, he aimed the translucent bazooka at oneof the balconies.

The audience whipped toward the target in unison. A smallboy clutching his mother’s neck took the balled-up fabric square in the face.

The crowd leapt to its feet and laughed at the child’smisfortune. With his mother’s prodding, he held up the extra-large Substrate-logoed shirt, his eyes wet with tears.

“God, he almost knocked that kid out,” Liz said to Rose.“Let’s do it now.”

Rose nudged the other two with a surreptitious elbow.Vashti blinked her assent. Barnabas’s lips peeled back to revealcrowded, straight teeth, like little cinderblocks.

Just as they had practiced, they each withdrew from their lunchboxes a tightly packed ball of Substrate TopSoyl. The soft black shreds were speckled with bits of gold and orange andwhite, which adhered nicely into a sphere with the heft and texture of clay.

They waited until the audience simmered and peoplesettled back into their translucent fold-up seats. Then, the foursome shot to their feet. They had one vanishingly slight chance of this thing working, they knew. In a fluid,synchronized motion, they withdrew their hands from their backpacks and loosed their missiles with the full force of their overhand strength.

Vashti’s loose cluster disaggregated into a shower of dampclumps, which fell onto the heads of the audience below. Liz’s struck the railing before her, bisecting the oblong hunk and sending its hemispheres falling lamely into the cup holder of an unlucky patron. Rose, the once all-state women’s softball catcher, splattered the stage with ersatz mud, some of which polluted the faux magma floes with bits of calico grit.

It was a good throw, but this was Barnabas’ golden moment. He unfurled his long, ungainly arm and liberated hisprojectile with impressive force. It whizzed through the air and stayed intact, rocketing toward its mark with a sniper’saccuracy. It caught Honeydew flush in the Substrate insigniapainted on the chest of his earthsuit.

The moment of impact dilated in Liz’s perception. Thesting of her failure to launch gave way to a thrill of glory.Honeydew’s arms splayed out and he let out a guttural grunt.His boyish face contorted into a mask of confusion and fear.The assembled gasped in concert.

“Hell yes!” Barnabas shouted into the momentary silencethat followed.

But his celebration was short-lived. Honeydew’s sentinelswere on the gang within what seemed like seconds. Where they came from was anyone’s guess.

—Excerpt from Honeydew by Ben Zalkind. Published by Radiant Press, 2025. Reprinted with permission. Copyright Ben Zalkind.

Read our interview with Ben here.

About Honeydew:

Rose Gold can’t catch a break. Her latest “golden opportunity” has given way to a madcap adventure through the soft underbelly of Bonneville City. She finds herself cast in the role of renegade mentor and hero to a trio of idealistic young rebels. Together, they perpetrate an act of subversion targeting “future-mover” and celebrity CEO Moses Honeydew, which puts them in the crosshairs of his Substrate Inc.

Along the way, they join forces with family-doctor-by-day and fixer-by-night, Dr. Hansjorg Winteregg, and go on the lam. Meanwhile, there are rumours about Honeydew’s private space station, The Visionary, which may or may not have forced its first passengers into working off their debt. Rose’s boss and his crew go missing. Honeydew announces his plan to take a manned submersible drill to Earth’s mantle to burnish his brand as a fearless and impossibly cool maverick.

With her faithful charges by her side, Rose finds herself at the centre of an unfolding conspiracy. Did she ever truly have a hand on the rudder of fate?  And what chance does a quartet of second-rate saboteurs have against a multinational corporation with a vendetta and a trillion-dollar market capitalization?

Bring home Honeydew.

Ben Zalkind lives and works in Calgary, Canada. His debut novel, Honeydew, was released by Radiant Press in October 2025. A Salt Lake City native and naturalized Western Canadian, Ben is happiest outdoors, where he can cycle, drink coffee, and adventure with his wife and fellow traveller. 

Power Q & A with Ben Zalkind

Q: Ben, your debut novel, Honeydew (Radiant Press, October 2025), seems to be a winking satire lampooning tech bros, surveillance capitalism, and maybe even the futility of resistance itself. Many readers look to fiction to sharpen and clarify what might otherwise look smudged and fuzzy, but it’s difficult to figure out where you stand. What do you mean for us to take from your book?

A: Satire is tricky. In a free society, it can be a form of entertainment, which confirms for its audience the idiocy and silliness of “that thing we enlightened people are against.”  In dicier milieus, such as Putin’s Russia, satire cannot be reckless, lest it disappear. It has to be clever, damning, and opaque enough to cloak its true purpose, which is as a tool of resistance. Making fun of our overlords is serious, political business.  

Here in North America, our most popular satire takes the form of visual media, such as The (late) Colbert Report and South Park, which seem to look right into their targets’ eyes as they subject them to ridicule. This style, though often funny, is at odds with the tradition of literary satire, which tends to lean more comfortably into ambiguity. Some of our finest contemporary satirical novels, such as Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, are satirical only insofar as we can gather. Beatty famously denies that he is a satirical author, though his very funny novel about a man who tries to reinstate slavery in a fictionalized California is, to my mind at least, a crackling and devastating takedown of the idea of a post-racial society in the same US that witnessed George Floyd’s murder. 

Honeydew, is most certainly a satirical novel. It is also a farce, equal parts A Confederacy of Dunces and The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a quartet of feckless wannabe saboteurs who have the right idea but can't quite follow through. I know there will be a temptation to see clear topical references in my characters, especially Moses Honeydew himself, who, I'll admit, does bear some resemblance to a few of our less impressive overlords. But my intention was not just to remark on the absurdity of our tech-saturated world. I also wanted to create my own. And Honeydew’s got everything: A billionaire tech bro who plans to pilot a submersible drill to Earth’s mantle, a criminal kingpin who bankrolls an anarchist collective, a Swiss family doctor moonlighting as a spook, and even a direct action splinter cell composed entirely of elderly activists. Though the story shares some of our reality, it also exists in its own milieu, maybe a bit like Boots Riley's Sorry to Bother You, Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast series, Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, and even P.G. Wodehouse’s Edwardian Britain that never was. 

I permitted myself the freedom to make my characters eccentric and the setting surreal. And I agree that there is something unsettling beneath Honeydew's humour. Though many of us face the welter of social, climate, and economic injustice with courage and wisdom, Honeydew's freedom fighters resort to harebrained schemes. This is not a commentary so much as a prism through which I filtered my own bewilderment. In my story, I always punch straight up, and I trust readers, who tend to be cleverer than the authors they read, will clock the story as a satire, a comedy, and, in its own way, a pointed critique, not of the resistance, of which I consider myself a part, but the frame in which all of us are forced to resist. 

About Honeydew:

Rose Gold can’t catch a break. Her latest “golden opportunity” has given way to a madcap adventure through the soft underbelly of Bonneville City. She finds herself cast in the role of renegade mentor and hero to a trio of idealistic young rebels. Together, they perpetrate an act of subversion targeting “future-mover” and celebrity CEO Moses Honeydew, which puts them in the crosshairs of his Substrate Inc.

Along the way, they join forces with family-doctor-by-day and fixer-by-night, Dr. Hansjorg Winteregg, and go on the lam. Meanwhile, there are rumours about Honeydew’s private space station, The Visionary, which may or may not have forced its first passengers into working off their debt. Rose’s boss and his crew go missing. Honeydew announces his plan to take a manned submersible drill to Earth’s mantle to burnish his brand as a fearless and impossibly cool maverick.

With her faithful charges by her side, Rose finds herself at the centre of an unfolding conspiracy. Did she ever truly have a hand on the rudder of fate?  And what chance does a quartet of second-rate saboteurs have against a multinational corporation with a vendetta and a trillion-dollar market capitalization?

Ben Zalkind lives and works in Calgary, Canada. His debut novel, Honeydew, will be released by Radiant Press in October 2025. A Salt Lake City native and naturalized Western Canadian, Ben is happiest outdoors, where he can cycle, drink coffee, and adventure with his wife and fellow traveller. 

A Quantum Entanglement of Genres: Steven Mayoff Reviews I Think We've Been Here Before by Suzy Krause

There is a school of thought that says we should live every day like it is our last. The impracticality of doing that should be obvious enough, although the spirit of that ideal carries a certain allure. Suzy Krause manages to capture something of both the impracticality and the allure, not to mention the sheer nightmarish absurdity of the world’s impending doom in her novel I Think We’ve Been Here Before (Radiant Press, 2024). Love, both romantic and familial, are put through the wringer in this story of human foibles juxtaposed against global doom. It is a kind of sci-fi tragi-rom-com, if you will.

Nora is a young woman from rural Saskatchewan who has travelled to Berlin to get over her broken heart. Through a work-abroad program, she has arranged employment at the coffee shop Begonia. On her first day she meets Jacob and feels a strange déja-vu-like connection to him. She also has two roommates who rent a flat, Sonja, a flakey American, and Petra from Hamburg, whose domineering Teutonic personality flusters Nora. 

I Think We’ve Been Here Before by Suzy Krause (Radiant Press, 2024). Read an excerpt from the novel here.

Back in Saskatchewan, Nora’s parents, Hilda and Marlen, are hosting a traditional Norwegian-Canadian Thanksgiving dinner for Hilda’s sister Irene, her husband Hank, their twelve-year old son Ole and Hilda’s and Irene’s father, Iver. It is in this holiday gathering where Hilda announces that Marlen has a malignant tumour signifying cancer. 

The following day, NASA announces a rare double gamma ray burst outside of Earth’s solar system that will cause the world to end in roughly three months. 

Reactions to this news vary in both of the novel’s locales. Shops and general services suffer slowdowns and closures. In Berlin, Nora and Sonja are scrambling to find flights back to their home countries. Petra, on the other hand, takes a much more ironic and detached (almost morbidly so) view of Earth’s imminent demise. She initiates outings for the three of them, such as getting a tattoo, going skydiving and an evening out at an exclusive night club. You know, millennial end-of-the-world stuff.

In Saskatchewan, Hilda’s anxiety increases because she cannot contact Nora, but strives to keep what time is left of hers and Marlen’s lives as normal as possible. She maintains her sanity by painting murals in all the rooms of their house. Hilda is influenced by an anonymous pamphlet that says the whole gamma ray thing is a hoax, which causes her and Hank to argue, which causes their son Ole to run away from home and live with his grandfather Iver, who believes that Ole is his dead son. In the meantime, Marlen has fulfilled his lifelong dream of writing a novel about the end of the world and gets it published.

 It's probably best not to reveal any more but at some point, Jacob comes back into Nora’s life and explains the theory of quantum entanglement.

“Okay, so quantum entanglement is basically when a group of particles become linked in such a way that they can’t be described independently of each other, even when they’re separated by great distances. Scientists have found a way to do it, which is absolutely mind blowing, but it’s a thing that occurs naturally, too, without any help from people—which is maybe even more mind blowing? And once they’re linked, they’re linked forever, I think, and it doesn’t matter how far apart they are. Like, you could put one of the linked particles in a spaceship and send it to the moon, and whatever you did to the remaining particle on Earth would also happen to the one on the moon. They act like one particle, even though they’re far apart.” 

As it happens, this theory also appears in Marlen’s novel and he explains it to Hilda. 

In a way, I Think We’ve Been Here Before seems to be a kind of quantum entanglement of genres and styles, mixing the downhome qualities of Canadian prairie life with the European exoticism of urban Berlin. The writing style adopts an almost Hallmark romantic lightness, such as when Nora and Jacob take it upon themselves to embark on a guerilla operation of Christmas decorating of Berlin’s mostly abandoned buildings, while the gloomy deterioration of the world order is taking place. Krause’s meta-device of having Marlen write a novel about the end of the world becomes the pay off, when she quotes from it directly to end her own novel.  

At its core, I Think We’ve Been Here Before is about a shared alienation, the culture of transformation and the illusion of permanence. It is a petri dish cultivating the birth pangs, growing pains and death rattles of our ongoing transience. As one character says:

“You think things like this are going to change you into someone else, but generally they make you more of who you already are. That’s true of lots of things. Tragedies. Weddings. Ends of civilization.”

Author Suzy Krause.

ABOUT SUZY KRAUSE: 

Suzy Krause is the bestselling author of Sorry I Missed You and Valencia and Valentine. She grew up on a little farm in rural Saskatchewan and now lives in Regina, where she writes novels inspired by crappy jobs, creepy houses, personal metaphorical apocalypses, and favorite songs. Her work has been translated into Russian and Estonian. 

Author Steven Mayoff

About Steven Mayoff:

Steven Mayoff (he/him) was born and raised in Montreal. His fiction and poetry have appeared in literary journals across Canada, the U.S. and abroad. He is the author of the story collection Fatted Calf Blues, winner of the 2010 PEI Book Award for Fiction; the novel Our Lady of Steerage; and two books of poetry Leonard’s Flat and Swinging Between Water and Stone. His acclaimed novel, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief, was released by Radiant Press in 2023. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.