Power Q & A with David Neil Lee

Today we’re entering exciting new worlds on our Power Q & A! Join us in welcoming Canadian sci-fi author David Neil Lee to talk about his latest Hamilton, Ontario-based YA novel, The Great Outer Dark (published by Wolsak & Wynn, 2023).

Q: Tell us more about how your trilogy responds to and builds on the work of H.P. Lovecraft, with a particular focus on how real-world places and spaces are transformed into the sites of “cosmic horror”?

A: Lovecraft believed deeply in modernity – the idea that overall, European culture and its accompanying technologies were a tremendous force for good in the world. He was also an old-fashioned United Empire Loyalist who admitted he felt English at heart. In reality, he never had the money to actually visit the UK, but he had read a lot and was steeped in English literature.

Grab the Great Outer Dark from Wolsak & Wynn!

His belief in modernity is a big part of his work’s powerful imagery: modernity as a system that is staving off enormous dark extraterrestrial forces, although it doesn’t always succeed, and those forces break through.

You can see a literary response to this trope in Lovecraft Country. Lovecraft’s fiction says, “the human race is actually suborned to an enormous malignant power that is willing to let humanity exist only provided that no one tries to step out of its shadow or bring themselves to its attention, or god forbid, resist – then it will reach out and squash them.”

 And the Black American response to that – at least in the Misha Green TV series, I haven’t read the Matt Ruff novel – is “tell us something we don’t already know!”

 In the Midnight Games books, that extraterrestrial force – the Great Old Ones – was mysteriously repelled from Earth many years ago, and they’re struggling to get back and reassert their dominance. When Nate gets in trouble with the cult who are trying to help the Great Old Ones, he finds all sorts of people, including a local Persian family, and in The Medusa Deep, west coast Salish – are aware of the Great Old Ones and have their own ways of dealing with them.

 I like sci-fi and horror settings that are very close to everyday life. In the trilogy, Nate and his Dad live in the same house my wife and I live in, two blocks from the stadium in east Hamilton. The North End, just across Barton with its diminished industrial base, vacant parking lots, overgrown train tracks etc., is very much a presence. Friends have even asked to be taken on tours of the routes Nate takes in the books, though when David Prentice and I did that, we had to scramble up an embankment to get out of the way of a freight train.

What this does, I hope is give a certain perspective on the powers that shape our own lives. It’s no coincidence that the name Raphe Therpens, the leader of the cult in the first book, that came out in 2015, is an anagram of a prominent Canadian political leader of the time.

David Neil Lee.

 More about David Neil Lee:

David Neil Lee is a writer and double bassist. Originally from BC, he spent years in the Toronto art scene and on BC’s Sunshine Coast, and currently lives in Hamilton, Ontario. He has just finished a PhD in English at the University of Guelph. In addition to the Midnight Games trilogy, he is the author of Commander Zero, Chainsaws: A History, and The Battle of the Five Spot: Ornette Coleman and the New York Jazz Field.

More about The Great Outer Dark:

After his voyage across the galaxy, Nate Silva arrives home to find Hamilton in the grip of a monstrous triumvirate. The Resurrection Church of the Ancient Gods has returned, with the human form of the shape-changing nightmare from the Medusa Deep as its leader. And closely guarded in a downtown tower a mind-devouring entity called Oracle lurks. The city is infested with invasive species that have slithered into our world during the Church’s occult ceremonies – many-legged dritches, bat-like thrals and the eerie, flying night-gaunts. Caught in the middle of this are Nate’s friends Megan and Mehri, who are leading the resistance with the Furies, along with a mysterious double agent, the enigmatic Dr. Eldritch and his Cosmic Wonder Circus. For the safety of everyone he loves, Nate and his friend H.P. Lovecraft hijack the antique airship Sorcerer for one last voyage, to free Earth from the Great Old Ones once and for all.

Power Q & A with Kate Jenks

It’s a first on our River Street Power Q & A series: we have a children’s book author joining us! In our experience, we’ve found writing children’s books quite challenging, but kidlit author Kate Jenks (Beatrice & Barb, Kid Can Press, 2023) is here to make an important distinction and dole out some advice for those of us who may struggle writing this genre.

Q: Writing for children can be incredibly difficult. What is one thing you’ve learned to make it easier for you?

A: It’s not so much that I find writing for children difficult. In my experience, children are the very best audience. They’re often bolder, more enthusiastic readers than adults. If you give kids a really great story, one that’s worthy of their attention, they’re willing to take great imaginative leaps.

It’s more that the picture book as a form can be exceptionally challenging to write. Most people don’t realize, for example, that they’re are almost always exactly 32 pages long (including front and back matter), and are generally between 0 and 800 words long. Because of this, picture book authors must be masters of pacing, ensuring their stories have exactly the right number of beats, and that the story begin and end in just the right places. They need to know how and when to speed the action up and when to slow it down. 

Beatrice & Barb by Kate Jenks. Kid Can Press, 2023.

Picture books share qualities with many different forms—they’re part short story, part poem, part comic book, part theater script— but they’re also unlike anything else. To write picture books well requires you to accept that what you’ve signed up for is a team sport, particularly if you are not also the illustrator. It is a bit like running a relay race — you do your part the best you can and then you pass the batton to the next runner. 

A great picture book manuscript has to leave room for the artist to collaborate equally in the storytelling, but it’s a unique sort of collaboration, because traditionally author and illustrator are not encouraged to communicate during the creation of the book. You can include art notes in your manuscript if absolutely necessary, but adding too many of these is generally frowned upon. I do my best not to dictate what the pictures should look like, but instead to make sure the scenes I write are rich with visual possibility.

At the same time, picture books are oral texts as much as they are visual ones, because they’re so often read out loud. You’re essentially writing a script that parents, teachers, and librarians are going to have to preform. Because of this, you need to make sure your text is a pleasure to read, with sentences that flow, imagery that captivates, and, above all, jokes that land. 

The very best picture books also leave lots of imaginative space for the reader. There should be gaps where they can decide what has happened, and what the story means. Failing to do this almost guarantees your book will not be picked up a second time.

All of this is a lot to hold in your mind when you sit down to write. It’s almost impossible to create anything that feels as loose and free as you want it to if you’re trying to consciously take all this into account. The trick, I’ve found, is to invest a great deal of time into studying other picture books I love, the ones I jealously wish I had wrote myself. I do this by typing them out into the same template I use when I draft my own stories. I look at how many words are in the manuscript, and consider what proportion of that word count is taken up with narration versus dialogue. I note how much time elapses over the course of the plot, and how many different settings there are. How many of the spreads consist of spot illustrations, moving the story along at a clip, versus how many are taken up by a single image depicting a single emotional beat. How many pages are wordless? How do the images relate to the words? How long are the sentences? Is there much repetition? How challenging is the vocabulary? What compels the reader to the page?

This practice has given me a reasonable grasp of the form, so that when I sit down to draft a story, a lot of these considerations are addressed by a more automatic part of my brain. It also means that when a manuscript isn’t working, I’m better able to diagnose and fix the problem myself before sending it off to critique partners or editors. 

There’s another benefit, too. By closely reading the work of others, I have been able to cultivate my own tastes and to calibrate my own voice. Closely reading the work of others helps me understand where my writing sits in relation to the work of other authors, how it is alike and how it is different from what is already out there. 

This gives me the best possible shot at achieving the ultimate goal—landing a manuscript in the center of the Venn diagram where the stories I feel compelled to tell overlap with the stories the market is hungry for. I’m not saying it allows me to do it every time—not even close! I’ve only had two “yeses” for the hundreds of “nos” I’ve endured. But it tips the odds just far enough in my favor to keep me moving forward.

The respledent Kate Jenks!

More about Beatrice & Barb:

In this heartfelt story of friendship, a young girl is determined to save her most unlikely pet. Beatrice desperately wants a pet of her own. Her mom has other ideas. No dog. No cat. No hedgehog. They finally reach a compromise, and Beatrice gets ... a Venus flytrap. Being a good sport, Beatrice makes the best of things. She gives her new friend a name, Barb. She does all the things with Barb that good pet owners do, such as taking walks and playing fetch. Only, now, despite all the love and care, Barb is starting to look sick, with black spots on her leaves and some parts of her turning mushy. Beatrice knows she has to find a way to save Barb. But how? The debut picture book from author Kate Jenks Landry offers a universal and powerful message about how to take care of those we love. It also celebrates differences, unique friendships and what makes each of us special (like how Barb needs to eat bugs to survive!). This story has strong curriculum connections to social-emotional learning and offers excellent character education lessons on caring, perseverance and responsibility. Vivian Mineker's illustrations are imbued with the soft greens of plant life and beautifully convey the warmth and affection at the heart of the story.

More about Kate Jenks:

Kate is a graduate of OISE, and of the MA in Creative Writing program at the University of Toronto. She's also the creator of the blog The Needle and The Knife, where she shares interviews with other creatives, exploring questions of craft, community, and creative process.

Her debut picture book, Beatrice and Barb, was published with Kids Can Press in October, 2023. Her second book will follow in spring, 2025.

Kate lives with her partner Michael, their children Zoe and Mae, and a wily bernedoodle named Leo in Kitchener, Ontario, on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabe, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

Connect with Kate online:

Website: katejenkslandry.com

Instagram: @katejenkslandry

Blog: theneedleandtheknife.com

Power Q & A with Gary Barwin

Welcome Gary Barwin to our Power Q & A! Gary is, most recently, the author of Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023). This transfixing collection of personal essays offers a wide-eyed exploration of identity, language, belonging, and the unruly wonder of our existence. Gary’s writing is a timely and vital antidote to the desensitization of the news cycle, and a reminder of the importance of belonging—a topic as relevant now as ever.

We’re chuffed to have Gary here today to talk with us about what inspired this wondrous book.

Q: How did this collection of essays come to you? Did you always know it was going to be a book or did it just start with one essay, then another, then a theme began to take shape? Or something else entirely?

Bring home Imagining Imagining.

A: I was tricked, I tell you. I was tricked! I submitted an MS of poems with illustrations to Wolsak & Wynn publisher Noelle Allen and she agreed to publish it if I interleaved some essays between the poems. She’d been trying to convince me to write a book of essays for a few years but I never really felt the impulse. But poet me, blinded by the opportunity of publication, immediately agreed to her proposal. I had just submitted a draft of a novel to my agents and had a few months of waiting before they would report back, and so I began writing about whatever energized me. It was a revelation! I had so much to say, or rather, as soon as I began, I realized how much the act of writing, of being curious, of following the unfolding of the essays revealed to me. Connections that I had only vaguely intuited emerged. The energy of the language, of the possibilities of creative non-fiction, of form, captured my imagination and writing brain. And as I wrote more essays, I realized that I was making next-level connections between the different essays: in the way they were written as well as in their themes.

Of course, Noelle being an astute editor and a great judge of writers, knew that this would happen. Very quickly, I understood that I should ditch the poems (which weren’t that good anyway) because the essay collection had become its own thing. I also realized that I had some past writing (some speeches and some non-fiction) that belonged with the new work. I rewrote them in light of the just-written essays and then the entire book felt like it came from the same place, that it was defining its own book-space, its own essay-world. There were a few essays that Noelle wisely suggested that I omit, and I agreed with her. You know that thing when you show your writing to someone, secretly knowing that it isn’t that good, but, hoping against hope, that they will tell you it is marvelous and you’re a genius. I might have been tricked into writing these essays, but Noelle wasn’t tricked into including all of them. I’m so grateful that Noelle steered me toward the essay. I’m so thrilled to discover what it helped me discover, what new part of my writing self it brings out, how it facilitates such compelling exploration and discussion, how I have the opportunity as a writer to engage with readers in a new way.

Gary Barwin, Canadian icon!

More about Imagining Imagining:

In Imagining Imagining: Essays on Language, Identity and Infinity Barwin thinks deeply about big ideas: story and identity; art and death; how we communicate and why we dream. From his childhood home in Ireland to his long-time home in Hamilton, Barwin shares the thoughts that keep him up at night (literally) and the ideas that keep him creating. Filled with witty asides, wise stories and a generosity of spirit that is unmistakable, these are essays that readers will turn to again and again.

More about Gary:

Gary Barwin is a writer, composer and multidisciplinary, artist and the author of thirty books including Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, which won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates won the Leacock Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and was long-listed for Canada Reads. It was also optioned for TV by the Jim Henson Company. Barwin is a PhD in music and publishes and performs his work internationally.

Power Q & A with Gina Leola Woolsey

Welcome to our Power Q & A with the amazing Gina Leola Woolsey, author of Fifteen Thousand Pieces: A Medical Examiner’s Journey Through Disaster, published by Guernica Editions. Fifteen Thousand Pieces is a moving and fast-paced biography intertwining the Swiss Air disaster that happened off the coast of Nova Scotia with the life of the province’s Medical Examiner at the time, Dr. John Butt—a closeted gay man who was coming to terms with his own sexuality at the same time this tragedy was unfolding.

In this interview, we ask Gina about the challenges of telling this story.

Bring home Fifteen Thousand Pieces.

Q: What was the most personally challenging part of writing this book?

A: This story of death teaching us how to live fell into my lap at the same time my husband was diagnosed with prostate cancer. 

I met my subject, a forensic pathologist named John Clulow Butt, and we immediately hit it off. I was drawn to his story, and curious about how he chose his profession. How, and why, does a person who has gone through the rigours of medical school, and studied life-saving to the nth degree, decide to work with the dead? Of course, life isn’t ever that straightforward, and the answer to that question proved to be long and winding. 

I traversed the country twice conducting interviews with several people who were a big part of Dr. Butt’s personal and professional life. I asked them probing questions about the deaths of sons, daughters, mothers, and fathers, all the while considering how it would feel to be the one answering. I often found it difficult to keep my emotions in check. Though I was already in my late forties when I started the work, I hadn’t been touched by the death of loved one yet. My husband’s illness was always at my elbow as I gingerly asked about grief and loss, wanting to understand, but afraid of the answers.

My husband’s prognosis worsened as I began to weave the story of Dr. Butt’s life together to form a compelling narrative. A person’s life is filthy with minutia, and I was searching for the thread to sew it all together while my life was coming apart. The cancer had spread and it was clear I would be a widow before the story I was crafting became a book. It was hard to stay on track, to find a reason to keep writing. But my husband was my biggest fan. He refused to let me give up. He died in August of 2018, at home, with my daughter and me by his side. Though he didn’t get to see the book published, he did read the completed manuscript two months before he left us. Fifteen Thousand Pieces is dedicated to him. 

Gina, hard at work!

More about Gina Leola Woolsey:

CBC award-winning author Gina Leola Woolsey writes about people striving to find love, self-acceptance, and belonging in an ever-changing world. She left her corporate career mid-life to pursue an education in creative writing, earning a BFA from the University of British Columbia and an MFA from the University of King’s College. Currently, her time is split between her home in downtown Montréal, her birthplace in small-town Alberta, and her previous hometown, Vancouver.

More about Fifteen Thousand Pieces:

On Wednesday, September 2nd, 1998, an international flight carrying 229 souls crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Nova Scotia. There were no survivors. By Friday, Sept 4th, thousands of dismembered body parts had come through Dr. John Butt's makeshift morgue in Hangar B at the Shearwater military base. The Chief Medical Examiner faced the most challenging and grisly task of his career. Five years prior to the plane crash, John had lost his prestigious job as Alberta’s Chief Medical Examiner. After 14 years of marriage, John began to think of himself as gay, but remained closeted professionally. Then, after serving a handful of years as Nova Scotia's Chief Medical Examiner, the devastating crash in Nova Scotia cracked his carefully constructed façade. Fifteen Thousand Pieces explores one man's journey to accept his true nature and find his place in the world. Chapters alternate between the fast-paced story of the crash, and the history of the man in the making. It is both fast-paced and introspective; gruesome and touching. Ultimately, it is the story of how death teaches us to live. Bring home the book.

Power Q & A with m. patchwork monoceros

mel patchwork monoceros wrote one of our favourite poetry collections of the year, Remedies for Chiron (Radiant Press, 2023). Remedies for Chiron is told through the eyes of a queer, disabled, Black poet trying to navigate love and an often inaccessible and inhospitable world. mel is also an immensely talented visual artist (their book cover features their gorgeous work) and we’re stoked to have them join us for this Power Q & A to talk about their work.

Q: Are there intersections in your visual and written art? 

A: While creating my first collection of textile works and accompanying poems, Point of Origin (2016), I worked on the series of quilts and tapestries for over a year, all the while composing text-kin to go with them when they were complete. I didn't know I had ADHD and was autistic at the time but I did recognize an interesting way of working. I was spinning stitches up to the last minute and despite having the poems held in my brain, I couldn't proceed with them until the textiles were done. A matter of days before opening, once the pieces had been delivered to the gallery I came home and finally had the mental clarity to sit at my typewriter and tap away all nights, scribing each of the 6 connected poems in the order of the textiles one after the other. Though the words weren't written in tandem with the creation exactly, the chaotic cosmos of my mind was working vigorously, holding the words until my hands could receive them. Sewing, weaving, etc. leaves ample room for thought mapping and scripting passages as they arise. Writing asks to have a tactile output often, to support puzzling any foggy elements out. Since then, while I haven't created an exactly analogous series of one-to-one text/iles or films there is an energy when I am in the creation-station zone that ignites the form next to it like kindling. It is all language to me and they are in constant conversation.

Bring home Remedies for Chiron from Radiant Press.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I am mid-way into a new series of fiber portraits featuring microscopic views of frequented areas of my home. The series Mourning Microcosmmutes explores how as a disabled person and at-risk covid cautious person, my entire life has been within the walls of my home for nearly five years. Every year the pandemic continues and mandates and policies lessen, thus endangering immunocompromised people further. There is deep grief watching the world go on from behind my curtains. I have missed milestones, my own and my loved ones' because it is not safe for me to go to a mall much less get on an airplane. Myself and other covid shielders have felt and witnessed our lives shrink and shrink as more and more becomes toxic to our presence. We miss each other and understand with full comprehension why we may not see each other for years, possibly a decade, but it isn't easy, comfortable, enjoyable. A play on microcosm and commutes, my quilted photographs document spaces like stained glass squares, the transom between floors of different rooms, etc. and categorizes them in the context of going to a "workplace". I was able to exhibit a set of the pieces this Fall during Rendezvous With Madness festival at Workman Arts in Toronto. I will create the next set over the next few months. Other than that I am continuing tilling the turmoil of writing a memoir, eagerly anticipating tucking into my cozy writer cocoonland as the winter approaches and settles. 

The respledent m. patchwork monoceros.

More about m. patchwork monoceros:

m. patchwork monoceros (Treaty 1/Winnipeg, MB) is a poet and polydisciplinary artist exploring tactility and somatic grief through text, fiber, and film. Their collection Remedies for Chiron (poetry, Radiant Press) was released in 2023.

Power Q & A with rob mclennan

rob mclennan is a CanLit institution and an iconic example of the power of good literary citizenship. In addition to being one of the most prolific writers we know, rob regularly amplifies the voices of other writers through his blogs. You can find more about rob below. For now, let’s get to the burning question!

Q: You have a new book coming out: tell us all about it and how/if it stems from any themes addressed in your earlier work.

A: Well, the new poetry title is World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), out but a few weeks back. With “new” being a relative term, after all, this is a poetry title composed across the three years prior to the year I spent composing the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022). The poems across World’s End, (the comma is part of the title) work to articulate the space of moving beyond my twenty-five years of living in Ottawa’s Centretown to what was built as a 1950s suburb, into a house with recent wife and newborn, and subsequent newborn. “World’s End,” of course, is a term the British used for a pub that sat beyond the city’s gates, and with this particular move, I felt outside the boundary of what had long surrounded me, and the differences were worth examining. Just as much, this collection leans hard into structural examinations of the lyric sentence and the prose poem, something that subsequently evolved into a full collection of short, sharp, single-stanza prose poems with the book of smaller, a collection of poems entirely wrapped around being home full-time with two small children. While World’s End, focuses more generally on that space of newness (children, geography, travel, household etcetera), the book of smaller is more overtly focused on being home with a one-year-old and a toddler (after Christine returned to work post-maternity leave), composing poems on naps, walks, park outings and scattered reading. There’s always been a Frank O’Hara “I did this, I did that” element to my poems, although one that has evolved over the years to first focus on structure.

Order World’s End, from ARP.

Given I asked you for clarification on whether your question referred to the current work or the forthcoming one and you suggested I respond around both, I’ll mention I’ve a collection of short stories, On Beauty: stories, out next fall with University of Alberta Press. Each story is roughly three manuscript pages in length, sectioned across an accumulation of short, lyric prose bursts that examine elements of intimacy, silence and how small moments can impact future decisions. Nothing happens in any of these stories, but the lives of the characters within are simultaneously in motion: one never knows where any of these people might end up, and that’s what I find most fascinating about one step, one step and a further step. So much nothing is essential for absolutely everything. 

I consider that my approach for writing always begins with language and literary structure—whether thinking about a particular shape of short prose or a line break or a consideration of the prose poem, for example—while elements of theme or content regularly echo across much of what I’m working on. The goal, naturally, is the perfect blend of form and content, with form always the particular prompt of any project or manuscript, approaching writing from the perspective of language and structure, and elements of story, content, theme, what have you, emerging through that process. For the book of smaller and World’s End, say, I’m not deliberately or overtly working to write on fatherhood, geography or family, but utilizing that material as a means to a particular end, perhaps. I approach from language and structure, and themes emerge: home, family, domestic, reading, history, poetic structure. There are certain arguments that writers, no matter what they produce throughout their lives, are but working on a single, extended work, and that might possibly be true of me as well. I’m currently fifty or so pages into working a book-length genealogical non-fiction project, examining my own genealogical threads and my own potential implications around such, structured around the form of a research-heavy lyric essay. It all goes back to the beginning.

The indomitable rob mclennan.

More about rob mclennan:
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Power Q & A with gillian harding-russell

On this Power Q & A, we are absolutely chuffed to welcome the wonderful Saskatchewan poet, gillian harding-russell, who answers our question about how her stunning poems take shape on the page. gillian’s 2018 poetry collection, In Another Air, was published by Radiant Press, and her 2020 collection, Uninterrupted, was published by Ekstasis Editions. Both were short-listed for Saskatchewan Book Awards.

Welcome, gillian!

Q: When thinking of how a poem should present itself on the page, how do you make decisions about a poem’s appearance?

A: My first answer is that I allow the poem to shape itself – I do not make conscious decisions about the poem’s presentation ahead of writing it. Since the eye and convention have taught me to read left to right, I do, however, favour a left justification and use the left margin as a point of departure for various kinds of expression.

Some poems write themselves in longer meditative or narrative lines. As an example, the voice in “Returning from the dead” (In Another Air, Radiant Press) uses longer lines to tell a story that begins with the refurbishing of the warships, the Erebus and Terror, that would take Franklin on his infamous last expedition. Similarly, “My Dearest John,” which is a fictitious letter written by an imagined fiancée of the shipboy John Hartnell who died on Beechey Island, uses long reminiscing and candid lines with dream imagery that carries the speaker’s voice, and I hope at once captures her first love and her need to carry on without him, her torn conscience and honest sentiments. 

Grab In Another Air from Radiant Press.

Some poems write themselves in short lines, as for example “Like an Albatross across the Beaufort” and “Off Track between Back Bay and Frame Lake” – which, interestingly, both have long titles! In these poems the images shape the verses and the short lines allow us to pause and reflect on particular images, whether it is a fox’s hole near the path or the implicit image of an albatross that finds its way into a poem about receding icebergs. One of the poems with the shortest lines is “Raven at -40” in which the quick images in the first stanza are intended to catch the reader’s attention to tell a story rather rapidly while assembling the details. Also, the short verses capture a tempo for wit. The raven plays a trick on the light sensor by sitting on it to make it turn on in Yellowknife where it is cold and the light is short in the depth of winter. Here, again, the length of lines and the dimensions of the poem are not a conscious decision but instead a reflection of the voice in the particular poem.

Some poems are written in irregular lines, some short and others longer, and an example might be the poem “Albatross” in which an albatross is discovered filled with plastic and has died of an artificial hunger due to our industries’ mismanagement. The long and short lines are intended to capture the solemnity and curt facts of the bird’s death, while alluding to a larger environmental situation against the echo of a literary albatross. Another poem with dramatically irregular lines is another raven poem, “Raven Talk” in which the idea is to capture the raven’s raucous and lively, not predictable and unfathomable intelligence that is “other” than our own. 

Although I have never set out to write a shaped poem, there is one in In Another Air. As I started writing “Inukshuk,” I found myself thinking of that landmark, and so the poem shaped itself around its subject. An inukshuk is a type of landmark used widely in the north in which stones are placed on top of each other and often in a human-like form with a headstone. Although the poem begins in a single column to resemble its subject matter, the base of the pedestal is left-justified on one side and parted with another leg-like column to suggest that it may be walking over the landscape. I suddenly wanted the inukshuk in the poem to stride into life!

Last, there is a prose poem. Although prose poems for some poets may simply be poetic short prose, I tend to make breaks as in more traditional verse where the enjambments dramatize the action or the content in some way. And here I would point to “Outer Galactic Reports from Planet Z3” as an example of a prose poem with un-accidental line breaks.  The block shape of the two reports, “Preliminary Report (2025 C.E.)” and “Secondary Report (3018 C.E.)” is also intended to suggest either a journalist’s or scientist’s reporting in the future. 

The respledent gillian harding-russell.

More about gillian harding-russell:

Regina poet, editor and reviewer gillian harding-russell has published in journals across Canada and her poems have been anthologized in seventeen anthologies. Her most recent collections include In Another Air (Radiant Press, 2018) and Uninterrupted (Ekstasis Editions, 2020), both shortlisted for Saskatchewan Book Awards. In 2016, the suite “Making Sense” won first place in the Gwendolyn MacEwen Chapbook Award. A short chapbook, Megrim (The Alfred Gustav Press) was released in 2021.

Power Q & A with Mariam Pirbhai

For this Power Q & A, we’re delighted to be joined by author and academic, Mariam Pirhabi, to talk about her lastest book, Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (published by Wolsak & Wynn). In this book, Pirbhai looks carefully at the pocket of land she has called home in Southern Ontario for the past seventeen years, which she notes is a milestone for her, and asks how long it takes to be rooted to a place? And what does that truly mean? Today, we ask her about the roots of this beautiful book.

Grab a copy of Garden Inventories wherever books are sold, including directly from the publisher at Wolsak & Wynn.

Q: What inspired you to write this book and would you say there was a certain reader you were writing it for?

A: I’m of the view that a book is inspired by an amalgamation of experiences and reflections. For me, the pivotal experience is the fact that I lived in several other countries and continents before my family immigrated to and settled in Canada. This got me thinking about how, as first-generation immigrants, we task ourselves with trying to determine what it means to belong to the cultures and communities of an adopted country, but we leave little energy to focus on what it means to belong to or interact with the land—that is, its natural environment, its sense of itself as a geographic space, and also how that space is shaped and reshaped, often destructively so, by multiple waves of human migration and settlement, including our own. So, in fact, the first inspiration was a set of questions I posed for myself: what is your relationship to this land? And how does your awareness, as someone who has also lived in some very different lands (e.g., Pakistan, England and the Philippines), inform or influence the way you have come to see Canada and its landscapes? 

In a book titled Garden Inventories, it goes without saying that the other major inspiration for this book is nature and gardening. As my husband and I really started to dig, so-to-speak, into this wondrous world of creating a garden, we quickly realized just what novices we were, and just how little we understood about gardening in a place that is considered the most southerly region of Canada and yet also a distinctly northern environment with a fleeting growing season. We realized that this land has a lot of stories to tell us, not only through plants and the history of plants in this place, but also through the wider environment to which our gardens are invariably connected—from storm drains to neighbourhood creeks, to woodlands and conservation areas. In fact, while this is a book inspired by gardening in a southern Ontario suburb, it is not, by any means, written by a gardening expert! Far from it, it is a book about what it means to take that first tentative step into a garden and, with it, into a land. This was my inspiration, I suppose: the journey that gardening has set me on. It’s both like and unlike all of my other migrations: on the one hand, I know it will be a constant journey because that is what is so magical (and challenging) about gardening: the nature of nature is change, so the learning curve is not only steep but perpetual. On the other hand, gardening has invited me to stand still for a moment and, perhaps for the first time in the 30+ years I’ve lived in Canada, helped me rethink my original question: namely, instead of asking, what is my relationship to this land, I now ask, what does it mean to bear the gift of this land in my earth-scented fingertips?          

My answer to your second question about readers goes something like this: this book is for anyone who lives and walks through the natural world that is their proverbial backyard and takes their sense of place in it for granted; and this book is for anyone who lives and walks through the natural world that is their proverbial backyard and takes their sense of outsidership in it for granted. That is to say, this book is intended for everyone.    

Mariam Pirbhai in her garden.

More about Garden Inventories:

Seeing the landscape around her with the layered experience of a childhood spent wandering the world, in Garden Inventories, Pirbhai shares her efforts to create a garden and understand her new home. From the strange North American obsession with non-fruiting fruit trees to the naming conventions of plants that erase their heritage, she casts a sharp eye on the choices that have shaped our gardens, and our society. Pirbhai considers wildflowers and weeds, our obsession with lawns, the choices in our plant nurseries and even our Canadian dedication to the cottage with warmth and humour. The result is a delightful collection of essays that invites the reader to see the beautiful complexity of the land around us all in a new way.

More about Mariam Pirbahi:

Mariam Pirbhai is an academic and creative writer. She is the author of a newly released book of creative nonfiction titled Garden Inventories: Reflections on Land, Place and Belonging (Wolsak & Wynn, 2023), a debut novel titled Isolated Incident (Mawenzi 2022) and a short story collection titled Outside People and Other Stories (Inanna 2017), winner of the Independent Publishers’ and American BookFest awards. She is Full Professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, where she specializes in postcolonial literatures, diaspora studies and creative writing. She is the author and editor of pioneering scholarly works on the global South Asian diaspora and its literatures, including Mythologies of Migration, Vocabularies of Indenture: Novels of the South Asian Diaspora in Africa, the Caribbean, and Asia-Pacific (University of Toronto Press, 2009). From 2017-2019, she served as President of the Canadian Association for Postcolonial Studies (formerly known as CACLALS, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies), Canada's longest-running scholarly association devoted to postcolonial and global anglophone literatures. Mariam was born in Pakistan and she and her husband live in Waterloo, ON.  

Power Q & A with Amanda Earl

We’re thrilled to have fellow creative misfit and community builder Amanda Earl join us today to talk about her incredible Small Machine Talks podcast, which celebrates and amplifies the voices of artists who have been traditionally excluded from conversations on creation and focuses on the joys and frustration of the creative process.

Welcome, Amanda!

Q: One of the things that strikes us about your podcast is how it seems to be artist-centric. What we mean by this is that while it is absolutely relevant for people who don’t live and work in the arts (and would be a powerful way for them to tap into this creative force in their world) it is especially honed into the process of creating, as opposed to a promoting a marketable finished product. Is this an angle you intentionally set out to pursue, or one that arose organically?

Also, your new book! Tell us about it!

A: The Small Machine Talks, since its beginning in 2016, has always been at the intersection of community and creativity. Over the years, we have moved from focusing on the poetry scene of Central Canada to prioritizing creators and cultural workers who have been systematically excluded from the literary canon all over the world. This falls in line with the mission of AngelHousePress, the sponsor of the podcast. All of AngelHousePress’s activity is centred on promoting and publishing these voices.

I started AngelHousePress in 2007 to be what I expected would be a press that made chapbooks. We did that for several years, along with two online magazines: NationalPoetryMonth.ca to celebrate poetry beyond borders and boundaries, and Experiment-O to celebrate the art of risk, with a separate imprint for transgressive prose, DevilHouse.

Through the work we were doing, and my other creative endeavours: writing and editing poetry, prose and visual poetry I learned about many writers, artists and visual poets from all over the world. After a few years, I started to publish chapbooks by writers and visual poets outside of North America, which I loved to do, but shipping overseas to contributors and their fans is expensive, and my husband and I live in a small apartment. We don’t have room to store chapbooks.

With AngelHousePress, I didn’t want my focus to be publishing only Canadians or locals. I do this already with Bywords.ca, a twenty-year-old online magazine and site that publishes poetry by current and former Ottawa students, residents and workers and promotes Ottawa’s thriving literary, spoken word, storytelling and nonfiction events through a calendar.

I liked what we were able to do with our online magazines, NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment-O. I liked that we didn’t have to limit ourselves to a small number of copies as we did with chapbooks, or black and white only, and that we could publish creators from all over the world, especially those who are being systematically excluded by the literary and artistic canons.

For Bywords.ca, we’ve always been able to pay our contributors, thanks to funding from the City of Ottawa. For AngelHousePress, because we do not focus on just one specific region or genre, we aren’t eligible for funding.

We didn’t pay our contributors until 2021, when we launched The first AngelHousePress Caring Imagination crowdfunding campaign. We combined this campaign with the promotion of small presses around the world, who have generously donated bundles of limited edition chapbooks, books and merchandise to help us raise money to pay our artists. The campaign was successful and has now become a regular part of our program, taking place in February yearly so that we can pay contributors for both NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment-O.

I think paying artists is important, particularly those who are systematically excluded. As Jacqueline Valencia writes, “"Many writers of colour struggle to get a foot in the door of the literary scene and do not have the privilege of giving away their time and labor for free." Conceptualism in the Resistance, The Town Crier, Puritan Magazine, April, 2017.

 In 2022, we were able to start a site, https://caringimagination.com/, which provides resources for creators and cultural workers who want to do their work with compassion. It includes links to resources with advice about choosing sensibility editors, workshops and residences for BIPOC writers, making accessible sites, writing descriptive text and more. I also have a bit of money that was donated separately that I’m using to commission guides, aimed directly at writers and artists. We have had two guides so far, one by me on running a crowdfunding campaign, and another by Rae White on gender inclusivity recommendations for literary events and festivals.

The Caring Imagination has an advisory committee made up of women and nonbinary artists from Australia, Canada, India, UK, and USA.

Other AngelHousePress initiatives are an essay series on AngelHousePress.com. 

I am very happy with what we’ve achieved and will achieve in the future with lots of learning and listening to the voices that matter. AngelHousePress is a defiant and feisty intersectional feminist, queer and quirky small press, a home for those that have been silenced for too long.

Beast Body Epic is a collection of long poems provoked by my near-death health crisis in 2009. I published it through AngelHousePress and it came out in September. Beast Body Epic is for anyone who’s circled the drain or knows someone who has. The book is about having the shit kicked out of you and surviving. More information is available on AngelHousePress.com. There will be a virtual reading from Beast Body Epic on Sunday, November 12, 2023 2pm EST with Amanda, Sandra Ridley and Christine McNair. You can sign up here: www.tinyurl.com/beastbodyepicNov1223

More about Amanda:

Amanda Earl (she/her) has been a working writer in multiple genres for over twenty years. Her mission is whimsy, exploration, and connection with fellow misfits. She has published poetry, visual poetry, short fiction and a novel. Earl is a pansexual polyamorous feminist writer, visual poet, editor, and publisher who lives on Algonquin Anishinaabeg traditional territory. Earl is managing editor of Bywords.ca, editor of Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry (Timglaset Editions, Sweden, 2021) and fallen angel of AngelHousePress.

Her poetry books include Beast Body Epic (AngelHousePress, 2023), Trouble (HemPress, 2022), and Kiki (Chaudiere Books, 2014; Invisible Publishing, Canada, 2019). In 2024 a digital chapbook entitled Seasons, an excerpt from Welcome to Upper Zygonia will be published by Full House Literary.

More information is available at AmandaEarl.com and https://linktr.ee/amandaearl. You can also subscribe to her newsletter, Amanda Thru the Looking Glass for sporadic updates on publishing activities, chronic health issues and the inner workings of AngelHousePress, calls for submissions and more.

Social Media:

https://twitter.com/kikifolle

https://www.facebook.com/AmandaEarlWriter

https://www.instagram.com/earlamanda

https://zirk.us/@AmandaEarl

amandaearl.bsky.social

Power Q & A with Maria Zuppardi

Maria Zuppardi, host of the Publisher’s Weekly recommended podcast, Get (Can)Lit, joins us today to talk about one of our favourite bookish topics ever: small press CanLit. Her answer to our question about reading books from small presses astounds and reminds us of why we started reading in the first place: to lose a bit of ourselves, and find a bit we never knew existed.

Welcome, Maria!

Get (Can)Lit—listen now!

Q: You’re obviously a voracious reader and one who vehemently supports small press CanLit. What would you tell someone who only reads—or reads predominantly—books by multinationals, to get them into reading more books by indie presses?

A: I have so many thoughts on this, what a topic to discuss! For those who read books that get all the social media hype, or the best placement in bookstores, congratulations, because you just fell for some great marketing plan that’s been in action for literally months. No shade though, because I’ll be honest, I totally fall for those blockbuster reads as well. I can’t deny reading a book I’ve seen a million times! But that’s what drives Big 5 publishing today - thousands of dollars (perhaps even hundreds of thousands?) being poured into printing ARCs, mailing costs, paid advertising geared towards librarians and booksellers, NetGalley costs and ads, conference fees, author travel….all to make sure that one of the books you read is THEIR book. By the time the book gets published, it’s all we see until the next big thing releases, and it’s up to us consumers to make up the financial hole this book is in, and help balance out those accounting reports for the publishers, or not.

It’s easy to walk into a bookstore or library and pick up the first thing we see because it’s on a table or other display, or on sale for that matter. But you know what? If you take your time and get lost in those bookshelves, you’re guaranteed to find a hidden gem, and it might not even be a book you’ve ever heard about! If you want to be a little more conscious of the types of books you read, here are my best tips:

Do a little bit of research. Simply googling “Toronto authors” or whatever province you live in will yield results, which will ultimately land you on an independent publishers list. We’re known for championing local authors before they’re snatched up by the Big 5!

Find out who your independent presses are. Again, a simple Google search that you can tailor to your needs. Canada has so many different types of publishers who specialize in unique books like travel, poetry, nonfiction, or again, specifically local authors.

Ask your local bookstore. Booksellers at indie bookstores are THE BEST. They know anything and everything about what you need even before you know you should read it. They have to be magical beings of some sort, I swear! Indie bookstores always keep indie presses in stock, and they are huge supporters for local indie authors. If you don’t have a local bookstore near you, you can always send them an email or see what types of books are on their social media, and find some new reads through there.

Scope out literary festivals. Even if you can’t attend, there’s always a great mix of Big 5 and indie press authors. See who’s on what panel, find out who published what and pick up that book that interests you. Just don’t regret not going to see the author talk about their book live when you had the chance!

At the end of the day, making slight behaviour changes to how you shop in bookstores or search for books online will go a long way. Authors from independent publishers face a unique set of challenges in the industry, and their books deserve to be read as much as anyone else. Especially for BIPOC authors. It’s so tough at the Big 5, let alone at an indie. But I promise you, #DiverseCanLit from Canadian publishers is literally superior to anything else that comes out internationally. Give it a try, agree with me, and keep buying those books from independent publishers! And when you find that little press you love, champion them on your own social media, share their books with others. You’ll have a very appreciative author, and press, behind you!

More about Maria:
Maria Zuppardi is an avid reader, book lover, and coffee drinker in Toronto. You can find her talking about all books at @readingmaria, and also talking about Canadian authors on the Get (Can)Lit Podcast available on your favourite platform.

Power Q & A with Saeed Teebi

Saeed Teebi’s collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian, was published by House of Anansi Press in 2022, and we were lucky enough to read an advance copy of it. We’d say that now more than ever it is important to amplify the underrepresented and silenced voices of Palestinian people, but the truth is it’s always been important.

We’re honoured Saeed Teebi joined us for this Power Q & A.

Her First Palestinian by Saeed Teebi is available wherever books are sold.

Q: We found your book to be this gripping and exquisite collection of stories that dismantle the notion of the Palestinian people as a monolith while also being one that unifies, resounding as a reminder that we are closer to each other than the powers that seek to control us—two narrative forces that may seem to work to opposite ends but are actually so authentic to the human experience across time, culture, and religion: we all want, basically, the same things, but fear corrupts. It distorts. Were these opposing forces something you were conscious of as you were writing? Or were they something that manifested unconsciously, merely by the act of so closely exploring your characters and their stories?

A: In writing Her First Palestinian, I was consciously aware of — and acting to effect — one of those narrative forces you refer to, while comfortable that the other one would emerge on its own. The prevailing conception of Palestinians as a monolith is pervasive, and it’s not an accident. Flattening a people into negative uni-dimensional characteristics like ‘violent,’ ‘uncooperative,’ or ‘anti-Semitic’ is a good way of marginalizing them. And marginalizing Palestinians, and by extension their interests and aspirations, has become a nearly foundational concept of Western societies and their vested geopolitical interests (as they perceive them). If someone is marginal, you can toss them aside, them and their slogans. 

So making sure my stories had a range of Palestinian characters (merely reflecting reality) was important, not to mention more interesting. With every story, I asked myself: “What different kind of person can I write about now?” Some of my characters are religious, some are licentious, some are apprehensive, some are reckless, some are traumatized, some are naive. But all are impinged on by the pressures of their identities and the locus of their existence. And you’re right that among the strongest of those pressures is fear. Fear of institutional power, fear of corrupt governments, fear of personal ostracization, or even just the fear of not being loved. The fear is well-earned given how often, in real life, it materializes into actual hurt. 

Of course, although fear might be particularly acute for many Palestinians, it is hardly unique to them. I was never worried that my readers would recognize this same fear in their own lives, whether they are Palestinians or not. It’s among our most human feelings, especially in a time when we feel less and less in control of our lives and our outcomes. Ultimately, the main faith that I have in literature is that it illustrates the connections between us that we can’t help but have.

Saeed Teebi.

About Saeed Teebi:

Saeed Teebi is a writer and lawyer based in Toronto. His debut collection of short stories, Her First Palestinian, was a finalist for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize, the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Award, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, and the Forest of Reading Evergreen Award. The title story “Her First Palestinian” was shortlisted for the 2021 CBC Short Story Prize. Saeed was born to Palestinian parents in Kuwait and, after some stops in the U.S., has lived in Canada since 1993. He is working on his first novel.

Power Q & A with Kathryn Mockler

We love flash fiction, so we were stoked when poet and flash fiction pro, Kathyrn Mockler, said she’d be game to join us for a Power Q & A. Let’s dive in, and learn a little more about writing, and why to write, this short and sweet form of fiction.

Q: There’s short fiction, then there’s short, short fiction. Your newest book, Anecdotes (Book*Hug Press, 2023) features the latter—flash fiction. Why did you feel this form was a good fit for the themes addressed in your book, if this was a conscious consideration at all?

Anecdotes is now available to order anywhere books are sold, including at Book*Hug Press.

A: Flash fiction is a genre I enjoy reading, and many authors I admire write in this form—Claudia Rankine, Lydia Davis, Osama Alomar, Gary Barwin, Kathy Fish, Diane Williams.

I also have a poetry background so that might account for my interest in the very short story. Most of my poetry is essentially flash or micro-fiction. 

In many ways the difference between prose and poetry is arbitrary for me and has more to do with publication categorization than any concern I have when writing. I use poetic techniques in my prose and narrative in my poetry. Very short autofictional prose and very short absurd prose are probably the most accurate descriptions of my work, which I admit isn’t the sexiest way to phrase it.

In terms of length, I don’t consciously set out to write in a very short form. It just happens. In Anecdotes there’s everything from one-lines to mid-sized stories in the collection. 

When a story feels like it’s said all it’s going to say, I wrap it up. I don’t try to force a longer narrative out of something that wants to be short. 

Many of the pieces from the third section, This Isn’t a Conversation, are from an ongoing project that is also a video project which consists of thoughts, fragments, conversations, journal writing, overheard snippets. When I hear a line or think of a line that fits that project, I include it. So I know those piece are going to be short by the nature of how they are composed. However I rearrange these pieces in all sorts of ways so they may be longer or shorter depending on what I am doing with them. 

But for the other stories, I just let each story be as long as it wants or needs to be. When a story tells me it’s done, I listen.

More about Anecdotes:

With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse.

Absurdist flash fictions in “The Boy is Dead” depict characters such as a park that hates hippies, squirrels, and unhappy parents; a woman lamenting a stolen laptop the day the world ends; and birds slamming into glass buildings.

 “We’re Not Here to Talk About Aliens” gathers autofictions that follow a young protagonist from childhood to early 20s, through the murky undercurrent of potential violence amidst sexual awakening, from first periods to flashers, sticker books to maxi pad art, acid trips to blackouts, and creepy professors to close calls.

 “This Isn’t a Conversation” shares one-liners from overheard conversations, found texts, diary entries, and random thoughts: many are responses to the absurdity and pain of the current political and environmental climate.

In “My Dream House,” the past and the future are personified as various incarnations in relationships to one another (lovers, a parent and child, siblings, friends), all engaged in ongoing conflict.

 These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.

Kathyrn Mockler.

More about Kathryn:

Kathryn Mockler is the author of five books of poetry. She co-edited the print anthology Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (2020) and is the publisher of the Watch Your Head website. She runs Send My Love to Anyone, a literary newsletter, and is an Assistant Professor at the University of Victoria where she teaches screenwriting and fiction.

Power Q & A with Valentino Assenza

This is a super exciting Power Q & A for us! Not only are we interviewing an extraordinary Canadian poet and spoken word artist, but we’re interviewing a tireless advocate of other Canadian artists: Valentino Assenza host and producer of HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. Every Tuesday night at 10 p.m. EST, Valentino welcomes emerging and established authors, poets, playwrights, and songwriters to the airwaves. We’ve heard many of our favourite artists on this show, and have learned about so many more who have become favourites, so we wanted to take this opportunity to spotlight the person behind this miraculous and indisputably vital celebration of art and artists.

Funding to the arts is (as always) precarious, but people like Valentino continue to provide a platform for artists. To support Valentino and Canadian artists, tune into HOWL at CIUT.com or access CIUT 89.5 FM through the TuneIn Radio app. You can also donate to the show here. Let’s keep the CanLit love alive!

Q: What is the origin story of HOWL? How did it come about and what are some of the biggest challenges and triumphs you’ve experienced hosting this show?

A: Howl was founded by Toronto poets Nik Beat and Stephen Humphrey in 1995. For them, it was a way to give exposure to local poets from across the city. In the early 2000s Stephen Humphrey left the show and for a very long stretch of time the show was co-hosted by Nancy Bullis and Nik Beat.

So unfortunately in September of 2014, Nik Beat passed away, and at the urging of people in the Toronto poetry community having hosted poetry events for years, I was encouraged to apply.  I had mixed feelings about the commitment.  I wondered how I was going to get guests on the show regularly,  and wondered if it was too much of a commitment, but decided to dive in and started hosting Howl in January of 2015.   While sharing the show with Nancy we alternated and switched hosting every Tuesday.  We decided to expand the scope of the show and include novelists, and singer/songwriters as well as poets.  We utilized social media to give the show a bit bigger reach, and ended up connecting with some fantastic publishers, and publicists leading to some remarkable interview opportunities. In 2017 I got to interview Margaret Atwood, but have talked to so many amazing personalities both before and after then. In 2020 the pandemic hit, and we had to online software so we could submit the show from home.  At the end of 2020 Nancy Bullis stepped down from Howl, and I have been running the show on my own on a weekly basis.  It's been challenging juggling the job with a 40-hour-a-week day job, but it's rewarding to give myself the commitment of reading books on a weekly basis, and talking to the authors.  I love giving the artists space, it feels like I am making a difference, and in a day and age where people are actually talking about banning books, I am going to hang onto this show and continue amplifying those voices for as long as I can. 

More about Valentino Assenza:

Valentino Assenza has been a published poet and spoken word artist for over two decades. He has published four chapbooks of poetry: Wandering Absence, Il Ritorno (Labour Of Love Productions), Quiet Confessions of a Loudmouth and Make Our Peace With Rattlesnakes (Lyricalmyrical Press). He has had numerous pieces of poetry published in anthologies such as Labour Of Love and Descant Magazine. He has read and performed his poetry throughout Canada and the U.S.A.

Valentino was a member of the Toronto Poetry Slam team in 2009 and 2010 and has performed his poetry at the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word and The National Poetry Slam. Valentino sat on the committees for the Art Bar Poetry Series and Toronto Poetry Project.

He currently lives in Grimsby with his wife Angela, and is the host and producer of Howl, a spoken word, literary radio show, Tuesday nights at 10pm on CIUT 89.5 FM.

Power Q & A with Lynn Tait

In this Power Q & A, we’re delighted to talk with the incomparable Lynn Tait, whose debut poetry collection, You Break It You Buy It, was just released with Guernica Editions on September 1, 2023. Tait’s work offers an evocative and gutsy exploration of pain and resilience. From racism to the climate emergency, to the complicated nature of family, love, and loss, Tait defies a generation’s debilitating standard of silence and cracks open our personal and shared failings with unflinching tenderness, humour, and insight. 

The effect is absorbing and resounds with a sonic call to empathy. Now more than ever, we need this message.

Today we’re asking Lynn about “accessible poetry,” and her nuanced and thoughtful answer is everything we hoped it would be.

Lynn Tait’s You Break It You Buy It is available wherever books are sold.

Q. Some poets don't like their work being called accessible, but not only do you not mind it, you have often referred to your own poetry as such. Why do you think other poets might have a distaste for this word? Why does it not bother you?

A. I couldn't try to talk for other poets here. I imagine it depends how one might define "accessible".  I realize there are "Instagram poets" who are not appreciated by writers who have worked at their craft for years especially publishing through print, magazines, and books. Social media platforms have made it easy to corral a large following and, in some cases, it’s paid off, but it does have somewhat of a cheapening effect on the art and craft of poetry.

Making poetry too accessible allows for copyright infringements, under the guise of fair use. We are not paid properly for our time and work as it is.

I think some poets aren't too keen on Amazon or e-books in general. I respect this point of view. For myself, I wish my poetry book was available as an e-book. If I had to buy hardcopy poetry books only, I'd read much less than I do; and I read a heck of a lot of books at one time on my Kindle and in hardcopy, so the accessibility of the product/book, my own and others is important to me. But I have 14 poetry books on the go digitally and 7 hardcopies I'm reading; one of which I was able to find used, so cost me a bit less.

For myself, readership is what I strive for and I equate that to accessibility. I have many friends and acquaintances who do not read poetry. They are surprised at the seriousness of my work pertaining to the subject matter and appreciate the humour. But they're also surprised to find they understand my pieces without a lot of difficulty or they relate to them in some way. I use a lot of metaphor and simile and ambiguity allowing a wide range of personal interpretation, but I think my subject matter allows for accessibility. Everyone has dealt with lousy relationships, we all don't have mothers we adore, we are cruel to each other, and people piss us off. We all have lots to say, but refrain from saying it, so I think my work allows readers to enter into feelings and thoughts they can't necessarily express.

Frankly, I think more people should attempt to read poetry. In this day and age and with time being precious, it makes sense for some readers to want to fit in short one or two-page pieces of writing rather than long stories. Poetry allows for 3 to 5 lyrical narratives, stories, and ideas in about 10 minutes. You get fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction, horror, speculative fiction, science, and everything in between in a relatively short period of time. The topics are endless. Readers unfamiliar with poetry are still stuck on trying to figure out our 'meanings' rather than just taking what they want or need from the poem. Most people aren't pondering over what Stephen King or what most prose writers are trying to say, so why agonize over meanings (unless you want to) in poems? No one is going to quiz you at the end of the day on poetry interpretation. Are they still doing that in the classroom? Reading poetry should be freeing not confining. Who cares what we initially had in mind or what prompted us to write a particular piece? Once poems are available to the public, does it matter what we originally had in mind?

I've read plenty of poems that I can't say are accessible. I don't have a clue what the poet means and I can't personally access the images. Sometimes it doesn't matter I'm enjoying the pieces regardless, but there are times . . .I'm in a fog and need some clarity. As a poet, I don't find this particularly intimidating, but if you want to turn people on to poetry, and want people to buy poetry books, I think some kind of accessibility of the art form or the content must be offered. Are my poems simplistic – no. But I do hope they are accessible.

Poet Lynn Tait.

More about Lynn Tait:

Lynn Tait is a Toronto-born poet and photographer residing in Sarnia, Ontario. Her poems have appeared in literary magazines and journals including Literary Review of Canada, FreeFall, Vallum, CV2, Windsor Review, and in over 100 North American anthologies. She is a member of the Ontario Poetry Society and The League of Canadian Poets. You Break It You Buy It is her debut collection.

For press or media inquiries for Lynn Tait, please contact us.

River Street Reviews: The Brickworks by Lucy Black, Reviewed by Gail Kirkpatrick

The Brickworks by Lucy E.M. Black. Published by Now or Never Publishing Co., October 2023.

Reviewed by Gail Kirkpatrick, author of Sleepers and Ties, (Now or Never Publishing Co.)

Lucy E. M. Black has the makings of a multigenerational saga in her rich and deep novel The Brickworks. Beginning in Scotland with narratives starting between 1879 and 1909, it tells the story of two men driven by ambition and their need to overcome the tragedies of their past in a new land just beginning to discover its potential. 

Through a fateful series of life events and a benefactor uncle, Brodie (Hamilton) Smith feeling ‘ashamed of his father, while yet sustaining a keen sense of injustice’ earns his engineering degree to prove construction and not his train-operating father was to blame for the collapse of a bridge. Even more, Brodie longs for something for which he cannot find the words. 

Alistair learned the art and science of brick building by way of his father. ‘I learned my craft in Scotland and thought there might be need of my skills in a growing country.’

The Brickworks is available for pre-order now.

The men meet while working on a swing bridge over the river Welland in Canada and quickly form a bond. Each are ambitious in their own way, seeking to make their fortunes and a new life in Canada. From the correct mix of clay, slate, and water to the Flemish Bond pattern in which they can be laid, the art of brickmaking is revealed. Likewise, in the demands of good bridge building, trusses vs cables, to the cable system used by Roebling for the Brooklyn Bridge, Black blends and layers history within the story of these two men. There is also lovely detail on how to build a spur rail line that will serve the factory. The nuanced use of Scottish dialect--‘if you were nae half so bladdered you would know it too’ adds just the right touch of authenticity.  

Inevitably, both men meet the women they wish to marry but through their own insecurities, doubts, and plain stubbornness these romantic relationships are delayed. As Alistair observes, ‘he was a man building his fortune and could not afford to be distracted.’ Violet Lewis and Charlotte Gowan are also both well-developed and interesting characters of their time and circumstances. 

The cold and harsh environment of Canada in the 1900’s is realized against the pains of a growing country, and Lamith Bricks is also concerned about housing its workers. 

As in her previous book, Stella’s Carpet, the author organically incorporates historical details within a moving narrative, never allowing a writer’s thorough research to outshine story.

That the work flows with ease between time periods and narratives is testimony to the skill of being able to write speculative, layered, and imaginative historical fiction. The reader is left wanting to know if the men do make their fortunes, if indeed their dreams of fishing and passing on their heritage to their children come true. Readers will be left imagining a book two or three of The Brickworks by Lucy E.M. Black.    

About Lucy E.M. Black:

Lucy E.M. Black is the author of the short story collection The Marzipan Fruit Basket, the historical fiction novel Eleanor Courtown, and most recently Stella’s Carpet. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA, and Canada in literary journals and magazines including Cyphers Magazine, the Hawai’i Review, The Antigonish Review, and others. A dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer, and freelance writer, Lucy lives with her partner in Port Perry, Ontario.

About Gail Kirkpatrick:

After receiving her undergrad at the University of Victoria, Gail Kirkpatrick completed her MA in writing at Lancaster University where she explored the parallel and converging lines of memory, shared history, and landscape. Her writing has been published in various literary and trade magazines in Canada and the UK, and Sleepers and Ties is her first novel. She currently resides in Victoria, BC.

Excerpt from 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages

With just over a month until 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages (edited by Dr. Nora Gold) is released, we are excited to be able to share an excerpt of a story from this beautifully curated anthology of Jewish literature. Keep reading!

The Guest
By Varda Fiszbein
Translated from Spanish by Andrea G. Labinger

Intuition or luck? The opportunity was in the guest’s hands and he knew how to seize it. 

The fact is that he guessed someone like my grandfather could only react as he did. In a God-fearing man, one respectful of Mosaic Law, the sense of tradition prevails even above feelings. He may not have been rich, but every year when the Pesach festivities rolled around, he would conduct his Seder surrounded by his family like a king. 

Elegant in his dark suit, with a gold chain draped across his chest, he sits in an armchair at the head of the table as if it were a throne, his head resting on a cushion designed especially for that day, a cushion on which the Star of David, delicately embroidered, stands out against a blue velvet background.

I was only thirteen and felt slightly out of place. I was the oldest of the grandchildren, no longer of an age to participate in the commotion produced by the younger cousins as they stampeded through the house in search of the afikoman, but not yet old enough to join the adults who took advantage of the occasion to chat about this and that while pretending to look for it. 

I remained in my chair, feeling uncomfortable, until my grandfather beckoned me with his hand, and understanding my state of confusion, hurried to my rescue, pointing out the circle formed by my two youngest uncles and their friend. 

Prepared to accept his suggestion, I stood up to join them, but at that moment the group dispersed. 

I don’t know what my uncles did or where they went. From that moment on, and until the end of the evening, all my attention was focused on our mysterious guest. 

About the anthology:

As the first anthology of translated multilingual Jewish fiction in 25 years, 18 is a highly-anticipated and transcendent collection that challenges the narrow viewpoint most people have about Jewish fiction, and attempts to change the monolithic way people think about this type of literature.

Each story in this collection has been translated into English from a different language; Albanian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Ladino, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Yiddish. These compelling, humorous, and moving stories, written by authors that include Isaac Babel, S.Y. Agnon, and Lili Berger, reflect both the diversities and the commonalities within Jewish culture, and will make you laugh, cry, and think. This beautiful book is easily accessible and enjoyable not only for Jewish readers, but for story-lovers of all backgrounds.

About Dr. Nora Gold:

Dr. Nora Gold, previously an Associate Professor, is currently the Founder and Editor of the prestigious online literary journal JewishFiction.net. She is also the prize-winning author of three books of fiction, as well as the recipient of two Canadian Jewish Book/Literary Awards and praise from Alice Munro.

Pre-order your copy of 18: Jewish Stories Translated from 18 Languages, edited by Dr. Nora Gold.

For press inquiries, please contact us.

Power Q & A with Lucy E.M. Black

Lucy E.M. Black is one of our favourite writers of historical fiction. Ever. Her upcoming (and fourth) book, The Brickworks, is due out with Now and Never Press in October 2023. Told in Black's signature luminous prose, The Brickworks tells the story of Alistair and Brodie, two ambitious Scottish immigrants to North America at the turn of the century. This is an unforgettable story of hardship and triumph from one of the most fiercely gifted writers of historical fiction in Canada. We are delighted Lucy agreed to join us for our latest Power Q & A. Here, she lifts the hood on her writing process and allows us to get a glimpse of the wonderfully intricate (and a wee bit intimidating) workings of her creative process.

The Brickworks by Lucy E.M. Black, published by Now or Never Press, October 2023.

Q: You are, by far, one of the most impressively methodical authors we know of in the writing of your books, which are largely historical fiction. But you’re also gifted with the ability to craft beautiful prose that seems anything but methodical. What’s your secret? How do you take what must be notebook after notebook of research—and what must sometimes be quiet dry research—and bring it to life in your narratives? 

A: Thank you for those kind words. I am, as you rightly identify, a methodical writer.  Unlike the brilliant Alistair MacLeod who could apparently write perfected, beautiful prose in a first draft, my first drafts are awful.  Ernest Hemingway is alleged to have said, “the first draft of anything is shit,” and I definitely fall into that category of writer.    

I write, edit, rewrite, edit, rewrite, edit, and rewrite a seemingly endless number of drafts.  The Brickworks which will be released in October, underwent fifteen full drafts of the manuscript.  It’s not that I tinker with my work so much as endeavour to ensure whatever I’m writing conveys the ideas I wish to communicate in as error-free a form as I can manage.  

Writing historical fiction means that a sense of verisimilitude is crucial to the reader’s enjoyment of the text.  I strive to transport readers to another time and place.  To do so involves ensuring that the tiniest of details is fact-checked for accuracy, and also for what I call believability.  There is no point embedding some fantastical piece of historic trivia in the manuscript, even if it’s true, if the detail will take the reader out of the text while they google the information or check references.  I read a lovely historical fiction book several weeks ago and kept tripping over references that were not consistent with the period.  Although I believe the author had the absolute right to utilize creative licence, the use of contemporary items and discoveries in a historical context felt sloppy to me and weakened the tone set by the tale.

There is always a bit of alchemy in what a writer writes but there is also a defined and disciplined process that I use when writing historical fiction:  

1. I begin my process by doing an exhaustive amount of research. Sometimes I am able to complete the bulk of the research in a matter of months but sometimes I do just enough to get the manuscript started, and then take writing breaks while I complete additional research. 

2. I then shape the novel’s trajectory by carefully plotting the storyline.  I don’t always have the final ending when I begin, but I usually have an idea of where I hope to end up.

3. After that, I develop my characters.  I begin by naming them, ensuring I use a name that was common to the locale and time period.  Once I have the name, I choose a birthday, key defining details (i.e., hair colour, name of parents) and physical description (i.e., hair style, shape of face, nose, height).  I will often flip through magazines or books of photos, to create what I call my reference images.  For historical fiction, my reference images often include clothing from the period. And then I let everything percolate.  At some point after that, often when I have awoken from a deep sleep, the characters are fully formed and just walk around inside my head, speaking to me.  I hear their voices, see the way they move and listen to them as they tell me what they want to have happen next.  

4. Once I’ve done that initial groundwork, I begin to write first draft.  I’m not particularly careful when writing first draft, but simply intend to shape the story and get it down.  I write furiously and completely immerse myself in the process.  During first draft, I’m careful to take a break from reading so that other voices don’t intrude upon my own narrative.  For a large writing project, like a novel, I section the writing up into large chunks or rough chapters.  For instance, I’ve begun a new historical fiction project and have worked very hard and in a very focused way to complete the first chapter.  Now I’m taking a break from first draft writing and have circled back to complete more research before I begin the second chapter.  

5. While I am writing first draft, as an aside, I create a scribbled hand-drawn map of the area or a floorplan of the house that I am writing about.  I use this as a reference when writing directions or descriptions.  If the master bedroom is at the top of the stairs on the left side of the landing, I need to keep that consistent when my character is tired and walking upstairs to bed.  

6. Once a first draft is complete, I read sections to a few very trusted beta readers for their general feedback. If they have questions about something that has taken place, I know that I need to do more structural work, in terms of inserting clarifying details and explanations.  That’s typically the work I do in the second draft.

7. Third draft is usually my time-stamped draft.  I run off calendars from the period and check major plot points for sequencing and time of year.  I need to ensure that all activities and weather conditions and lighting correspond to the calendar.  I also make sure that certain events take place on certain days.  If I have someone attending a church service, for instance, I make sure that the calendar day for that year corresponds to a Sunday.  Little tiny tweaks to weather conditions, timing and scheduling are worked out in this draft.  I create a timeline for the manuscript using key historic events as reference points for my work.  For instance, it would be irresponsible to write a novel placed in Europe in 1940 without referencing the World War.  I try to ensure that I capture the importance of key events that take place in the background of my story.  

8. The next draft typically focuses on lexicon and dialogue.  For each of my historical novels, I create a special lexicon that I build based upon letters, diaries and books from the period.  These are the key words I insert to give the narrative voice a sense of authenticity.  I know that I can’t recreate the voices of the past but I endeavor to use just enough of an older language base to create a tone and feel for another time. I also attempt to use the conventions of language for the period.  In the nineteenth-century, for instance, nouns were often capitalized and commas were used liberally.  I mimic those small conventions in a deliberate way, along with the formality of written language as it was commonly employed at the time.  

9. The second part of the lexicon and dialogue drafting has to do with my character’s speech patterns.  This would usually begin as a fresh draft, number five. Each of us has, consciously or unconsciously, individual patterns of speech and vocabulary that we often re-use.  I create huge flip-chart reference sheets with all of my characters listed, and those idiosyncrasies of speech that are unique to them. This might include the dropping of certain vowels or consonants, favorite cuss words, or exclamations that they reuse.  These lists are tricky because they must reflect, to a certain extent, the educational background, country of origin, regional dialects, and sometimes religious persuasion.  I also pay attention to the development and evolution of a character’s speech.  For instance, in The Brickworks, when we first meet Brodie, he is a very young man and is uneducated.  His speech changes and becomes more refined as he completes his education and takes on managerial responsibilities at a steel mill.  

10. Draft six is about a more general use of language and description. This is where I work on those aspects of my work that correspond to and address your question. 
    I strive to polish my language while not compromising the energy and pacing of the story.  I go back into the text and develop my descriptions and my use of language when writing those descriptions.  Sometimes I indulge myself a little but generally I have to work hard to restrict colourful and lengthy descriptions. For instance, in The Brickworks, Alistair is seated next to Violet at a concert in Buffalo.  Here is a tiny excerpt:
    ”He glanced to his right and saw the curve of her neck, the sweep of her hair, the gentle mound of her bosom.  The lace sleeve of her gown was floating almost imperceptibly above her arm.  He watched it flutter for a moment before it settled against the pale skin.  He resisted the urge to look at her again, concentrating intently on the programme he held.”

    I hope readers know that Alistair is smitten and that Violet is a lovely, feminine beauty.  I had done a lot of research on clothing of the period and had originally written a long and very detailed description of her gown and jewelry.  I used a reference photo from the Metropolitan Museum of a Worth ballgown in light pink silk, with exquisite embroidery and lace. You can imagine how much fun I had describing this luxurious and elegant gown.  In the end,  I edited out all of the extraneous detail because I felt it was slowing down the narrative and not leaving enough to the reader’s imagination.

11. The next several drafts are all about editing and boiling down the story.  I tend to over-write and over-explain and in these next several drafts, I slash out chunks of the story that are interesting to me because of my research but likely unnecessary to the overall piece.  I edit down descriptions, fine-tune conversations, and sometimes even remove or add a character. 

12. The most tedious of drafts is done about this time.  I call it the speech edit.  Using “find” I go through the manuscript one character at a time, ensuring that their speech aligns with my planning sheets and that any changes to their speech patterns make sense in terms of their development.  Depending upon the number of characters in the book, this series of checks, edits and drafting can take a really long time.  In The Brickworks, there were twenty characters with speaking parts, and the speech edit took me a month to complete. 

13. More beta reading come next, utilizing my network of supportive writer friends.  I usually ask for specific kinds of feedback that zeros in on those scenes I am worried about, details that seem too sketchy, and plot points that might not be strong.  After yet another clean draft, integrating the feedback I have received, I send it off to a professional story editor. The story editor comments on the trajectory, plot points, character development, tension and quality of the writing.  Quite often my characters need further tweaking.  I have a tendency to make all of them nice people and that just isn’t realistic.  Even nice people have foibles and bad habits, and my story editor will always call me out on this.  

14. Once I have the story editor’s feedback, I write another draft, addressing those things that needed work.  I also do a final fact-check, often checking with an industry expert on technical points or fine details. This polished draft is then sent to a professional copy editor who catches the majority of typos, spelling inconsistencies, errors in punctuation, and other glaring oversights.  Once those slipups have been corrected, I have a final draft (anywhere from draft 10 to 15) which I then use to begin the process of placing the manuscript with a publisher.  

    I hope I’ve given you some insight into the process I use for writing historical fiction.  I’m sure other authors have perfected their own processes but this is what works for me.  Many thanks for providing this opportunity to share my writing process with you.   
    

    More about Lucy E.M. Black:

    Lucy E.M. Black is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, and Stella’s Carpet. The Brickworks will be released October 14, 2023. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA, and Canada in literary journals and magazines including Cyphers Magazine, the Hawai’i Review, The Antigonish Review, the Queen’s Quarterly, and others. She is a dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer, and freelance writer. She lives with her partner in the small lakeside town of Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations. Learn more at www.lucyemblack.com.

Power Q & A with Colleen Brown

Colleen Brown’s book, If you lie down in a field, she will find you (Radiant Press, October 2023), is an absorbing, eye-opening, and heart-wrenching memoir in fragments, conversations, and memories of her mother’s life and murder by a serial killer. It’s also about the impact violence has on memory and storytelling and how persistent contact with the justice system affects individual needs for a narrative that can make sense of a life. On this Power Q & A, we ask Colleen about the perhaps not-so-obvious challenges of writing this story.

For review copies and media inquiries, please contact us.

Q: A story of this nature is bound to encounter resistance, beyond the usual writerly self-doubt. What was the most significant roadblock you encountered while writing this book?

A: There were a few different kinds of resistance along the way.

The first is common to anyone trying to express personal tragedy. A lot of social learning is committed to how, when, and where you are allowed to express trauma. I know my siblings and I were told in different ways not to speak about my mother’s death. My sisters and I were accused of lying at different points in our lives and, more commonly, threatened by being understood as weak and needful. There is always a sense that speaking about tragedy will hurt the listener, and so you are trained to save other people from your grief. The first breakthrough for the book occurred when I told a co-worker about my mother’s murder, and to my surprise, she laughed and said, “Wow, you really have a good story there.” After I got over the shock, I realized I felt great. I didn’t hurt her. I could speak.

At the core of the book is an ambivalence. The first coherent sentence I wrote was, “...because the spectacle of her murder overwhelms the entirety of her perfectly human and unremarkable existence, I lost my mother as a way of creating meaning. “ The book is driven by a desire to express and cleave my mother’s life from her death. To sunder her before from her after, I had to hold both in view.

As the writing continued, I experienced a lot of confusion in understanding my duty toward the person who confessed to my mother’s murder. People were offering very confident and totally contradictory advice. A visit to the Artists Legal Outreach Clinic clarified things for me. At one point, I blurted out a question about my moral obligations, and the lawyer working with me was very clear that legal advice and moral advice do not intersect. This really straightened out my thinking. The book was altered to follow the rules and adhere to my own sense of obligation to a person and a perpetually open legal case.

Colleen Brown. Photo: Zed Payne.

More about the book:
While in the middle of a divorce and in the process of reinventing herself, Doris Brown died suddenly in 1974. Two years later, a serial killer confessed to her murder. What propels this book is a desire to recover Doris' life, which has been obscured by the spectacle of her death. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there captures the cadence of family stories collected through interviews the author conducted with her siblings. Essays and memories by Doris Brown's youngest children, Colleen and Laura, appear alongside spoken word anecdotes that contain the family's oral history and tell us who she was.

More about Colleen:
Colleen Brown is known primarily as a sculptor. If you lie down in a field, she will find you there, is her first book. Colleen created visual artworks related to the book when she was the Artist in Residence at the Ranger Station. Colleen is one of the current Artists in Residence in Maple Ridge, BC.

Power Q & A with Marina Sonkina

When the war in Ukraine erupted, Russian-Canadian author Marina Sonkina dropped everything and flew to the Russian-Ukrainian border. Having come to Canada as a refugee with two young sons, she knew she had to help. Today, we ask her about how (and why) her experiences at the border became her new book, Ukrainian Portraits: Diairies from the Border (Guernica Editions, September 2023).

For review copies or media inquiries, please contact us.

Ukranian Portraits: Diaries from the Border. Available for pre-order now.

Q: Your newest book documents your time at the Ukrainian/Russian border as a volunteer, helping women and children fleeing the war. Did you leave for the border knowing you'd write about it, or did this realization come during or after your experiences?

A: No, I absolutely did not know I was going to document my experience. As I said in the preface to my book, my desire to go to the border came out of a certain helplessness. I knew that Putin would inflict the most brutal devastation on Ukraine, and yet couldn't do anything about it. So I decided to do the little I could. Returning from the camp to a small hotel after ten-twelve hour shifts, I was emotionally shaken and exhausted by what I saw and heard. Often I couldn't fall asleep. I started writing down people's stories as a way of helping myself to cope but also to somehow honour the suffering of women and children I met. I also thought their voices should be heard. When I returned to Vancouver, I saw I had a little book.

Author Marina Sonkina.

More about the book:

At the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, Canadian author Marina Sonkina flew to the Ukrainian-Polish border to be one of the first respondents at the border for Ukrainians fleeing the war. There, working with the JDC—Jewish Distribution Committee—she used her knowledge of Russian and some Ukrainian to try to help women and children in the transition camp. The suffering on a massive scale was beyond what she could possibly expect. 

More about the author: 

Marina Sonkina is a scholar, a former CBC producer, and the author of several collections of short stories, among them, Expulsion and Other Stories. Having come to Canada as a refugee with two young sons she did not hesitate to help Ukrainians fleeing the war. Her experience at the Ukrainian-Polish border is reflected in her latest collection, Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border.

Power Q & A with Steven Mayoff

We’re delighted to be interviewing author and lyricist Steven Mayoff, whose most recent novel, The Island Gospel of Samson Grief, is coming out this fall with Radiant Press. Masterfully disrupting the idyllic picture often painted of Prince Edward Island, The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief is a darkly funny and thrilling story of spiritual dissonance and cultural satire in Canada's most wholesome province.

There’s much to unpack in Mayoff’s stunning and layered novel, but our question is actually about how his novel echos themes in his concurrent creation, Dion: A Rock Opera—a musical reimagining of the ancient Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides, for which Mayoff is the lyricist and Ted Dykstra is the composer. Dion: A Rock Opera is the first original production developed by Toronto’s prestigious Coal Mine Theatre and will receive its world premiere on its stage in February 2024.

Interested in an advance review copy of The Island Gospel of Samson Grief or have a press inquiry? Contact us.

Q: You are a lyricist as well as an author and your latest play is opening in Toronto next year. There are some thematic similarities in these works. Namely, the shared theme of political autocracy versus spiritual agency. Was this a coincidence, or would you say one work informed the other? Or maybe they were created in a symbiotic sort of synergy? We're fascinated!

A: My novel The Island Gospel According to Samson Grief was written roughly from 2016 to 2020. The musical theatre piece Dion: A Rock Opera was created by myself and composer Ted Dykstra from 2020 to 2022. There was definitely some overlap in terms of events that informed both works, mostly dealing with the political upheaval that was happening in the U.S. during the Trump administration.

The novel had a very long gestation period that started quite soon after I moved to PEI in May 2001. Having lived in Montreal and Toronto most of my life, the contrast of living in a small and relatively secluded rural community gave me the illusion of somehow being hidden from the world. But after the 911 attacks, that illusion was shattered and, like many, I realized there was nowhere to hide from the changes our world was going through. When I discovered that there was no synagogue on PEI, despite having a small but active Jewish community, the wheels soon began to turn. I knew the story would be about a reclusive painter, who is enlisted by figments of his imagination, in the form of Judas, Fagin, and Shylock, to build PEI’s first synagogue at the behest of a deity known as the Supreme One.

By the time of Donald Trump’s surprising rise to power, I was well into the novel. Much of the MAGA movement is made of evangelicals who think God put Trump in the White House. I started to think: if that was true, to what end? This started me on the thematic path of political autocracy versus spiritual agency and helped me develop the sinister turn the story takes later in the novel.

I’ve known Ted Dykstra since 1981 and for much of that time we have collaborated as lyricist and composer. During the Covid lockdown in 2020 Ted asked me if I would be interested in turning the Greek tragedy The Bacchae by Euripides into a rock opera. The play is about Pentheus, the king of Thebes, returning home to find that Dionysus, who is half mortal and half god, has taken the women of Thebes and made them his followers. This leads to a feud between Pentheus and Dionysus and a battle of wills. In our version Dionysus, who we call Dion, entices not only the Theban women, but all of society’s disenfranchised groups to follow him, thus starting a movement of social rebellion. After reading the play a few times, my research included watching university lectures on The Bacchae on Youtube, which helped my understanding of the play. But I found an interesting parallel when I saw how disastrously Trump was mishandling the Covid crisis. I thought, if our rock opera portrayed Pentheus as a Trump-like figure then it only stood to reason that Dion was a force of nature, similar to Covid. That idea greatly influenced the language I used in my lyrics, as well as pushing a theme of Nature versus Civilization.

The Gospel According to Samson Grief by Steven Mayoff. Will be available wherever books are sold this fall 2023.

More about the book:

Samson Grief, a reclusive painter from Prince Edward Island, is confronted by three red-haired figments of his imagination in the form of Judas Iscariot, Fagin, and Shylock. They claim to be messengers of “The Supreme One”, a genderless deity who has decreed PEI to be the new Promised Land, who also wants Samson to build the Island’s first synagogue. Scared, confused, and seriously doubting his sanity, Samson eventually, though grudgingly, accepts the challenge amid increasingly bizarre obstacles in a new dystopian world. 

Steven Mayoff. Image credit: Thelma Phillips.

More about Steven:
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. Steven lives in Foxley River, PEI.