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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 visually 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!

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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!

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 workings of her creative process.

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.

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 her experiences at the border became her new book, Ukrainian Portraits: Diairies from the Border (Guernica Editions, September 2023).

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.