Power Q & A with Nicola Winstanley

We love hearing from authors who move between genres, and Nicola Winstanley has some poignant insight into her transition from children’s literature to her first book for adults, Smoke (Wolsak & Wynn) a collection of short stories. Smoke is an unforgettable collection of short stories that is both searing and thought-provoking.

Smoke features a cast of characters across Canada and New Zealand, showing us glimpses into their lives of loss and heartbreak. In these eleven linked stories, Winstanley takes a hard look at intergenerational trauma and their impact on characters from multiple points of view, but her characters are not victims—anything but. Guilt, self-reflection, compassion, and forgiveness are central themes in this collection of stories that help us understand the degree of responsibility we hold toward the events that happen to us in life. 

Welcome, Nicola!

Bring home a copy of Smoke by Nicola Winstanley.

Q: Can you speak to your move from children’s literature to fiction for adults? Having read your books in both genres, it seems to have come naturally, if a little darkly.

A: When my daughter was born, I desperately clung to writing to keep my head above water, and because I had been working at a children’s publishing house, and because I was now immersed in mothering and children, I ended up writing picture books. But I’ve always thought of myself as a writer for adults, and if you read Smoke, which to put it mildly is not pretty or fun, you will be surprised that I ever wrote for children—except that my first three children’s books have the same core emotions that I have explored in my stories: a deep fear of abandonment; the desperate need to be loved. 

It's not surprising that my most popular children’s book is the funny, silly How to Give Your Cat a Bath in Five Easy Steps (brilliantly illustrated by John Martz), because on the other hand, one child said my book The Pirate’s Bed, was the most terrifying thing he had ever read. I thought I had written a jolly pirate book! But reading it again, I could see exactly what he meant. In one of the spreads, the anthropomorphic bed who has been separated from his ship and pirate mates, floats in on inky black sea, lost and alone. Matt James’ illustration underlines the feelings of loss, fear, depression that I was circling in the story without really knowing it at the time. It is a terrifying page—and now, if I read that book aloud to children, I tend to skip it.

I think maybe I was not ready to dig into these feelings at that stage of my life and writing for children was a way of not only of expressing fear and need but of imagining having it met by a loving mother. The pirates’ bed is found and restored by a little boy’s mother, and in A Bed Time Yarn, the gentle, patient mother teaches her child to sleep by using yarn to show that they are always connected.

Writing these picture books prepared me, I think, for writing the autofiction that makes up Smoke, because a loving mother is the absence at the heart of the book and my own life. My own mother died suddenly when I was six and for a long time I floated on an inky black sea, lost and alone, and there was no restoration until much later in my life. And that’s what Smoke is ultimately about: restoration. But you have to read it to the end.

Author Nicola Winstanley.

More about Nicola Winstanley:

Nicola Winstanley is a writer for adults and children. She has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary award is the recipient of the Alvin A. Lee Award for Published Creative Non-Fiction. Nicola’s fiction, poetry and comix have been published in The Windsor Review, Geist, the Dalhousie Review, Grain Magazine, Untethered, and Hamilton Arts and Letters, among others. She holds an MA from the University of Auckland, NZ, and an MFA from UBC. Nicola works at Humber College in Toronto and lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Power Q & A with Michael Trussler

Three-time Saskatchewan Book Award winner Michael Trussler’s latest book, Realia, (Radiant Press, 2024) grapples with the black fire of mental illness, revels in the joy inherent to colours, and probes what it means to be alive at the beginning of the Anthropocene. Perfectly clear, perfectly opaque, Trussler’s poetry implodes the lyric to channel the bright disintegration of our contemporary moment. We’re honoured to have Michael join us for this Power Q & A to speak to his experience of writing as a neurodivergent individual.

Realia by Michael Trussler (Radiant Press, 2024)/

Q: Do you think being neuro-divergent influences your writing?

A: Definitely, though of course for the longest time, I had no idea that I was neuro-divergent. As a child I had no way of knowing that all minds weren’t like mine. I knew that something was off with me, but then again, not fitting in is something most children and many adults face. So, I didn’t give it much thought, didn’t talk about it. Also, I was a child a long time ago and people simply weren’t very aware of the incredible variety in human brains as we are now. However, it turns out that I don’t only have the learning disability but I also have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I’ve only learned about this in the past few weeks. The ASD has been here for all my life, but the spectrum is broad. Not all autistics are alike. Because I’ve needed to learn to use words well, my teachers didn’t pay much attention to my other difficulties. Other people have essentially perceived me as being a bit eccentric and quirky. Let me explain it like this: when I did an interview for Accidental Animals, the interviewer noticed that my work is “very optically driven” and my poems combined “surrealism and animism.” He was spot-on, but I didn’t then know that my sensation that non-human objects are sentient isn’t widely shared. Being optically-driven and living in a world of perpetual voices is part of the ASD. To me, things and living beings vibrate, each with their own personality, as it were. The window of my left is alive in a way that the window in front of me and the other on my right isn’t. Every book in this room has an identity apart from the text it holds. This of course goes down to the level of individual words.

Words are objects, and they’re self-aware. I’ve always felt this way, but I’ve had no diagnosis to explain it for almost all of my life. So, yes, it seems that being neuro-divergent has likely been instrumental in how my work functions through associative patterning rather than synthetic, logical thought. I suspect that what drew me to poetry in the first place is that its rhythms felt familiar to the way I repeat nonsensical sounds throughout the day—stimming—and that the sense that many lyric poems have that the world is ablaze and alive, that was familiar too. Here’s an example of what I mean: 

Stories are for Children

Yammers the lyric 

ice pick with absolutely 

zero fear 

              of surrendering to  

memories, meandering creatures 

with no capacity

to mate for life. A breadline

roped in and waiting. The migrating

womb of the moral

                              community, its agile 

and disintegrating mind. Each day

an obituary, the psyche composed

of rivals and sends—a birthday party

trampoline, the mescaline flare

of smoked paprika in the wild, the pulse of

                                  unhurry 

and the world to come, the world’s soon-to-be 

extinct 

technique 

of info-washing, its disavowal of 

                               endless

scarcity. Heat. Roped in

and what happened

↔

when things happen

The incomparable Michael Trussler.

More about Michael Trussler:

Michael Trussler lives in Regina. He writes poetry and creative non-fiction. Three-time winner of the Saskatchewan Book Award, Trussler’s work has appeared in Canadian and American journals and has been included in domestic and international anthologies. Also a photographer, Trussler has a keen interest in the visual arts and is neuro-divergent. He teaches English at the University of Regina.

Power Q & A with Christopher DiRaddo

An accomplished and acclaimed writer in his own right, we first heard of Christopher DiRaddo through his work with The Violet Hour Reading Series. We were immediately struck by Chris’ openness, kindness, and generosity, and knew we wanted to ask him about his experience organizing and maintaining his vital series for queer writers in our current cultural landscape.

We’re honoured to have Chris join us for this Power Q & A.

Welcome, Chris!

Chris DiRaddo.

Q: You began hosting The Violet Hour after your first book came out and you noticed a lack of reading spaces for queer writers. Would you tell us about this experience? The challenges and triumphs?

A: Like most aspiring queer authors, the gay bookstore was my sanctuary. Before I knew what story I wanted to tell, there was L’Androgyne. I would go in and peruse the stacks (I can still smell the paper). I’d check out the new releases, examine the classics. Sometimes I’d be there for over an hour, talking to the staff about what we’d just read or gossiping about the crushes we had. There was never really anything like that space again. I’m sorry it closed in the early 2000s the way so many of them did.

When I finally did find my story, when I wrote it down and got it published, it broke my heart that there was no queer bookstore in Montreal to house it (there is one now, L'Euguélionne). No places for new discoveries of queer books of any kind. As a debut author, I wondered how I was going to find readers if readers couldn’t discover me the same way I discovered the ones that have remained on my shelves over the years. 

I also received few invitations to read at mainstream venues. And it wasn’t just me. I noticed that some of my peers were dealing with the same issues. Canada publishes so many queer books every year, yet here we were struggling to find a way to reach our audiences.

So, I decided to create that space again even if it was for one night. A space where queer writers could find new readers, where queer readers could discover new books, and where queer book lovers could discover each other. Ten years later and Violet Hour is still going strong. Since its inception, we’ve created a platform for more than 250 writers to court new audiences.

There have been challenges, surely. It can be difficult to find partners or venues to house you. And it’s hard to make things happen when you don’t have a budget. I’ve been lucky from time to time, but I hope to be able to adequately pay the authors I program. 

Overall, though, Violet Hour has been a success I’d say. One of the triumphs for me has been the creation of the Violet Hour Book Club, which serves as a companion piece to the series. For the past five years, two dozen Montrealers (and some folks joining us from out of town on Zoom) have been gathering every month to discuss classic and contemporary works of LGBTQ literature. We’ve also been forging wonderful friendships.  

What’s been made clear to me over the years is how vibrant queer writing is in Canada. There are so many of us writing and publishing so many books. And people are hungry for it. Hungry for queer books, hungry for discussion about queer literature, hungry for literary friendships. I’m happy to keep feeding them.

The Family Way (Vehicule Press, 2021) by Christopher DiRaddo.

More about Christopher DiRaddo:

Christopher DiRaddo is the author of the novels The Family Way (2021), shortlisted for the F.G Bressani Literary Prize, and The Geography of Pluto (2014). His essays and short stories have appeared in First Person Queer: Who We Are (So Far), Here & Now: An Anthology of Queer Italian-Canadian Writing and The Globe and Mail. He has also written for several publications, including Elle Canada, Xtra magazine and enRoute magazine, for which he won a National Magazine Award. In 2014, he created the Violet Hour Reading Series & Book Club, which has to date provided a platform for more than 250 LGBTQ writers in Canada. He lives in Montreal.

The Geography of Pluto (Vehicule Press) by Christopher DiRaddo

Power Q & A with Robin Pacific

Robin Pacific’s memoir, Skater Girl, (Guernica Editions, 2024) is an electric and disruptive examination of a life that challenges assumptions of not only how a memoir should read, but also, how women should act. It is definitely one of our favourite nonfiction reads this year, and we’re thrilled to have Robin on our Power Q & A to share a little bit more about her scrappy and sensational book.

Welcome Robin!

Grab a copy of Skater Girl from Guernica Editions, or your local independent bookstore.

Q: What is the significance of the subtitle to Skater Girl: “An Archaeology of the Self”?

A: In the final essay in the book, I describe “sifting through the midden of consciousness, examining potsherds, shells, a broken piece of mirror.” As I wrote, I was digging down deep to find different parts of myself, in different eras and in different narratives. In the first essay in the book I talk about the mutability of the self, a concept propounded by Montaigne in his Essays in the sixteenth century. In some ways, and the book attests to this, I’ve been many different people in my life, and have even had different surnames. In other crucial ways the book is a spiritual odyssey, an attempt to find the “true self” as Thomas Merton called it. Living through the crucible of grief and loss, I came to believe in God and in the immutable soul. This is, I understand, completely irrational and indefensible. But it saved my life.

Similarly, memory in the book, as both concept and imaginative act, is slippery. The image of a broken piece of mirror is an apt metaphor. Even as I recount detailed memories from childhood and beyond, I question the authenticity of memory. Remembered details blossom into whole stories, the veracity of which I wouldn’t defend in a court of law. But the emotional truth is there, the colour and tone of the experiences, and I hope that is what readers respond to.

The wonderful Robin Pacific!

More about Skater Girl:

Skater Girl is a collection of intensely personal essays, an archaeology of the self. Robin Pacific sifts through the midden of consciousness to find shells, potsherds, a broken piece of mirror. Themes of art, spirituality and social justice run like a current through otherwise disconnected pieces and fragments, many as short as one paragraph. Further, ideas about aging, loss and mortality colour many of them. The book is about the formation of Robin Pacific's many selves, about creativity, spiritual seeking, and the dream of a more equal society.

More about Robin Pacific:

Robin Pacific‘s work has spanned thirty years and a wide variety of media. In addition to writing personal and critical essays, she has produced artworks in a variety of media, encompassing painting, drawing, video, installations, performance, and numerous community-based collaborations. Robin holds a PhD in  English Literature from York University,  a Masters in Theological Studies from Regis College, and a Masters in Fine Art, Creative Nonfiction, from Kings College. Skater Girl is her first full-length book.

Power Q & A with Melanie Marttila

It’s National Poetry Month, and we are celebrating by showcasing poet Melanie Marttila. Her debut collection, The Art of Floating (Latitude 46) is a testament to years of honing her craft. The collection of five sections of free verse poems is wide-ranging and eclectic, bringing to life her deep connection with the earth and sky of Ontario. The aptly named collection describes her learned ability to ride the unpredictable waves of mental illness  and prevent herself from drowning within it, while seeking solace in the natural world around her. These lyric poems are stunning and transportative, absorbing the reader with captivating imagery, complex diction, and highly relatable themes most pivotal in life, such as loss, grief, and hope.

We’re honoured to have Melanie join us for this Power Q & A.

The Art of Floating by Melanie Marttila, published by Latitude 46.

Q: What is a piece of advice you have for poets (or writers in general) who wish to write about mental health?

A: I'll preface my answer by saying that I am not a health care professional and none of what follows constitutes medical advice. If you're in distress, please seek out the qualified professionals who can best support you in your mental health journey.

If you are on a journey with your mental health, you will write about it. There is no question. You may not even realize you're doing it, but it's there. In my case, it wasn't until after I received my late autism diagnosis that I realized that most of my fictional protagonists were neurodivergent in some respect and thus struggle with various mental health issues. Now that I'm aware of the pattern, I can craft my stories more intentionally.

If you want to approach writing poetry about mental health deliberately and from inception, self-care, in the true sense of the word, is paramount. Delving into mental health can be fraught and triggering. Be gentle with yourself. This journey is a long and difficult one for many of us, and writing about mental health, while it can be therapeutic, can also retraumatize. Start out by journalling. It's a safe space where you can "let it all hang out." Go through your journal at the end of each week and see if you can pull out some themes or images that feel right for you to explore in the moment. Then, get curious rather than judgemental about what you've chosen to explore. Ask yourself questions in the same tone as you would ask questions of a loved one who reaches out to you for help. Then, get playful. Returning to your journal, freewrite and brainstorm. Don't cross anything out. Again, your journal is a safe space. This is just for you. Can you reinterpret an event in an evocative way? What metaphors speak to you most clearly? Is your voice "what you see is what you get" or is it more "tell it slant"? Writing should be fun, at least in the early stages. Revising and editing are where the more demanding work comes in.

Me? I write a lot of moon poetry because the moon is my solace (and I may be a wee bit pagan).

Poet Melanie Marttila

More about Melanie Marttila:

Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC's "Pencil Box." She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s Masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Power Q & A with Courtney Bates-Hardy

In one of the year’s most anticipated poetry releases, Anatomical Venus (Radiant Press, 2024), author Courtney Bates-Hardy offers a visceral collection that invokes anatomical models, feminine monsters, and little-known historical figures. It’s a journey through car accidents and physio appointments, 18th-century morgues, and modern funeral homes. Grappling with the cyclical nature of chronic pain, these poems ask how to live with and love the self in pain. Magic seeps through, in the form of fairy tales, in the stories of powerful monsters, in the introspection of the tarot, and the transcendence of queer love. 

We’re excited to have Courtney join us for this Power Q & A to speak to the slick and writhing vitality of her work.

Welcome, Courtney!

The gorgeous cover of Anatomical Venus by Courtney Bates-Hardy, published by Radiant Press, 2024.

Q: Why was it important for you to write so viscerally, and in some cases, graphically, in Anatomical Venus? 

A: Living with chronic pain is a kind of body horror. It would have felt disingenuous not to acknowledge how scary it can be to have your body turn against you. The pain I experience is invisible to others, so writing graphically about anatomical dissections was a way for me to make the invisible, visible. 

I also included poems about various monsters in Anatomical Venus, such as the Bride of Frankenstein, Mothra, and Medusa. Writing about these monsters allowed me to explore how chronic pain, disability, and queerness can other us in the eyes of society. But I also wanted to show how being seen as monstrous can empower us to know ourselves, to fight for what we deserve, and to find others like us. 

Writing viscerally about my experiences was cathartic, and I don’t expect that everyone will feel comfortable reading about them. The car accidents I’ve experienced were violent. The pain I feel is violent. The pressure I feel to be silent about my pain is also a kind of violence. Anatomical Venus is a way for me to speak openly about my pain and no longer be silent. It’s an opportunity to connect with others who know what it’s like to be in pain and don’t know how to talk about it. I hope that Anatomical Venus helps those people feel less alone. 

Poet Courtney Bates-Hardy

More about Courtney Bates-Hardy: 

Courtney Bates-Hardy is the author of House of Mystery (ChiZine Publications, 2016) and a chapbook, Sea Foam (JackPine Press, 2013). Her poems have been published in Grain, Vallum, PRISM, and CAROUSEL, among others. She has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (Biblioasis) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is queer, neurodivergent, and disabled, and one-third of a writing group called The Pain Poets. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Power Q & A with : melanie brannagan frederiksen

This doesn’t happen often around here, but we are excited to welcome a poetry reviewer to our Power Q & A series. melanie brannagan frederiksen is the poetry columnist for The Winnipeg Free Press, to our series to speak to the review landscape in Canada.

Welcome, melanie!

Q: How would you like to see the cultural landscape around reviews and reviewing change? 

melanie! Find out more about melanie here.

A: I’m coming at your question from the position of someone who has almost exclusively reviewed for non-specialist audiences: that is, for about the last 10 years, my reviews have mostly been published in the books pages of The Winnipeg Free Press, and since 2022, I’ve been the monthly poetry reviewer there. I’m also thinking specifically about poetry reviewing. 

Newspapers were also where I first read book reviews: Every Saturday when I was an undergraduate, I would pick up a copy of the Globe and Mail, which at that time had a substantial books section. This isn’t in any way to discount literary magazines and trade publications, as well as individuals publishing reviews online or in newsletters. All of these are, of course, vital to Canada’s ongoing literary conversation.

I’m insisting on my own positioning as one answer to your question: I don’t think there’s one cultural landscape surrounding reviewing — or, more accurately, that landscape looks different depending on where you’re standing on the field. From where I stand, there are so few generalist publications that cover poetry regularly, and that informs my approach to the entire enterprise. From my perspective, there aren’t enough poetry reviews. Someone who writes in more specialist spaces would talk about the weakness in Canadian reviewing culture differently.

There are so many poets in Canada working to turn our culture and ourselves inside out in smart, complicated, and intricate ways, and someone just coming to poetry (someone who may have read some poems in English class; who doesn't know where to find a literary magazine; who, for whatever reason, can’t easily access their area’s artistic communities) might not know that.

Related to that — I think one of the failures of literary culture, in general, is that we assume that everyone who might be interested in books has a certain level of access to a variety of books and a baseline cultural knowlege about where to look for more and different ones. We assume people who are interested both know about and can access the conversations around books, and conversations that connect books to other conversations in the world. Newspapers and generalist publications can contribute to filling that gap: they did for me when I was growing up, but could that still be the case?

A last thought: Increasingly I return to the question not only of who has access to reading reviews, but who has access to writing them — which is not unrelated to the masses of under- and un-paid work that scaffolds so many aspects of literary culture in Canada, but encompasses too those who have been harmed by bad actors in literary communities or marginalized by class, gender, race, disability, or age. We need to reckon with all of these marginalizations in order to build a more just and more robust literary and reviewing culture.

About melanie brannagan frederiksen:

melanie brannagan frederiksen (she/her) lives and writes in Winnipeg, on Treaty One territory. She is the poetry columnist for The Winnipeg Free Press, the author of the chapbook poseidon's cove, athena's cave (Model Press 2021), and her poems have been published in various venues.

Get Away to Go Home: How To Plan A Writing Retreat

As a special feature, we welcome the phenomenal author and workshop facilitator Lauren Carter to our blog to talk about something many writers dream about often, and execute less: we’re talking about writer’s retreats—those elusively but oh-so beneficial companions to a healthy writing practice.

Lauren Carter is the award-winning author of five books, with news of the sixth coming soon. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a certificate in teaching and training adult learners and regularly teaches writing. From June 7-9, 2024, she will be co-leading Stillwater: A Trauma-Informed Writing Retreat at a gorgeous historic estate on Ontario’s Lake Simcoe. 

You can find out more about Stillwater and other retreats at www.wildgroundwriting.com or by emailing Lauren directly at lauren@wildgroundwriting.com 

For now, let’s hand the reigns over to Lauren, and learn more about why and how you should go about planning a writing retreat.

Get Away to Go Home: How To Plan A Writing Retreat 

By Lauren Carter

Every morning I get up and have coffee in a cozy recliner in front of the bird-song-filled meadow that my husband likes to play on our T.V. 

I crack open my journal or notebook, wait for a first line to bloom in my head. 

Hold the pen. Stare at the blank page. 

Ignore headache, tinnitus, fatigue, my nearby phone. 

Or try to. 

Lately the world feels so full of pressures, and anxiety. Maybe this is just me, but I don’t think so. So much terrible news. So much fear for the future. So much straining for perfection, constant engagement, to be seen. 

All. The. Time. 

This is bad for art because it’s bad for artists. For our ability to grow quiet, calm, immerse ourselves with attention into the quiet place where art grows. 

More and more it seems we have to guard these quieter spaces: like George Orwell escaping to the wild island of Jura, or Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own (“…I must ask you to imagine a room, like many thousands, with a window looking across people's hats and vans and motorcars to other windows, and on the table inside the room a blank sheet of paper..”), or writer Carol Bruneau’s plant-filled space.

That’s why I love getting away, carving out time for creative retreat whether it’s on my own or through Saskatchewan’s Sage Hill Writing Experience or other organized events. 

Fuel the Fire 

A couple of years ago, I planned my own solo Manitoba writing retreat at a historic Mennonite house in the province’s southern prairies. 

Filled with antiques, the cottage had a composting toilet, a wood-fired sauna out back, a couple of rattling baseboard heaters and a central Russian bake oven. As luck would have it (depending on your perspective, of course), we plunged into a prairie deep-freeze. I had to keep that central oven fully fueled to stay alive as the thermometer bottomed out. 

I spread my work out on the long table and that’s what I did: stoked the fire, wrote, ate, repeat. The pleasure of it: simple, focused activity, an external task to keep me on track, the space and time to consider nothing but my work and my immediate physical needs. 

Heaven. 

But, I admit, it got a bit lonely. Plus, the cottage had wi-fi so I had to wrestle with my desire to check on the world every fifteen minutes… 

Junot Diaz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer says, “The whole culture is telling you to hurry, while the art tells you to take your time. Always listen to the art.” 

And he’s right, but this takes intention. We have to do the work to create creative retreats or to find skillfully-built writing retreats that can guide us into the trance of writing, so we can sink deep, either alone or with others who are also yearning, as E.M. Forster wrote, “to only connect.” 

Author Lauren Carter.

Create Your Escape 

How do you create the conditions “to only connect the prose and the passion”? Here are some tips from my experience as a retreat attendee, organizer, and facilitator: 

1. Book the time.

Setting aside time for yourself can be difficult and scary. It means that you are claiming your work, asserting its importance, setting the intention to go off and write. But, as Pat Schneider says, “Whatever you do, don’t stay in the never-never land of wanting and not doing. It will make your soul sick. If you want to write, claim for yourself what you need in order to learn, grow, practice. There is no other way to be an artist.” 

 2. Find the space. 

What do you need? A lake view, a city apartment close to coffee shops. Wi-fi or not? Dog friendly or does it matter? Take time to scroll Airbnb or VRBO but try not to get lost in the hunt or hung up on needing “the perfect place” and procrastinating. Every place has it’s pros and cons. Or, if you want someone else to do the work—including feeding you!—book a ready-made writing retreat dedicated to offering supportive instruction in inspiring locations. 

3. Plan your work. 

What are you going to do? Revise the short story you’ve been meaning to get to? Get started on an idea for a novel? If you’re going off on your own, without planned writing workshops and sessions, this is really important. Going off to “just write” can derail you like shopping without a list when you’re hungry: you’ll go home with things you don’t need or, worse, empty bags because you panicked and couldn’t decide. 

4. Be kind to yourself. 

This is a big thing to do! You are asserting the importance of the most intimate relationship you have: the one with yourself and your stories. Bring the cheesecake selection if that makes you happy, or the ready-made gluten-free pizza you never, ever buy because who spends $20 on a frozen meal? Plus, your coziest clothes, your music,  something delicious and inspiring to read. 

5. Slow down and get grounded. 

When you walk through that door into your cabin, loft apartment, room in the bed and breakfast, you might feel nervous and keyed up. For me an inner pressure rises: I need to have this novel done NOW. Cue panic and the rattling of my tender nervous system. I’ve learned how helpful it is to consciously slow down, sit on my butt, and do a grounding exercise to help me settle into the space and calm my nervous system. Try the 54321 technique or taking a few diaphragmatic breaths. 

6. Ditch perfectionism. 

Natalie Goldberg offers a bit of advice about creating a writing routine that I love: give yourself a checkmark on the calendar for each day you write but if you skip a day, or even two days, don’t let it derail you. In other words, don’t let your inner perfectionist blow up the whole plan. Same with being on a retreat. You write, you don’t write; you read instead, you spend too much time playing a stupid cell phone game. Don’t go to war with yourself. Learn, grow, and fail again, but fail better.    

7. Be proud of yourself. 

Regularly I go on a women’s weekend with a couple of writer friends of mine. We talk, we eat, we write, we laugh. We hot tub or sit by the fire. I met E. when she sucked up all her courage and came on our first Wild Writing in the Boreal retreat as an introvert who desperately needing writerly connection. I got to know C. on the same retreat because she’d booked herself a spot as well, in her own cabin, newly prioritizing herself and her creative needs. 

Whether you go off on your own or find a retreat to support you, these acts of self-nourishment and support are huge, especially for women. Go home knowing that no matter if you wrote a hundred pages or ten, you’ve done this for yourself. The next time will be easier. 

Power Q & A with Jade Wallace

For this Power Q & A, we are delighted to welcome author Jade Wallace! Jade is known not only for their individual work—like their upcoming release, Amonia (Palimpsest Press, 2024) but also, for their incredible collaborations with other artists. Today, we want to know a little bit about what makes these collaborations work.

Welcome Jade!

Q: You do collaborative projects and we are wondering: what’s one piece of advice you’d give people thinking about entering into collaborative writing?

Amonia is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in June, 2024. Preorder here.

A: Writing collaboratively is a type of relationship, and you should treat it like one, so all the wisdom of maintaining human relationships applies (ensure you're compatible, be clear about expectations, yes it is fun but it also requires work to sustain, etc.) And like any other relationship, collaborative writing can allow you to experience (artistic) realms that you simply would not be able to enter alone. Open yourself up to that unfamiliarity—it's what makes collaboration so thrilling.

Jade Wallace. Photo credit Mark

About Jade Wallace:

Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, and disabled writer, editor and critic. Their debut poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, (Guernica Editions) came out in 2023. Wallace is co-founder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity, whose debut collection ZZOO came out from Palimpsest Press. Anomia, their novel, is also forthcoming from Palimpsest Press on June 15, 2024. Pre-order here.

About Anomia:

In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space, an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.

Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’sThe Death of Vivek Oji, Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.

Epilepsy Month Excerpt: In Sickness and In Health, by Nora Gold

March is Epilepsy Month, and we are honoured to be featuring an excerpt from Nora Gold’s new novella, In Sickness and In Health, which is part of a set of novellas published earlier this month by Guernica Editions.

The narrative around epilepsy has been, historically, fraught with misinformation and prejudice, and Nora explores this stigma and shame in her writing.

In Sickness and In Health & Yom Kippur in a Gym by Nora Gold (Guernica Editions, March 1, 2024)

As Nora explains, “When I was a child and teen about 55 years ago, medical knowledge was much less advanced, the drug treatments cruder and with more troubling side effects, and societal attitudes toward people with epilepsy were far less accepting. In general, people with epilepsy encounter a higher level of social stigma than people with other medical conditions because epileptic seizures – which can seem frightening and bizarre – were seen historically as evidence that an individual was possessed by a demon, and therefore evil. This moral condemnation of people with epilepsy persisted even after epilepsy was determined to be a neurological (and not a moral) disorder, but in some circles it still persists to this day.”

Thank you to Nora for writing this important story, and for sharing a bit of it with us here. You can grab a copy of In Sickness and In Health wherever books are sold, including your independent bookstore and directly from the publisher at Guernica Editions.

Excerpt from In Sickness and In Health

In ninth grade she turned fourteen, and on this birthday she was perfectly normal again. Her doctor had taken her off meds the year before, gushing over her progress – no seizures (or, as her father called them, dreams) for three years, and a good EEG – as though this was a personal achievement on her part like learning to high jump, and she now merited a reward. In any case, she was thrilled with the reward she received: an end to those horse pills, which had made her feel as monstrously big and ungainly as a horse. It took a couple of weeks to transition back to normal; and as this was occurring, she was acutely aware of the two different lives (drugged/abnormal and undrugged/normal) that she lived, the two realities she inhabited, and the two versions of herself, the two Lilys, that existed. She didn’t know back then that Tegretol, the pill she’d just been taken off of, was being prescribed also for schizophrenia, but she did feel that her life was schizophrenic. Joseph in the Bible – known as “Joseph the Dreamer” (if he “dreamed” so much, perhaps he, too, had epilepsy?) – had interpreted Pharaoh’s dream as meaning seven good years would be followed by seven bad ones. In her life she’d had three good years followed by three bad ones, then four good ones, then four more bad ones. And three and four added up to seven, just like the years in Joseph’s prophecy.

Now at age fourteen (two times seven), it was a relief and a joy to be Normal Lily again. Her own face looked back at her in the mirror, not the weird one swollen by medication. The awful fatigue and heaviness were gone, her body was coordinated, and at school she was friendly with her classmates and perceived as smart. In English they’d been reading Flowers for Algernon, a novel about an intellectually disabled man named Charlie who undergoes experimental surgery and briefly becomes a genius before the effects wear off and he returns to his original state. Lily – not that she thought she was a genius – identified deeply with Charlie’s transformation from moron to genius and back, even though in her case (the opposite of Charlie’s), the drugs made her stupider, not smarter. She produced a book report of such quality it surprised her English teacher, and also, when it got an A, her classmates, who knew she rarely invested effort in homework assignments. When someone asked her about this one, she replied cryptically, “Charlie’s life is a metaphor,” and turned away. Like Charlie, who’d observed his own transformation from stupid to smart and back to stupid, she was sometimes filled with dread at the likelihood, or even inevitability, that at some point – probably in four or five years, when some other incident happened and they put her back on drugs – she too would revert to moronhood. Her lifelong vacillation between on-pills and off-pills, stupid and smart, was like the flicking of a light switch on and off, and ensuing periods of light and darkness. Sometimes she wasn’t certain who, or what, she really was: dumb or smart, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. Maybe she was all these things.

Author Nora Gold. Photo credit: Yaal Herman

More about Nora:

Dr. Nora Gold is the author of four acclaimed books and the winner of two Canadian Jewish Book/Literary awards, as well as praise from Alice Munro. A former professor and an activist, Gold is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious literary journal Jewish Fiction .net, which has readers in 140 countries.

More about In Sickness and In Health. Lily had epilepsy as a child, so her most cherished goal has always been to be “normal”. By age 45 she has a “normal” life, including a family, friends, and an artistic career, and no one, not even her husband, knows the truth about her past. But now some cartoons she drew threaten to reveal her childhood secret, and destroy her marriage and everything she has worked so hard for. A moving novella about shame, secrets, disabilities, and the limits and power of love.

More about Yom Kippur in a Gym. Five strangers at a Yom Kippur service in a gym are struggling with personal crises. Lucy can’t accept her husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis. Ira, rejected by his lover, plans suicide. Ezra is tormented by a mistake that ruined his career. Rachel worries about losing her job. Tom contemplates severing contact with his sisters. Then a medical emergency unexpectedly throws these five strangers together, and in one hour all their lives are changed in ways they would never have believed possible.

Power Q & A with Susan Wadds

Mere days from the official release of her glorious debut, we are delighted to have author Susan Wadds join us to answer a burning question about her much-anticipated, super salient novel, What the Living Do (Regal House Press, 2024).

Welcome, Susan!

Q: What the Living Do offers an intense, complex, and incisive look at questions and concerns surrounding women's reproductive rights (among other things). Was this something you set out to address in the novel, or was it something that emerged as the story developed? 

What the Living Do by Susan Wadds. Bring it home!

A: Story elements tend to emerge organically. I often begin with an idea, or as Sherry Coman says, a sacred image. In the case of this story, it began with an image and a dilemma. My image was a blond woman holding a Stop/Slow sign for a road crew. I wondered who she was, how she came to the job, how it was to work in that environment, and then thought, what if she didn’t just hold signs but worked side-by-side with the men? Who would that woman be? The dilemma driving the story ties into the theme of reproduction—something I’d wanted to write about for a long time. 

In this story, the protagonist has left a toxic relationship in which her partner refused to father the child they conceived. Raising a child with no partner and no father was not a life she wanted for herself or for a child. Abortion seemed to be her only option. 

One of the conflicts in the story involves her closest friend who has conceived twice within her marriage but has miscarried both times. Although I didn’t set out to have this particular dynamic play out, a situation in my life offered itself to serve the story. My dearest friend had been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to conceive and I, without trying or wanting to, conceived. In our case it didn’t cause a rift, but it inspired me to use a similar tension around two women’s disparate lenses on motherhood. One, who has lost babies judges the other who willingly “discarded” one.

In What the Living Do, the weight of guilt for the death of her three-year-old sister isn’t the only reason Brett would rather not have children. She believes that she cannot “bear” children--it’s a dangerous world and there are predators out there, so not only does she feel unworthy to be a mother, perhaps it’s better not to bring a child into a dangerous world where they may be exploited. 

To answer the question simply, I didn’t think about “rights” per se as I headed into the narrative, and that may have to do with the medical system with which I’m familiar; one where a safe abortion is available to those who need such an intervention. Luckily, the protagonist’s dilemma didn’t involve having to choose between an unsafe abortion and single motherhood.

Later in the story, Brett encounters a male doctor with a shockingly cavalier attitude toward abortion, a scenario based on personal experience. So, as I said, many of the elements present themselves organically as I write, many of them inspired by my own experienced events and encounters. I think what I want to say here is that I didn’t set out to “make a point” but rather to tell a story about a headstrong woman mired in guilt and grief finding her way back to wholeness and health.

Author Susan Wadds.

Winner of The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contest, Susan Wadds’ work has appeared, among others, in The Blood Pudding, Room, Quagmire, Waterwheel Review, Funicular, Last Stanza, and carte blanche magazines. The first two chapters of her debut novel, published by Regal House Publishing, “What the Living Do” won Lazuli Literary Group’s prose contest, published in Azure Magazine.

A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator.

She lives in Kawartha Lakes in the former Dalton township by a quiet river on Williams Treaty Territory in South-Central Ontario with an odd assortment of humans and cats.

Power Q & A with Marion Agnew

We first came to admire the writing of Marion Agnew when we read her debut book, a memoir: Reverberations: A Daughter’s Mediations on Alzheimer’s. When her second book—the novel Making Up the Gods was published—we knew we had to invite her on our Power Q & A series. Even though the books are markedly different, in narrative approach as well as genre, there was a major similarity readers were picking up on, and we had a question.

Welcome Marion, and thank you for taking the time to answer it!

Q: Your essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Mediations on Alzheimer’s, is about the grief of your mother's dementia and your family's response. Each of the characters in your novel Making Up the Gods (Latitude46, 2023) is dealing with grief, too. What keeps drawing you to that subject?

A: I didn’t recognize the level of grief in Making Up the Gods until the blurbs came in! I’ve always assumed that everyone carried around a backpack of grief, and that all of life and writing is about dealing with that grief—it just seemed normal to me. 

Actually, it still does. Some people are well-acquainted with grief early in life—they lose a parent or have other traumatic experiences. But even privileged people like me have tiny losses and disappointments—failing a test, not making the varsity team, a shocking diagnosis, a failed relationship. We might not use the word “grief” to describe them. But, as in my case with the illness and loss of my mother, eventually the word “grief” obviously matches an experience, and then it’s easier to look back through life events and become more aware of grief’s companionship all along the way.

More about Making Up the Gods

Making Up the Gods is equal parts quirky and sincere in its thoughtful exploration of tragedy and recovery, of new and old relationships, and of deeper questions of when to let the past rest.

Simone, a retired widow, would live a quiet and isolated life, if not for the lingering ghosts of her family. One day, Simone is visited at her home by a man named Martin claiming to be her cousin. When Martin asks if Simone is willing to sell her cottage by the lake, a proposition made sweeter by the prospect of a condo in Florida, Simone, though pleased at the thought of a cousin, also questions his intentions.

Where among her past has Martin even come from, and why has he emerged in this moment? The burden of making a decision is all the more difficult because Simone has agreed to take care of a friend’s nine-year-old boy, Chen, for a short time while his mother enjoys a much-needed vacation. Simone finds her match in Chen, a curious and precocious boy grieving the loss of his father and stepbrother in an accident that has shaken the entire community.

Can Simone hide her ability to see her family ghosts? Will Martin succeed in extorting Simone’s beloved home—and worse, is he a danger to Chen? Because of Chen and Martin, Simone is caught between her ties to the past and her desire to embrace the company of the living.

More about Marion Agnew:

Marion Agnew is the author of a personal essay collection, Reverberations: A Daughter’s Meditations on Alzheimer’s (Signature Editions, 2019). It was shortlisted for the Louise de Kiriline Lawrence award for nonfiction. Her essays have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award. She lives in Shuniah, Ontario, mere yards from Lake Superior, on Anishinaabe/ Robinson-Superior Treaty territory.

Power Q & A with Sahar Golshan

We’re delighted to have Sahar Golshan, the author of SO LOUD! (Annick Press, 2024), join us for this Power Q & A. Sahar speaks about the power of reading and representation in childhood, and how this compelled her to tell this story of finding your voice in her new, incredibly fun, and touching children’s picture book.

Bring SO LOUD! home.

Q: Why did you choose the form of a children’s picture book to tell this story?

A: Picture books are powerful. They are the very first books that a person reads in their lifetime. Adults often remember the first titles they read in childhood. I want kids, especially girls and gender-diverse children, to read this book and feel emboldened to be their true selves. No matter if they’re loud, quiet, or somewhere in between.

I have vivid childhood memories of being read to in libraries. I remember being in grade one and being shuffled into the school library. The librarian read a picture book called A Promise Is a Promise by Michael Kusugak and Robert Munsch. She read it very well. Maybe too well. I was both scared and moved by its powerful message of keeping to your word. I reflect now on how important it was for me, a non-Indigenous child growing up in Canada’s largest city, to have been read a story about Inuit folklore and contemporary Inuit life.

I was also gifted a picture book called From Far Away by Saoussan Askar and Robert Munsch as a kid. It was the first time I’d seen a woman wearing hijab depicted in a book. My father’s family in Iran are Muslim and it was powerful for me to see a Muslim woman represented in this story. From Far Away is also about the culture shock of moving to a new country. It resonated with me as a mixed-race child who grew up in between many cultures. The main character of So Loud! is named Rudy. I don't often see mixed-race children with two racialised parents depicted in children's literature, so in this way telling Rudy's story in picture book form was really meaningful to me.

More about SO LOUD!

Rudābeh (Rudy for short) loves to talk, sing, jump and shout. There’s just one problem: the adults in her life are always telling her that she is SO LOUD. When her grandmother (Māmān Bozorg) visits from Iran for the first time, Rudy worries that she might be too loud for her. But as she tries to be quieter, Rudy starts to feel less and less like herself. Listening closely to the many sounds in her world—from husky howls and streetcar chimes to Māmān Bozorg’s roaring sneezes—Rudy tries to figure out the full range of her own voice, discovering along the way the joy in being loud.

With exuberant illustrations by Shiva Delsooz, this charming story will resonate with readers who love to make noise and are still learning where and when to take up space.

More about Sahar Golshan:

Sahar Golshan is the author of the picture book So Loud! (Annick Press, March 2024) So Loud! is illustrated by Shiva Delsooz. Sahar is a writer, a language learner, and the director of the short documentary KAR (2019). She is a winner of the Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing in Non-Fiction and a recipient of the Air Canada Short Film Award. Her writing has appeared in Room, Taclanese, Shameless, The Ex-Puritan, The Ampersand Review, and Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language. She enjoys teaching and facilitating workshops in academic and community spaces such as the University of Toronto and the Toronto Public Library.

Power Q & A with Kate Rogers

Kate Rogers is the author of The Meaning of Leaving, a tender and unflinching collection of poems that strives to show society's thoughtless acceptance of violence towards the vulnerable: women, the natural world, and the unhoused who struggle with mental health and addiction issues. These are brave and tender poems that will ignite and unite.

These are also incredibly personal poems, many of which Rogers identifies as autobiographical. In this Power Q & A, we ask Kate about the impetus and challenges of this project.

What a cover! The Meaning of Leaving by Kate Rogers is now available.

Q: Your book deals with intensely personal but also, sadly far-reaching themes and materials. Can you speak to the challenges of working with difficult autobiographical material?

A: There were days when it was particularly challenging to work on the poems about intimate partner violence in The Meaning of Leaving. Most of the challenge came from returning to the poems again and again to craft them from raw experience and emotion into art. And yet, the most important part of writing poetry is the revision. That process, like shaping any experience, moment or narrative on the page, can also be liberating. There were both challenges and rewards in working on my poems inspired by five years in an abusive marriage.

A series of losses and discoveries led me to write The Meaning of Leaving. One catalyst was the death of my abusive ex-partner during the pandemic. I suppose his death freed me and my unconscious to return to the painful experiences of abuse I’d had with him, but on my own terms.

While it was challenging to craft art from my years in an abusive marriage, I found that literary devices and the associative nature of poetry took me from literal experiences to metaphorical truth. I used metaphor, simile and form to evoke emotion. At times, free association helped me expand on my experience in unexpected ways. Repetition was helpful for emphasis. At all times, I was striving to evoke the impact of physical and psychological violence and seeking emotional truth.

Two linked reasons I wrote The Meaning of Leaving were to chronicle the journey of leaving my abusive ex-husband and to take back control of the narrative of my life. A tactic abusive partners often use to maintain control is to isolate the partner they are abusing from friends, family and community. Isolation means she has no external validation for her feelings and doubts the reality of her own suffering. I hope reading my poetry collection, reading this mini essay on the challenges of crafting autobiographical material into art, or hearing an interview with me helps anyone in an abusive relationship who needs to feel they are not alone. I hope they would be empowered by that recognition and ultimately, be able to leave their abusive partner.

Poet Kate Rogers.

More about Kate Rogers:
Kate Rogers' poetry and critical writing have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies both in Canada and abroad, including The Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology (Véhicule Press), Looking Back at Hong Kong (CUHK Press), subTerrain, ARC, PRISM, and many others. Her most recent poetry collection is Out of Place (Aeolus House/Quattro Books 2017.) She is a co-director of the Art Bar Poetry Reading Series in Toronto.

Power Q & A with Patrick Grace

Patrick Grace's collection of poetry, Deviant, is one of the most anticipated debuts of the year, tracing a tender and salient exploration of queer identity and belonging, as well as Patrick's personal experiences with the systemic dismissal of intimate partner violence that occurs in 2SLGBTQ+ relationships.

We're stoked to have him on this Power Q & A to ask one of our most pressing questions about the collection.

Deviant is available from University of Alberta Press.

Q: Many of your poems concern agency, and often a lack of it. We’re thinking of your poems about childhood and also, the poems later in the collection about stalking and gaslighting. Would you tell us about how you approached these poems, and the challenges you faced addressing these issues?

A: There's an intentional dreamlike quality in these poems, a blurriness that kept me safe when writing the childhood ones, to counter the fear and trauma of writing about my ex-partner's stalking and gaslighting. I spent months writing about the house I grew up in, the streets, the boys I crushed on and the fantasies I had. Some are real and some are imaginary. This was intentional, a blurry dream for the reader to get lost in. In my memories I'm safe in childhood with my secrets and my desires, even if this wasn't reality. In adulthood, in the abusive relationship with my ex, I couldn't hide. I wasn't safe. My biggest challenge was questioning whether to send the poems out into the world. When "A Violence" won The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for Poetry in 2020, I remember being frightened, thinking of what repercussions would come from this. It's one of the most intimate poems in the collection about what I went through. The only truth I hold is my writing. My words give me agency over my life, to take back what was stolen from me over months of psychological abuse.

Poet Patrick Grace.

More about Deviant:

Deviant traces a trajectory of queer self-discovery from childhood to adulthood, examining love, fear, grief, and the violence that men are capable of in intimate same-sex relationships. Richly engaged with the tangible and experiential, Patrick Grace’s confessional poetry captures profound, sharp emotions, tracking a journey impacted equally by beauty and by brutality. Coming-of-age identity struggles are recalled with wry wit, and dreamlike poems embrace adolescent queer love and connections as a way to cope with the fear and cruelty that can occur in gay relationships. Later poems in the collection recall vivid moments of psychological trauma and stalking and explore the bias of the justice system toward gay men. Collecting memories, dreams, and fears about sexual identity, makes important contributions to queer coming-of-age and intimate partner violence narratives.

More about Patrick Grace:

Patrick Grace is an author and teacher who divides his time between Vancouver and Victoria, BC. His poems have been published widely in Canadian literary magazines, including Arc Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Columba, EVENT, The Ex-Puritan, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and more. His work has been a finalist for literary contests with CV2 and PRISM international, and in 2020, his poem "A Violence" won The Malahat Review's Open Season Award for poetry. He has published two chapbooks: a blurred wind swirls back for you (Turret House Press, 2023), and Dastardly (Anstruther Press, 2021), both of which explore aspects of love, fear, and trauma that represent a personal queer identity. Deviant, his first full-length poetry collection, continues to explore these themes. Follow him on IG: @thepoetpatrick.

"Afternoons are my favourite time for sex": A Sexual Health Week CanLit Special!

February 12-16 is 2024 Sexual Health Week here in Canada, and we’re always up for raising awareness about sexual health, education, and care—especially when we can do that through amazing CanLit. That’s why we’re excited (almost inappropriately excited) to be featuring an excerpt of award-winning author Susan Wadds’ upcoming novel, What the Living Do, due out with Regal House Publishing on March 18, 2024. (Available for pre-order now.)

What the Living Do, by Susan Wadds.

About the book…

Sex and death consume much of thirty-seven-year-old Brett Catlin's life. Cole, ten years her junior, takes care of the former while her job disposing of roadkill addresses the latter. A cancer diagnosis causes her to question her worth, suspecting the illness is payback for the deaths of her father and sister. Thus begins a challenging journey of alternative healing that she doubts she deserves. Just as Brett surrenders to the prescribed cure, a startling discovery sends her on a more profound exploration of cause and effect. Encounters with animals, both living and dead, help her answer the question: who is worth saving?

Excerpt from What the Living Do:

Cole’s warm voice streams into the room. I sit with my side nestled into his back. I think about leaving all the time. It’s one thing I do very well, but there’s always one thing or another to put off the leaving. Cole’s hands for one thing. His mouth for another. He likes old songs, particularly folk songs from my parents’ time. He’s singing “Fire and Rain” now, which is nice. I close my eyes, letting the vibration from his ribs move mine. But right after the part about things in pieces on the ground, he stops singing and turns to me. “Let’s have a baby,” he says.

“Cole,” I say, trying to breathe some air back into my lungs.

“We could. It’s not too late.” He looks so earnest, so innocent, so trusting. He wants to assure me that I’m not too old, as if that’s the reason.

“Is the air conditioning on?” I say, unbuttoning my blouse.

Stroking my upper arm, Cole says, “You’d be a great mom.”

I catch his hand and bring it to my mouth, kissing the cup of his palm. “I’m sorry, Cole,” I say. “We’re not doing this.”

He draws away his hand to finger the frayed set list on the side of his guitar and drops his head so I can’t see his face.

“You want to fuck or eat first?” I ask into his ear.

“I hate it when you talk like that.”

I straighten my shirt and push myself off the ottoman.

Cole strums, his gaze floating out through the window and over the roofs of our neighborhood. Beckett follows me to the kitchen, quiet except for the clicking of his nails. Across the counter are four small plates littered with crumbs, two cereal bowls with gluey flakes, a coffee mug with congealed sugar, a yogurt cup, and a glass tumbler stuck with bits of pulp.

“Cole…”

“Norah called.”

I stretch out of my crouch. I don’t want to think about Norah, not her flushed hopeful face and not her crumpled one either.

“She wants you to call,” Cole says when I don’t answer.

“She has my cell number,” I say.

Beckett’s eyes track from mine to his dish. It’s still half-full of dry food. The guitar strings twang as the wood’s hollow sound reverberates against the wall. I set the dishes into the sink, turn on the tap, and squeeze out dish soap in a green line. Beside me Beckett sits, shifting from paw to paw, the skin lifting over each eye into alternate wrinkles. I turn off the tap and reach under the counter to dig into his bag of treats. The guitar is quiet, and now Cole is leaning on the archway to the kitchen, one thumb hooked into the front pocket of his jeans.

Beckett takes the chicken-cheese strip in one gulp.

“You should call her,” Cole says, moving close. “What’s with you two anyway?”

“I’ll call her,” I say, although I’m not sure I want to. It’s been sort of strangled between us ever since she had her second miscarriage. I brought her flowers, but I couldn’t stay with her for long. We’ve both created ghosts, their breath like those tiny white flowers that show up in sympathy arrangements. 

Cole takes my face in both hands. “You okay?”

I kiss him hard, pushing my tongue into his mouth, and drop my hand to his crotch. We do a quickstep, with me leading and Cole back-stepping, until we fall onto the couch. Hoisting one leg over his thighs, I straddle him and unzip his jeans.

“Well, hello there,” I say, running my fingers along the length of his penis.

“Hush, baby,” Cole says, reaching for my face with one hand, my breast with the other. “Come here.” I love the saw-against wood sound of his voice when he’s aroused. Afternoons are my favorite time for sex. Cole hasn’t been up for long, so he’s full of young male wake-up horniness, and I’m letting down from the stink of the road, my body aching for release. It’s quick and satisfying. I propel myself off him, leaving a slippery trail across his belly. “I’m starving,” I say.

He doesn’t answer. When I turn to ask him what he wants to do about dinner, it doesn’t surprise me that his eyes are closed, one arm arched across his forehead, one leg sloping to the floor, his chest with its fine ginger curls circling the nipples in the slow rise and collapse of sleep.

Cole was twenty-two when I met him, squatting in the aisle of Zehrs with a sliver of skin showing between the knot of his apron sash and the top of his jeans, his hair the color of arbutus inner bark.

“Aisle four, about halfway, on the right.” He rose. His eyes were gold-brown with dark flecks. “Here, let me take you. It’s a bit hard to find,” he said, slowing so we could walk side by side.

“You like Thai food?”

I nodded, taking him all in. “You?”

“I love all kinds of food. Just put it in my mouth and I’ll eat it.”

Oh my, I wanted to say, but instead asked him, “What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?”

His grin revealed perfect teeth. “Frogs. Octopus. Crickets. You?” He indicated a left turn at the end of the aisle.

I gripped his eyes with mine. “Bulls’ balls.”

He took in a quick breath and then shot it out with a laugh. “No kidding? Here we are,” he said, pointing at the shelves of Asian foods. He hesitated, those fawn eyes scanning me in a way that made me heat and swell. “Bulls’ balls, eh? Did it work?”

I hoped that the look I returned made him heat and swell. “I guess it did.”

“Okay then,” he said, wiping his hands down the length of his green apron. Big hands, smooth skin. “I’d better get back to my spices.”

“I’m making cold rolls,” I said, reaching for a pad of rice paper.

“Cool,” he said, taking a small step backward.

“I could make enough for two?”

Five years later he is still almost eleven years younger than I am.

Author Susan Wadds.

More about Susan Wadds:

Winner of The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contest, Susan Wadds’ work has appeared, among other publications, in The Blood Pudding, Room, Quagmire, Waterwheel Review, Funicular, Last Stanza, WOW-Women on Writing, and carte blanche magazines,. The first two chapters of her debut novel, published by Regal House Publishing, “What the Living Do” won Lazuli Literary Group’s prose contest, and were published in Azure Magazine. 

A graduate of the Humber School for Writers, Susan is a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator.

She lives by a quiet river on Williams Treaty Territory in South-Central Ontario with an odd assortment of humans and cats.

Power Q & A with Carmela Circelli

Our Power Q & A guest today is Carmela Circelli—a Toronto psychotherapist and philosophy professor at York University, and also the author of the novel, Love and Rain (Guernica Editions, 2023). Love and Rain is a stunning story that explores the human cost of political ideology against the backdrop of the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy. Carmela's work resounds with the depth and immediacy of the human psyche, and shows, with painful clarity, how we flail and suffer in times of civil unrest.

Our question for Carmela is about this book’s irrepressible moodiness: of theme and language.

Q: We love what a deeply moody story this is: how the narration echos the internal unrest of the characters. Was this style something you consciously thought about while writing, or was it an unconscious response to the themes you were addressing?

The equally moody and goregous cover of Love and Rain, by Carmela Circelli.

Q: Numerous people have made the comment that they like the moodiness of Love and Rain. I find this very interesting, as it is not at all something I consciously strove for, or was even aware of till people started mentioning it. One thing I was aware of, is that I wanted to focus on the weather, that I wanted to address environmental concerns without being explicit about it. So I did set some of the scenes against the backdrop of extreme weather events. But I did not consider that, in some cases, this actually correlated with the internal, emotional states of the characters.

A couple of things come to mind, that might have unconsciously contributed to the 'moodiness' of the book. One has to do with the reason why I write, which is mainly to process big emotions that I have nowhere else to put. Of course, thoughts come into it too. But despite having a philosophical background, it's feeling and not thinking that compels me to write or makes writing something I cannot seem to live without.

When I first decided to write a novel, I was afraid that my philosophical studies would interfere with my ability to construct narrative, that I would fall into being abstract and dry, and be unable to create a sensuous, living world. But now, I think that maybe, even my philosophical interests may have unconsciously contributed to the 'moodiness' of the book. That is because Existential Phenomenology, which was my main area of study, is very much concerned with prioritizing and describing 'experience' of which mood and feeling are a central part. In the context of philosophy, I have written quite a bit about the importance of mood, about how moods are not just random states that interfere with the clarity of thought, but are in fact revelatory, and can tell us important truths about our existence. And now that I think about it, the chapter on Mara is a kind of explicit expression of that belief on the value of moods, and the importance of sometimes, just letting them be, rather than muting them with medications.

But no, none of this was conscious. I was just trying to tell a story and out it came, in a moody way.

Author Carmela Circelli.

More about Carmela Circelli:

Carmela Circelli was born in Southern Italy and grew up in Montreal. She has been teaching on contract for the Philosophy Department at York University for 30 years, and also works as a psychotherapist in private practice in Toronto. In 2014, Quattro Books published her philosophical memoir Sweet Nothing: An Elemental case for Taking out Time. Love and Rain is her debut novel. 

More about Love and Rain:

Love and Rain is a novel that explores the nature of love, its pain, and the near impossibility of its enduring happiness. Moving back in space and time from Rome to Montreal in the sixties and seventies, it also traces the individual rebellion and social revolution that marked the FLQ movement in Quebec and the Red Brigades in Italy in the late 1970s. The power of love, music and politics intertwine in a tale that spells the mysterious alchemy of fate and chance.

Power Q & A with Gail Kirkpatrick

Gail Kirkpatrick is our esteemed guest for this Power Q & A. Gail is the author of the beautiful novel, Sleepers and Ties (Now or Never Publications, 2023)—a story about the importance of rebuilding community and friendships, and how these connections are often missing from (but necessary to) our everyday lives. This lack of connectivity is something so many of us feel, despite our increasingly digitally-tethered productivity-obsessed existences. We had to ask Gail: how does she take it slow?

Q: Could you speak to your writing practice, which you’ve described as slow. How do you maintain and importantly, honour this pace, in a world that can often feel oppressively obsessed with speed? We’re also thinking of how the message in your book seems to encourage resisting this modern-day pressure, and reconnecting with ourselves and each other.

Sleepers and Ties, by Gail Kirkpatrick (NoN Publications, 2023)

A: Thank you for this most interesting question.

For the last many years I have lived within a five minute walk of PKOLS (Mount Douglas Park) on Vancouver Island. I have a very visceral need to be deep in the forest as often as I can be. Here nature keeps its own pace; the leaves fall when it is their time and the camus and white fawn lily bloom in their own season. This revealing, the mystery and magic is never hurried.  

I believe that landscape plants itself in us if we allow it to. If in small measure I have somehow osmosed that process or that it is reflected in the way I work, and certainly as I’ve gotten older, in the way I connect with people, in patience or being a better listener, then I am very grateful.

Of course, when there are deadlines to meet, when I was the mother of young children, I got up early to get the day’s writing done in a two-hour window,  or I wrote when everyone else was asleep. There was more pressure to hurry. Then, I mostly wrote short magazine pieces that didn’t need a whole overarching time-line or plot and character development. Still, I am not immune to checking my phone too often in the day, and when I am writing I often write ‘offline.’

In the case of my protagonist, Margaret, in Sleepers and Ties, she is trying to hurry through her grief, get her executor duties over with so she can get back to her job as a museum curator, get ‘back to her life,' whatever that is. Events take place that force her to slow down and to see with fresh eyes a changed and changing landscape, to examine her oldest friendship, her marriage, and the legacy of her sister, for whom she grieves. It is largely through taking time in the landscape in which she finds herself, both physically and emotionally and she is able to reconnect. I planted her there and as the work evolved, though I may have been honouring a pace, the words in my book were revealed at their own pace too. 

Gail Kirkpatrick. Visit her website.

 More about Sleepers and Ties:

Grieving museum curator Margaret returns to her childhood home to leave behind her sister Shirley’s ashes and attend the final reading of her will. Unbeknownst to Margaret, Shirley has left her eight million dollars and a letter asking Margaret to return to its former glory an abandoned railway line—a fanciful notion, everyone tells her, with no real legal binding. Embarking on an adventure that will test more than just an executor’s duty and loyalty to her sister’s legacy, Margaret is forced to make decisions now and for the future that will challenge and forever change a landscape, her career, her marriage, her friendships, and her very own legacy.

More 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.

Power Q & A with Catherine Owen

The incomparable Catherine Owen is our guest for this Power Q & A, and we are honoured to welcome her. Catherine is a vital member of the CanLit community and she has published 16 collections in four genres. Today, we wanted to ask Catherine about her upcoming poetry collection, Moving to Delilah, (Freehand Books, April 1, 2024). Having been on 12 cross-Canada book tours, she’s chosen a distinctly different approach to launching this most recent collection, hosting salon-like in-home performances and discussions. We were fascinated and we had to ask: why?

Q: We are intrigued by your approach to introducing your new book, Moving to Delilah, to readers. We are wondering if you’d tell us more about the book, and the reasoning behind these intimate and interactive gatherings? 

Moving to Delilah by Catherine Owen.

A: Moving to Delilah is a collection of poems about a Westcoaster buying and inhabiting a 1905 house in Edmonton, AB from 2018 to the present. The book is in three sections: Home, Garden, and Neighbourhood, each representing the challenges and joys of renovations, growing things, relationships and re-learning the parameters of space and place in an entirely alternate environment. The thematic undercurrent is the realities of economic itinerancy so many face in Canada now and the impossible housing market that has undoubtedly redefined notions of home. Having been on national tours for most of my books, I aim to shift my performative style and my approach to undertaking workshops with each one. Now, I've realized what I value most about being on tour is the chance not only to do readings but to gather with other artists in informal settings to read and discuss poetry and undertake material explorations that spur us to new ways of thinking and feeling, in this case, about the themes and forms of house and home. As Stephen Dunn reminds us, the usual "prompt-based" method behind workshopping can "regularize what should be rarified." With Moving to Delilah, I want to dance around the subject with those individuals who care to participate: drawing, assembling, resonating and articulating and leave the choreography of the poem itself to the later "rooms of their own." 

Catherine herself!

More about Catherine Owen:

Catherine Owen is a Vancouver writer who now lives in Edmonton in a 1905 house where she edits, hosts the performance series 94th Street Trobairitz, reviews, and runs the podcast Ms Lyric's Poetry Outlaws. She's published 16 collections in 4 genres, including her latest, Riven (ECW 2020) and her next Moving to Delilah (Freehand Books 2024). She's been on 12 cross-Canada book tours, played bass in metal bands and worked in the BC film industry in the Props department. 

More about Moving to Delilah:

In search of stability and rootedness, in 2018 Catherine Owen moved from coastal Vancouver to prairie Edmonton. There, she purchased a house built more than one hundred years earlier: a home named Delilah.

Beginning from a space of grief that led to Owen’s relocation, the poems in this collection inhabit the home, its present and its past. These poems share the stories of decades of renovations, the full lives of Delilah’s previous inhabitants, and Owen’s triumphs and failures in the ever-evolving garden. The poems ultimately whirl out in the concentric distances of the local neighbourhood and beyond — though one house can make a home, home encompasses so much more than one house.

In this exceptional and lyrical collection, Catherine Owen interrogates her need for economic itinerancy, traces the passage of time and the later phases of grief, and deepens her understanding of rootedness, both in place and in poetic forms.

Power Q & A with Niloufar-Lily Soltani

Zulaikha is the gripping and gorgeous debut novel by Iranian-Canadian author Niloufar-Lily Soltani (published by Inanna Publications). The novel takes place over a forty-year period of war and upheaval in the Middle East—specifically, in Zulaikha's home territory of Khuzestan, which boasts the bulk of Iran's oil reserves. We’re delighted to have Lily with us for this Power Q & A to talk about the inspiration for this book and her world-building through language.

Grab Zulaikha from Inanna Publications.

Q: One of the aspects of your book we loved the most is how you immerse the reader in a world that is likely vastly different than the world many English-language readers are familiar with, and while making the story absorbing, you don't pander to these readers. The protagonist's name, Zulaikha, is a good example of this balance: it's not a name that's easy to pronounce for native English speakers—but you do provide a pronunciation guide. Did you consider this approach to be a risky one?

A: I have prepared for this question regarding Zulaikha's name since the beginning. "Zulaikha," pronounced as "Zuli-Ka," (approximately: the “kh” sound in Farsi is often difficult for English language speakers) is the title for my debut novel, a modern story characterized by its complexity, covering vast periods with numerous characters. A debut novelist should be extra careful about the risk-taking approach, which is why I gave this a lot of thought. 

According to the textbooks, the title must be attention-grabbing, memorable, informative, and easy to say. Did my chosen title or my protagonist's name represent all these qualities? Certainly not at first glance.

The inspiration for "Zulaikha" came from my cousin. Certain aspects of her life, mainly Abadan, the place she was from, lingered in my mind for many years. Choosing any other name would have left me with a lingering sense of guilt. But I kept an open mind. 

I began writing my first draft, not changing her name, but I picked most other characters' names, like Kia, Assef, and Abdul, as easy to pronounce as possible, in anticipation that an editor would ask me to change Zulaikha's name at one point. My first mentor was Karen Connelly at Humber Creative, whose editorial notes showed she was knowledgeable about the mythical figure. Neither did my publisher when they sent me their acceptance letter or later. I could be wrong then; people might be familiar with the historical figure, Zulaikha. 

But no, there is no documentary, no movies, and very few mentions of this mythical figure in the popular media.

Comparatively, Cleopatra, another historical figure of the exact origin, enjoys widespread popularity in the West. Several debates surrounding how she looked like, Hollywood movies, classics, modern adaptations, and documentaries. This triggered me to introduce Zulaikha to Western audiences. Her sensational and provocative nature, along with the mysterious and fascinating love story with Joseph, deserves some attention. Jami's book of poetry, "Yusuf and Zulaikha," offers further insight, and I encourage additional research into the literary materials available.

There are several other difficult names in my novel, the names of the places, like Khuzestan province, Bakhtiari or Chaharlangi ethnicities. These difficult names are a part of our history, shaping the most important parts of the novel's setting and themes. Even in Iran, the name Zulaikha is rarely used in recent years. Like endangered species, our historical names and their cultural significance deserve our attempt to survive them.

Finally, in my risk-taking approach I chose to trust the readers, their open mind, or their eagerness to research would prove that if given a chance, Zulaikha, both in the historical/ mythical context and, hopefully, in my novel, is attention-grabbing, memorable, and informative.

Author Niloufar-Lily Soltani.

More about Zulaikha:

In the winter of 2007, returning home from visiting her son in Amsterdam, Zulaikha accidentally runs into Kia, a family friend she hasn't seen for many years. Kia's father has passed away and he is flying home to attend his funeral. In a shocking twist, Zulaikha suspects that Kia may have had information about Zulaikha's missing brother, Hessam, who disappeared shortly following the murder of their mutual friend, Abbass, during the Iran–Iraq War. When the flight is suddenly cancelled, Zulaikha is taken into custody and questioned about her relationship with Kia by the European airport security. A day later, in Tehran, the Iranian authorities have their own agenda for intimidating her. A tense thriller explores the impacts of war and oppression through a sprawling, tender, imperfect love story, scored with the notes of the Arabic and Persian music and poetry that grace so many Middle Eastern lives.

More about Niloufar-Lily Soltani:

Niloufar-Lily Soltani is a fiction writer, poet and translator based in Vancouver. She is a graduate of the Humber College creative writing program. Zulaikha is her debut novel.