Issue No. 10

SUMMER 2026

In the tenth issue of The Ampersand Review, we are proud to present a variety of short stories, poems, and works of creative nonfiction that showcase innovative writing in the Canadian literary landscape. This issue features an exclusive interview with Hollay Ghadery, poetry by Anne-Marie Turza, Ayomide Bayowa, and Rachelle-Anne Lawka, fiction by Aaron Kreuter, and more!

Contents

From the Editor

Paul Vermeersch

On the Subject of Grief

Poetry

Rachelle-Anne Lawka

Not Every Monster Devours

Borrowed Animatronic Meat Suit

RICHARD-YVES SITOSKI

Mountain Lions

The Year Without September

CRISTIAN RAMIREZ RODRIGUEZ

La Treizième Disciple En Ontario

Rubidium 87

JUMOke verissimo

Archival Entry 1.1

August c. bourré

Fan Expo Toronto, 2024

adam wilson

Megafauna

Gone Tomorrow

Cassandra myers

Iulia Is The First Person I Tell About What He Did To Me And Her First Instinct Is

Pleasure Cruising

Anne-marie turza

Top-Down Shooter Game

Fiction

K. R. byggdin

Grief Like A Fragile Egg

Aaron KREUTER

Colby’s Paradox

jill m. talbot

Supportive Housing

Non-Fiction

murgatroyd monaghan

Island Girl

sophie anne edwards

And Then It Only Fluttered

Feature

hollay ghadery

A Conversation

Interviews

Three Short Interviews With Literary Translators:

Jessica Moore

Katia Grubisic

Madeleine Stratford

Reviews

marcia walker

The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston

paige leblanc

Syncopation: A Novel in Verse by Whitney French

Kevin MacDonald

What to Feel, How to Feel: Lyric Essays on Neurodivergence & Neurofatherhood by Shane Neilson

macie yott

The Garbage Poems by Anna Swanson

Selena mercuri

Wonderland Road by Carrianne Leung

Paul Vermeersch

From the editor

Dear reader,

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.” —Alice Notley

As the editor of a literary magazine, I am generally opposed to the idea of a “theme issue.” Once you commit to a theme, it limits (or forces) the editorial decisions you have to make. You might have to reject a brilliant poem or story because it doesn’t deal with gardening or violence or water, and you might have to say yes to a lesser poem or story because it does. Theme issues are too frequently the enemy of literary excellence, and for this reason, The Ampersand Review does not attempt them.
Still, some experiences are so universal as to be unavoidable. Paige LeBlanc, our current editorial intern, pointed out to me how often the spectre of grief appears in this issue. We did not set out to make a theme issue on the subject of grief, but it is such a ubiquitous element of the hu man condition and such a constant undercurrent in all kinds of literature that you could call nearly any general issue of a literary magazine “the grief issue,” and scarcely anyone would have grounds to question it.
It’s right there in the title of K.R. Byggdin’s excellent short story “Grief Like a Fragile Egg.” Poet Richard-Yves Sitoski wonders “If every name / is a synonym for grief…” and Cassandra Myers writes “then Iulia says // this can’t happen // takes me by the wrist and walks my grief to the corner store like a goldfish // flopping in her hands.”
But grief need not be called by name to be present, or indeed, to be felt. In Rachelle-Anne Lawka’s fabulous poems, the recurring character of Wölf appears as an embodiment of both dread and grief. Simultaneously allegorical, iconic, and palpable, Lawka’s Wölf is both big and bad, and we begin this issue with her warning that “anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful.”
Grief like a river, winding its way through the magazine. Grief like a cast of characters, or like a single shapeshifter changing its appearance from face to face. Or, as in Anne-Marie Turza’s poem “Top-Down Shooter Game,” grief like the indefinable sensation of being disconnected from language itself and, consequently, from the possibility of forming a meaningful connection with “the green unnumbered citizens / viewed as pixels from above in the game / of feeling wrong in language.” It is work like this that makes Turza, to me, one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian literature to have emerged in the last decade or so.
I cannot enumerate for you each instance of grief’s presence in the pages you are now reading. It accompanies us through non-fiction pieces by Murgatroyd Monaghan and sophie anne edwards, and it is present in our interviews and even in our book reviews. Grief is an uncountable noun. There is no one grief, no two griefs. It is everywhere. It takes every form. And in the hands of these talented writers, it is the (un)common thread of our beauty, our pain, our empathy, and, finally, the contrasting dark background against which the bright and colourful shapes of our joy can be discerned.
I hope that makes you happy.

Joyfully yours,

Paul Vermeersch
March, 2026
on the train from Toronto to Ottawa

Paul Vermeersch is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing

Rachelle-Anne Lawka

Borrowed Animatronic Meat-Suit

anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful. a host of candles burning
at your father’s seance. two girls rising like stags on their un-legs

in your backyard. sometimes, the world stills between the gap of your
front teeth. this is a kind of magic. when you step backward over

the threshold of your childhood, curl into a cockle shell on your twin
bed of wet black mould and death cap, this is just another monday.

when you take off bloody, wash away the Wölf with irish spring
and a desire to return to september, this is just another body

reduced to a highway. you can try to learn how to dull your fangs,
but somewhere there’s an underground party where you fill

his mouth with holey, not holy, Wölf-teeth, and how easily these
small givings can turn to acts of taking if you forget to keep watch:

your indigo name on a stranger’s lips. a ghost sleeping above your
sweating brow, a fish, too ugly, thrown back into the ocean’s bloated-blue

belly. here, it is the bad side of the Wölf that gets you first. here, there
is no right word for temporary escape when what you really mean

is the long, scrubbed face of wanting, removed. now is your chance
to finally say something honest: blood is blue on skin under moonlight.

a Wölf’s bruise glows neon after dark. feeding the wild Wölf only
results in third-degree whirlpools. now is your chance to say something

dishonest: the borrowed animatronic meat-suit has loved you always.
the empathetic rancher cried tears of joy when his livestock was resurrected

the last time. the EMT poltergeist playing with the ouija board
in your backrooms sincerely missed you, and that’s why she brought you

back to life. none of this is magic. it is a failed medical response.
there are mornings when the lake near your house evaporates and you

pretend to be a fish drowning upward in air. sometimes, a kind hand
reaches in, pulls you back down. it never hesitates to throw you back in.

this has always been a mistake. sometimes, you open your mouth wide
enough to reveal two sets of Wölves breaking the surface of your skin.

RAchelle-anne lawka

(she/her) is an emerging Canadian poet living in Ontario. She is currently a candidate for the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing.

Richard-Yves Sitoski

Mountain Lions

The thought of them makes me panic. Of all the ways
to go, the dirtiest. Life ripped in chunks from the body.

The thought of you in bed makes me panic.
Your breath so shallow it wouldn’t flutter goose down.

I never knew sleep could be so total,
learned the hard way the first time I shook and

shook you, my heart pounding with disaster.
One night you said a thing you couldn’t walk back.

All next day it stalked me through town,
slinking around buildings on silent pads.

It entered Coles and snarled through the stacks.
It sat at my bedside, eyes glaring night-vision yellow.

This in early spring, around the time we learned
that you and the cat were both diabetic. Each

on your own was serious, but two at once
was almost funny in a Looney Tunes

anvil-drop sort of way. The cat was pissing
on rugs and sofas and if it used the box would put

its front half in and let the business end piddle
weakly on the floor. You were more bedridden

than normal, ate nothing, faded over Netflix
till the Jardiance kicked in. I realized then

what the Fates have in store. Knew straightaway
that Atropos will shear your thread

quick and clean while you sleep, all so I can count
the empty hours till she hacks at mine

with the butter knife of heart disease. I learned what
every Instagram poet has been saying for years,

that I mustn’t hold grudges longer than cats given
needles. Or else I’d be mauled by a hundred pounds

of mange, ticks, and worms, be shredded
by broken fangs in a mouth reeking

of abscess, be carried off by hostility with
a northerly blowing through its gaping ribs.

So I beg your indulgence. If every name
is a synonym for grief then

let us shut up and dance in the kitchen,
ignoring domestic atrocities.

Let us sway, Kelly and Charisse, cruising
the toast crumbs and sand of an unswept floor,

you holding the cat while I hold you
until it squirms to be set down.

Look at it, frisky on insulin, its old self,
writhing on its back for attention.

How gentle it is now it’s decided we’re worth its trust,
as if it knew, somehow, it is we who keep it alive.

Richard-yves sitoski

lives in Owen Sound on the lands of the Saugeen Ojibway Nation (treaty territory 45½). He was the 2019–2023 Poet Laureate of Owen Sound. His work has appeared throughout Canada, including in The Antigonish Review, Arc, CAROUSEL, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, PRISM, and Train. His works include the fringe show Butterfly Tongue, the chapbook How to Be Human and the full-length collection Wait, What? His collection A Current Through the Flesh is now out from Ronsdale Press. He was the artistic director of the 2023 Words Aloud poetry festival and works as the marketing and publication coordinator for Kegedonce Press.

Cristian Ramirez Rodriguez

Rubidium 87

Here at last
is the most indivisible:

A. a population?

B. a voting bloc?

C. one universal wave function
encompassing what was
and forever will be!

All that is real finds form from this deception:

A. Marigolds on the altar
beside the sweetbread?

B. Eternal love
professed by Rocío Dúrcal?

C. The trail beside the road
leading to my current
place of residence
where the power
outage transforms
from little “Apagóncito”
to “El Apagón”!

In the days after the harvest moon
but before the election
vehicles of various fuel efficiencies
slow down beside me.
Some form of atomic cooling
typical of reactive alkali metals
facing the light that travels
at the same speed as the rays
illuminating my face
just enough for the drivers
to see me and scream
about the effects of rain on my back.

cristian ramirez rodriguez

(he/him/él) is a twenty-three-year-old Venezuelan-Canadian poet based in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) peoples. He is the winner of the 2026 Stacy Doris Memorial Award, the Quantum Arts prize in Literature from the Canadian Association of Physicists and the 2025 Spanish language poetry contest from the Oregon Poetry Association. He is currently working on his debut poetry manuscript. Connect with him @pray4cristian on Instagram or via https://linktr.ee/cristianramirezrodriguez.

Cassandra Myers

Pleasure Cruising

there was a marriage where even the wet outline
of orgasm would bring me pain, in theory

on the boat, we have private cabins, and yet
I am a coward. To touch myself would be to admit

I couldn’t touch myself before, and still, cannot
While swimming naked, a jellyfish humbled me

to the hot white nerve. I was a precautious child, my mother reminds me
when I come home from my trip to my childhood bed where once

a duvet folded between my legs, a door without a lock.
thrill without fear is a mythos, Atlantis even in my dreams

anxious is what the gynecologist tells me, forcing the speculum
Like a dorado, thrushing the surface for dear life. What death

follows so closely behind, it tenses the body into an impossible climate
Try to relax, the pelvic physio therapist tells me, the chiro tells me, the
massage therapist tells me, the captain tells me—correcting my posture

bodygrotto, bodycenote, bodyeels, body, and its urchin hives

salt-lubed on my private shoal, without hands to rush me ~ she arrives

and never stops arriving. Gentler than my own hands, rushing the timer

I lose ending in the wave pattern as the world deadliest sea snails crawl
over my hands unknowingly. And when the water and I make our pact

I contribute to our volume.

cassandra myers

(My’z) (they/she/he) is an award-winning poet, performer, dancer, illustrator, and counsellor from Tkaronto, Ontario. As a queer, non-binary, South-Asian-Italian, crip, mad, survivor of sexual violence, Cassandra’s work has won national literary and spoken-word titles including the National Magazine Gold Award in Poetry and Champion of the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Find them @cass. myers.poetry or at cassmyers.com.

Anne-Marie Turza

Top-Down Shooter Game

I’ve auto-joined the green unnumbered citizens

viewed as pixels from above in the game
of feeling wrong in language. My companion’s

a medieval dog named Beste-of-All
with a beard of skeptical bullshot.
We’ve levelled up in talking:
I talk to ants with roses, and ants talk
to my dog in proffers. It works like this:
To say to ants, tell Beste-of-All his name, I offer

rose seeds. Trees burgeon woodenly. They aggro
flower, unfolding like exploding linen napkins! Some ants

appear. Animated dark marks like hyphens. And something—
something sensory with motions and feelers,
something further, happens.
To be honest it’s beyond
an Ant-Rose-Dog native speaker’s
understanding. It works, Ok! And is the alchemy

of every true adventure.
I wear a cotton coverall. My name per Beste-of-All—

I think, translated via several species—is:

Specific Cheerful Cotton Skin Stink. I am armed,

typically with brandy. I can throw a drink on anyone’s old
impressive wound to make it sting. The problem is:

too many thousand players, the sentient wind,
900 km per hour, a blinding orbit, audacious
mission, a planet mistaken for a star. And stars mistaken
for grenades. I say with scattered rose seeds, specifically:

Why language?,

trees blasting into orange and yellow flowers.
Ants alpha-release the whole game with brazen sensitivity.
No one knows the roses from the question marks.

Anne-marie turza

is the author of two collections of poetry, The Quiet (Anansi, 2014) and Fugue with Bedbug (Anansi, 2022), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline, 2018). She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, and won the inaugural Writers’ Trust Board Fellowship (2026) for her body of work.

 Aaron Kreuter

Colby’s Paradox

It was the night the coral were supposed to release their yearly gamete bundles into their glass bathtubs. A controlled and monitored version of the frenzy that would soon overtake their cousins out in the reef. The same every November. People started arriving at the windowless laboratory around seven thirty. At eight o’clock, the fake sun started to fake set. The project leaders, scientists, undergrads, and various assorted switched on their headlamps, held buttons till they glowed red, whispered reverentially over the gurgle of the tanks, pointing and speculating. The red lights milled around, shone into the water, waited for the coral to set, for each of the thousands of tiny polyps to produce a hard little nub. A biological precursor to release.
By eleven, an eternity of waiting, it seemed unlikely there would be any action tonight. A hundred red lights bobbed toward the exit.
“Not to worry, it’ll definitely be tomorrow,” Thomas said to Anna-Maria.
“I just have to get something from my car, meet you at the dorms,” Clare said to Colby.
“Good night, sweet things,” Olatokunbo said to the tanks.
The door shut on the coral, leaving them to their simulated night.

Colby sat on the rocking chair behind the research centre’s dorm rooms, watching the rolling ocean. She had had one too many pulls from Helmut’s absurdly massive bottle of vodka, was trying to clear her head and take a break from the raucous reunion vibes inside. She could see Olatokunbo with some of the undergrads down in the surf. They were swaying and shouting their promises into the salty air, the sky above them smeared with clouds and stars, sex, drugs, rock and roll.
It was a charged happening, this annual gathering on the sea edge. Except for Thomas, they all came from elsewhere. Britain, Nigeria, Chile, Finland, America, Canada. To this research station on Australia’s northeast coast, to catch the corals’ rose-hued sexual discharge, separate sperm from egg, play mad scientist.
Clare clattered out of the dorms, sat on the step beneath where Colby was rocking. She was still wearing her white peasant skirt, even though she had spilled salsa all over it. They watched Olatokunbo pick up one of the undergrads and twirl her around, her bare feet raised behind her, scalloped with sand.
“Anna-Maria and I think this is going to be the year,” Clare said, as if picking up a prior conversation. “We’ve mapped out enough couplings between northern and southern species that we should, hopefully, hit gold. Hit pay dirt.” She was tapping her fingers along the wood of the step, each nail a different colour: coral blue, coral pink. Chalk white. “Hopefully,” she repeated.
Everybody here had their reasons, their story: why they fell in love with the ocean, with the wrack. The reef. And that was Clare’s: having made her escape from a suffocating evangelical childhood, she now pursued the need to save these bright, cathedral-esque life forms with intense, nearly religious zeal, to crossbreed and crossbreed and crossbreed again, under various and mounting stresses, until a new species evolved. Anna-Maria was the world-renowned scientist, the project leader, the one who conceptualized augmented evolution to begin with, the one who won the grants. Thomas, founder and head of the Reef Revitalization Nursery and Laboratory, was the disgruntled son of the second-richest coal-mining family in Australia. Through RRNL, Thomas was going to keep the reefs alive, to do what he could to undo the planetary damage his family had wrought. For Olatokunbo, it was the science of it, the symbiotic attraction between coral polyp and algae, the mystery of Darwin’s Paradox—how could such life thrive in the nutrient-starved waters of the tropics? He brought infectious joy to everything he touched, kept undergrads enthused and donors pleased. Then there were the non-scientists, the hangers-on of various stripes. Helmut, who, along with his parents and six brothers, worked at his family’s tabletop game company, Elämää Games; their forest-ecosystem game Boreal! was a massive sleeper hit. He arrived at RRNL three years ago to research for a sequel based on the mind-bogglingly complex ecology of the reef and had been back every November since. Jana was a video journalist—though as she told anybody who would listen, she was actually a failed novelist—making a self-funded documentary on Anna-Maria and her noble attempt to save the coral, sticking herself and her camera into everybody’s business.
And then there was Colby. Why was Colby here? She wasn’t exactly sure. She didn’t even like the coral, not really, not like the others. In fact, it terrified her, had since she first watched Finding Nemo with her sister. But, still, she found herself majoring in biology, doing a master’s in oceanography, and suddenly there was Anna-Maria in her lab offering Colby a cushy three-year contract as her assistant: she’d be based in San Diego, travel the world, the yearly pilgrimage to Australia. So, Colby said yes. And, for some reason she didn’t quite understand, she excelled at it, was, as Anna-Maria never failed to mention, “indispensable”; it was that very word, indispensable, that accompanied a picture of Colby in National Geographic, posing next to a tank of orange coral, a pipette in hand, a confident yet—to Colby, at least—slightly sour smile on her face. The more time she spent with the corals, the more obsessed and repulsed she became, the more unsure she became of this project she was enmeshed in, the more alien the reefs grew—their symbiosis, their unearthly cityscapes, their communal sexual explosions. But, as Helmut said the morning of his arrival, the two of them half on the bed, half on the floor: anything that is not human seems alien. Colby responded that sometimes humans seemed like the most alien species on the planet. Steadily dreaming our anthropic dream.
“I think Jana wants to sleep with me,” Clare announced.
Olatokunbo and the undergrads were walking up the beach, almost at the dorm steps. Clare waved and smiled at her boyfriend, who bent down and scooped her up, whispered something into her ear. Watching Clare and Olatokunbo, Colby thought of Helmut, inside with his vodka bottle, probably getting bored of waiting for her. He had asked if, since her contract was over anyway, she’d come back to Finland with him; she had told him she was going to the kitchen for a beer.
Over the sea, the red blink of a satellite carving through constellations.

They truly were a wonder. The reefs. Home to endless varieties of fish, urchin, clam, shark, octopus, crab, sea star, sponge, oyster, turtle, celled life singular and multiple. The plasticene wonder of it. The colours! Orange, gold, and brown. Fuchsia, pink, and teal. Yellow, blue, and green. The corals themselves built drip by drip, nib by nib, over tens of millions of years. But now, it was a race against rising ocean temperatures, against coral bleaching. Against death. A race to breed a new coral that was more heat-resistant, that didn’t expel their algal counter parts at the first sign of trouble, that could live in an altered world. As Thomas liked to say, if the coral goes, the entire script of the ocean will be rewritten. The entire script, period.
The second night. The air of the sea lab murky with expectation. Thomas’s husband, James, had just arrived from Melbourne, had his headlamp on the regular light setting until Jana whispered in his ear and he fixed it, Jana returning to panning over the tanks that simulate ocean conditions in twenty years, in fifty years, in one hundred. Anna Maria stood by the stainless-steel lab tables in a white lab coat, clipboard in her hands, a mother unhappy her brood were not performing.
Around ten o’clock, one coral let out a pip of gamete. Otherwise, nothing.
“Somebody get these guys some oysters,” Olatokunbo said.
Midnight: a river of red toward the door.

Colby ended the call from Toronto. She was standing at her dorm room window, watching the feral pigs rooting in the dumpsters; her sister had just informed her the cancer had metastasized, was back. Watching the pigs, she thought about how mammals many times larger than humans don’t have higher occurrences of cancer, even though they have thousands of times more cells. Peto’s Paradox. Elephants’ recompense for never inventing the oil derrick? Colby had stayed away from Toronto for three years, but her contract with Anna-Maria was over; there was no reason not to return home.
Downstairs, the dorm kitchen was full of people. Everybody was drinking, telling stories, laughing. The undergrads came in, hysterical, spooked by the pigs. The talk turned to roadside wallabies, the scourge of the cane toad, the fires that, not even three years ago, had killed a neat billion. Colby and Helmut chipped away on their nightly group project of the vodka bottle.
Jana turned her camera on, asked if it’s actually even possible to save the coral. Colby stared at Jana’s earrings, two house keys, one gold, one silver. What doors did they unlock?
“Yes, but augmented evolution is only one piece of the puzzle,” Thomas said, leaning back. “We need to slow the heating of the ocean. Brighten the clouds, block the sun. Pump in cold water, deploy robots to reseed damaged reefs. Anything and everything.”
“As long as it’s scalable,” Anna-Maria interjected.
“Yes, yes, of course. Scalable. The latest euphemism for money.” Clare had told Colby that Thomas’s parents had recently cut him out of their will; if it wasn’t for Anna-Maria and her grants, RNNL would be shuttered. “The only truly scalable technology is human beings. But if we can buy the corals twenty, thirty years, maybe we’ll have come to enough sense.”
Colby watched this exchange through slitted eyes.
“I wish somebody would do some augmented evolution with me,” Clare sighed. She was curled up with Olatokunbo on the futon, but was looking at Jana, who was filming James brag about a fishing trip he had just come back from in Canada’s Northwest Territories, the amphibious vehicle they had rode out into the frothing lake, fish the size of compact cars.
The undergrads turned up the music, started dancing.

Later, Anna-Maria was loudly fighting with Thomas about the Fermi Paradox. Everybody had paused to watch.
“Either interstellar travel is impossible, or there is no other life in the universe,” Anna-Maria stated in her determinative way. “I tend to the latter.”
“Bullshit!” Thomas said, nearly yelling. Colby had never seen him so animated. Clare often said that Thomas had had his blood medically replaced with liquified self-importance; Colby had never seen it, not until now. “The universe is big enough for trillions of advanced civilizations. They just haven’t gotten to us yet. I have to believe that. Otherwise, tell me, please, what’s the point?”
Olatokunbo tried to break up the argument. “Maybe they’re waiting for us to solve our own problems.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
Don’t hold your breath.

Colby was with Helmut at the kitchen sink, filling their mugs with water. She leaned into him as they let the water run cold. Helmut was a big guy, with a big beard, big eyes, a big brain, big appetites.
“Have you thought about it?” he asked. Colby took a step back.
Finland.
“Seeing you once a year is no longer enough,” he said.
“I don’t know. Maybe.” Colby was stunned at her own words.
Helmut took her by the waist. “I need your expertise with the game. Plus, my brothers are dying to meet you.” The game. The game! For Helmut, it was easy. You did this, you got this in return. You picked a card, you got a reward. Augmented evolution. Put the right egg and sperm together, make something better.
Colby took a drink of the lukewarm water, flavoured with the faintest hint of sulphur. She knew she didn’t want to go with Helmut, but why not? They had fun. The sex was great. She had nowhere else to be, not really. Except for Toronto, her sister. The disease.
“Sometimes, I hate everybody,” she said. “Everybody, and everything.”
“What?” Helmut asked.
“I said, I hope your brothers agree with your new idea for the reef spawning mechanic.”
Helmut’s face was a mask of Finnish fortitude.
Colby scanned the kitchen. The undergrads had found an ancient Twister mat, were contorted into unnatural shapes. Olatokunbo was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the wall. Clare and Jana were no longer present; Thomas had reamed Jana out after discovering that she was planning on using her documentary to get funding from Silicon Valley, and Clare had escorted Jana to her dorm room to comfort her. Olatokunbo jumped up. “The night, she is young! Who wants to go for a swim?” The undergrads collapsed, laughed, jumped up, followed Olatokunbo out the door.
Colby took Helmut’s hand.
Time for bed.

Shortly after lights out, on the third night, it happened.
First, there was a spitting. Then, a sputtering. Finally, a storming, the tanks clouding with red. Cheering and high-fives. The lights went back up. Anna-Maria and Colby rushed around with their clipboards, their lists of the desired pairings. The undergrads helped Olatokunbo and Clare catch the gamete slicks, sieve out the sperm from the eggs, transfer the sperm into buckets, send the buckets to the appointed workstations. The two of them joking and laughing, holding hands. Jana everywhere with her camera; she had removed the key earrings, two little nubs where the holes in her skin were already beginning to fuse. Helmut, for the first time Colby had known him, seemed out of place, his big blonde bulk removed from the action.
They worked into the night. The dorm rooms forgotten.

Colby stood with her feet in the chilled surf, the sky beginning to boil with the dawn. The team had only just finished pairing the coral. Now, we wait. Colby’s role in this experiment was, at least momentarily, complete; until Anna-Maria sorted her latest grant, Colby was a free agent. Her small white duffle was packed and waiting for her by the brown rocking chair. Shortly after Helmut had wandered off to bed, around four thirty, kissing Colby on the forehead and saying he’d see her in the morning, she had slipped out from the frenzy, ran to the dorm and booked a very expensive flight to Toronto. She had hastily packed, had every intention of getting right into her rental car and driving to the airport, but felt compelled to say goodbye to the ocean.
Colby let the sunrise sting her eyes. Tomorrow, nearly everybody else would be leaving, headed back to their wired corners of the globe. She tore her eyes from the new day’s succor, looked up. Pictured airplanes in the sky, their trails of exhaust criss-crossing, expanding, melting into the air.

Aaron kreuter

is the author of six books. His most recent poetry collection, Shifting Baseline Syndrome, was a finalist for the 2022 Governor General’s Award, and was shortlisted for the 2022 Raymond Souster Award and the 2023 Vine Awards for Jewish Literature. Aaron’s first novel, Lake Burntshore, was released in spring 2025. He lives in Toronto and is an assistant professor at Trent University.          
            

Murgatroyd Monaghan

Island Girl

1998

There is the sound of a swing. Damp sand sits crystallized curiously against my teeth. An upturned garbage can leaks its contents over my skin. I wonder why I cannot smell it. I notice the smell, but I cannot smell. Just as I cannot taste the sand in my mouth or hear the swing that is creaking above me. The sensation should scare me, but it doesn’t. Nothing scares me. I feel nothing. My favourite rainbow crop top is flipped up to my shoulders from when they grabbed it, I know it is, but my hands are not mine to move. I am floating somewhere off in the distance. My breath is catching from the stomping on my back. I see red blood on my hands. I send my brain around to feel for any pain that might be responsible for the blood, but it finds nothing.
Someone’s feet have righted me and carried me across the playground. The feet are at the ends of my legs, I can see this, but they are not connected to my nervous system. All of my thoughts seem brought in by satellite, or maybe by freighter or helicopter, the way they bring things in back home. The most important incoming thought is the need to rediscover reality and place myself back there. Palms press into eyes, nails scratch thighs, teeth bite tongue. Sand. There is the taste of sand. Spit. Good. Keep going. The body is the mainland, but I am far away.
Six birds perch on a wire above me. Eight now. Twenty-seven leaves lie on the ground beneath this bench. The bench is brown, browner than me. I am sitting on it. My feet swing. They swing sixty-five times. Hands pinch body parts. Sounds are louder now. I remember I know how to check the time. It is five-thirty. Dammit. I have to go.
I practise what I will say.
“I fell off the swing. Stupid mistake, really. I’m fine, I’m fine. What’s for supper?”
That sounds good.
My mother wouldn’t want to know the truth. She wouldn’t want to know that I am not adjusting to life in Canada at all, and that I’d rather do anything than leave my apartment and face other kids. Everyone loves a success story. No one wants to know the truth: the bullies make me hate myself. I definitely don’t want my mother to know that it’s her fault. She has enough of her own troubles.
I sling my backpack over my shoulder and begin my short walk to the bus.
My mind has begun to detach from my body a lot more readily, lately. This is a skill I have learned to master just like the other skills I have learned to master since arriving here. This is how I cope with the memories, the insults, the constant fear. I have become, not a Canadian girl, but an aspiring chameleon, a people-pleasing actor—a lie.
The world around me is real enough now. Walking helps. My mouth tastes the sin of its difference as I force it to form English words the way the other kids do, without my foreign accent; without the familiar vocabulary that makes the world make sense for me. I need to be normal and I don’t feel normal. I practise with song lyrics: “All I can say is that my life is pretty plain. I like watching the puddles gather rain,” I mouth. I don’t, though. I hate puddles. I can learn to like them, I guess. That band is Blind Melon. Another popular one is Smashing Pumpkins. I wonder why people here garner so much satisfaction from damaged produce. No matter. I can learn to like that, too.

2002

My mother takes me home on the TTC on Tuesdays. She can’t find a job, so she’s home all the time. Back on the island, my mother was the charge nurse on a burns unit. My grandmother and grandfather were born and raised in India, where my grandfather founded a hospital that still bears our family name. I come from a long line of medical professionals. Here, though, my mother can’t even get an overnight cleaning gig. We live in an overcrowded, derelict housing project that smells like pot and piss. My mother drinks and yells at my new father a lot. They blame “the system” for everything. I think Mum’s problems are her own fault. She doesn’t even try to fit in.
I am reading The Princess Bride as we sit together on the 39 Finch East. I am not so much reading as pretending to scan the pages while I actually use all of my senses to scan the environment around me for potential threats. I know as much as it is possible to know about every stranger within a fifty-metre radius of me, while at the same time, I go to great lengths to avoid potential interactions with them. There is a good reason for this. Speaking in front of kids is asking for trouble. But the adults are worse. Every adult’s response is inevitable:
Hello.
So cute. Where are you from?
Where is the bathroom?
Oh, where are you from?
Excuse me please, I’d like to get by.
Ha, where’s that accent from?
One day it’ll be, HELP, I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!
Aww, omggg, where do you come from?
If I have to hear that question one more time, I think I’ll scream. Anyway, it won’t be like this much longer. I’m starting a new school in September for the seventh grade, and I’ve been perfecting my Canadian accent. I’ve also been straightening my hair and using a different name. I almost look white, and I almost sound normal. The plan is for no one at the new school to ever know I’m different.
The biggest flaw in my plan is my mother. She is on a mission to humiliate me. As she begins to yap genially with a man across from us, I tense. I see the question forming on his face. I knew it. Right there. Here it comes. And I don’t want to hear it. Placing my hand on my mother’s knee and looking at the man, I say clearly and perfectly: “Please forgive her. My mother has a speech impediment.” The man smiles awkwardly and stops talking. I go back to my reading. My mother takes the high road and waits until we are alone to whack me upside the head.
“Oww!”
“Don’ be owwin’ me, ye daft shite scunner or ah’ll gie ye summit ter greet aboot. Da leik o’ dat. Ahm at doon-drappin wi’ ye. Tank d’Lurd Jaisus ye’v naught but a skelpit lug, noo.”
“Mum.” I rub my head. “People don’t hit their children here.” I duck as the next blows come rounding, but it doesn’t matter. She never misses.
“Och, raileh? Well, mebbe the bairns here are less cunty, leik.”
I look around me in horror. “See what I mean?! Mum, you can’t say that word here, it’s really bad! Just stop, okay?”
“Stop wot noo, Murga? Bidin’?” Mum has gone from mad to sad mad. I hate that. I don’t know the right Canadian words to say. My tongue floats, just like the island it left. I hear the waves of my swallow. I feel the salt in my eyes. I feel the muir under my feet and feel the mist on my skin, and then, just as I start to feel at home again, I know it isn’t real. Nothing ever feels real.
I feel sad-mad, too. The world is disappearing again. There is cotton in my ears, and my surroundings are both too blurry and too crisp. When I answer, it’s with a new voice. Murgatroyd Mk II has risen from the playground sand and become someone that neither Mum nor I recognize. Someone who doesn’t get picked on or hurt, with straight hair and straight A’s; someone who can keep the real me safe. I know a secret Mum doesn’t: if you aren’t real, no one can hurt you. If she could just turn off reality and step out of herself like I can, she wouldn’t have to drink so much. I touch her cheek.
“No, Mum. We can bide here. We can live, like. I mean, we can live.” I don’t believe that, but I want her to think I do.
My newest backstory is one the kids at the new school will respect. I’ve practised it until it feels true. My real parents are in prison. They’re … bikers. This? This is just a foster parent. Yeah, she makes me call her “Mum.” But I’m tough. I’m crazy. Don’t mess with me. My fantasy is my ticket to safety; to friends. It doesn’t feel wrong. What’s the difference between starting again in a new country and starting again with a new name? I exhale hard. Now seems like as good a time as any to tell my mother what I’ve been meaning to. “And I don’t go by that name anymore, Mum. Call me Hannah from now on, okay?”
Mum is silent. The silence is worse than her speaking. She just stares, like she’s watching a hurricane closing in from afar. She lifts my straightened hair and lets it drop like it’s dirty. Her breath is shaky. The hurricane is closer now. She pushes her sunglasses up her nose just as the tears form, and that’s when I know for sure that we’re both pretending.
“Feckin’ reet.” Her voice is quiet now, the eye of the storm. “Yare a reet braaly perskeet, du. Ah’ve a reet ter be here an’ so dae ye. Lay ye doon en yuir ain calf grund prood leik.” She puffs out her chest and smacks me again for good measure. I pretend it hurts, to make her happy. She smiles.

2004

The first time I cannot find my way back, I panic. I try teeth, nails, palms on my eyes. Nothing works. I am floating, floating. I never got lost on my island back home. How could I? Even if I tried to lose myself, the village midwife would find me when she went out on her bicycle, or perhaps the barmaid’s husband would click his teeth at me on his way home from the postmaster’s, or any of the mothers or grandmothers trading vats of soup or bites of gossip who walk around with their skirts hiked over their leather boots would come up to me and grab me by my ear to bring me home. Once, I walked out alone to the phone box on the outskirts of town, and when I returned, my mother scolded me in our unique dialect of Gujerati-Scots for skipping stones at the glass even though I was sure no one had seen me. But here in my head there is nothing, not even wind, not even stones, not even a phone box two miles away.
I begin to cut myself before I know what I am doing. When the air touches the pink globs of fat poking through the opening in my forearm, the sting begins like seawater in the wound and the shoreline comes into sight again. I breathe because I am home. I bandage my arm and wear only long sleeves, even in summer. It takes my mother a year to find the red lines criss-crossing my skin like a highway map to nowhere. It takes her another year to speak to me without hatred because of the shame I bring on our family. I spend less time at home and more with the neighbourhood kids, who fear my scars and follow me as if I can take them to a place where they don’t feel pain until it pushes its way out of their flesh, either. My mother stumbles from drink and shouts that I am not her daughter. There are dozens of Gujerati-Scots words for crazy and I know them all.
We don’t have a word for lost that doesn’t also mean broken.

2006

Clouds are closing in overhead. Bring in the boat, I think, but it is an old thought. There are no boats here for us to make our living. Here, I survive with my fists. I roll up my sleeves. The girl my friends are dragging across the parking lot to me is crying, but I don’t care. These bitches all cry. Not me—I haven’t cried in years. “What’d this one do?” I say, looking into the tear-streaked face. Some of them steal boyfriends, tattle, or run their mouths. This one looks pretty clean.
“New girl. She don’t speak no English, even. We brought her to you for initiation. Curb her bitch ass.” Fight, fight, fight. The familiar chanting begins, and I realize I am floating away.
It is like looking into an enchanted mirror. My ears and eyes keep losing the present and I see blood on my hands. C’mon, hit her, what are you waiting for? But I taste playground sand in my empty mouth and hear the sound of the swing, the swing, the swing. I can’t hurt myself here, and the creaking is so loud it envelops me. You stoned or what? Fuckin’ knock her out. I finally smell the garbage. It took years, but it all comes back now. “You hit me first,” I whisper to the girl, faking a shrug, trying to keep my cool. “It’ll be better for you.” The girl just cries hysterically and keeps shaking her head. Please, please.
There is so much fear between us I could cut it with a knife. But I have no knife, not to cut the fear in the air or the fear out of my own skin, and the girls who know Hannah surround me, hungry for blood. I know only one way to find my way home from here: I leave reality, go to a place where I have no feelings or sensations at all, and I punch the girl in her face as hard as I can.
The kids cheer. Everyone disperses.
She is vomiting. Or maybe it’s me. I might be vomiting. I don’t know. I can’t feel anything. Feet are running, and they’re mine. I am an island surrounded by wind, water. The water undoes the job of the straightener; reveals my curls. Nothing touches me. Everything is touching me. The feet take me to my apartment door. I am wet and screaming. “Open the door, Mum. It’s me, Murgatroyd. It’s Murgatroyd. It’s me.” The door is open now, but I am still sobbing and banging the doorframe. “It’s me, Mum, it’s me, it’s me, let me in.”
My mother squeezes me softly and strokes my half-curly hair. She is mostly sober, and for the first time I notice the hand marks on her neck and shoulder, the thick makeup over her left cheekbone. “Ah know who ye are, ye stchupid bloody fecking chakotra. Ah know.”

MURGATROYD MONAGHAN

is an Autistic mother, author, poet, and spoken word artist of mixed descent. Her work has won national and international awards, including the Canadian Nonfiction Prize (CNFC). Her essay, “Island Girl,” was originally longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Murg’s most recent collection, white spaces where we learn to breathe (Off Topic 2025), was named one of 2025’s best collections by CBC. When she isn’t writing, performing, or teaching, Murg can be found snuggled up with her kids watching Star Trek. 
            

sophie anne edwards

And Then It Only Fluttered

I entered the world with one eye open, she said. Wary of the world. Not sure whether I really wanted to enter it.
I watched her eyes weeping with infection. I watched her eyes close.
By Monday, she was only awake for part of the day. She smiled every time she saw me, or when the nurse leaned toward her face, and when Emilie arrived for a visit. From time to time, very slowly, shakily, she raised her pointer finger to the corner of her eye in an attempt to wipe away the sticky gunk encrusting her eyelids. I’d painted her fingernails blue a few days before. They matched her blue-veined soft hands.
On Tuesday, her eyes only opened for a few minutes at a time. Her hands lay at her sides. Her jaw hung open, revealing the ravaged mouth, the pulpy tongue, the skin peeling away from the inside of her lips, the teeth mossy with yeast. She had first refused food and then drink, everything stinging.
On Wednesday, both eyes fluttered for a few moments when a remembered voice spoke to her.
I didn’t think of the garden then, nor of the seedlings germinating in the greenhouse under Yan’s care. I wasn’t sure what she’d planted of the seeds I’d left with her. There was no world but this one. A bed, a La-Z-y Boy chair, a small fridge, and my mother’s starving body. I have tried to tend toward life—planting, caring, helping my mother, tending to her for so many years. I hadn’t intended death, not in this close way.
Walking through the woods in the snow following Karen’s discarded clothing, finding her body curled in the cold was different. There was the life, and then suddenly there was the death. There was no preparation except the feeling that one should have been prepared. Should have seen, known, intervened.
The nurse called to say there was a hole in my mother’s back. I can see metal. Does your mother have metal in her back? The hardware bolted along her spine after the first accident crushed her back twenty years ago was eroding, the now naked bolt pressured between skin and the wheelchair, skin and bed. The hole felt like a dream entering the daytime hours, a fault line. That Mom hadn’t mentioned the pain or that her pain hadn’t been heard was a silence that couldn’t be spoken.
I thought I had been preparing. The ground had been worked.
Tomatoes can develop blossom end rot, squashes and eggplants, too. Round sunken spots darken the bottom. The fruit rots. The culprit is a lack of calcium, usually from soil deficiency, or from over- or underwatering, which makes it hard for the plant to uptake calcium from the soil. My mother’s spine, spongy from osteoporosis, was crushed when her car went off the road, down the embankment and raced over a frozen mound of road construction waste, from where she flew forty feet to land next to a swamp, the tires of the car splayed. The doors were crushed, too, like her back. A lack of calcium and the loss of estrogen results in bone not being replaced as quickly as it should. For two decades she had taken medication for Barrett’s Esophagus to reduce reflux, the medications further reducing the body’s ability to re-create bone, affecting her stomach’s ability to absorb calcium. The second car accident crushed her hip. A third accident broke her arm. I found a round piece of metal in her ashes when I divided them for me, my daughter Emilie, and my brother.
Seedlings that are too damp can develop what is called damping off—a fungus that develops around their stems and causes them to rot and die.
The rosemary plant, a Christmas gift from my friend Anong, did fine through the winter, then began drying. Small tufts of white fungus gathered at the nodes between the needles and the stem.
The yeast that colonized my mother’s body is naturally present in all our bodies. But the conditions became overly favourable, and so the yeast duplicated and travelled. They didn’t notice her mouth until it became raw and she was unable to eat. They hadn’t noticed her weakly trying to lift her hospital gown to scratch below her belly and the thin hairs of her pubic bone. Please can we have some Canesten, I asked. Can we reduce at least one irritation? They didn’t notice the pain in her belly. She had a urinary tract infection, vaginal yeast. Her eyes began to get sticky. The antibiotic drip intended to reduce the risk of infection post-surgery made her body prone to yeast. They replaced the antibiotic with a medication for yeast but after a week it still wasn’t working—too late, too much yeast, her body too weak, the yeast multiplied.
Plants infested with spider mite get sticky. The leaves roll into themselves. We could treat the UTI and the vaginal infection. She was hydrated through the IV but we couldn’t clean her mouth. It was too painful. The surgical incision along her spine was eight inches wide and four inches down, a red cross that began to become redder, inflamed, puss building behind the stitches.
A few years ago, I transplanted a climbing rose to a south-facing wall, a gorgeous peach colour with a classic heady rose scent. I made a mistake, though. I planted it in a raised box I built and lined with blue insulation. The freeze and thaw of that mild winter killed the roots of the climber, and the other two small rose bushes I’d planted alongside. Those two small roses were simple grocery-store roses, the miniatures in pinks and yellows, dark red that show up around Mother’s Day in four-inch pots with coloured plastic sleeves. Those two miniatures had blossomed into full-size roses with heavy blooms. Come spring, when I pruned them back, it was dead wood all the way down.
There’s a stillness in the body that is like a hole in the back; a dream undreaming itself, a silence that isn’t silence because it’s not just a lack of sound. It’s beyond silence, beyond stillness. Beyond.
I miss that rose. The generosity of her blooms, the grandness of them, the enlivening of the grey siding, the companionship of the blossoms sitting beside my bed. I wasn’t holding my mother’s hand when she died. I had slipped into my own deep sleep, finally, after many nights of wakefulness. And wait-fullness. I lay beside her, the palliative playlist running. I’d stayed awake through the night, counting the seconds be tween breaths, the silences increasing by increments of four until she’d reach twenty-three seconds of held breath, then she began the cycle again. Breathing for a few seconds, holding for a few seconds, then holding for seven seconds…. And again.
I read to her, a flower blooming on her face when she saw me. I lay in the narrow bed alongside her and we looked at photographs from her childhood home: Carcassonne, les calanques, the streets of Marseille, lavender fields.
Plant characteristics change depending on the type of fungus they grow with. This is such a close relationship perhaps we should call them they rather than two separate entities. Much in the same way that our own bodies are so microbial, these microbes so integral to our systems, so influential in our bodies. The medicinal qualities of plants, their antioxidant levels, aroma and flavour, and their adaptations are all affected by the type of fungus with which they cohabitate. Plants began as algae and evolved into what we call plants, and yet they are only plants by some visual cue that we seem to think is definingly independent, like our own bodies.
Lichen aren’t a thing, really, or a thing. Lichen are the symbiotic conjoining of fungi, algae, cyanobacteria. Less a conjoining than a world in process, an encounter, a long conversation in much the same way that during pregnancy there is no separation—mother is mother and baby. The baby is the mother’s blood circulating, the shared history of cells. Even later it becomes difficult to parse what of ourselves is unique from our families, to parse what of ourselves is separate from the microbes, the water, the collection of collaborations that we are.
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake writes that each lichen is birthed in relationship. The relationship between plants and fungus is so very close, that he argues in book Entangled Life, “What we call ‘plants’ are in fact fungi that have evolved to farm algae, and algae that have evolved to farm fungi.” Fungus is entwined with roots, too, and where plant and fungus connect, plant signals pass between them.
I am somehow the garden, and it me—neither fully functioning without the other, at least becoming our current expression through our relations. The garden is also a third entity between the “wild” and the human, between past and future. The garden is not a thing of itself, but rather all the relations between soil and seed, weather and microbes, insects and intentions. And I am my mother, too, and her mother, and her mother’s mother, and my daughter is me.
All day Thursday she began breathing slowly but regularly again, seven or eight seconds apart. It was the twenty-seventh of March. They told me it could be weeks more. I didn’t know it was our last day. I lay beside her as I had been every day and every night, lifting the blankets when she sweated, recovering her when the skin was cold, her ability to regulate temperature diminishing. Alert to the most minute movement signalling pain, I whispered to her, stroked her arm, read passages aloud from La Gloire de mon père.
Plants are aware of one another and the insects and other critters that eat and otherwise interact with them. I cannot see this recognition between plants and their worlds, yet I was aware of my mother’s every minute movement and my mother was aware of me.
The birds notice me. The crows know when I am adding more food to the compost. At night I hear raccoons fiddling with the lid of the bin, which I’ve covered with a board and topped with a couple pieces of firewood to keep the dogs out. I sense the plants know me. I too have a scent that must give the plants and critters information about me. I move between the plants, rub against them all, I prune suckers, accidentally bend a stem too far, step on vines that cross the pash. Their chemicals do not work against the size of me. I’m not a small insect feeding on leaves, but a large predator. But the blistering that developed on my arms this summer from the parsnip has changed my behaviour with them. I do not have a way to measure how the leaves might taste differently day to day, week to week. I wonder if the plants look forward to my touch. My gentle touch. The way I tuck a leaf away from the electrified fence. Tuck compost around the base of the flowering squashes.
I called my brother. Told him she needed to hear his voice, for him to say he would be fine. We would all be fine and that she could go. I sent my daughter to the liquor store to buy a bottle of champagne. We drank small sips from small glasses and each time a friend or beloved visited or called to say goodbye, I wiped a drop across her lips.
The scent of tomatoes is strong on my hands when I prune and gather. This scent must have a function. I sometimes wish I had followed my interest in plant biology, the only science class in high school that turned me on. I loved learning about the plants and creating plant identification drawings. I am not a scientist but I have my imagination. Science is fascinating and important—it proves what we guess at. It gives the rationale for love, for protection. It leads to understanding the functions, the mechanisms that can help us help the plants, to understanding their medicines and gifts. Long observation does this, too. The layperson’s long observation, the long observation of Indigenous tribes carried forward, reaches the same place as science, but often well before.
I was fine-tuned to the scent of her. I could smell the yeast, the drying breath, the dried sweat and warmth of her skin. I should have trusted my instinct and stayed awake with her, to witness her final breath the way her mother witnessed her first one, to hold her hand as I’d been doing all week.
Some flowers grow so quickly. You think you can sit and watch them grow. Suddenly the basil needs pinching back. The true leaves have formed above the cabbage’s cotyledon. Beans race toward the sky within days. Sprouts pop up from seeds, giant sunflowers tilt their faces toward the sun just like mine, Mom would say.
I rotated my sore hips on the extended La-Z-y Boy that I had drawn up close beside her bed and fell asleep again.
The garden is always scented, but it is absorbed differently into the open sky. In the greenhouse it is distilled. In the greenhouse it feels as though I inherit green. It’s always eight degrees warmer than the temperature outside. Scent is a relationship with water molecules; the gift that is the respiration of leaves. When plants began to breathe in carbon dioxide, humans began to breathe it out. We are connected directly by breath if nothing else. I’d like to say we are a gift to the plants but the exchange is reciprocity only up to the point when we make them work over hard by pumping so much CO2 into the atmosphere. This closed greenhouse, the earth.

In the room where my mother was dying, we were in a world apart, a space between the world outside and the room we inhabited, between the world toward which she was moving and the one where I would live without her.
I’ve always heard that talking to our plants is good for them, and music, too. My mother always said so. Perhaps it’s an old wives tale, but the voice is vibration, an invisible language like the volatile chemicals of plants. Certain people can make my hands clammy, my underarms sweat. It is said we can smell another’s fear. I could sense my ex-husband’s mood at the turn of a hair. I had become finely tuned to the slightest shift in tone, to the scent of him. I wanted to hear my mother’s voice again, to feel her sound my name.
On Thursday only the left eye opened. She was finishing her days as I started mine. One eye closed. But she was sure of me. A slight squeeze of my finger, the moving eye. A small sound. She was perhaps less sure of where she was going than from where she had come.
And then it only fluttered. I watched carefully to see the eye under the lid, a fish swimming below the surface.
Around midnight I put a chant on repeat, reminded of the Ravi Shankar records she and Dad played when I was a child.
I slept. Perhaps I dreamed.
The roses on the window and the opening orchid absorbed her last breath and returned it to me.

sophie anne edwards

(she/her/settler) lives, writes, and gardens on Mnidoo Mnising (Manitoulin Island). A Mouth of Vowels, an experimental novel, is out now with 1366/Guernica Editions. Her debut collection of visual and text-based poetry, Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024), was a CBC “must read.” She’s just started a new letterpress company called Field Folios, working with a 1954 Heidelberg “windmill” press.
            

From Corporate P.R. to Professional Canlit Fangirl

A Conversation with Hollay Ghadery

HOLLAY GHADERY

is an award-winning, multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir on mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/ Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024 and was longlisted for the Toronto Book Award. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is a host on The New Books Network, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also the Founder of River Street—a boutique book publicity firm—and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. Learn more about River Street at www.riverstreetwriting.com. 

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Let’s start from the beginning and imagine that some of our readers are getting to know you here for the very first time. We’ll touch on all areas of your work, but let’s begin with the publicity side of things. You have over twenty years of experience as a PR, content, and communications specialist and in 2010 you founded River Street Writing. Walk us through what brought you to where you are today; how did you make the switch from corporate PR to book marketing?

HOLLAY GHADERY: I never really thought about working in publishing, mostly because I always assumed that was something somebody else would be better suited to doing than me. I thought people had this specific knowledge set that I didn’t have. It was a combination of not understanding the industry, underestimating my own abilities, not knowing the way the industry was going to change, and not understanding how deeply unhappy corporate PR was going to make me. And I think with anything in life, if you really, truly are passionate about what it is, you can make yourself good at it.
I wasn’t terribly passionate about corporate PR. I did it for years and it definitely paid better. And it could be a lot of work and a lot of bureaucracy. But sometimes there wasn’t a lot of work and there were quiet times. With book publicity, on the other hand, there’s always something happening. There’s always something you can do. The transition from corporate to book publicity happened a few years ago now, when one of my last big contracts dried up and I didn’t really want to renew it. I didn’t want to do anything like that anymore. I mentioned my feelings to a good friend of mine, who is the wonderful historical fiction writer, among other things, Lucy E. M. Black. She also runs Heart of the Story Reading Series in Port Perry. I said that I think I just want to work somewhere that means something to me, like go into communications for David Suzuki or the World Wildlife Fund—something that lets me sleep at night knowing I’m not propping up big corporations who invest in fossil fuels or whatever. I just wanted to do something that wasn’t so soul-destroying.
Lucy had a book coming out and she said, “I think you’d be great for book PR.” And I said, well, I don’t know. Again, it was that detachment from the industry, not feeling like I would know what I was doing. But then I thought about it more. I’ve been reviewing books for years. I had good friends who were in the industry and often shared insights. I knew something of what was going on. I’d also been publishing long enough to have at least a feel for it. I’d been an editor for various literary magazines. I was the reviews editor for the Minola Review. I knew more than the average writer about the industry. My reluctance was founded in a lack of confidence in myself.
But Lucy had believed in me. She offered to hire me. She talked me up to other authors. Basically, Lucy E. M. Black is the reason I moved into book publicity. It only takes one person to believe in you. And that was essentially where it started. My first client was Lucy E.M. Black, and her phenomenal work of historical fiction, The Brickworks.

TVL: Oh, that’s so amazing. And it’s true. Sometimes it really does take one person to believe in you and give you that confidence boost to do what you couldn’t imagine doing before. So, does that mean River Street existed before you transitioned into book publicity specifically?

HG: Yes. It existed for a very long time, probably before 2010, as content creation and communications. We did do things with authors; we edited books, we did some mentorships. It was still very much book-adjacent, so it wasn’t a difficult transition for us to make. We still have a few content-creation clients that we’ve been working with for decades. They’ve been wonderful! They just have nothing to do with books.
So, even before we transitioned to book publicity, we were always talking about books and language. In fact, a lot of our social media content was author interviews and talking about etymology. We often couldn’t talk about the work we were doing with our clients because we signed NDAs. Still, because we were already sharing our love of language and literature all the time, we were halfway there before we made the switch.

TVL: You are the founder and senior publicist at River Street, and work with an incredible team of publicists and copywriters. How did you build your team, and what is your creative and collaborative process like?

HG: I consider everyone on my team my colleagues. For the most part, the people with whom I work are people who have come and asked about working with us. Or people who have come to us highly recommended. We have recently started accepting interns, as well, so there may be a possibility for those positions to turn into more permanent work, but I think it’s important to note that none of us are full-time. I’m close, but I don’t work a standard forty-hour week. Everybody is doing other stuff. I have my own writing projects, and I’m a mentor so that also takes up time, and it’s important for me to make time for it. Other team members work for arts organizations, and other arts-related jobs. It seems one thing we all have in common is that we enjoy variety. What’s more, I find working in these other roles helps me build connections that can inform my work in publicity.
In every publicity campaign we run, there is one lead publicist. Another publicist may come on to support and lend their expertise and we will have a meeting and exchange frequent communications to make sure we are collaborating effectively. I trust the people I work with. I don’t micromanage them. I already have four children. If I’m having to micromanage someone and get too involved with their campaign—other than helping as requested and checking in regularly—that would be a sign of a problem. We share assets, resources, and pitch spreadsheets, and at any given time, we can see what is happening in a campaign. So, while we are aware of what other people are doing, and while we can check in with them directly if need be, everyone who works with us is self-sufficient.
There’s also the structure of how River Street works. We vet every single client we represent, as well as their work, and we are careful to manage each season’s frontlist. When you have too many clients, you cannibalize the opportunities you have for each client. If we have too many poets, then we’re more likely to get people saying no to our pitches about poets because we’re pitching them too much. We try to scale our list back, and we’re very selective. The people I work with are essentially people who are fine with this structure and are fine knowing they will need to be doing something else to round out full-time hours, if that’s what they are looking for. We’re all freelancers. Every publicist at River Street has signed a contract and confidentiality agreements—all the usual business stuff. And there aren’t that many of us. The max number of publicists I have ever had working with us is four. As for the character traits I look for: enthusiasm, respect, and self-sufficiency balanced with the ability to realize when you need to ask a question or have something clarified. I want somebody to come to me and bring value. I cannot hold people’s hands through every little detail. That’s not to say that I can’t mentor someone and help them learn. That’s part of the process, and I enjoy helping people learn—that’s why I also do mentorships and that’s why we have interns. This said, I do need the people I work with to have a base level of awareness of their capabilities and of their weaknesses. And not to be shy. When you’re a publicist, your job is to be extremely schmoozy. I guess “schmoozy” has a used-car-salesman vibe to it. I see myself more like a delicate marshmallow filling that keeps people together. I’m not there to oil my way around. I just want to make people comfortable and share the books I love. And that is what I expect: love the book, be aware of the industry, and believe in the authors and their work. Working in the arts doesn’t pay particularly well for most people. It’s largely thankless, and the demands and expectations are high from everybody. It’s rewarding, but it will only be rewarding if you really love it. You’re not always going to get your flowers. You are not centre stage. The books are. The authors are. You have to love the books and believe in them more than you want accolades for yourself.

TVL: This may be a good moment to ask if you’d like to explain River Street’s business model and how you operate.

HG: Sometimes we work with individual authors, and they can approach us about representing their book. We also work with publishers. Now, the caveat is they must be traditionally published and the publisher and/or author must be Canadian. We don’t represent authors who are self-published, published with hybrid presses, or vanity presses. But if there is a newer press that perhaps hasn’t been around long enough to become a member of (for example) the Literary Press Group, we will still consider representing a book. For example, Jerrod Edson came to us a couple of years ago with his incredible book The Boulevard, which was published by Galleon Books. I’d never heard of Jerrod and never heard of the press. I was wary. I’m ashamed to admit how skeptical I was of the concept of the book, which was Hemingway and Satan on a train ride through Hell to visit van Gogh because van Gogh had painted Hell in the image of Heaven. But now God was coming to check on things, so they have to destroy the boulevard of Hell and go break the news to van Gogh, who is in a delicate state. I loved it. A little lesson: never write off a book based on it sounding like a wild premise. Amazing writers can pull off the wildest premises.
We also tend to only work with books in advance of their publication. There have been exceptions, but they’re based on referrals from people we trust. Expectation management is such a huge part of our work. Writers obviously want the best for their books, but some writers are attached to a relic of what the media industry used to look like and not what it looks like now. All this to say, the simplest way to explain our business model is we work with traditionally published Canadian authors or presses who publish traditional books, and we vet every single book we represent.
Another key part of our business model is our organic content and our community-based approach. Organic content is content that River Street creates and distributes ourselves across social media, blogs, and newsletters. This allows us to guarantee at least some of the opportunities we can offer our clients because we create them. We are also invariably community based. We believe in the ecosystem and trying to make it healthier for everybody. We believe in connecting with readers and helping authors find the readers for their book, which will not be every reader. We believe in championing literary criticism. We have a Reviewer-in-Residence. This position involves an honorarium and the reviewer can review whichever books they want: it doesn’t have to be books we represent. We have a wonderful community built, and we depend on a lot of grassroots efforts because the big traditional media efforts are fewer and further between. We don’t rest on our laurels and we don’t put all our eggs in one basket. We get very inventive with the way that we work, and we’re huge believers in radical reciprocity. We celebrate the people who celebrate our books. We have a feature that’s forthcoming with Shawn Syms, the reviews editor for Plenitude Magazine. He is just a wonderful person to work with and we enjoy the magazine. Many of our authors have been published in Plenitude, so we like to spotlight the people on social media and blogs who spotlight us. Same with Brockton Writers Series. We did a blog with them and a social media shout-out, talking about things people might not know about the reading series and all the effort that goes into curating these events. A lot of authors want to be invited to these places, but I don’t think a lot of us understand and appreciate how draining they are for the people who are organizing them, how much they want to do more, but sometimes they don’t get grants or have volunteers. I think it’s important that as authors we show up as audience members and supporters of these initiatives more than we expect to be featured with them.
So yes, we are book publicists at River Street, but we also want to nurture a more conscious industry awareness among readers and writers, whether it directly benefits us or not. We want people to know what this landscape really looks like. We want to show them how they can help when and as they are able.

TVL: You really do so much for your authors. Like you said, with publicity you’re always thinking outside the box and you’re very inventive with what you do. What is one of your favourite or most memorable publicity initiatives that you’ve undertaken?

HG: One thing that we were doing for a bit were things like Instagram Lives, which were lots of fun. Once the pandemic hit, a lot of really wonderful Instagram Lives were established, like Sarah Marie doing her lives or Jess Taylor’s “Stop the Doomscroll” or Junction Reads’ “The First 30.” Eventually, we started to realize numbers were dropping, and we didn’t want to encroach on the IG Lives that were already established. I think some of our best initiatives were our in-person events where we got groups of our writers together and did pop-up launches and things like that.
There’s also been things like partnering with wonderful places like the On Creative Writing platform, which is run by Sheelagh Caygill, and she started this just of her own volition. It has turned into quite a monster, and we sponsored her writing contest. We sponsor the Toronto Review of Books, which popped up relatively recently, and the St. Lawrence Writers Festival. A lot of our effort—our inventive ways of doing things—are supporting the people and organizations who are already supporting writers. That has been one of the smartest things I’ve done. I used to do things like Instagram ads or Facebook ads, and we spent thousands of dollars a year on these things. I couldn’t tell you if there was any real measurable outcome. But there is a measurable outcome from keeping the existing infrastructure alive. We subscribe to Steven Beattie’s wonderful That Shakespearean Rag, The Quill & Quire, and Catherine Owen’s brilliant review site. If there’s any place we can put money now and then, we will. And it’s not always a lot. I’ve donated five dollars sometimes. But it can make a difference and it supports the infrastructure that’s already there.
When we have the budget, we are also trying to get involved in in-person events at festivals and so on. We were at Word on the Street Toronto in 2025, which was so much fun. We met so many readers. We weren’t there to attract clients. We were solely interested in talking to people who love books, and that is all we did that weekend. We gave out a lot of candy, as well. So much candy. We met amazing readers, and our social media and newsletter communities grew exponentially. We also talked to other publishers, went and visited Magazine Mews and chatted with all the great people who do magazines. I mean, it’s just getting out there in the community, and that’s where we thrive.

TVL: That’s amazing. Your approach seems a lot more authentic and community based, and that also reflects River Street as a whole. We often talk about the importance of the connections and relationships we build in the literary community, and that seems to be the heart of how you approach your publicity work, too.

HG: Yeah, and we try to operate with integrity. It’s not like I have a heavily populated grudge sheet or anything like that, but integrity is one of the reasons we vet books we represent. It doesn’t make us popular when we turn people down. And it’s not always because of the literary merit of the book. Sometimes it’s that they’re getting to us too late. Sometimes it’s not too late, but we’re already booked. Sometimes it’s that we already have too many titles in one genre and we can’t take on one more.
I’ve been called some terrible names by people who aren’t happy with our judgments, but I refuse to lose sleep over decisions I could’ve avoided if I had just listened to my gut. I’m not just going to work on a book because it’s going to make me popular. I’d rather work on Jerrod Edson’s wonderful book The Boulevard, which blew my mind, than a book by a super-mainstream author that doesn’t resonate with me.
When we vet books and when we have meetings, too, with potential clients, we are also vetting attitudes. We have to make sure we can work with these people because we are going to be talking to them a lot for three months. If the personalities don’t match, then we are going to pass on representing the book and spare everybody a lot of unpleasantness.

TVL: Are there any green flags that you look for in authors when going into these meetings, or red flags, like the consistent emails that you’ve seen?

HG: I would say green flags are just being receptive to what we’re saying and realizing they’re coming to us for our expertise. We love it when people show a willingness to listen and learn. We expect the same thing from ourselves: we know there’s always more to learn. We also love it when authors are ready to be an active part of their campaign to a realistic degree: they are enthusiastic but not trying to get overinvolved in what we’re doing behind the scenes, which really only slows us down.
If an author comes to us with a list of complaints about how CanLit has wronged them and they never got the recognition they deserve, then we are probably going to pass on that author. I know the industry is not perfect, but there are already enough obstacles in our way. We need to work with people who are thinking and moving forward. If you don’t like something, then try to change it. We’re working within the broken system and we’re trying to effect positive change, but authors are not powerless, either.
One of my favourite author meetings was Maria Giesbrecht. We hadn’t signed her as a client yet, but she had reached out about the possibility. I was knocked on my ass by her energy. It was contagious. Maria is doing her MFA at the University of Guelph and she’s publishing with WriteBloody Publishing—a U.S. press with a Canadian imprint. She came into our meeting having done her homework. She knew that we usually support Canadian publishers, but that we sometimes made exceptions. She made it clear why she should be an exception. At one point, I was reciting her my usual riot act about poets and poetry and what to expect as a poet (i.e., getting media for poetry is usually more challenging than any other form). Maria listened so respectfully. She said she absolutely understood and she knew this wouldn’t be easy. Then she said—and I’m paraphrasing here—“Listen, I’m delulu and I need you to be delusional, too.” The biggest smile broke my face. What can I say? I’m a romantic. Whimsy is at my core. You don’t need to ask me twice to be a little delusional. So sure, let’s understand the realities and then let’s be a little delulu about what we can do with this. Maria has an Instagram platform of over eighty thousand followers. She runs the Gather Poets group. She’s a beloved poet and poetry community advocate. If anyone’s going to drag me into delusions, it’s going to be Maria. She has the passion, sure, but she’s already proven what she’s capable of.
I’m willing to do almost anything for my clients. I’ve sent poetry books to Chris Hadfield before. I’ve reached out to Sarah Polley’s agent and got her to accept one of my client’s books because my client was positive Sarah would love it. I will do some bold things for my clients if the respect is there. I don’t sign people who show signs of disrespect in the beginning.

TVL: Like you mentioned, you’re incredibly selective in the authors and books you represent. Can you share how you know you want to represent a book and what that means for you?

HG: Some of the decision-making process has to do with those elements I mentioned earlier: we need variety and cannot have too many books of the same genre. We can have a great speculative fiction book come to us, for example, but if nine out of ten of our fiction titles are already speculative fiction, we may have to turn it down. We tend to prioritize small presses over multinational presses or imprints of multinational presses. If we already have a full lineup of small press books, we will decline representing big press books. This year we have three poetry titles from McClelland & Stewart, which is an imprint of Penguin Random House. We were pretty busy, but I was confident taking them because poetry is a different beast altogether. And admittedly I was fangirling a bit over the poets: Laurie D. Graham, Jake Skeets, and Kaie Kellough. And there’s that, too, just being a fan of my authors has absolutely helped me. There are authors I’ve never heard of who reach out, of course. This doesn’t mean they don’t have big readerships. It just means I’ve never heard of them. I can’t know everybody. But if their emails are respectful, clear, they’ve read the website, and they’re not trying to change my mind on our non-negotiable stipulations, I’ll take a look. Again, sometimes my mind can be changed, but it’s almost always by referral that my mind is changed, when somebody vouches for this person and after that, we read their work. We try to be pretty quick with turnaround time because we understand people are trying to nail their publicists down, and it’s not always easy.
The interpersonal stuff is super important. It doesn’t matter how much we like an author’s work if our personalities don’t vibe. This said, the way we feel about the writing itself is also vital. We represent such a wide variety of writers and writing styles that it’s difficult for me to pin down an exact defining characteristic that I look for, but I suppose, broadly speaking, I like to be surprised. I want to read something that, in some way, shape, or form, surprises me. Maybe it’s the language. Maybe the first page knocks my socks off. Maybe it’s an uncommon and powerful central conceit. Maybe it’s a delightful melting of genres. Part of the ability to be surprised is remaining open to it.

TVL: What are your relationships like with the authors you represent?

HG: My relationships with the authors I represent, I hope, are always validating and understanding. I also hope there’s an element where my authors feel they can learn something from me just as I am continually learning from them. I can get hundreds of emails a day, so I’m not going to pretend that on a day-to-day basis I am able to get into deeper industry conversations with my authors, but I try to make room for it as much as possible. I try to help them understand that we receive responses to a small fraction of the queries we send out, and this has nothing to do with the merit of their books. It also probably isn’t because our pitch sucked. Producers and editors are overwhelmed by queries and they are making the decisions they feel are best. Disappointments are inevitable. But we can’t let them define us or how we feel about our own work. I hope my clients always feel support from me and that when they do feel disappointed that they know that I believe in them, even if they’ve momentarily stopped believing in themselves. I wouldn’t have taken on their book if I didn’t think it was amazing.
When I do get emails expressing disappointment for whatever reason, I always try to reply as quickly as I can, because I know what it’s like to sit and stew in these low feelings. I can’t promise to be able to lift them out of their despondency, but I can at least let them know I understand.

TVL: I have to say, you are exceptionally quick with your emails. It’s really impressive. So much of book publicity happens behind the scenes and can be invisible to authors and readers. What is one thing about the publishing industry or publicity, specifically, that you wish everyone knew?

HG: I wish everybody knew how hard-working the editors and producers and volunteers at literary magazines and festivals are. I wish everybody knew how much your publisher believes in your book, and how whether you get accepted for an opportunity doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the literary merit of your book. I say necessarily because I’m placing caveats around myself here, but for the most part, whether your book makes a list or doesn’t, it’s not based on literary merit. It’s not that your book stinks. It’s not that nobody cares. There’s a lot going on in the world. A lot of decisions are made based on how somebody’s feeling that day, what the news cycle is like, what month it is. Some books are just right time, right place, right person. It’s not that they’re better or worse than your book. It’s out of your hands.
I worry about people getting bitter and thinking no one cares. I think we need to live our lives with a little more compassion for the people who are trying to make things work. Not everyone is trying—I’m not saying everybody’s heart is in the right place—but the people who do book media, industry media, reviews editing: they have a lot of expectations placed on them and a lot of pressure that many cannot comprehend. We’re not privy to the inner workings of the reasoning. I think it’s important not to make whether we’re included in something part of our happiness or personality. Try to be respectful of the people and appreciate what they do, and if you don’t like something, ask yourself what you can do to change it. But don’t let your resentment become your defining personality trait.

TVL: I love that. On that note, what would you say is the best way for readers to support the authors and the books that they love?

HG: Talk about them all the time. Talk about them over dinner. Talk about them to your co-workers. Read them on the subway. Take a picture of a book that you love. Request a book into your local library. Talk about it on social media if you’re comfortable doing that. There are thousands of ways to weave books into the tapestry of our culture and our lives. If you have a book club and the author of the book you’re reading is local, invite them to attend, or have them join via Zoom. Volunteer at a literary festival. Donate to a reading series. Buy a subscription to a literary magazine, even just one.
And not everything has to be about money. Look at Rod Carley starting the St. Lawrence Writers Festival; that’s a massive undertaking. I love that they’ve done it, but I’m not saying everyone should or even can do something on that scale. But as a reader or author, you can show up. Share a post on social media. Put a poster on a community bulletin board. Support existing infrastructure. The people already doing the work are often underpaid or unpaid.
There are great podcasts, too. Canada Reads Inspired is one of my favourites, hosted by Rebecca in Michigan and Tara in Ontario. They talk about books they love. Sheelagh Caygill’s On Creative Writing platform and podcast are also awesome, as is Lola Opatayo’s The Journey of the Art, Seamus Woolven’s A Novel Review, and Writers Read Their Early Shit with Jason Emde. Give podcasts like these five stars. Subscribe. Follow. Listen, even if it’s not about your book. Especially if it’s not about your book. Readers who are just readers already do this. But when authors get involved, there’s sometimes an ego that needs to be negotiated with, and that can complicate things. I speak for myself, too. Sometimes my ego muddles my genuine love for books, and I have to swat it away and come back to being a reader first and support the books I love. If I don’t like a book, I don’t talk about it. But if I like a book, everybody within a nuclear-blast radius will know.

TVL: In addition to being an incredible publicist, you’re also an award-winning author and you write across genres. What has your experience navigating the publishing world as a writer been like?

HG: I think it’s reinforced how wonderful the people are who support books. It’s incredible how much editors and publishers believe in their books. These people are chronically overworked and underappreciated, but they show up every day and are devoted to the books. I’ve never had a bad experience with a publisher—and I’ve published with a spread of them, being the irrepressibly disloyal author that I am. I move around. To date, I’ve never been published by the same press twice, though I will be next year; Guernica Editions published my first book and they’re publishing my fifth. But I’m an opportunist when it comes to my own writing. Whoever replies first and gives me a good offer—because I live with existential dread and our time is so brief—is who gets the book. If I’ve sent my book to a publisher, I like them. I’d be honoured to be published with them. So I send a manuscript to my top five all at once and work from there.
In my experience, publishers want the best for their authors no matter who they publish with, which speaks to how wonderful these people are. I’ve never once had a publisher say, oh, you should have given that to me. They’re just happy for you. From a genre perspective, I haven’t noticed much difference. I’ve been treated the same across every genre I’ve published in, which has been lovely.

TVL: That’s wonderful. I love hearing the overwhelmingly positive experiences. I find that’s what I hear most often in Canada, which is really heartening.

HG: Yeah. I’ve never had a poor experience with a publisher, ever. I mean, if I could invite my publishers over for holiday dinners, I would. They’re just wonderful people.

TVL: Your debut novel, The Unravelling of Ou, was released on February 15, 2026. Congratulations! Can you tell our readers a little bit about your new book and the inspiration behind it?

HG: Thank you. The book began with a comment made by Jeremy Luke Hill at Gordon Hill Press, who published Widow Fantasies, my third book. He mentioned that he’d be interested to see what I could do with a longer form. For context, Widow Fantasies is flash fiction. It’s like it’s in the basement of the short fiction world, and I think I was having some inner feelings of inadequacy. I realize that if short fiction is going to be a hard sell, flash fiction is going to be especially difficult. It’s not something that a lot of readers are going to pick up and automatically know what to do with. The general population of readers might be like, what is this? What am I encountering? People who have studied literature in school, who studied creative writing, they’ll know what’s going on. But I was a little bit worried about the general population of readers. And even though you can’t write for the general population of readers, I suddenly thought about them and thought, oh, damn. So, I was having some insecurity about my book’s reception. When Jeremy said he’d love to see what I could do with a longer form, which was a compliment because he obviously liked what I did with the short form, I felt challenged, I guess. And I was like, how dare you? How dare you imply that I couldn’t do a longer form—which he in no way, shape, or form implied at all—but I was just feeling, unnecessarily and ridiculously defensive. (You’re amazing, Jeremy! I’m sorry to drag you into my book’s origin story but here you are!)
So, I decided to write a novel, which was not even on my radar. I had been writing poetry, and I had no idea what I was going to write a novel about. Then I decided to approach it the way I do with poetry, where I think about what is currently obsessing me. At the time, I was obsessing over reading Adele Wiseman’s beautiful memoir of creativity and motherhood, Old Woman at Play. I found an old copy—it’s not in print anymore. And I was captivated by it. The book is about Adele’s mother’s prolific doll-making. Her mother would make dolls from things she found around the house, like onion netting and fishbowls. These dolls were very unusual and at times, I’d argue, unsettling, but very charming and rooted in a place of joy and goodness. Her mother also did not have a particularly easy life. And I started to think about the ways that her mother, other people, and I have used creativity and creation to make sense of our pain or shame or guilt or whatever it is that we’re feeling. And since I have four young children, I made a sock puppet with my youngest and the rest is history. The puppet started talking and it did not stop. So now this puppet, who I named Ecology Paul, is the narrator of this story. That’s where it started.

TVL: That’s amazing. I’m so excited for this book to come out! You’ve written memoir, poetry, and now fiction. How did the process of moving between these genres compare? Did you find there were any surprising similarities or differences?

HG: I’d say that writing poetry is the most natural for me. That’s my factory setting. Anything else is me deviating from the factory setting and shaping it around myself. Next would be creative non-fiction. Personal essays are straightforward and simple for me. It’s a contained universe, which I feel a poem is, too. Then I’d say fiction. The long fiction was a lot, but I finished it the quickest. I wrote The Unravelling of Ou in less than a year, whereas personal essays and poetry can take me years and years and years to write. I wrote flash fiction quite quickly, too, but that was also because I had a friend writing a novel, as well, and we were trading our work back and forth. I felt like when she sent me a chapter, I owed her something in return. With the novel, though, I felt that it was just a really consuming world to be in, and there was no coming up for air. I was constantly in this weird and whimsical space talking to a sock puppet, and while I was having fun at times—it was a very playful experience—I was also aware of the fact that I’d be walking around the zoo with my kid but half my brain would be with Ecology Paul. And my babies are only going to be babies for such a short period, and as a mother who lives with existential OCD, I’m excruciatingly aware of time passing. I’m also aware that most parents know their children as children for less time than they know them as adults. I was getting frustrated with what I perceived as my own selfish creative pursuit taking me away from my babes. So I just wanted to get into the novel and get out, which yes, I did very, very quickly. But it was easy to do because I’m such an obsessive person that I just made it happen. And like I said, I truly was consumed by the story: it occupied my mind constantly. The process was a valuable lesson. It reinforced something I already believed. You cannot wait for inspiration. You just write. You do the work. I wanted to get the book done so I could lie down and stare into the perfect galaxies of my children’s eyes, uninterrupted by the nattering of the story. This motivation drove me. Of course, during the year I wrote the book, I did come up for air and spend time with my children on a daily basis. I must have. But I look back on that time and think, what did I miss? I may have missed too much.

TVL: Wow. That’s fascinating. Long fiction occupies a completely different kind of space for you.

HG: Yeah. I’m not saying I’ll never write a novel again. I also said I was done having kids after two and now I have four, so never say never. But I’m trying to move on to things that give me more space and allow myself to be in this world and enjoy art and engage with art without all-consuming drive. It’s a strange thing to say because I need to finish another book that’s due out next year and it’s not done yet, but it’s personal essays. I can finish them in little bursts. And because of the nature of the essays, which are travel essays, I’m taking my kids to these places and we’re exploring them together. It’s something I get to do with them and they’re in the stories, so it’s a lot of fun.

TVL: Having a deep understanding of how the publishing world works while also being an author is a unique position to be in. How does your insight and experience on both sides of the industry influence your practice as a writer and as a publicist? Have you experienced any challenges balancing the two?

HG: As a writer, I’m going to write whatever I want. I’m not too worried about it being published or who will publish it. Thank goodness Canada has so many amazing independent presses who are into my kind of weird, so I don’t stress over it. But if I aspired to publish with multinationals, I might be in a bit of trouble. I might need to work very hard at making my writing into something it just isn't naturally.
As a publicist, I try to have an honest understanding of what’s going on. The Unravelling of Ou is my first novel. Before it was even out, it got more reviews and attention than anything else I’ve ever written, and that’s in part because of my amazing publicist, Selena Mercuri, and in part because it’s a novel. That is what novels do. Now, I’m not saying it’s not also because this is my fourth book. I’m not debuting with a novel. Debuting with a novel might be different, but the difference in reception between, let’s say, my poetry collection and this is wild. I honestly can’t believe it. It’s mind-blowing. If I was a different kind of person, I might decide to only write novels, but I love the other forms, too. From a publicity standpoint, novels are often the easiest. Some memoirs can be relatively easy, too, depending on the author. But in our catalogue, novels are the most requested by reviewers by a landslide. It’s not even close. River Street has a list of thousands of influencers we work with, and of that list, only about fifty people review poetry. I call them my unicorns. But from a publicity standpoint, I think about what I’m publishing next not with any desire to change what I’m working on, but because I’m aware. I also know from working with other multi-genre writers that when they publish a novel, suddenly their writing gets reviewed in places their work never has before. It’s wild. Just enjoy it while you can.

TVL: In addition to your very busy writing career and multifaceted work as a publicist, you’re also the Poet Laureate of the region you live in, a host on the New Books Network, the host of Howl: The Literary Arts Show on 89.5 CIUT-FM, a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, the Creative Nonfiction Collective, and the National Book Critics Circle, and a former board member of the League of Canadian Poets and co-chair of the league’s BIPOC Committee. To put it simply, how do you do it all?

HG: I mean, not easily. There’s been burnout and I’ve had to step back. I was reticent to leave the League, for instance, but my term was up and I had to be realistic. I just needed to breathe. Especially when it comes to the unpaid gigs—there is an honorarium for the Poet Laureate position, but everything else you just mentioned is unpaid. Contrary to popular belief, I do not get paid to be a host of the New Books Network. I’m not paid to be a host of Howl. When I write reviews, most of the time I’m not getting paid. I don’t write as many reviews as I used to because of how much I’m interviewing for NBN and Howl. It uses a critical part of my brain, so I don’t review as much as I used to. I might get back to it, but it won’t be until I hand in my next book. I think my drive boils down to me being a smidge neurotic and riotous: I believe in what I do with the intensity of one billion suns. I also believe that I don’t get to complain about the way things are if I’m not trying to change them.
Example: I became a host of the New Books Network after about a year of pitching my authors to them. Finally, I contacted the CEO and asked to become a host. I was already a host of Howl. And I got to be a host of Howl because I was asked by Valentino Assenza, the co-host and co-producer, after he’d heard me do some interviews before. Sometimes people think the individuals behind these podcasts—the people creating and sustaining this infrastructure—are more special or capable than anyone else. And I’m not saying that some of us don’t have an innate ability to be conversational or see the world in a certain way, but I think there are a great many other people who could do what I do. The difference between me and some other individuals is that I said I’ll do it and then I did. That’s it.
Remembering that I was a reader first helps me navigate moments of frustration and doubt. I remember the yellow beanbag chairs in my school library and sitting there for hours with a book. I remember that Scholastic Book Fair excitement. I remember the bookish joy I held as a child and try to channel it into what I do now. How lucky am I to get to talk to authors I admire about books I love?

TVL: The literary world often feels very Toronto-centric, and you live in rural Ontario, several hours away from this city. You’re also incredibly active in the literary scene. How do you prioritize staying involved, and what advice do you have for writers and readers trying to find and build their literary communities wherever they live?

HG: There’s usually something around you. I do drive to Toronto when I can. I often have to get my partner to drive me because I live with chronic pain. So, if I’ve taken something for the pain, I can’t be driving. I look for things around me. I mentioned Heart of the Story, which is a reading series run by Lucy E. M. Black. My local library and bookstore both offer book clubs. There are sometimes writers’ groups there, too. I think maybe if you’re going to be a snob about it—if you’re going there thinking, okay, well I’m here, where are Ondaatje and Atwood?—then you might be disappointed. But if you’re joining these groups just to be around people like you, you probably won’t be. There are great artists everywhere, wherever you are. Not all of them live in cities. So I’d say join a group, and if you can’t join a group, start one. You know, Field of Dreams style: if you build it, they will come. It might take a while. Be patient. Build a community if you can’t find one. Ask around, go out and talk to real people if you can. If you can’t, there are online communities you can join. But I think the world needs more connection. While writing is in some ways very solitary, being a writer doesn’t have to be.

TVL: I imagine you read a lot by nature of all the work that you do. What kind of reader are you? Do you read one book at a time, or do you have many on the go?

HG: I usually have prose and poetry on the go at the same time. It could be non-fiction and poetry, short fiction and poetry, long fiction and poetry, any variation. Poetry is always on the go with something else. But I usually read a couple poems a day. I do most of my reading—this is one of the reasons I’m so tired all the time—at night and I often stay up too late. So, I’ll start with poetry and then switch into whatever else. As soon as I start skimming poems, I know it’s time to close the book because poems are not meant to be skimmed. I can get a few poems in before my brain goes into skim mode. Although there have been books of poetry like Elizabeth Greene’s No Ordinary Days that I read cover to cover and did not skim. Something about the very conversational, easy manner of the poetry made me feel like I was sitting down talking to a friend.

TVL: What are you currently working on?

HG: I’m working on that collection of travel essays about lesser-known places in Ontario to visit. The essays are not particularly journalistic. Everything is filtered through me and what I think about a place, what’s going on in my mind, or whatever weird tangent I’m going to take people on. There’s one on the Bean Puzzle Tombstone in Wellesley, Ontario. There’s one on the now-sunken Silver Islet Mine just outside Thunder Bay. There’s one on the Whetung Ojibwa Centre on Curve Lake, the reservation there. I went to the Village at Black Creek for Christmas, where they light up the village by lamplight.
And I’m always working on poetry. I had a chapbook published by Anstruther Press last year, and I’m working on a larger collection stemming from that. It’s a collection of occasional verse that centres around the way time distortion works in neurodivergent people. How do you account for time when you have trouble connecting to it?

TVL: Lastly, what is the best piece of advice about writing, or other wise, that you’ve ever received?

HG: I would just go back to write about what obsesses you. Don’t try to write what anyone else is writing.
Don’t try to do something because you think it’s trendy or cool. The most interesting thing about you is you. What weird and wonderful things are occupying your thoughts? Let us know about them.

Three Short Interviews with Literary Translators

Jessica Moore

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Can you share what brought you to literary translation?

JESSICA MOORE: My path to literary translation is one of those things that is clearest in retrospect, looking back on the turns taken, the choices and synchronicities and overlaps. Or the encouragements and opportunities you only really become aware of later. I always thought I was going to become a writer (and maybe this is a good place to remind readers that the translator is, by copyright law, the author of the new text—think about it: using the map of the original text, every single word in a translated work has been chosen and arranged by … the translator!). From elementary school through high school, I had a firm root in French (a bilingual school program, an exchange to Lausanne, Switzerland, when I was sixteen, a French teacher I loved). I went into my undergrad planning to do a degree in English literature, but after my best friend convinced me to come on a year abroad with her to Aix-en-Provence, I had enough French credits that I ended up graduating with a combined degree in English and French (which is what allowed me to apply to master’s programs in translation studies). It was also during my year in France that I took my first class in translation and found it immensely pleasurable. It satisfied my desire to write, at the same time as fulfilling a certain leaning toward puzzling things out, or arranging them just so (as in logic puzzles, like a book I had as a child called Alice in Puzzleland, or the gratification of rearranging spice jars in my mother’s kitchen cupboard).

TVL: What is the biggest challenge you face when working on translations? And/or what is the most rewarding element of working on a translation?

JM: For me, the most rewarding element of working on a translation is the miracle moment when the story or poem comes through that wordless space—before or behind language—and lands in my own mother tongue, revealing more of the emotion of the work than I was able to access in French. That’s a strange thing, the way emotion can feel at a slight distance in a second language—this is why I fairly quickly gave up speaking to my kids in French, because for me, English is my language of the heart. It is the moments of writing coming together in a pleasing way, which has a little bit to do with a balance between 1) capturing (but it is actually un-captureable) or honouring a work, and 2) the translation stretching far enough to become its own. It has to do with space, spaciousness, and a movement that is like the settling of leaves.

TVL: You’re a writer in addition to being a literary translator. How does your writing practice influence your translations, and vice versa? Or do you find them to be quite separate from one another?

JM: I’m sure my writing practice must influence my translations, with emphasis on the word practice—because I keep up my practice of writing, I’m more toned or primed to apply that sensitivity to my translations, as well. And, just as reading something very closely (who will ever be a closer reader than a translator?) can influence my writing by bringing in new rhythms or attentions, my translations sometimes creep, rhythmically or obsessionally, into my writing. Maylis de Kerangal uses the word “sagittal” more than once and I covet that word a little. Also, I have in the past used lines from a translation (Turkana Boy, my first translation) as scaffolding or springboards into my own pieces (Everything, now, my first book, borrows several epigraphs from my translation). There is too the way that thinking in a second language stretches the edges of my approach to English, which I find infinitely valuable.

TVL: What advice would you give to budding translators who hope to make a career in literary translation in Canada?

JM: I would say, read so much and listen to programs in your source language. Find a text you really love, enough to enter into a long and deep relationship with it, and play with translating—really let yourself play. Walk the fine line between loyalty (a tricky word) and independence, where your translation does become its own thing without adding elements that are not there in the original. Take courses or a program in translation or translation studies. And the same advice I would give to writers—read, read, read, and keep up a steady writing practice.

TVL: What is one project you are currently excited about? Or what are you working on now?

JM: I’m currently finishing revisions on two exciting translation projects—one is the longest novel I’ve ever translated (726 pages!), called Sailors Can’t Swim, set in the seventeenth century on a fictional island somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean where only the inhabitants of the walled city are safe from the equinoctial tides. The story follows an orphan named Danaé, who possesses the rare gift of being able to swim.
And the second book is Maylis de Kerangal’s latest novel, tentatively titled In the Wake in English, which, in her habitual and totally compelling style, tells a kind of quiet police drama in which the city of Le Havre is a main character; a novel that has been compared stylistically to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves.
And finally, my current writing project is called Porous, and is a memoir of motherhood and art.

Jessica Moore

is an author and an award-winning literary translator with a special interest in the shadowy corridors between languages, and between people. Her first book, Everything, now (Brick Books, 2012) is a love letter to the dead. The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood, 2020) is a true story blending long poem, investigation, sailor slang, and ecological grief. Jessica lives in Tkaronto/Toronto, where she tends to her twins and her urban garden. Her work-in-progress, Porous, is a memoir of motherhood and art.

Three Short Interviews with Literary Translators

Katia Grubisic

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Can you share what brought you to literary translation?

KATIA GRUBISIC: I had always written—I’ve always thought of the world in worded images, and I’ve always had stories rolling around. In a manner of speaking, I had also always translated—helping my father draft translation from his cribs … He’s a writer, but English is only his eighth language or something.
I don’t think I had ever thought of the authorship of literary translation, however. I don’t think it had ever really occurred to me to read the books I was reading, in French, with an eye to rendering them in English. I had co-translated a play for a friend of mine. I had published my own work, I had translated poems here and there and had some work in journals, but I had never thought of the whole armature of literary translation: you have to think of the books from the point of view of the individual reader, as well as the wider readership, editorial concerns, publishers’ styles and approaches, and the market.
When Peter McCambridge founded the QC Fiction imprint in 2015 and contacted me to ask if I wanted to translate David Clerson’s Frères, it was more serendipitous than it was the result of any organized professional effort or intention on my part.
That translation, Brothers, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, which opened other doors. And, especially, it introduced me to Clerson’s writing, which I’ve continued to translate; it’s so wonderfully baroque, moving, and reality-altering. I really like his voice and his work; it fits me like a tailored coat.

TVL: It is an incredible skill to be able to translate a work from one language into another without losing the style and voice of the author of the original work. Is there a myth about the art of translation you wish you could dispel, or one thing about the practice of literary translation you wish more people knew?

KG: Especially as AI spreads the myth that linguistic equivalency conveys meaning equally (not to mention the extensive moral, ethical, and environmental issues around the use of AI), I find that the careful negotiation around the idea of creative freedom and voice that underpins—undermines, emboldens—literary translation becomes more relevant. Humanity is messy, complex, divergent, interpretive; and art, especially now, is first and foremost about humanity.
One word does not just mean another. Bad translations are often literal, just mirrors that distort just enough to make you doubt what you’re seeing. I think even many good translators can sometimes fall into the trap of wanting to cleave too closely to the words arranged like so in the original text.
What layers of meaning is that anxiety of faithfulness making us lose? What might we discover if we allowed ourselves to stray, to invent, to create? You have to be observant of the original, you have to listen to it so carefully it becomes a whisper in your own head, and ultimately you have to answer to it, and be reined in by it. But if you don’t try to push to the outer edges of what you might be able to make the words mean as a co-creator, there won’t be any depth to the translation. Art is inherently an iceberg; the meaning is seldom the part we see.

TVL: How would you describe your collaborative relationship with authors whose work you translate?

KG: So much of that depends on the book and on the author. With some, I’ve had the luxury of extensive discussion, and sometimes that’s necessary, and integral to their style, the book’s contexts, the writer’s approaches. In other cases, their voice feels like it just trips off my own tongue, and the back-and-forth tends to be about specific questions, intentions, or images later on in the process of writing and editing.
Translation is lovely because you get to fall into someone else’s project for a time, someone else’s world. I’ve been really lucky to work repeatedly with a few authors, like Clerson, like Marie-Claire Blais before her death, and with Marie-Célie Agnant on a novel and then on shorter pieces. So, then you get to evolve alongside them, you get to grow up together, to think with and against each other over books and years.
I’ve always valued long-term relationships between editors and writers, and I’ve been privileged to live a few, as a translator, with writers.

TVL: In addition to being a literary translator, you’re also a writer and editor. How do your writing practice and editorial work influence your translations, and vice versa? Or do you find them to be quite separate from one another?

KG: Writing and translating has made me appreciate the hell out of editing. When I was starting out, I did a bit of everything, including some proofreading and copyediting, but as I’ve moved along in my career, and as I’ve benefited from incredible editors, I realized that the fine mechanics are just as much of a craft as the invention of the machine is an art.
I still do a fair bit of substantive editing, and especially bilingual editing; I feel like I have a kind of duty to contribute in that regard. And of course it teaches me things: whenever you have to articulate why something isn’t working, in order to let someone else apply their own abilities and strategies to solve it, it forces you to understand how the whole apparatus works: how come this character makes me react this way as a reader, how does structural stability or deliberate instability drive a narrative, how does the use of a particular pronoun create distance … ?
What a gift, as a writer of any sort, to be able to be the sum not only of your own thoughts, your own mistakes but also of mutual or even collective exploration and learning.

TVL: What would you say is the role of literary translation in today’s literary landscape?

KG: Literary translation is the art of rapprochement, of bringing together; I guess all art does that, but translation reaches across a rift more literally than others, perhaps, creating understanding where none may be possible. If that’s not necessary in the world today, I don’t know what is.
I really believe that art can save us, if we let it.

TVL: What is one project you are currently excited about? Or what are you working on now?

KG: I’m just wrapping up proofs for my translation of Catherine Leroux’s Peuple de verre, Republic of Glass, which will be out with Simon & Schuster this fall. Leroux’s previous books have been translated by Lazer Lederhendler and Susan Ouriou—giants!—so it was an honour to take on this novel. And it’s so good, beautifully written and inventive, and disturbing: in a proximous and not-implausible dystopian future, the housing crisis has taken on epidemic proportions, and leads to government measures that, unfortunately, aren’t too hard to fathom.

Katia Grubisic

is a writer, editor, and translator. Her collection What if red ran out was shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry and won the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book. Her translations of David Clerson’s first novel, Brothers, and of A Cemetery for Bees, by Alina Dumitrescu, were shortlisted for Governor General’s Awards. Her translation of Clerson’s short story collection, To See Out the Night, won the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation, and her translation of Marie-Claire Blais’s Nights Too Short to Dance won the Governor General’s Award.

Three Short Interviews with Literary Translators

Madeleine Stratford

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Has your approach to literary translation changed over time? What is different about your approach today than when you started?

MADELEINE STRATFORD: Yes and no. There’s always been a lot of active reading and research involved, and I’ve always relied on intuition a lot. For me, literary translation has always been about feeling the text as much as understanding it. And I still have butterflies in my stomach at the beginning of every project (welcome jitters that mean I’m truly engaged). I guess with time, though, I’ve become more efficient. I don’t necessarily work more quickly (I like to take things slow), but I waste less time than I used to. I can now predict how long a given book will take me, and which tools I’ll need to tackle it, so I can plan ahead better.

TVL: Is there a considerable difference in the work of translation when you are translating your own writing versus someone else’s?

MS: Yes. When I translate others, I’m in their corner: I defend their stories, their voices, their books. I’m in it for them and them only. I must learn to write like them. I must deconstruct their texts to figure out how they work, and rewrite them in a language in which they weren’t meant to exist. I like to say that the original text is like a wooden house. I just have bricks at hand, but the house still needs to look like it’s made out of wood. A translation is never identical to the original, but it should give the illusion that it is.
When it comes to my own writing, there are no such rules. When I translate my own texts, I tend to workshop them significantly, so that the original and the “translation” might seem quite different in the end. I don’t mind if “the house” looks like a completely new one once I’m done rebuilding it: it’s mine!

TVL: How do you translate things that just … don’t translate? That is, idioms and other culturally specific references that might not work as well in the language the text is being translated into?

MS: I believe that everything can be translated: maybe not now or by me, but by someone (perhaps even me!) at some point, into a number of target languages (if not my own).
Being a translator is about experiencing otherness intimately, about finding yourself in books that you could’ve never written, about strongly identifying with authors who, at first glance, may have nothing in common with you.
When I hit a wall, it’s my job to try and find my way around or through it. Idioms are usually not that big a challenge once you’ve spotted them and know what they mean. It’s my job to spot them and find out what they mean in the context of the book. If I can’t find an equivalent idiom in the target language, I’ll translate its meaning or literary function (and ideally its effect). Sometimes I’ll compensate for stylistic loss elsewhere in the text. Yes, it takes time. And solutions don’t always come to me when I’m sitting in front of the computer. I’ve often had eureka moments when walking outside, working out, or doing house chores. For me, translating is an immersive experience: I carry my projects within me wherever I go until they’re done.

TVL: Writers often talk about their influences or their mentors and teachers, all the examples they might look to that guide the development of their work. Do you have influences that guide you as a translator? Are these different than your influences as a writer?

MS: I became a member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada (LTAC) when I was still a student. I was lucky enough to meet wonderful translators at various LTAC meetings and activities, some of whom I then spent time with at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre (an amazing residence program that sadly doesn’t exist anymore). I couldn’t possibly name all of them here, but those who probably most influenced me at the very beginning of my career were Nora Alleyn, Phyllis Aronoff, Sheila Fischman, Paul Gagné, Patricia Godbout, Lori Saint-Martin, Howard Scott, and Donald Winkler.
The people who impact me most as a writer are poets that I read and constantly go back to. I’ve always loved Anne Hébert, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, and Anne Sexton. I also spent years studying the work of Ingeborg Bachmann and Alejandra Pizarnik. All of my favourite poets were already dead by the time I discovered their work, so we never got to meet. Still, it feels like they’re with me all the time when I write poetry.

TVL: What is your view of the culture of literature in translation in Canada, and how would you like to see that culture develop in the future?

MS: Canada has a strong tradition in literary translation: it’s been generously funded and highly regarded here at least since the early 1970s. We’ve developed a recognized expertise in literary translation. And we’re rather well paid compared to our European and American counterparts. However, the Canadian book industry translates almost exclusively Canadian authors from one official language to the other. Sure, there have also been a few translations from and into Indigenous languages in recent years, but not nearly enough. Although the LTAC has been advocating for the translation of other source languages and non-Canadian authors for as long as I can remember, little progress has been made. I hope that changes in the near future.

TVL: What is your next project? And what can you tell us about it?

MS: My second poetry book is set to come out shortly. I’ve essentially been publishing translations for the past fifteen years, so this writing project was about finding my own voice. It was a daunting, yet cathartic process. Some of the poems were originally written in English, then adapted and workshopped in French. I wouldn’t want to be the one translating that book into English!

madeleine stratford

is a poet, a literary translator, and an associate professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais. Her translations have been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award in Canada (2016, 2019, 2021, 2023, 2024), as well as for the Kirkus Prize for Young Readers’ Literature (2017) in the United States. Her recent work includes Québécois classic Swallowed [L’Avalée des avalés] by Réjean Ducharme (Véhicule Press, 2020) and Canadian bestseller Cours vers le danger [Run Towards the Danger] by Sarah Polley (Boréal, 2024).

Marcia Walker

liz johnston, The fall-down effect

Toronto: book*hug press, 2026. $24.95

In a time when our world feels more and more fractured and out of control, it’s tempting to reach for simple narratives that comfort, either by distraction or conciliation. The Fall-Down Effect, the debut novel by Liz Johnston, provides no easy solutions to complex environmental questions and difficult family situations, yet it offers something far more enduring: a reminder that no life stands in isolation, whether human, animal, or plant.
Spanning three decades in a small rural town in B.C., The Fall-Down Effect tells the story of Fern, a nature-loving child; her two siblings, Sylvia and River; her father; and her mother, Lynn, a dedicated environmental activist. When Lynn’s roles as a mother and wife begin to conflict with her commitment to the land, she chooses to leave her family and dedicate her life to saving the earth. This creates the first of a series of fallouts which change this family’s ecosystem forever.
The second fallout is when Fern, at age nineteen, follows in her mother’s footsteps and becomes a radical environmentalist. In her effort to make a “big impact,” her protests escalate into a federal offence and she, too, must flee; with no warning or explanation to her parents or siblings, Fern disappears. Regardless, the family protect Fern by keeping her disappearance a secret, but they also silently blame themselves, and one another, for losing her. These recriminations grow, further fracturing the family. Almost twenty years pass and only under the duress of a forest fire do the family reunite to face the hurt and guilt of their shared past.
One of Johnston’s admirable skills as a storyteller is her understanding of how families metabolize regret, blame, and secrets, and how these can compound over years. None of the characters are either wholly blameworthy or entirely blameless. Lynn, the most problematic character, may be vilified by her children at times, but for Johnston such condemnation is too easy. Instead, she lets the reader feel and experience why Lynn believes she must “fight like hell” to protect nature at the expense of her family. As readers, we may shake our heads in judgment, but we are also brought in so close to her that we feel her belief that her “activism [is] enough to make her good.” This moral examination of protest and loyalty, as oppositions, runs throughout the novel.
The Fall-Down Effect asks many questions, and one of its recurring interrogations is what good activism looks like. The novel itself refuses to become a manifesto but instead offers various examples of characters who prioritize ecological preservation by actually labouring in different capacities—in forestry departments, for non-profits, in local grassroots communities, as artists, and as radical activists. And while each figure struggles with different challenges and setbacks, it’s those who continue diligently working in service to the land who emerge from the story most gracefully. What Johnston suggests is that activism must come with humility, otherwise it quickly distorts into egotism and self-importance.
While at one time the term “eco-fiction” may have sounded like the literary equivalent of eating oat bran, writers like Richard Powers and Kyo Maclear have helped to build the genre into an exciting literary experience that prioritizes storytelling and characters that remain with the reader long after finishing the book. Johnston continues this tradition with well-paced scenes and a fluid use of third-person narration. For example, when Lynn literally chains herself (and her three children) to a blockade between the loggers and the forest, the tension is palpable. While her prose remains controlled, Johnston writes deep into the interiority of the characters, slowing the pace to reveal each family member’s emotional reality and reaction to this same event. We feel Fern’s pride, Sylvia’s humiliation, River’s fear, and Lynn’s outrage. The characterization is riveting. At the same time, the overall image of a mother shackling her children in the name of protection is both powerful and deeply unsettling.
The book’s title stems from forestry economics. The “fall-down effect” describes what happens when old-growth forests are harvested faster than younger forests can mature, leading to a steep decline in supply. In Fern’s journal, she reflects on the emptiness of the word “renewable”: “What’s lost is lost. You can’t plant six hundred years. You can’t plant a habitat, an ecosystem.” Johnston uses this ecological concept as both metaphor and warning. Families, like forests, cannot simply regenerate once stripped bare.
And yet, families endure. As Marilynne Robinson writes in Housekeeping, “Families will not be broken. Curse and expel them, send their children wandering, drown them in floods and fires, and old women will make songs of all these sorrows and sit on the porch and sing them on mild evenings.” Despite the distance and hurt within this family, they cannot disconnect. As Sylvia, the responsible and complacent oldest sister, realizes about herself, “she is not a free-floating atom. Her family was a molecule, and she was bound to every member.” Building on Robinson’s adage, this story reminds us that individualism is a seductive and dangerous myth that benefits capitalism more than it reflects our actual experience on this planet.
The Fall-Down Effect is not a conciliatory novel, but it is a compassionate one. It argues that we are bound—to family, to landscape, to history—whether we acknowledge those bonds or not. In recognizing that interdependence, Johnston offers a quiet, hard-won hope: that facing what we have broken is the first step toward living more honestly within the tangled ecosystems of both forest and family.

MARCIA WALKER

’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Prairie Fire, Bellevue Literary Review, yolk, The New Quarterly, The New York Times, CBC Radio, and elsewhere. She has been short-listed for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, PRISM’s fiction and non-fiction prize, and the Writers’ Union of Canada short prose competition. Her debut short story collection, Things to Think About When Looking at the Sky, is forthcoming with Freehand Books in Spring 2027.

Paige LeBlanc

whitney french, syncopation: a novel in verse

hamilton: buckrider books, 2026. $24.00

Whitney French’s Syncopation explores what it means to rely on the senses when memory becomes a luxury and a commodity. Throughout this novel in verse, French seamlessly weaves together vivid dystopian world-building, the multiplicity of Black identity, lesbian love and queerness, memory, music, and more. Syncopation is a form-defying narrative that refuses to comply with any traditional notion of linear structure. In the aftermath of what French calls the Memory War, people use chips to replace their memories and sell them, leading to whole identities, names, and stories being forgotten or made obsolete. Since the Memory War, the oppressed classes now rely on the physical senses to build community and tradition—a phenomenon familiar to many who are historical and ongoing victims of colonization. As such, French disrupts any notion of a clear, dominant narrative by relying on rhythm and sound to build momentum and tension.
Fittingly, Syncopation is told in verse. The novel uses a collection of prose poems, “déjà vu suites,” spoken by a collective of nameless characters who both guide and interrupt the love story of O and Z. O and Z’s love story oscillates between their individual perspectives and the perspective of their relationship as a whole. O is descended from “space pirates” and is part of the class of “Neo-Griots,” who store “memory through storytelling, primarily by way of auditory transference” and who “typically have hyper-auditory intelligence & sensitivity.” Z is part of “the Ones who use Earth Technology.” O and Z decide to become travel companions after a chance encounter in a bodega—in a poem aptly named “meet cute”—as they take shelter from the worsening ecological conditions and acid rain caused by industrial mining on the moon. French’s almost scientific description of the act of falling in love—in poems like “menispermum canadense” and “dark biosphere I”—has an ephemeral effect that reverberates through the lines. In the poem, “escape velocity,” for example, she writes of the fundamental forces of nature that cause O and Z’s attraction: “see inertia / see something moving / so fast it escapes the gravity / of its initial starting point.” O and Z’s love escapes its initial starting point, forcing them to reckon with the precarious state of the world and their past personal traumas that directly affect their ability to love, and to accept the love they give each other.
Syncopation is a reflection and refraction; French uses the moon as a finite symbol of intimacy, destruction, and the values that illuminate every action in a dystopian landscape. She creates a world where the profitable alternative to extracting resources from Earth is mining the moon for “moon dust,” since it is considered a source of energy that is “cleaner than fossil fuels.” It is fitting then that the introduction to the world of Syncopation is the poem “moonsong”—an ode to narrative, love, and generational trauma from colonization. “moonsong” foreshadows and provides a thesis for the love story of O and Z: “this land a new lover / this moon an old pattern.” In the latter half of the novel, French dedicates an entire poem to a broader explanation for the mining: “mining the moon (a découpé poem)” is a collage of state propaganda fragments revealing why the working classes and the youth are being sent to mine in space while also providing the backstory of the moon-mining project in the first place. One of the most compelling lines of the poem is its closing, which is only comprised of one word: “cheap”—the ultimate explanation for this exploitation.
Juxtaposing the old and new, French consistently plays with memory as non-linear and triggered only by the senses. Through Z, O learns to see the environment in a different light because of Z’s intimacy and affection for the land, which inevitably rubs off. However, the moon—space, rather—is what is familiar to O; her mother was a pilot, and she plans to follow in her footsteps. O’s mother is introduced in the devastating poem “marauder / mother / Maura,” which provides multiple, contradicting definitions for each word, and sheds light on Maura’s difficult upbringing and the sacrifices she had to make in different phases of her life that led her to being a “space pirate.”
The ending of “moonsong” highlights how every aspect of the narrative is tied to the moon—the tide, “space pirating,” O and Z, and the collective of nameless characters:

on the surface
sea is symbol
never simple, in movement, in relation
in story & moon, from this
view is fated for an elsewhere.

as sun cuts the sky red with day
ocean is longbellied
unaware of Luna’s breaking point.

The last poem, “last déjà vu: new moon,” calls back to “moonsong” with the collective of nameless characters describing how “the ocean is not prepared to catch her lover Luna, the horror of watching a celestial body crumble to ash.” French chooses to describe the moon as a “lover,” symbolizing the ending of O and Z’s relationship. The poem emphasizes how taking away and distorting memory prevents this society from reflecting honestly or wholly, which ultimately becomes a catalyst for anti-colonial resistance.
Musically, syncopation refers to the accenting of a weak or “offbeat” in a song, commonly used in jazz: a music genre originating in Black American culture. Syncopation makes the reader confront these “offbeat” spaces between the dominant notes that structure society: corrupt and exploitative leaders, the erasure of personal and communal histories, and ecological cataclysm. Simultaneously, French highlights the importance of love and connection as a means of survival in such a dystopian, apocalyptic society. This Black, queer, dystopian sci-fi novel in verse is a work of multiplicities, emphasizing the “offbeat,” underrepresented “nameless” characters. In doing so, Syncopation emphasizes the importance of intimacy and connection within revolutionary political movements through the timely, complex love story of O and Z: a love that forces the reader to navigate the tension between our personal and public desires for safety, intimacy, and justice.

PAIGE LEBLANC

is a fourth-year student in Sheridan College’s Creative Writing & Publishing program. They are the current editorial intern at The Ampersand Review and are also poetry editor at the student magazine, B222. Alongside editing, they are an avid reader and writer in various genres and forms.

Kevin MacDonald

Shane neilson, What to feel, how to feel: lyric essays on neurodivergence & neurofatherhood

windsor: palimpsest press, 2025. $21.95

“Shame is the foundation on which all oppression operates,” writes Shane Neilson, an autistic poet, physician, and author of What to Feel, How to Feel—a worthy finalist for the 2025 Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-fiction. Neilson’s collection scrutinizes the intergenerational impact of shame and social stigma on people living with disabilities. But it also functions as a confessional family history and a blistering social critique condemning overt and covert violence against the disabled in an ableist society. Ranging from unbridled fury to eye-watering vulnerability, Neilson’s evocative voice exposes the hidden struggles individuals with disabilities confront every day. He shines a light on society’s mistreatment of those who are different and exhorts us to construct a more compassionate and accepting world for non-normative people.
The essay “On Stigma,” (first published in Issue 6 of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing,) begins with Neilson scattering his father’s ashes into the Wolastoq River in New Brunswick. Neilson recounts vivid episodes of experiencing and enduring physical and emotional abuse perpetrated by his father, remembering “the altered gait of his inebriated approach . . . [conjuring] a feeling that doubles as an imperative, a saving fear that is also an action: Run.” Years later, after his father’s death, Neilson wonders, “can righteous pain be released by turning injury into an opportunity to understand?” In this hope he unearths an untold story about his father, learning that he was once taken to a psychiatrist to have his own “abnormal behaviour” examined in an institution for the “mentally defective.” His father, he comes to understand, was a victim of bullying, as Neilson hears for the first time of the instance when several men shoved his father into a barrel and rolled him down hills just to entertain themselves. “On Stigma” allows Neilson to navigate anger and grief while finding ways to empathize with his father, leading him to question the extent to which shame catalyzed his own abuse and was “as destructive for my father as it was to me.”
Section 2 tracks Neilson’s sense of difference and otherness, from his childhood all the way through to his ongoing medical career. The section begins with “Diagnosis Day,” an essay probing the trauma he suffered while growing up “different,” and the catharsis of receiving an autism diagnosis as an adult. In “Spoon Under the Table,” he rails against the dichotomy of so-called visible and invisible disabilities, arguing that his own “difference” has always been visible and constant, following him through medical school and into his professional practice. In “Two-Hit Hypothesis,” he examines how the medical profession’s culture of rampant perfectionism and the unrelenting demands it places on its practitioners result in discrimination against disabled medical professionals. Specifically, we see how such discrimination contributed to his own sense of alienation within the profession, reinforcing the idea that there was something fundamentally “bad” about him. In “Blurring the Borderline,” Neilson confronts this “badness,” bravely documenting his recovery from a suicide attempt. He learns, eventually, to tell himself he isn’t bad; “the tragedy is that you are good, but you cannot see the fact, you cannot let yourself see it.” Neilson continues to explore the wounded healer archetype in “Chiron the Wounded Healer,” tracing the figure’s roots in Greek mythology through the work of Dr. Károly Kerényi, the academic who inspired Carl Jung’s conception of the archetype. Tellingly, Neilson’s dedication to healing others inevitably helps heal his own wounds.
Section 3, “Neurofathering,” offers an intimate glimpse into Neilson’s experiences raising his intellectually disabled son, Kaz. In “Like Father, Like Son,” he chooses his words carefully, writing: “Only the parents of other intellectually disabled people can understand this burden. Yes, fuck you, burden.” He grieves for his son’s losses, confessing, “I still occasionally fantasize about normativity, the doomed dream he might turn into a normal boy and have the normal things taken for granted by us.” In “McDonaldsing into the Future Death,” he introduces the reader to Frink, a part-Nestea, part-Fruitopia concoction that Kaz considers “the meaning of life; Frink as the purest joy.” But as Kaz savours Frink, Neilson can’t help but wonder who will be around to love his son and take him to McDonald’s for Frink once he’s dead. These essays teem with love and fear, and our hearts cannot help but ache for Kaz and his father as we consider their inevitable trajectory.
The spectre of Neilson’s father, Doug, haunts him from beyond the grave throughout the essays in this collection, and the imperative which protected him as a child—“Run”—manifests in the text whenever Neilson’s memories become too painful. He alternates between reliving traumatic private memories and examining public though sometimes obscure intellectual history, using narrative distance and a command of writerly craft to create a safe space for reflection. Sometimes it’s an imaginary conversation with Erving Goffman in a diner, interrogating the great sociologist’s dramaturgical theory and how it relates to Neilson’s struggles passing as “normal.” Other times he’s poring over the diaries of an unknown American poet named David Ignatow to reflect upon his own fathering. Close readers will recognize that Neilson’s oscillating, recursive shifts in scope mimic the patterns of confrontation and avoidance that characterized his survival adaptations as a child. But it’s his dazzling erudition and tender, furious heart that will invariably compel his readers’ empathy and attention throughout these essays. Whether you’re seeking luminous language and experimental forms, a brilliant polemic, or a life-affirming meditation by a loving father and doctor, What to Feel, How to Feel is a singular, highly original disability treatise that establishes a new frontier for medical narratives in Canadian literature.

Kevin macdonald

is an Edmonton-based communications professional who holds an HBA in Creative Writing & Publishing from the Sheridan College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. His writing has been featured in Flash Fiction Magazine, Savant-Garde, and The Ampersand Review of Writing and Publishing. When he isn’t reading or writing, you can find him exploring new restaurants and spending time with friends and family.

Macie Yott

anna swanson, the garbage poems

kingston: brick books, 2025. $24.99

Like a crow’s nest, made up of shiny, recovered fragments, The Garbage Poems is an expansive collection of found material transformed into something luminous. Anna Swanson’s newest book is an inventive reimagining of capitalist vocabulary in which each poem is derived from the text on pieces of litter collected by the author. In a patchwork of queer joy, ecological grief, and reflection on chronic illness, Swanson weaves together the glittering remnants of beer bottles and chip-bag foil into moving poems that surprise and delight again and again.
The Garbage Poems’ inception begins during a writing retreat in Newfoundland, where Swanson collects the garbage left in and around the natural swimming holes on a near daily basis. As her attention turns not only to the quantity of litter she collects but the text and labels on each item, she begins to develop a process and structure for the collection, which she defines as the project’s “constraint, n.”:

I rearrange the words to create small proto-
poems about the swimming hole. I can re-use
words and combine them, but never shorten
or split. If a word is torn, or partly worn off,
I transcribe whatever fragment remains …
Every other word of a poem must be found
or made by combining.

The resulting collection is divided into six sections, each named after the swimming holes whose litter make up Swanson’s corresponding poems: Flatrock, Punch Bowl, Big Punch Bowl, Roblin Lake, Cape Broyle, and Beachy Cove. Interspersed between these sections are Swanson’s personal lexica, which give meaningful insights into her creative process. As she revisits her vocabulary, the poet subverts traditional etymological definitions, layering them with fragments of emotion or memory in order to reclaim their poetic power. It is within these upcycled definitions that Swanson also includes intimate vignettes recalling feelings of both hope and frustration as an individual living with chronic illness. The poet emphasizes that healing is a nonlinear journey, narrating years of gradual recovery followed by renewed perseverance in the wake of, in the speaker’s case, a serious concussion. Time and time again, Swanson returns to the swimming holes, highlighting their role as temporary but treasured sanctuaries. In the water’s reprieve, the body becomes more than its symptoms or labels, wholly conscious and present. For the poet, cold-water swimming is, at its centre, “[n]ot a remedy, not a biohack or productivity strategy, but a letting go of fixes and cures.”
Most impressive about this collection is Swanson’s ability to take the language of discarded inanimate objects and transform it into something deeply human and alive. Her poetics here capture countless brilliant, fleeting moments, leaving readers feeling as though they too have dived into those ice-cold waters and completely submerged their senses. The poem “Blessing for the Swim Selfie,” for example, is an indulgent medley of textures, flavours, and hues that also serves as an invitation to the reader:

Layer by layer, let us onion
open into the sun. Let us swing,

pantsless as tolling bells,
into the green-gold water.

The Garbage Poems includes playful cameos from its source material, with some corporate brand names written outright. In “Gesture Goods,” for example, Swanson identifies one of the many companies whose single-use products continue to accumulate in the wilderness: “Praise the tossing back, the open throat cooled / by a can of Palm Bay Strawberry Pineapple Vodka Spritz.” In other poems, like “Portals,” the original marketing text from the packaging has been stripped down much further, uncovering the lyrical beauty hidden within warning labels or advertisements:

Now I dive toward the perfect

doorway of my outline,
the rippling of a beaded curtain

about to part.

While there is a clear brightness within Swanson’s writing, The Garbage Poems is inseparable from a larger sense of ecological grief. There is an openness in the poet’s voice as she shares feelings of climate anxiety and encourages us to ask questions, to hold corporations accountable, and to imagine a landscape unencumbered by single-use waste. But in the same breath, Swanson also reminds us that her writing is not only ecological. At the heart of many poems in this collection is an all-encompassing celebration of queerness and sexuality. The Garbage Poems tells us about “bottle laws” and “gesture goods,” but it also explores the meanings of “cure narrative,” “autonomic conflict,” and “survival joy.” Garbage becomes “found text,” and litter is replaced with “love.” Trash becomes memorabilia, and language becomes poetry, as Swanson recounts sunlit undressings and night swims where, along with her readers: “[w]e are a queer candy / in the underwater light.” In a landscape marked by discarded fragments, the poet brings us soft moments of connection that assert to fellow queer readers: Our ways of loving endure.
A review of The Garbage Poems would not be complete without touching on its gorgeous watercolour illustrations by April Mary Lynn White, an award-winning Canadian artist from the East Coast. Seeing the richly coloured renditions of the real-life litter next to the finished poems—interactively designed for the web by Matthew Hollett and available at garbagepoems.com—truly highlights Swanson’s inventive recycling and reclamation of capitalistic language. Under the poet’s thoughtful direction, the mundane is transformed into the magical, and the commercial is transformed into the intimately human. In this way and others, The Garbage Poems is an innovative, heartfelt collection that reminds us of the creative potential hidden within our material world. With raw, playful diction, and warm authenticity, Swanson immerses readers into a pool of lyrical language where every current of grief is met by the indelible demand for joy.

macie yott

(they/she) is fourth-year student in Sheridan’s Creative Writing and Publishing program. A queer writer of Chinese and Canadian descent, they have worked as an editor at the student-led B222 Journal and are currently an events & communications intern at The Ampersand Review.

Selena Mercuri

Carrianne Leung, wonderland road

toronto: harpercollins canada, 2026. $24.99

Wonderland Road is a novel populated by ghosts. In this post-apocalyptic tale, the boundary between the living and the dead is porous, as characters are both haunting and haunted. The ghosts here are literal and metaphorical: the spirits of ancestors, memories that arrive uninvited, and people who risk becoming ghosts themselves.
The novel centres on three characters—Pauline, Jing, and Julian— whose lives intersect in the suburban neighbourhood of Wonder, located outside of what was known as Toronto before the disintegration of society through food shortages, wildfires, and institutional collapse. In the before-times, Wonder was “filled with racialized people who couldn’t afford to live downtown but commuted to it every day to clean offices, sell fast food, work in construction.” Now the community there is hollowed out because most of the healthy adults have gone to work at Bayson Farms, a corporation that quickly grows to become “an enormous force, consolidating agribusiness and housing and pretty much whatever the government had allowed to be privatized.” The Bayson Farms employees from town used to visit and write letters, but now the visits and letters have mysteriously ceased. Left behind are mostly children and the elderly, trying to maintain their humanity in this new world.
Pauline, living in what was formerly Toronto (and estranged from her sister Mei for twenty years), receives a letter asking her to return to Wonder to care for Mei’s twelve-year-old daughter Jing while Mei works at the Farms. Pauline leaves the city, where conditions have grown increasingly unstable, to take on a role she feels unprepared for in the neighbourhood where she grew up—a neighbourhood to which she hasn’t returned since fleeing her abusive mother.
Jing, living in the Children’s House (where all the parentless children stay), hasn’t heard from her mother in months. She skips school to sit on a bench on Wonderland Road: “the bench was known as the Bench, but sometimes people called it Jing’s bench because I was always there. It was just an ordinary bench beside the bus stop on Wonderland Road, but the bus didn’t come anymore.” She waits there, thinking that the bench is the perfect place to stay until her mother returns, even if her mother—if she’s coming back at all—would likely be returning on foot. She counts to one hundred over and over, a ritual of hope in the face of maternal absence. It is in the thrall of this yearning that Jing sees ancestral ghosts. When Pauline confesses that Jing’s grandmother used to hit her and Mei, for example, Jing observes that “the ghosts jumped around, agitated. They went crazy mad in the living room as Pauline said what she said. They spun, leaped, tore their flesh out piece by piece.”
Pauline herself moves through the world in a kind of emotional paralysis. Jing describes her aunt as someone who “stopped looking for attention, who didn’t care to be understood. She had words, but she didn’t use them. Some of the quiet ghosts were like that, too. They faced the walls or sat in the corners making themselves as small as possible.” Her observations cut through adult evasions with startling clarity throughout the narrative, suggesting that the emotional life of this family, like the ghosts Jing senses around her, is defined as much by what is hidden or suppressed as by what is openly expressed.
The novel reveals one of Pauline’s deepest fears: becoming like her mother. “When Jing got rude, Pauline felt the urge to do something mean. Pauline’s mind let her see herself hitting the child across the head, as her mother would, and this terrified her.” The moment captures one of the novel’s most persistent tensions: the fear that the past is never quite finished with us. Pauline understands how easily the patterns she grew up with could reappear in the present, and her horror at the prospect suggests an awareness that breaking those patterns requires constant vigilance. Wonderland Road repeatedly asks whether awareness alone is enough to interrupt these cycles, or whether the past continues to shape the present in ways the characters cannot ever fully escape.
The storytelling captures Pauline’s inner life through the fragmented logic of memory; her recollections arrive in flashes she cannot control: “She didn’t invite them, but the memories came anyway. They were slivers of remembered faces, sparks of forgotten feelings. There was the gentlest stroke of her cheek from Ma when she had the measles [. . .]. Mei laughing until she was doubled over at a joke Pauline made. Her lover whispering that he loved her for the first and only time.” The effect is to immerse the reader in Pauline’s interior life, where the past surfaces hauntingly and unpredictably, and where emotional meaning accumulates through brief, vivid flashes.
Julian’s storyline provides a different perspective on loss and duty. His family stays to run the community while others leave for the Farms, and his brief, first experience of love with a guy named Len—an encounter that leads him to question his sexuality—is cut short by the collapse of civilization. He is filled with regret for hesitating when he had the chance to pursue things further with Len. By the time he works up the courage to text “len ily fr,” it is too late. The novel treats his questioning sexuality with tenderness, acknowledging that even as the world falls apart, the human heart continues its work of discovering itself.
Julian’s regret also reflects one of the book’s recurring preoccupations: the fragile timing of human connection. Moments of vulnerability, self-recognition, and love arrive slowly, often after hesitation, but the world does not always wait. In reading Wonderland Road, it becomes clear that personal awakenings and emotional risks remain deeply human concerns even amid catastrophe, and that what is lost in a collapsing world goes beyond infrastructure and stability to also encompass the futures people might have built with one another.
In Wonderland Road, apocalypse creates ghosts of the living as surely as it invokes the ghosts of the dead. Pauline becomes ghostlike in her silence and smallness, Jing communes with her ancestors while waiting for a mother who may never return, and Julian dreams of a boy and a kiss from what feels like another lifetime. In a world of societal and ecological turmoil, the novel shows how everyone becomes a kind of ghost. Leung’s novel is about learning to recognize the living among all the ghosts and about finding ways to care for one another even when we feel invisible ourselves. The fragile networks of family and community that remain—guardians, neighbours, surrogate parents, and children learning to survive together—become the places where that recognition is possible. In the absence of stable institutions or futures, care within these small human circles becomes the novel’s most meaningful form of resistance against erasure.

selena mercuri

is a Toronto-based writer and MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Literary Review of Canada, Room Magazine, Prairie Fire, Herizons, and other journals. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing, as well as the 2025 Marsh Jeanneret Memorial Award. Selena is reviews editor at The New Quarterly and works across the literary landscape in various other capacities. Find out more at selenamercuri.com.