Heeding the Universe’s Calling

A Conversation with Catherine Hernandez

catherine hernandez

(she/her) is an award-winning author and screenwriter. She is a proud queer woman who is of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese, and Indian descent and married into the Navajo Nation. Her first novel, Scarborough, won the Jim WongChu Emerging Writers Award for the unpublished manuscript and was a finalist for several awards, including Canada Reads 2022. She wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Scarborough, which was nominated for eleven Canadian Screen Awards and won eight, including Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. Her second novel, Crosshairs, was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award and made the CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction, NOW magazine’s 10 Best Books, Indigo Best Book, and NBC’s 20 Best LGBTQ Books list of 2020. Her third novel, The Story of Us, was published this year by HarperCollins Canada and was an instant bestseller. She is currently working on a few television projects and her fourth novel.

Tali Voron: Catherine, thank you so much for taking part in this interview. I thought we could get started in a slightly unconventional way. Rather than me introducing you, can you describe yourself in three words and share why you chose them?

Catherine Hernandez: I would describe myself as a storyteller, a changemaker, and homesteader. I became a storyteller under the tutelage of my late mother, Cecille Estioko Hernandez, who was a pioneer of Filipino folk education here in Canada. As a child of the Filipinx diaspora, I grew up understanding that our stories were important. If we kept our stories alive through dance, song, and writing, then we would never be lost. Home would be wherever we were in the world. I consider myself a changemaker because after surviving theatre school, where I was basically taught that my stories as a brown woman didn’t matter, I worked for years to reclaim and decolonize my creative process. For decades I shared my decolonized creative process with countless institutions and organizations in various disciplines. Now I do regular international keynotes on subjects such as embodied allyship, resilience, and sincere community outreach. I am also a homesteader. My husband and I are caretaking 3.7 acres of land on the traditional territory of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte. We engage in permaculture practices by rewilding our land, foraging, and beekeeping. It is a challenging yet rewarding life in which I can treat our land as its own country where we as QTBIPOC folks are safe, where people of all communities are welcome, and we have equal access to resources.

TV: Thank you so much. That is a really great answer. I wonder if you could share a bit about how you started your writing career. And, do you remember the first story that you wrote?

CH: The first stories I wrote were in notebooks as a child. I loved imagining film scenes in my head and watching them come alive in my imagination. It was real for me, as though the scenes would play out before my very eyes as I wrote them.

After graduating theatre school, I quickly realized that the only way I was going to work regularly was to create the work myself. This led me to writing and developing my own plays. After my first play, Singkil, was produced by fu-GEN Asian Canadian Theatre and Factory Theatre and was nominated for several Dora awards, I was thrilled that Playwrights Canada Press was willing to publish it. It was thrilling to hold a book in my hands knowing that the play could cross borders and be read by a larger audience than the entire run of the play at Factory. That was the power of books. I wanted to try my hand at writing long-form fiction and already had a series of short stories about my hometown, Scarborough. Since I had a home daycare, I wrote a book in my off hours (before 7:30 a.m. and after 9:00 p.m.) and submitted it to the Jim Wong-Chu award because I just wanted feedback on the manuscript. To my surprise, I won the award, then got the publishing contract with Arsenal Pulp Press for the novel Scarborough.

TV: It’s inspiring to hear the ways in which you’ve used your practice to not only create space for yourself, but also for the stories of others. What is your writing process like?

CH: My writing process is a decolonized writing process. In other words, rather than believing that I’m disconnected from the world around me and from the spirit world, I believe that I am one with it. I believe that my ancestors are speaking to me all of the time. It’s almost like a form of mediumship, you know? Every morning I journal and I ask the question, “What do you want me to say today?” They tell me and I spend the entire day manifesting what they want me to say. My books, screenplays, plays—all of them—are truly co-written with my ancestors. I know that sounds different from a lot of people just because I know a lot of writers like to use outlines or character sketches, but for me, it really is just sitting and letting them speak to me. It’s a very powerful process because it means that it’s not about you. It’s about you being a conduit to the whispers of the universe. I feel really blessed to have been given this gift.

TV: I love that so much. That’s incredibly powerful. I wonder, has your writing process changed, or has it stayed the same throughout all of your various projects? I’m curious if there have been shifts as you’ve moved through different works.

CH: The process that I just told you really spans every discipline that I’ve been a part of from dance to writing screenplays. The only thing that changes is the way that the art form manifests. Is it your body that’s moving? Is it the way that people are speaking to each other in dialogue when you’re writing a screenplay? So yes, the only thing that really changes is the art form itself.

TV: That makes a lot of sense. In your interview with Malia Baker for CBC, you mentioned that Scarborough was the first novel you wrote and that you were a playwright first. I wonder if you could share how you decided, or perhaps knew, that Scarborough was meant to be a novel rather than a screenplay or a play first.

CH: I could sense that I was being called to tell the story of the resilience of Toronto’s East End. I certainly wasn’t the first person to tell stories about Scarborough, but it was an important story to show the precarity of living in certain underserved neighbourhoods and the fact that everyone deserves to have equal access to resources. I had never written a novel before, so I just wanted to try my hand at it and that was it.

TV: In 2021, Scarborough was adapted as a film, and you wrote the screenplay. I wonder if you could share what that process was like.

CH: Since I had written for theatre, I knew how to write dialogue and I already had a taste for movies that I loved. I intuitively understood what makes a good film and what doesn’t. However, I still had a lot to learn. I was approached by a few filmmakers who had asked if they could option the book and I had taken a look at their reel, and they were very talented people, but the work they created was polished and Scarborough is not a polished place. I wanted it to feel just as raw as the novel itself, so I knew it had to look like a documentary. I approached documentary filmmakers and good friends, Shasha Nakhai and Rich Williamson of Compy Films and asked them if they’d be willing to produce it. I said, “Do you think it’s possible that I could write the script, but you can make it look like a documentary film?” They had never written, produced, or directed a fiction feature film before, so they were venturing into unfamiliar territory as well. They said, “Well, you know, two weeks from now, there’s one funding application we can try for. Do you think you can maybe offer a snippet of what your vision is?” I looked up how to format a script on Google Images because I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even have the money for any script-editing software. I just used Word and my tab button, and wrote it over the course of two weeks.

TV: Wow.

CH: And that very poorly formatted script ended up winning the Canadian Screen Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. As an artist, I have always adopted the mindset of “Let’s just try it!” “Let’s fail brilliantly!” I try not to let my ego get in the way of thinking you have to make a film that’s going to win all the awards or notoriety or whatever. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m trying to tell a story. We ended up getting the funding and we just hit the ground running. With that said, it was a very arduous time for the producers, the cast and the crew. I put them through hell and back. That team worked very hard, and we were running on nothing but steam and a dream and very little money. We should never ever have to suffer like that again. This crew and these producers deserve the world. And I hope that they never work under such limited conditions ever again.

TV: It’s really incredible that so many of your experiences and projects are brought to life by you through the vision that you have. It’s certainly not easy. I wonder, did you always envision Scarborough as both a novel and a film?

CH: Since I work in multiple disciplines, I understand that art can exist in different dimensions. I was open to it one day being a film. I just didn’t know what the process was going to be, and I had no idea that I was going to be at the helm of it. You just have to take the bull by the horns and dream big. There’s no reason to fuss over whether things are not for you or consider what is not possible. You’re just wasting your time and energy as an artist believing those things. Instead, I ask myself “what’s possible here?” Thankfully, the film was possible.

TV: “What’s possible here?” That opens up so many possibilities and is such a great approach. Would you like to see any of your other novels adapted into film as well? And is it something that you’re working on?

CH: Sadly, I can’t share any of those details with you. It’s a ridiculous thing in the film and television industry that you can’t share what you’re working on. It’s really strange! However, I can just tell you that yes, I always have the intention for my books to be adapted into television or film and news will be shared when it’s ready.

TV: Fair enough. Well, we’ll keep our fingers crossed. Jumping forward to 2023, The Story of Us came out earlier this year. Congratulations! In our own words, can you tell us a little bit about the novel and the inspiration behind it?

CH: It’s about a cisgender Filipina by the name of Mary Grace who becomes an Overseas Filipino Worker. She goes to Hong Kong and then to Canada by working as a caregiver, and she comes to Canada under the live-in caregiver program, hoping to give her family a future here. She inadvertently becomes the personal support worker of an elderly trans woman by the name of Liz. They create this beautiful friendship and become each other’s chosen family, and it’s all told through the eyes of MG’s newborn baby, Dina. The novel is inspired by a few things such as the act of creating chosen family in both queer and diasporic communities, the mysterious wisdom of newborn babies and most importantly, my ancestors who felt that I needed to write a book that told my readers that love was possible.

TV: In your interview with Tom Power, you spoke about the incredible amount of research that you had to conduct for the novel, and I was really fascinated by that. I wonder if you can describe what that process was like, and how it informed and shaped the writing of your novel.

CH: It started way back in 2008 and 2009, when the Sulong Theatre Collective began research for a play called Future Folk. Over the course of the play, the audience was going to understand the emotional truth behind the notorious live-in caregiver program. This program requires participants to observe twenty-four months of service caring for children, those with disabilities or the elderly, and they must live in their employer’s homes. If you are able to complete the program, you are given just the chance to apply for permanent residency in Canada. And then, if you’re lucky, you can apply for citizenship and one day sponsor your family. It’s an arduous journey for participants who are vulnerable to financial, physical, and sexual abuse living in their employer’s households. Sometimes they don’t have a door. Sometimes they don’t have a proper room. Sometimes they aren’t given a lot to eat. They’re cheated out of their paycheque. They’re cheated out of their time. We interviewed dozens of people who were going through that program to ask them about their experiences. The show was a sold-out run and it was profound moment for me in my career, especially when we had the chance to perform for caregivers at that time.

When I started writing this book, I referred back to that research that we did for the play. But then I did another round of research where I spoke to people who were specifically caregivers for the elderly, and then also people who were specifically caregivers for elderly trans folks. It was eye-opening. It was humbling to understand the wear and tear on someone’s body doing caregiver work for the elderly. To give you some background, I used to be a home daycare provider, and that’s tough on your body. You have a maximum of five children, all under five, maximum two non-walkers. You build a lot of muscle carrying children, putting them on the toilet, feeding them, teaching them to go to sleep by themselves, etc. It’s a lot of carrying and rounding children up, putting on boots and all that stuff.

For dealing with the elderly, you’re holding an adult; you’re bringing them in and out of chairs. You’re changing their diapers. You’re dealing with a lot of violence too. That was humbling to hear.

TV: The Story of Us, as you mentioned, is told from the incredibly unique perspective of MG’s newborn baby. And in Scarborough, you write from the perspective of three children in the novel. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what lies behind your decision to write from the perspective of children.

CH: Children learn most of what they need to know to survive by the age of two. Who is safe to be with, who’s not safe, where do you get your food, just the physics of the world. When you’re writing from the perspective of a child, you can help the reader surmise all of the dynamics between people very quickly. The only problem is when people write children’s dialogue and it’s so bad. In order for you to write from a child’s point of view, you really have to listen to the way children speak. You can’t make that up. The way that they speak, the pattern, the honesty, the truth bombs that they give people all the time. You can’t make that up. I always imagine that I’m just listening to characters beyond my laptop and I’m just their court stenographer. And that’s especially true when it comes to children.

TV: I spent a lot of time working with children as well. And there’s so much wisdom that they have that. When you’re able to see that on the page, and it’s authentic, it’s a hard thing to do well when you’re able to honour that, and you do.

You write in a number of mediums and genres from realistic fiction to the dystopic fiction of Crosshairs to your work in television and screenwriting to your children’s books. How do you move between these mediums? And perhaps a very basic question: do have a favourite to work in?

CH: I don’t really have a favourite because if a story comes through me in in a particular form, that’s how it comes, and I don’t think I have any control over it. For example, Crosshairs came out the way that it came out. I’ve never written dystopian fiction before, but I had to try.

TV: Have you ever worked on a project where partway through it, you’ve switched the medium that you were working in, or you found that something else would serve it better?

CH: No, no. If the ancestors are speaking to me in this way, I allow it to happen. No point fighting it. They know best.

TV: My final question is one of my favourites to ask: what is the best piece of advice that you’ve received, for writing or otherwise, that you would like to share with our readers?

CH: I remember David Chariandy and I were having lunch, and he told me that when considering publishing contracts, to always centre the work and partner with people you believe are going to make you a better writer. In the publishing world, you want to be paired with an editor who’s going to challenge you, who’s going to make you believe that a better version is out there and you just need to uncover it. You want to work with an editor who’s going to encourage you and who’s going to believe that you can do better. And, since then, even when I’m curating a television writers’ room, for example, my thought is not who’s going to agree with me, but who’s going to challenge me. It’s very tempting to choose people who have an impressive CV or who might have the connections to get you further in your career. Instead, think about who you are vibing with.

That’s the reason why I love working with Jennifer Lambert over at HarperCollins Canada. She pushes me to places that I never thought possible, and yet she does so with a loving hand. I’m grateful. I’m also grateful for screenwriters like Adam Pettle, Andrew Burrows-Trotman, and Marsha Greene. These folks in the television and film industry have challenged me by asking, “What story are you telling and is there a better way to tell it?”

 Ampersands of the Industry

Three short interviews with Sanna Wani, AGA Wilmot, and Laurie D. Graham

Wani/ Wilmot/ Graham

Sanna Wani

is the author of My Grief, the Sun (House of Anansi, 2022), a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and the winner of the 2023 Trillium Book Award for Poetry. She is the poetry editor at Fernwood Publishing, columnist with Herizons and artist-in-residence with The Seventh Wave magazine. She loves daisies.

TALI VORON: My Grief, the Sun is incredibly moving. When I was reading it, I couldn’t put it down; it resonated so profoundly. Can you share the inspiration behind the collection?

SANNA WANI: Thank you so much for saying that. With inspiration I think poetry is hard to talk about. I was listening to this podcast a couple of years ago called the VS Podcast with Donna Smith and Franny Choi, which was very popular at the time. They had this episode where they talked about how poetry is odd because it’s almost like an accumulation. It can be kind of not about something because it’s an accumulation of a poet’s time. But then they were also discussing, politically, “aboutness” is more and more becoming a part of books and how books are marketed or how books sell, even poetry books. So, when I think of that question, I think it’s about my family and my life, mostly, but it also resists the idea of a book being inspired. It was just an accumulation of time, as well. It was a period of my life that ended up in poems and then I put them all together. It was actually like three different manuscripts that I had been trying to place separately, and then I talked to Kevin [Connolly] at House of Anansi, and he was just, like, “Well, we can just put them all together.”

And I said, “Well, what do you call four chapbooks that are one big book?”

And he said a poetry collection. And that was that.

TV: In 2019, you published The Pink of The Seams, your poetry chapbook, and in 2022, My Grief, the Sun, your debut poetry collection was published. What is your approach to crafting collections of poetry? Did you follow the same/a similar process for both collections?

SW: I think my approach to crafting collections of poetry is mainly to gather enough poems to make a sizable Word document. The approach was very different with The Pink of the Seams. It was smaller, so I was able to work more digitally on it and conceptualize there what I wanted to happen. I don’t think I was as interested in a thread or creating any kind of narrative or bigger cohesion with the first book. I was putting it together based on vibe. I had a cute little Pinterest board that was my main, if not only, ordering device to create a structure for the book. I don’t even think The Pink of the Seams has a table of contents.

But then, with My Grief, the Sun, it was intensely purposeful. I spent a lot of time thinking about what would go where, and my friend gave me some advice, that there’s something nice about when you can feel a narrative thread in a collection of poetry. And I really liked that. I thought the easiest way to make a thread, and I still do this now, is to look at the beginning and the endings of poems. That’s one way I feel like you can create threads and the other way is thematically through what was going on. Like if a poem ends in a conversation about, let’s say, love or sleep, and the other poem begins with waking up, that’s a kind of thread.

There are other kinds of threads too. The idea of different sections. Some sections are more general and then two sections are more distinctly topical. I was playing around; should the two sections be split? How? Then I printed everything out for the second book, and I looked at it in a big way. I put everything on my dining room floor and followed it around to see how it looked.

TV: What is your writing process like?

SW: I think I’m only starting to have one now. It was very random for a long time. I’m one of those people where I don’t sit down at a desk and try to write. I don’t find I do well or that the work comes out well with discipline. I want to be more disciplined and now I’m trying to very gently integrate it into the practice, but there’s something about poetry that really resists discipline for me, and I found the more I tried to structure my poetry, the less I liked what I was doing. I am destined or doomed to be one of those people where I have to just walk around until the idea for a poem starts, and then write it down as quickly as I can. And then I’ll do a structured, disciplined process when I edit.

TV: How do you know when a poem is complete?

SW: Oh. No clue. I don’t know—it’s weird, right? I think that is something similar to the question: how does a poem begin? There’s a similar practice, or a feeling, when a poem is done. I’ll feel when a poem is coming on now. I can start to see the signs, and so I’ll go and I’ll grab my phone or I’ll grab a piece of paper or I’ll pick up whatever I have to write around me and I’ll sit and I’ll be like, okay, a poem is coming. And then I’ll receive it. It feels like it will pass through me.

Similarly, I think I’ve started homing in on the instinctual feeling of a poem being done. I think it’s less about me being satisfied with it or happy with how it looks, though that can be a part of it. It’s more about closure. Like, does this poem feel like it’s done what it had to do? The feeling that came over me that started this: does that feeling feel resolved?

TV: Is there a book or a text that you would describe as essential reading?

SW: Personally, my answer is probably The Blue Clerk by Dionne Brand. I think there’s something about that book that teaches poets, but also anyone, how to step behind the veils of your mind. Like, how do you step into a deeper place of how we feel, or how we process an event, or the world? I think there’s a lot in that book that is about being a person who feels a lot and how to understand that and where it comes from and why. It’s also about how to understand how stories are made or structured, even, and why we should step outside of structures to really look at them before we participate in them. It’s so enriching to think of our minds that way.

TV: So, switching gears a little bit, you are also publicity and promotions manager and poetry editor at Fernwood Publishing. How does your work as a poet shape your approach?

SW: That’s a great question, actually, because I think I have been thinking really deeply about my job with publicity lately, and it’s really developed since I first joined. I’ve been understanding that different people do publicity in different ways. My job as a poet is actually not disengaged at all from the work of promotion because promotion is all about relationships, too. It’s all about momentum and relationships and how to build an economy of attention around a book, and how to do that ethically—especially with Fernwood, because of our politics.

When you’re a poet, one of the main things that we wonder and ponder over is relationships, relationship-building, and community-building. I think all poetry happens in community, and publicity and promotions is all about community. It really only works with community; that’s when it’s the most rich. So I think my abilities to think as a poet, and that whole disposition, has been very useful in my job. And thankfully my coworkers have been so supportive in creating a kind attitude toward promotions that is very in line with poetics as well as politics.

TV: Can you share one common misconception about publicity and promotions in the publishing industry?

SW: Hmm, I mean I have this thing that I call my conspiracy theory, which is really not a conspiracy at all. I think there’s a misconception—I’m about to sound like an absolute pessimist, but I think there’s a misconception that the books that deserve the most love are the most covered. There’s a lot more politically happening in the publishing industry that relates to the kind of way that money is arranged. Industries have economies and how money is distributed matters a lot for publicity and promotions. By the end of a production cycle, how much do we have left to spend on books? What other books are part of the season and how do we distribute resources? How many people are working on any given book? And so on. I also think that there is a culture of individual celebrity that also reinforces this kind of complicated highlighting of books. It’s a kind of exceptionalist culture where we’re uplifting certain authors or certain books topically and then often not realizing that culture of uplifting is embedded in the capitalist tendencies to assign one voice to one thing. There’s a lot that’s outside of how good your manuscript is that decides who gets to be that voice. Not to say that the books highlighted by mainstream media and popularized are not good books. But I think that it’s just really way more calculated behind the scenes. Again, there’s a big asterisk on myself because a lot of good books get a lot of good love, and they deserve that good love. But, if you see a book get a lot of coverage, I think that it’s always good to know that there are a lot of good books that don’t get that kind of attention and it’s really important to not just think of attention as equivalent to value or worthiness.

TV: What is the biggest challenge you face in your role?

SW: Honestly, relationships again, because the misconception is outward relationships, toward community, and the challenge is the inward relationships with authors. What I didn’t realize is there’s also a client element to my role as well. Authors bring you their art and have a very particular idea of how they want their art to be treated, but then you are the conduit between them and the real world where that conspiracy theory is happening, so you have to be very gentle in how you handle those relationships.

People have a lot of emotions around their books. A lot of editors get called “book doulas”; they go through that emotional work and that’s really, really intense and important. I feel like I’m then the book’s nanny for a while after: the person who has to take the baby to the playground and babysit for a year and be, like, “Now meet all the other children!” And then their parents are yelling at me and being like, “Why did you do this? Why do you do that? Why didn’t you do this?” Not all of them; just some parents get very protective of their child and they want their child to be treated in a certain way. Anyway, that’s my extended metaphor.

I also really don’t like the old culture of treating authors with kid gloves because I think it can be very patronizing and paternalistic. “Author handling” is a word that I’ve heard before and I don’t think that’s fair to authors as people, but I do think there needs to be more awareness and transparency between authors and publishers about what the reality of the situation is.

I think it’s really important and helpful for people to be more informed on what the reality is, because then it doesn’t make you feel bad when your book doesn’t get twenty reviews or a star-studded virtual launch or whatever your aspirations are for publicity. Going back again, to the conspiracy theory, which plants [the idea that] maybe some of those dreams as generally achievable when they are exceptional. It just clears the air on what can be done and how it can be done, and how to best work together. It’s a relationship where we’re in it together, we’re both working on it, so let’s work together as well as we can. That’s really

what helps books get out in the best way possible.

TV: What is your favourite part of your role?

SW: My favourite part of my role is when I get to just see books be celebrated and know that I was a part of it. I think there are so many people with amazing books that start such amazing conversations.When I get to be part of planning any community gathering that brings together people in a meaningful way about a meaningful topic—there’s a particular example of an event coming to mind, which was about healthcare in Canada and how it’s linked to land struggle. Being able to help community be in conversation. It makes me really happy to have that be a part of my work. It’s a blessing.

TV: We’ll wrap up by bringing it back to your own writing. What are you working on right now?

SW: I’m not sure yet if it’s fiction or nonfiction; it’s kind of in the middle. I’m working on prose, because I’ve been wanting to write something in prose for a long time. I’m working on a book about my own life again. I think it’s a book about family, intergenerational trauma. It’s a book about freedom. I’m just thinking through a lot of complicated and recent changes in my life and I’m straining it through the language of personal essay. It’s still in that stage where it’s nothing. I wrote two sentences yesterday, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense right now. Loneliness, love, conversations with friends. My usual jam. Digging through my place in the world and how I make it and how we live.

TV: I’m excited about that. Hopefully we’ll be able to invite you back in the future and you’ll tell us all about it.

AGA Wilmot

(BFA, MPub) is a writer, editor, and painter based out of Toronto, Ontario. They have won awards for fiction, short fiction, and screenwriting, including the Friends of the Merril Short Story Contest and ECW Press’s Best New Speculative Novel Contest. For seven years they served as co-publisher and co-EIC of the Ignyteand British Fantasy Award–nominated Anathema: Spec from the Margins. Their credits include myriad online and in-print publications and anthologies. They are also on the editorial advisory board for Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn. Books of Wilmot’s include The Death Scene Artist (Buckrider Books, 2018) and Withered (ECW Press, 2024). They are represented by Kelvin Kong of K2 Literary (k2literary.com). Find them online at agawilmot.ca.

Tali Voron: You’re an editor by trade and have had experience in every area of the industry. Can you tell me about your journey and the kinds of projects you work on?

AGA Wilmot: My journey was a little bit unexpected. I didn’t anticipate I would wind up in publishing. In undergrad, I trained to be a practicing visual artist. I specialized in oil painting. I still love it, I just wasn’t cut out for making a career out of it. Had I followed that path, I think I would have started to hate it eventually. But while I was in undergrad, I stumbled into editing by accident—I just had a natural tendency for it with my own work. Then friends started asking me to look over their papers and I started to realize, “Oh, is this something I’ve been ignoring my whole life?” The answer was yes. That led me to doing some volunteer work with a couple of B.C.-based organizations, one of which was a local food culture magazine that only lasted for a few issues. That led me to applying for Simon Fraser University’s Master of Publishing program. That’s when I really fell in love with it, and I already knew by that point that I also wanted to write. I had heard so many stories of authors being furious with their editors and whatnot. I never wanted to be oblivious of the other side of the coin, but I didn’t expect that I’d wind up with a career in publishing as a result.

As for the types of projects I work on, I take on almost anything that comes my way, if I think I’m equipped for it. If someone’s coming to me for sensitivity reading for something that I have no experience with, for example, I won’t take that on. But generally, I do a fair bit of fiction, and a lot of academic work as well. I fell into the latter by accident. A friend of a friend needed help with a dissertation that focused predominantly on eating disorders and body dysmorphia. And this friend knew that I had a personal history with that. From there, it just spiraled out. One friend told another friend, another friend told their professor, and that process filtered me through their program. So, while I have a small career in academic editing, I largely edit fiction—sometimes speculative fiction, but honestly fiction of all types. The only thing I’m not terribly comfortable editing is poetry, simply because it’s never been my wheelhouse. I enjoy reading it, but I’ve never had the same level of understanding with it as I do with the conventions of fiction.

TV: Do you approach your fiction editing and academic editing in the same way? Or is it two completely different experiences?

AW: No. Every project is different with academic editing. There are some things I start with right off the bat, of course. For example, there are certain things that are inherent to the APA style guide, so I go through before I read anything, fix all the headers and make sure they’re all formatted properly. When it comes to fiction, I kind of dive in. I will usually read a synopsis of the work and then read through what’s been noted for me, because most times I’m doing copy and line editing. Then I get started, trying to experience it as if I were a reader coming to it for the first time. So it’s a bit different in that regard—I want to go in with some element of surprise, because that will help me gauge how the average person is going to approach this work.

TV: What do you believe is the biggest misconception about being an editor?

AW: I feel like the biggest misconception from the writer’s side is that we are here to interfere with your work, or to get in the way of your vision. That’s simply not the case. We’re trying to work with you to help bring out the best version of your vision. I feel like the biggest misconception from the publisher’s side is this idea that we will get our work done in the office. I think all editors should have the option for remote work because you need no distractions. Every time I’ve worked in an office, I’ve wound up doing the bulk of the work at home and not being paid extra for it. The biggest misconception from the editorial side, and this is purely for fiction, is to beware of the editor who thinks that their work can’t be challenged, because in fiction, any rule can be broken if there’s a reason for breaking it.

TV: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced as an editor? And what is your favorite part of this work?

AW: My favorite part is honestly seeing someone see their work come to fruition. I was at a launch this weekend for a local author named Suzan Palumbo. She was releasing a book of short stories, and the first story in that collection is one that we published through Anathema back in 2018. It wasn’t her first publication, but it was still great to be able to see where she was a few years ago versus where she is now. It’s a very fulfilling feeling to know you’re playing any part in helping someone realize their dreams.

As for the biggest challenge, earlier in my career I worked more with independent authors, ones not tied to a publisher of any kind, and it was difficult getting them to accept that editors have to dip their fingers into their work. I had a number of people hire me who afterward I felt only hired me so I could tell them that their work was great. Hiring an editor was a step they felt they had to go through for accreditation, but they weren’t actually expecting you to say, “Well, here, here, here, and here are some problems. And also, this is deeply offensive, unintentional, etc.” That was the biggest challenge I faced early on. I would say the biggest challenge, broadly speaking, that I face nowadays is simply managing workload, because with the rising cost of inflation, you have to also raise your rates, but you can’t price out publishers because they also are limited in terms of what they can afford. There’s a constant push and pull with the work itself, which I don’t find terribly difficult. It’s more the juggling and separating things out with the freelance life and, you know, having to manage not just your deadlines, but shifting deadlines when other people miss theirs. You have to adjust and you have to watch as things cascade … life gets messy sometimes. I don’t encounter many challenges with individuals these days, but I have had projects that have been very challenging. I copy edited a book for Arbeiter Ring Publishing (ARP) years ago. It was fifty essays from Indigenous writers detailing the atrocities of Canada’s history and present. It was difficult in the sense that it was an emotionally draining project. By the end of it, I think I shut down a little bit, once I’d submitted my edits. But that’s a rarity. Usually, I’m able to compartmentalize.

TV: Let’s talk a little bit about your writing as well. You’re an author, and you have many publication credits to your name. Has your career as a writer influenced the way you approach editing?

AW: Yes, absolutely. It’s softened my approach. When I work with authors, especially fiction authors, I make it clear that my edits are suggestions and that everything is open for conversation. We’re working together—I’m not working for you; you’re not working for me. I find that as an author, that approach has also helped me come to what I’m given with more patience, more calm. It’s common that you get your edits back and immediately your hackles go up, like, “How dare this person say this about my perfectly formed idea?” But I don’t care who you are, no idea is ever as perfectly formed as you think it is. And so I say, as an author, the best thing has been knowing that this is a partnership. I try to begin all working relationships that way regardless of the side I’m on. I can always tell when I’m working with an editor who doesn’t feel that way, and it’s never a good feeling.

TV: What are you working on right now?

AW: Right now I’m dividing my time into a few different areas. I’m finishing up work on a book of my own that comes out next spring with ECW, titled Withered. I think I’ve delivered the last round of copy edits on that. I have been working on a draft of a different project for a couple of years now, Every Little Death. The novel is a very trans-heavy, art-heavy narrative about capitalism, self-worth and the apocalypse. It’s the best way I can describe it. It’s also a love story. I’ve also been plugging away at some short stories for various anthology calls. And I’m very, very, very slowly plotting out a couple of new things that I probably won’t get to actually touch for years. So yeah, it’s a multi-layered process with me—my brain is never on just one thing at a time.

TV: What is your favourite punctuation mark, and why?

AW: Easily the em dash. I write a lot of dialogue. I am more of a dialogue writer than a prose writer, and the em dash is so useful as a harder pause. I probably wind up speaking with it a lot in my own life without realizing it. So yeah, I’ve used it more than any other punctuation mark.

TV: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers?

AW: Buy my books, and buy several copies for your friends! However, if I’m speaking more to editors and/or prospective editors and writers in this interview, it would be to offer the advice I give to any aspiring editor. Providing you’re comfortable, lean into what makes you weird or unique. The reason I say that is because the majority of editors out there have an English or literature background, or at least the majority that I’ve known. That’s what they did in undergrad or grad school, and that’s wonderful. I did a Bachelor of Fine Arts focusing on painting and drawing with a minor in film studies. And I have a background in conservatory piano. I’ve leaned on these things for different types of work, such as working with art magazines or getting asked to look at works of fiction that are a bit more art-heavy or that are rooted in music or film. And also, my history with mental health issues and anorexia, and being queer and trans—all things that I am able to speak to personally. If this is what separates me from the pack, I’m comfortable leaning on it. These things give me my own corner of the sky. I still like getting to look at almost anything that comes my way, of course, but this is how I can differentiate myself. And I feel like that is key for many editors. There are a lot of us out there. And a lot of editors who are brilliant, compassionate people who know their stuff. And that’s how you carve out your own corner. So yes, lean into what makes you weird.

Laurie D. Graham

grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta), and she currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her latest book, a long poem called Fast Commute, was a finalist for Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for Poetry. A chapbook of new work, entitled Calling It Back to Me, is out now with Deer Mountain Pages.

Tali Voron: An international literary journal with a focus on literary nonfiction, Brick has been pushing boundaries since 1977. What role would you say Brick plays in Canada’s literary landscape?

Laurie D. Graham: Brick is different from other literary magazines in that it publishes a lot of international writers. The editorial board solicits writers in addition to us reading unsolicited submissions, and we focus pretty heavily on literary nonfiction. We, like most other journals in the country, are a pretty small outfit, and we publish what winds up being a pretty big magazine. So, we share a lot of similarities with other lit mags, but our broad international reach winds up making Brick a little different. This was started by Michael Ondaatje and Linda Spalding when they took over Brick in 1985. They wanted to hear about what novelists and poets were writing about, and what ideas were driving their work. They wanted writers to turn from their projects to write about the things that really fuelled their passions. And now we’re really interested in publishing the widest range of nonfiction we can possibly find out in the world. In other words, we’re always trying to redefine what literary nonfiction is or can be.

TV: You are the publisher at Brick; can you share what a day in the role looks like?

LG: It’s tough for me to describe a typical day because we’re a pretty small group, so my role could involve anything having to do with the magazine. There are three paid staff and an editorial board of six people—I’m on that editorial board as well. We have a few freelancers who do copy editing and design and web development, as well as a small crew of readers who go through all the unsolicited submissions. I’m largely focused on the magazine’s editorial direction and financial situation, but I also, along with the other two editorial staff, query and proofread all pieces that come in.

Another thing that most people don’t know is that the editorial process at Brick is one of the more intense editorial processes among literary journals not only in Canada, but in the world.

We are kind of like book editors who are looking at singular pieces in a journal. We’re actually in the throes of production on the winter issue right now. These days, my day-to-day life has the Canadian Oxford Dictionary very close beside me as I comb through all the pieces. Then I will be working on fundraising and strategic planning and the long range vision for Brick. There’s always administrative work to do as well: later I’ll be sending issues for consignment and assisting the other staff with getting the newsletter out. It’s an all-hands-on-deck situation at Brick for sure. With work like this you become very, very well rounded. You get to know every aspect of making a magazine.

TV: What are you most looking forward to in your next issue? What was your favourite piece or part of the previous issue?

LG: Our summer issue came out in June. My favourites from there were a piece by Omar El Akkad about memorable swims that he’s taken throughout his life. We had an astounding poem by Robert Bringhurst in memoriam for Stan Dragland, who was the founder of Brick back in 1977. In every issue we also publish an interview from Eleanor Wachtel, and in the last issue we published her interview with Percival Everett, which has many memorable moments. We also had a piece by Suzanne Gardinier, an American writer I wasn’t familiar with until recently. She writes a really pulled-apart, visceral, poetic work of nonfiction about Pablo Neruda’s assassination, statecraft’s intrusions on poetry, and what happens when poets become tied up in the bloody machinations of oppressive governments. It’s a wonderful piece that encompasses the whole world.

In the next issue, we have a piece about an Ed Roberson poem by the writer Douglas Kearney, who won the Griffin a couple of years ago. We have a new poem from Fanny Howe and a lovely short, poetic prose piece from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, who’s a contributing editor at Brick. Eleanor’s interview this issue is with Michael Ondaatje, which is really fun, because they’re friends and you can see that in their exchange. We also have a piece from Maggie Helwig, who is both a writer and a priest at Saint Stephen-in-the-Fields church in Kensington Market in Toronto. She writes a really beautiful and heart-wrenching essay about her proximity to the people murdered in the gay village and being present for her father’s death.

TV: We’ll switch gears a little bit and talk about your writing as well. In addition to playing an integral role in the publishing industry, you are also an acclaimed poet. Each of your collections tackles incredibly important topics, from familial memory, to the Plains Cree uprising at Frog Lake, to land development and ecological injustice. What has made poetry your chosen medium to explore such complex topics?

LG: Ultimately, I don’t know. After I’ve finished writing a piece, and I think I’ve figured out what it’s trying to say, and see how I can’t properly translate what a book of mine is saying into grammatical sentences, then I know that I’ve picked the right form. It’s as close as I can get to philosophy, just to show some aspect of living that I can see and can’t put into proper words. Poetry is what allows me to look out at the world and to say what’s there at some length, and then a sort of thesis forms. Poetry is the form I feel like I can say the most urgent things the best. Poetry really does become a way of seeing, a way of sensing. The longer you do it, you find that it’s there with you all the time.

TV: What is your favourite piece of writing advice?

LG: I’m always a little hesitant to give writing advice. I feel like there’s not much I can say to a writer who already has that fire, but I am a big proponent of following your nose when you’re writing, to really try to let go of the internal editor in your head telling you what direction you should go in, what you should be doing, what might sell, and what might be best received. What I love most about writing is being able to sit down and go where I’m moved. Basically, if I want to write about what I’m seeing out the window, I go there. If I want to stop and dip into a book for a few pages, I’ll do that. If no words come and I’m just sitting, I’ll do that and try not to feel guilty about it. To me, that’s the process of being present so the words can show up when they’re ready.

TV: Do you have any pearls of wisdom when it comes to editing?

LG: My favourite advice actually came from the poet Tim Lilburn, who was my teacher at the University of Victoria in B.C. while I did the BFA there. He was a really astounding teacher who really changed my course. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing when I started in that program, and I gained a sense of what poetry could be and what it could do in large part thanks to him. One day in class, almost as an aside, he said when you’re reading someone else’s work, your job is to not colonize the text. You don’t get to exist within someone else’s text and make it into the thing you want it to be. Your job is to see and sense what the author is trying to do and try to help bring what they are doing into its fullest, most robust form, and that has stuck with me. He was talking specifically about workshopping, but I think this applies to editing as well. It’s how I try to edit: to really discern when I’m trying to insert myself or insert my preferences into someone else’s work. It’s hard though, because there is such a thing as house style. There is such a thing as having a piece exist in some relationship to the rules that the publisher has set, and so you have to balance that. You also have to understand when rules need to be broken, when a writer’s aims and their voice needs to be supported. Those rules have to go by the wayside when something is urgent. That to me is the most interesting and important part of editing.

TV: What are you working on right now?

LG: I just brought out a chapbook of poems that is from a larger collection that I think is nearly done. I’m trying to parse my great-grandparents’ immigrations to this country about a century ago to farm homesteads in Alberta and Saskatchewan, and to understand more of the circumstances of their leaving and what they left behind, while also digging into how implicated I am in the harms of settlerdom. There was a lot of silence around these stories, and there was a sense that that generation wanted a clean break so they could start over in Canada. And that’s interwoven with poems that involve a family member with dementia who’s trying to pass along heirlooms from those great-grandparents, and what she knew of the stories is degrading as she does that. I’m also trying to write—I almost shouldn’t even talk about it because I feel like I’ll ruin something—a bit of nonfiction prose, trying to discern a shape at this point, something that’s been bubbling for a little while now. I’ve been able to fit poetry into my life pretty well because it’s quick compared to, say, writing a novel. But this prose has been urgently presenting itself lately, so I’ve got to somehow find some extra hours in my life to follow it through.

 How You Climb the Mountain:

Accessibility, Advocacy, and Agency in Writing and Publishing

A Conversation with Amanda Leduc

AMANDA LEDUC

is a writer and disability rights advocate. She is the author of The Centaur’s Wife (Random House Canada, 2021), Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (Coach House Books, 2020), and The Miracles of Ordinary Men (ECW Press, 2013). Her essays and stories have appeared across Canada, the US, and the UK, and she has spoken across North America on accessibility, inclusion, and disability in storytelling. She has cerebral palsy and lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where she serves as the communications and development coordinator for the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), Canada’s first festival for diverse authors and stories.

She met (virtually) with The Ampersand Review’s managing editor Robyn Read for a conversation about her work in March 2021.

Robyn Read: You published your short story “The Centaur’s Wife” in 2014 in Necessary Fiction. At what point in the process did you realize that there was more to tell, and decide to evolve the story into a novel? What was the first step in starting to expand it?

Amanda Leduc: In the fall of 2015, I pulled together a bunch of short stories that I had written, and “The Centaur’s Wife” was one of those. I remember at the time, I workshopped it with some friends here in Hamilton, one of whom was Liz Harmer (1). At the time, she said, “Oh, I really need to know more about these centaurs. I want to know more about them, this isn’t enough, the short story.” So I expanded the short story and fleshed it out a little bit. By the time the short story collection was ready to send to publishers, “The Centaur’s Wife” had gone from 2,500 words to 20,000 words, so it was more of a novella. And really, at that point, I sort of knew that I wanted to expand it into a novel. By the beginning of 2016, I had a short story collection, and a proposal for a novel based on “The Centaur’s Wife,” which we took to a number of publishers and it was rejected by almost all of them. The only one who said “yes” was Anne Collins (2) at Random House.
When we signed for the book in the spring of 2016, it hadn’t been written yet. Which was a very interesting experience, because suddenly I had this book that hadn’t been written, but I had a contract for it, so it felt like it was more finished than it actually was.
I remember finishing the first draft of The Centaur’s Wife and thinking, “Oh, I have this writing thing down, it’s good to go the way that it is!” And it required three more years of writing. Actually, at the beginning of 2019, I ended up selling Disfigured on proposal as well to Coach House, so I did it again!
There’s a lot more overt rage in the short story. This rage is still there in the novel, but it became much more about grief and the way that rage acts as a cover for grief in some ways. Having to work all of that out and think about the centaurs in particular, and their motivations, and how they’re torn between being half human and half animal—the germ of it was there in the initial short story, but definitely took a while to come out in later drafts of the novel.

RR: I was curious how long it took to get from short story to novel, because the centaurs in the short story are very much in the shadows. Bringing them to the forefront, giving them names, and allowing them to speak and be present in the novel, I imagine that process probably took a while.

AL: Yeah, it really did. One of the things that I really liked in the short story was that rage, and the way that rage and desire can bleed together. It was something that ultimately ended up being a little too unwieldy for the larger book. But that’s where working the disability angle into the book turned out to be very revelatory for me, because there’s a lot of buried rage there. A lot of sublimated rage that Heather has been dealing with her entire life.
I remember when I was in undergrad—so this was like seventeen years ago—studying with Carla Funk (3) at the University of Victoria, she talked about how you should cannibalize your own writing for future projects. The Centaur’s Wife was very much taking something that worked in a very short story format, but needed to be expanded in different ways when it became a novel.

RR: And one of the things you expand upon and explore in the space of the novel is Heather’s story. Do you see Heather’s story challenging norms and expectations of the hero’s journey?

AL: I don’t think Heather is your typical likeable narrator. I like her a great deal, and understand her very well. Sure, she can be bitchy, and she’s kind of rude, and she’s not really friendly to a lot of people, but so are a lot of people we encounter in the world. So are, in particular, I would argue, a lot of disabled people, and they have good reason for being that way. Because there is no reason for someone to be soft and cuddly when the world has not been soft and cuddly to them in return.
For Heather, I think so much of the hero’s journey that’s the traditional hero’s journey we focus on—especially in fairy tales—is about the hero overcoming various challenges so they can fit into society. But society overcoming its own biases and barriers is never part of that hero’s journey. It’s never society that changes, and I talk about this a lot in Disfigured. It’s always the protagonist who has to change in some way. And for Heather, she has fought her whole life against that idea of changing. She wanted to feel supported by her dad, and she never did. She wanted to change so she could be more palatable to him, be the kind of daughter that he wanted, or she felt he wanted her to be, and she wasn’t able to do that, and then she did not feel like she was a part of the city that she grew up in; she didn’t really feel accepted. There are definite walls around her as a result. Walls that definitely work to her detriment.
I also didn’t want to write her as being this kind of…not object of pity, but someone you really feel for because she’s just been wronged every step of the way. I mean, she has been wronged most steps of the way, but also lashes out, and remains walled off in very crucial ways that are her own fault. And I think that it was key—it was important for me to include that in her story in much the same way that Tasha as a character is, in some ways, your typical hero narrator. She sort of comes in and saves the day. But Larissa Lai (4), in her questions at my launch for the book, talked about Tasha being a narcissist. I hadn’t really thought of Tasha that way, necessarily, but she does definitely do some very narcissistic things. It’s all about her trying to save the town. But she’s also centring herself in ways: heroes are supposed to be humble. They’re supposed to do what is asked of them. And in many ways, the characters in The Centaur’s Wife struggle and chafe against what they feel might be asked of them. And that was something that I really wanted to explore in the book. Because the actions that we take toward survival and thriving, in particular, are complicated and multifaceted, and it didn’t make sense to have The Centaur’s Wife be an uncomplicated story of survival, because survival itself is complicated.

RR: You mentioned how Heather understandably does not have a soft approach when it comes to overcoming barriers. Tasha, on the other hand, is criticized by other survivors when she tells them that help is on the way. They accuse her of telling fairy tales, making up stories, and they are not comforted by her assurances. She takes this soft approach, she thinks that she’s comforting them—and they actually really bristle at that. Then Tasha sees Heather’s approach, and she’s puzzled, because she adamantly doesn’t think fear is a good motivator for people. The question that resonated for me so much is when Tasha asks Heather, “What good will stories about monsters do?” I’m really curious, do you think that stories about monsters can do some good?

AL: It’s not helpful if people are always telling stories about monsters and despair and wallowing in grief. Absolutely, that is not a way to move forward. But it’s also not helpful to constantly be like, “It’s okay, we will move through it together, we’re all going to be fine.” I was interviewed by Julie Lalonde (5) about the book a couple weeks ago, and a term that she kept referencing was “toxic positivity,” which was so great, because I hadn’t thought about toxic positivity when I was writing the novel, but it is very much Tasha’s approach. I think that’s part of why people get frustrated with her, and why Heather gets frustrated with her in particular, because it’s so exhausting to just think, “It’s all going to be okay” all the time.
Obviously, I was not thinking about the pandemic when I was writing the book, but it’s been interesting to see the parallels when I look at what’s happening in the world now. Because there is such a push for people—especially now that people are getting the vaccines—to embrace this kind of dogged “we’re going to get back to normal, it’s going to be great!” What so many people are refusing to acknowledge and see is that a) normal was never really great to begin with, but also b) it’s so much more complicated than just going back to normal. There are so many things that will need to happen in order for the world to get back to some semblance of where it was, that really, the world that you inhabit after you’ve gone through the worst of grief and catastrophe is going to be different. You’re never going to go back to the way the world was before. I think that is what Heather is really trying to tell Tasha, because she recognizes Tasha is also working through her own grief.
The Centaur’s Wife ended up, even before I knew it, being very much a novel about grief, which was then impacted because my best friend passed away in December of 2019 after I’d finished writing the book. It was really weird to look back on the book in January 2020 when I was doing copyedits and see the parallels in there: see the ways in which, even now, almost a year and a half after it happened, when I face grief head-on, there is that moment of being like, “No, no, I don’t want to look at it, I want to—I’m going to distract myself, I’m going to look at something else, I’m going to do something else.” And you can’t do that, right?
I mean, you can do it, you can continue to do it, but you’re just continually going in circles.

RR: There’s so much in what you said there, and I want to unpack some of it. But I want to start by saying I’m so sorry for your loss.
Heather accepts that we don’t know what comes next. Tasha, however, distracts herself from her grief by aspiring to seek redemption, to try to make up for a loss by being a hero to others.
There is something about the nature of someone who tries to adamantly seek redemption without taking a break that is, as you said, exhausting. I think the mountain teaches people in the novel how you climb. When you climb the mountain—when Heather and her father climb the mountain—they’re able to climb the mountain because they rest when they need to. I think about your beautiful passages about the doctor climbing the mountain. How she rests and she eats and she sleeps and then she’s able to climb. She’s able to do the climb by resting when she needs to, listening to her body, and taking care of herself.
Elyse is a character in The Centaur’s Wife who is in desperate need of a lung transplant. There could be a comparison drawn between Elyse’s emergency and the plight of those who have had their procedures and operations put on hold during the pandemic.
I’m wondering if you can speak a bit about the many ways the novel explores the agency—or lack of agency—we have over our health and wellness?

AL: See that’s a great question, because one of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot over these past weeks since the book has come out is the ways in which the dystopian narrative, and the apocalyptic narrative in particular, have treated the disabled body in very particular, time-worn ways. I think about Station Eleven (6), which I loved as a book. But at the beginning, when that first pandemic starts spreading through the world, there’s a character, Jeevan, who has a disabled brother, Frank, and the disabled brother chooses to stay on his own and die and encourages his brother to go and find his own life, his own way. There are disabled people in the disabled community who pointed out when the book was first published that it was being ableist, but not necessarily with a wider awareness of how it was an ableist narrative: I think about how when we write apocalyptic stories, people follow the same pattern, where it’s sort of understood that the disabled body, the disabled person, is reliant on technology to survive. So, when you take the technology away, there’s nothing you can do. The disabled body just…the person just dies. They have to be left behind so that everybody else can survive. And I think it can be quite radical to think about apocalyptic and dystopian fiction in particular as an area in which writers—disabled and non-disabled alike—have a real responsibility to envision new futures that move beyond that question of technology.
The character Elyse was a really important one for me. She is in danger, in terms of how physically fragile she is. But one of the reasons and one of the ways she survives is because she has this community around her. Which ultimately helps her continue to be alive throughout the course of the book. Elyse her whole life has been told “you can’t climb the mountain because of your lungs,” and the reason that she does climb the mountain at the end is because she has this community of people around her who help her do it. She’s technically not climbing the mountain in her own physical self—she is riding a centaur as they go up—but this is how we envision the disabled body as surviving and thriving in new societies. By means of the community that we build around them; by not leaving them alone.
The people in the novel survive both because they become their own community, but also because as disabled characters—because by the end of the novel, everybody has some sort of physical ailment or some kind of psychological trauma they’re working through, and I consider them all disabled in some way—they’re all surviving because they have learned how to adapt and shift their perspectives in ways that become crucial for survival. The people who don’t survive in the book are people who can’t make that shift. Who can’t change their perspective. Which you need to do, so that you can reach for some kind of hope. You’re not reaching for the bright, shiny, perfect hope. You’re reaching for the imperfect hope, and it’s not a failure to do that. It’s actually the way that you survive.

RR: And certainly Elyse falls into that category of trying to adapt to survive. She’s helping strategize. She’s making choices that are sometimes good and that are sometimes questionable, but she’s making moves. And that is so important that she is not a character just awaiting a future that will not happen, because the future is uncertain. She is still speaking up, and because she is responding, because she is participating, she has agency.
I’d like to talk about the medical notes in your book Disfigured from the consultation between your parents and the neurosurgeon who operated on you as a child: you say in the introduction to the book how including the notes gave you an opportunity to take back the narrative. I’d love to hear you speak a little bit about the enormous potential that Disfigured and The Centaur’s Wife have to reclaim how a narrative can be shared, as books published in all accessible and standard formats at the time of their release.

AL: A lot of people have been saying in discussions about The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured that they were surprised to hear that books aren’t immediately available to anybody who wants them when they’re published. I think it’s a wider conversation that the Canadian publishing industry—all publishing industries—need to be having, because we assume that stories are available to everybody, but they’re really not, especially in the ways that we package them. There are people who cannot access books in the same way that everybody else can access books. We need to really focus on that and understand that it’s not solely the responsibility of the disability community to advocate for that change. It’s everybody’s responsibility.
I mean this whole question right now with the funding for the Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) (7) and the National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) (8) having their funding cut—it’s been partially restored now, which is great. But the wider conversation is that the work these organizations do is a huge part of the Canadian literary fabric. We need to be talking more about that. The government has made decisions about the funding because what they want to see is more publishers building accessibility into their books right from the beginning, rather than having organizations like CELA and NNELS retroactively make books accessible. But that leaves out a whole bunch of backlist and international titles that were not made available in accessible formats.
I hope that both The Centaur’s Wife and Disfigured can contribute to the conversation, because advocating for my books to be made accessible was actually really easy for me to do as a writer because I knew the players. I basically just introduced everybody, and they went ahead and did their work. The question of funding is key here, because CELA and NNELS had the resources to work together on my books and they could have them ready for publication. They don’t have the resources available to do that for every single book that’s published in Canada. There is funding available, and I think the government needs to do a better job of advertising that funding and advertising the different initiatives that are available.

RR: When you clarify it can’t just be disability advocates, it has to be part of the conversation that everybody is having, I think about BookNet Canada (9) and what they do for the publishing industry in terms of the data and research and standards they provide. Accessibility was something they drew attention to in their State of Publishing in Canada 2019 report.

AL: And it can’t just be a conversation that publishers are having, either, even though they’re the ones that obviously need to take on the lion’s share of the work of making books accessible. It needs to be a conversation that all writers are having. Ideally, I want all writers to ask their publishers about accessibility when they initially start things. There’s a wonderful writer by the name of Therese Estacion, who has a poetry collection coming out this month with Book*hug Press (10). She’s recording the audiobook herself. She’s a disabled poet, and she was a really good advocate for getting her book available in accessible formats, looking at different avenues to make that happen, and connecting Book*hug with the right opportunities. I want to see other writers who are not disabled doing the same thing, asking the same questions.
Again, it becomes a question of resources. Because when Disfigured was published last year, it was the first book in Canada to be made born accessible (11) in that way. And after it was published, CELA had a flood of requests and questions from writers who wanted to make their books—both backlist and upcoming releases—accessible, and they didn’t have the resources to handle all of those requests. It’s all linked: you have disabled and non-disabled people advocating for this change, which means that there’s an increased demand, which means there needs to be more resources thrown toward the problem. Even though the government is hoping for more books to be made accessible from the publishers, and is making more money available, the publishers then need people who know what they’re doing: it all comes down to people being aware of funding opportunities, because a lot of publishers don’t know what’s available. They don’t understand that making the shift to including accessibility right at the time of publication, while it’s big, is actually less of an overall shift than retroactively turning your entire catalogue accessible.

RR: I think about the blur of the moment for a writer, especially a new or emerging writer, when…your book has been accepted! But when and once a book is accepted for publication, there are so many important questions for the author to ask, just to gain awareness of how it’s going to be produced and marketed. In writing communities, and for us here in our Creative Writing & Publishing program (12), this can be something we inform emerging writers: ask questions during this crucial part of the publishing process.

AL: Especially when you think about traditional publishing, there’s that divide: the writer does their job, and their job is to produce the manuscript, and then the publisher is there to take care of all the other things. And I do think in order to survive, I think it is in a writer’s best interest to educate themselves on how best to help that process along.
There are writers out there who just want to write, and hand their stuff over and aren’t really keen on doing any sort of promotion or things like that. And that’s fine, but I do think you miss out on opportunities by not knowing or learning a little bit more about the cogs of what goes on in the system. Because publishing, historically, has been a huge marginalizer. There have been certain stories that have been prioritized and elevated over other stories. And people who just kind of sign into the publishing system as it has always been done, and don’t question, don’t push or agitate for change in various kinds of ways actually continue to prop up that system. So when I say we all have a responsibility to do these kinds of things and to ask these kinds of questions, that’s where it comes from. I want the system to change in really significant ways. Arguably, you want it to all come crumbling down and then be rebuilt. Is that logistically going to happen? No, but in order for these really kind of crucial changes to happen, everybody needs to be asking the questions, all the time. And to step back and not ask the questions…we can’t all be firing on all cylinders at once and be advocating for all things at once. I do understand that. But I just think you need to ask at least a few questions as a writer. You need to understand your role in the process. Even just for the marketing of your book. Take an active role in getting your book out into the world. I think it’s more enjoyable that way.

RR: It’s about understanding the agency of the author doesn’t end with the completion of the manuscript, that that agency should be ongoing. It’s almost—I’m not sure about the leap I’m going to make here, bear with me—apocalyptic language you’re using to talk about systems you’d change in the publishing industry that have to come crumbling down in order to be rebuilt.
We could talk so much about loss and survival in your novel—how so many of your characters seem to mourn what used to be, and inhabit liminal bodies, spaces, and states of being. And I’m wondering if you can tell me a little more about the foxes.

AL: So, the foxes are interesting, because for me the foxes very much fall in line with the natural world in the book, which has its own kind of agency and its own kind of personality, which is very different from human agency and human personality. I thought about this when I was writing the book, in terms of time, humans are these blips in the universe, they’re kind of there and then gone, but the natural world continues in some way, shape, or form. So, in a weird way, I feel like the natural world doesn’t change in the same way. The foxes feel kind of static to me.
The whole push that they’re giving toward the centaurs is saying “there’s a choice that you have to make.” You have to choose to be part of our natural world or part of the human world. And if you choose to be part of the human world, you can’t come back here.
The things that survive in the natural world and are thriving are the plants. If the mountain had been hit by one of those falling meteors, the mountain would have been destroyed, or it would have been significantly maimed in a very particular kind of way. But it’s the trees and the vines that crawl over things and reclaim their ground. I guess I was thinking about the foxes as luring Heather, in particular, up the mountain, away from her work of survival—keep going, one foot in front of the other. But it’s significant that it’s not that natural world that saves her, it’s the liminal in-between centaurs who save her, because they have one foot—or, you know, two feet as the case may be, two feet in one world and two feet in another. That neither here nor there, that in-between, this goes back to the disabled characters in the book. It’s the disabled characters who are neither fully abled nor completely incapacitated—who survive. They’re the ones who ultimately have agency, and they have agency because together, as a group, they’re taking care of one another.
The foxes, much like the mountain centaurs who also have that kind of detached, nonhuman approach to things, they don’t have that kind of flexibility. Or they view the world in a way that doesn’t have that kind of flexibility, and therefore may survive, but will survive in a very limited kind of way. The mountain—the jealous mountain, whose favourite son is that black horse—wants the horse to stay because the mountain wants the world that the mountain knows to remain the same. To not change. And it can’t accept change, it can’t accept the way that the horse wants to pull away and become something different. And it keeps Heather the same because it recognizes that there is no need to change her, she has always been the thing that she needed to be.
I guess I was playing with all those different things: the ways in which we long to change because we think that we might fit better into something if we are x, y, and z, versus the way that some things don’t change as a method of survival—which is also not necessarily the way to go, right? For me and the novel, it’s the in-between beings and the in-between approach that turns out to be what everyone needs in order to survive. It’s like how Heather says that you can’t survive by thinking that everything is going to be okay.
You have to take a little bit of despair and a little bit of hope at the same time, and somehow braid something out of that, to get you through. Because I think the danger of having too much hope is that when the bottom falls out, when catastrophe happens, when the plants turn on you and people are overwhelmed by their grief, they see no way forward. They give up because they have just been holding on to this bright, shining idea for so long that when it comes time to acknowledge that the bright, shining idea is no longer going to be there, it’s too devastating. There’s no way forward from that. Whereas the people who have dealt with grief and also disability and had to learn how to adapt to a world that maybe was not as bright and wonderful as it once had been—those are the people who survive, because they understand that survival is its own kind of hope, even if that survival doesn’t look like what you might have imagined hope would look like.

RR: You refer to parts of the natural world, the trees and the vines, reclaiming their ground. When I think about a land taking itself back, I envision the sea swallowing the crumbling California coastline. So maybe that’s because climate change is on my mind, or always somewhat on my mind. I’m wondering, hearing you talk about the natural world, was it one of the things foremost in your mind when you wrote the novel? Or can the land simply be, as you say, its own kind of character in a book these days and not also a warning?

AL: I think for me, it is its own kind of character. I don’t have very many survival skills, you know, wilderness survival skills. I could probably learn, if push comes to shove. But I do very much rely on my material comforts of modern-day living. I wasn’t really thinking about The Centaur’s Wife as a climate fiction; I wasn’t thinking about it as a kind of indictment of climate disaster or anything like that. I was thinking about magic, and it was kind of immediately apparent when I was writing about the mountain, in particular, that the mountain would have a certain kind of agency. It was this gnarled, old, jealous thing that loved very deeply and was very, very deeply hurt when abandoned. And then, when things [in the novel] started to grow with such lushness, it made sense to me that is what the natural world would do once humans had been removed from the picture, because that is what it does, right? Indigenous activists have been saying this for years, if not decades. The idea is that we are all interconnected. When we talk about climate change and saving the planet, what we’re really talking about is saving ourselves.
The world will continue on in some way, shape, or form if human beings are not here. The world was here fifty million years ago. Nature was here fifty million years ago in some capacity. And it will continue to be here long after we’re gone. And so, this question about climate and climate change and the work that we’re doing to secure a future is securing our future, as much as it is securing the future of the planet that we know right now.

RR: Then, I suppose my last question is since, try as I might, I’ve never been good at caring for my houseplants—should I be worried they might be plotting revenge?

AL: I mean, you never know, right?

1 | Canadian writer, editor, and teacher Liz Harmer: her speculative novel The Amateurs (Knopf, 2018) was a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award. lizharmer.com.

2 | Award-winning writer and editor Anne Collins is publisher of the Knopf Random Canada Publishing Group. penguinrandomhouse.ca/imprints/RK/knopf-canada.

3 | Canadian writer and educator Carla Funk: her most recent book is her memoir Every Little Scrap and Wonder (Greystone, 2019). carlafunk.com.

4 | Canadian poet and novelist Dr. Larissa Lai: she holds a Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, where she directs the Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing. larissalai.com.

5 | Canadian writer, women’s rights advocate, and educator Julie S. Lalonde wrote Resilience Is Futile: The Life and Death and Life of Julie S. Lalonde (Between the Lines; CBC Books Best Canadian Nonfiction, 2020). yellowmanteau.com.

6 | Canadian writer Emily St. John Mandel’s award-winning speculative novel about a pandemic, Station Eleven (HarperCollins, 2014). emilymandel.com.

7 | The Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) is a Canadian accessible library service for readers with print disabilities. celalibrary.ca.

8 | The National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) makes books that are in accessible formats available to Canadian readers with print disabilities. nnels.ca.

9 | BookNet Canada is a non-profit that supports all sectors of the Canadian publishing industry, developing technology and standards, providing research and services, and making sense of the ever-changing book market. booknetcanada.ca.

10 | Inspired by Filipino horror and folk tales, and exploring disability and grief, Therese Estacion’s debut poetry collection is Phatompains (Book*hug Press, 2021). book*hugpress.ca.

11 | Born accessible: when a book is published in accessible formats at the time of its first publication / publishing the book in accessible formats is factored into the original production of the book.

12 | The Honours Bachelor in Creative Writing & Publishing at Sheridan College is the only degree program in Canada that brings together and gives equal balance to the study and development of skills in creative writing and publishing. www.sheridancollege.ca/programs/creative-writing-and-publishing.

A Conversation with Leigh Nash

Invisible Publishing

invisible publishing

is a “small, scrappy, and seriously good” (1) publishing company based in Prince Edward County, Ontario. I find their mission to build “communities that sustain and encourage engaging, literary, and current writing” (2) inspiring. Reading about the publisher’s mission and various initiatives left me wanting to know more about how Invisible succeeds at standing out in the industry. With a keen eye for design, Invisible’s book covers make this small publisher so unique and adept at capturing the attention of readers across Canada.

Leigh Nash

is the publisher of Invisible. She is the author of the poetry collection Goodbye, Ukulele (3), and enjoys reading tarot cards and practicing yoga in her spare time. Leigh was kind enough to chat virtually with me and answer a few of my questions.

Olivia Costa: One of the first elements of Invisible Publishing that I noticed when browsing your catalogue was your incredible design and attention to detail. You refer in the “what we do” section of your website to having a “DIY-done-right style;” what inspired you to have this approach, and what is the production process like?

Leigh Nash: All of our covers are designed in-house by our art director, the inimitable Megan Fildes! (4) Megan is one of Invisible’s founders, and she is 100% responsible for the press’ aesthetic, which you’ve rightfully flagged as flowing through to all parts of our publishing process. We work hard to make sure we’re doing right by our authors and their work, whether that’s crafting pitch-perfect cover copy or packing up orders with care or dreaming up hook-y promo schemes. I took over Invisible from founding publisher Robbie MacGregor in 2015, and so I inherited much of Invisible’s branding, and I’m a big subscriber of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it!” Most of our production is done in-house by me and Megan (we do outsource editorial work on occasion), up to sending the books to print; we’ve also standardized a few things, like our trim sizes and font choices, which helps us to keep costs down, and gives our list its cohesive feel.

OC: Congratulations on becoming a Benetech Global Certified Accessible Publisher! (6) What is your approach to accessible publishing? 

LN: Thanks! We think books should be able to be enjoyed by all readers, and that’s what motivated us to pursue certification via a pilot project between eBOUND Canada (7) and Benetech. We make all our e-books in-house, so it was fairly easy for us to adapt our workflow to meet Benetech’s standards. E-books are made available to readers with different needs by really great organizations like the NNELS (8) and CELA (9), and we’re pleased to be able to contribute to and share the workload. We’re trying to lead by example: if a small firm like Invisible can make accessible e-books, then other publishers should be able to do that work too.

OC: You take a sustainable approach when producing your books. What does this approach mean to you, and how do you balance sustainable printing with the rising need for accessible e-books? 

LN: We try to be as sustainable as possible while recognizing that print books need paper (which means cutting down trees) to exist, and e-books need devices (built on technology that requires mining the earth) to be read! We don’t see one format as any more eco-friendly than another; they all have trade-offs. For print, we use Rolland Enviro paper (10) for our covers and interiors, and we print in small batches to meet demand, then reprint as necessary, which lets us avoid shipping tonnes of extra boxes of books around the continent just to end up pulping them. We also try to use as little plastic or tape as possible in our operations, and we pay for carbon offsets (an imperfect system, but better than nothing) for the emissions we can’t avoid.

OC: Your website features reading guides (11) that complement some of the books that you have published. How did you pick which books you wanted to create these guides for? How do you create these guides?

LN: These guides are written by a book’s author as a letter to potential readers—we ask our authors to write them, but they’re optional, which is why there isn’t a complete set. Not every promotional opportunity is a fit for every author! We envisioned the reading guides as a way to connect our authors with readers, and while we hope they’re useful to book clubs, we also use them in our media kit as part of the book’s promotional outreach.

OC: As a smaller publisher, how do you determine which books you choose to publish? Do you think that your audience looks for specific books from Invisible that they can’t find elsewhere?   

LN: The reality is that as publisher, I’m the one who gives projects the green light. We have a great crew of editors acquiring books, and they all have a good sense of personal taste, and an understanding of what makes an Invisible book. We’ve built an internal “strike zone” that we hold manuscripts up to for evaluation, and that helps us to decide the extent to which a manuscript is a good fit for us. I think we’re developing a bit of a reputation for publishing fun books and beautiful writing, but while our list is broad in what we publish, it’s small in quantity—we only do 10 titles a year—so we’ll always be a bit of a niche publisher.

OC: Invisible Publishing is a not-for-profit publisher: how does this business model differ from a “traditional” publisher?

LN: At Invisible, running as a non-profit is two things: first, a tax status (we don’t pay corporate taxes, but that also means we don’t get tax credits, so it’s a bit of a trade-off); and second, it means we take a collective approach to everything from acquisitions to promotion, and any money the company makes is reinvested in our authors and promoting their work. Our articles of incorporation keep us honest and working toward our mission, which, in addition to publishing books, is to support the work of emerging and under-published Canadian authors. Lots of for-profit publishing companies run in similar ways—we just decided to embrace the fact that independent publishing is more a labour of love than a money-making venture.

OC: You have a great holiday sale happening right now that benefits both authors and their readers. What is the process behind creating your creative campaigns?  

LN: We love a catchy promotion! There are couple of things that motivate us to think outside the discount box:

1. In the book business, there’s a lot of deep discounting and remaindering that happens, which tends to drive down the value of books. (Book cover prices haven’t really increased in two decades!) We don’t want to train readers to only buy our books when they’re on sale, because we think they’re still a really good deal even at full price. This means we have to find other ways to incentivize readers to buy our books, especially during Black Friday.

2. While we love a discount, at Invisible, we pay net royalties to our authors, which means if we put books on sale, we end up paying our authors less at royalty time, which isn’t cool. So that keeps us creative: what levers can we pull to entice readers to shop our titles other than discounting? Usually, one of us has an idea that we bring to the team, and then we all work to test the limits and refine it until it’s fit for public consumption. In addition to doubling royalties, we’ve also donated a percentage of our sales to other community-minded organizations, and offered limited-edition swag with book purchases.

The Canadian publishing industry would not be as successful as it is today without small publishers like Invisible who are dedicated to publishing the best books for their readers. Invisible Publishing’s design, sustainability efforts, and focus on their readership is what makes them one of my favourite small presses. I want to thank Leigh again for taking the time to answer my questions and share her insight and passion for publishing. 

1 | You can visit Invisible Publishing at invisiblepublishing.com, and follow @invisibooks on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

2 | Check out the “Who We Are” section of Invisible’s website at invisiblepublishing.com/about to learn more about their mission.

3 | Goodbye, Ukulele was published in September 2010 by Mansfield Press. mansfieldpress.net.

4 | Megan Fildes is the art director for Invisible Publishing and a freelance graphic designer. She runs her own store, Pin Action, where she crafts and sells hand-painted wood accessories. pinactionhfx.square.site.

5 | After stepping down from his position as publisher, Robbie received a master’s degree in Computer Science from Dalhousie University and now works as a cybersecurity administrator.

6 | Benetech’s Global Certified Accessible (GCA) certification verifies e-book accessibility and helps publishers create content that is accessible for all readers. bornaccessible.benetech.org.

7 | eBOUND Canada helps publishers advance their digital engagement by offering conversion, distribution, digital asset management, and research services. eboundcanada.org.

8 | As discussed in our conversation with Amanda Leduc, The National Network for Equitable Library Service (NNELS) makes books that are in accessible formats available to Canadian readers with print disabilities. nnels.ca.

9 | As we also discussed with Amanda Leduc, The Centre for Equitable Library Access (CELA) is a Canadian accessible library service for readers with print disabilities. celalibrary.ca.

10 | Rolland Enviro is a leader in high environmental standards as their paper is made with 100% recycled content to leave the smallest environmental footprint possible. rollandinc.com.

11 | Check out Invisible Publishing’s reading guides at invisiblepublishing.com/reading-guides.

olivia costa

is a writer, editor, musician, and avid reader of all things fantasy. She is the Publishing & Web Intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. She lives in Mississauga, where she studies in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College.

Making Can’t Lit:

WHAT A PODCAST ABOUT CANADIAN LITERATURE HAS TO DO WITH BRITNEY SPEARS, HEMORRHOIDS, AND “WEIRD LITTLE JERKS”

A Conversation with Dina Del Bucchia and Jen Sookfong Lee

DINA DEL BUCCHIA

is the author of the short-story collection Don’t Tell Me What to Do and the poetry collections It’s a Big Deal!, Coping with Emotions and Otters, Blind Items, and Rom Com, the latter written with former Can’t Lit cohost Daniel Zomparelli.

JEN SOOKFONG LEE

is the author of the novels The End of East, The Better Mother, The Conjoined, and the young adult novel Shelter. She has written several children’s books, a collection of poems, The Shadow List, and Gentlemen of the Shade: My Own Private Idaho, a book about the Gus Van Sant film and ’90s alternative culture.

Together Del Bucchia and Lee host Can’t Lit, “a podcast on all things Canadian and Literature.” They met (virtually) with The Ampersand Review’s managing editor Fawn Parker for a conversation about their podcast in March 2022.

Fawn Parker: Maybe a good place to start would be if we could talk for a second about the “can’t” in the name of the podcast? I imagine it must be a joke about CanLit, but why “can’t”?

Jen Sookfong Lee: Go ahead, Dina.

Dina Del Bucchia: I guess that was me. Before Jen came on, I was hosting this podcast with Daniel Zomparelli, and we’d been talking about it for a few years before we even started the podcast, and when we were talking about names, I feel like this is really the only one that we had. I think part of it was, yes, the pun on CanLit, but also kind of a rejection of some of the staidness of what for many years kinda constituted what literary interviews looked like. And also, because we were going to do a podcast, as opposed to CBC, who are doing coverage all the time, but they can’t do things like we can do. They can’t talk about gross shit, or swear. They can’t say shit. So I think it is all kind of built around that word [can’t]. The can and the can’t of it, what we can and can’t do.

FP: Interesting.

DDB: And I don’t know, Jen might want to add something herself as well about what she thinks, after coming on board.

JSL: Yeah. I have a fractured, conflicted relationship with the concept of CanLit, partly because I have a very—well, we both do—classic literature education. Canadian literature courses were not new when I was in university, but they all sort of covered the same thing and they haven’t changed much. I was in university in the ’90s, so when I started publishing, you know, CanLit wasn’t really any different. I always think of our podcast as being the antithesis to what Robertson Davies might have said it is. Maybe he’s a poor example. What Margaret Atwood would say CanLit is maybe is a better example?

DDB: But also, I don’t think it’s a challenge. We’re still doing normal things like having conversations with writers about their work or with people who work in the publishing industry about what that work is like. I think tonally we’re at least trying to do something that is separating us from the old guard in some respect.

JSL: More playful and less self-conscious maybe.

FP: Right. I think it’s interesting, Dina, that you said “tonally” because I think my interpretation was always that it was a play on that phrase, “I can’t.” I feel like on the internet people are always saying that, and that seems in a way like your approach.

DDB: Yeah, and I think there’s also, a little bit of a class aspect to that as well. I was not raised in a house where we listened to CBC all the time; that was not a thing. We had a TV, and it was on, and I’m a TV child who was raised by television, even though I have amazing parents who also raised me amazingly—

FP: I’ll put that in [the interview]—

DDB: You can add it in or not. [My parents] are adorable and will probably find a way to get this literary magazine, because that’s how cute they are—

JSL: Yeah, that’s how cute they are.

DDB: That’s part of it for me too. I still have a lot of discomfort around these institutional spaces that CanLit really prizes. You know?

JSL: (Laughing) Oh, I know.

DDB: Jen and I have talked about this a lot on the podcast and off. I think we’re also hoping it comes across that we take it seriously—that the space that the podcast occupies and the people that are talking to us about their work. We have reverence for that work, but hopefully we can make it somewhat comfortable.

FP: That leads into my next question, which is about the humour aspect. I see it on Spotify—I don’t know if this is your choosing—but the podcast is listed as under “books” and “comedy.”

JSL: Really?!

DDB: I don’t think we have that choice.

FP: I wasn’t sure.

DDB: I love that.

FP: Obviously it’s funny, but it isn’t only funny. CanLit is, as people often say “a dumpster fire.” Do you have any difficulty balancing that aspect, like, you are two people who get along well and have good rapport. Are there areas where you don’t want to go because of the humour, or do you find you can use it no matter what?

JSL: I don’t think anything is off-limits. You can correct me if I’m wrong, Dina. As long as everybody who’s on the podcast at that particular time is okay with it. I mean, I think we can joke about almost anything; there are obviously things that we don’t joke about that are serious, really heavy issues. But I don’t think there’s any topic that is off-limits. I guess—I know that people who are involved with CanLit go through really traumatic things that are directly or indirectly the result of the system that CanLit is—and they may or may not wanna talk about that. That’s really up to them. Am I wrong, Dina?

DDB: No, I think you’re right. I think the podcast has a pretty strong punching-up policy, for the most part, but I also think we hopefully are reading cues from our guests and each other and allowing the conversation to go in directions toward humour if it feels like it’s right in that moment. A lot of times the stuff we joke about is not connected to the guest; it’s about something else that’s happening outside of the immediate conversation that we’re having. It might be about something happening on Twitter, or that someone wrote like a real piece-of-shit op-ed and we need to weigh in on it. Back in the day, before shit [in CanLit] got even more terrible, Daniel and I used to have a segment called CanLit Feuds where we would talk about fights people were having—

JSL: But those were minor feuds, before stuff really got horrible—

DDB: That’s what I mean! I mean half the time it was just like this poet and this poet are getting upset about some magazine, and I’m like, that is funny, like I do want to joke about that, I love that. But, of course, when things become more serious, painful, polarizing, it’s a lot harder to just be like, “Here’s this horrible thing this man did to a bunch of people!”

FP: Exactly. I think you occupy such an interesting position, because it is punching up. You’re talking about CanLit but you’re also talking to CanLit.
Do you two think that there is an audience for a CanLit podcast that isn’t writers and publishers, or do you think that we’re sort of an in- group, because the language is sort of niche and we all know the same people. Does it go beyond that?

JSL: I don’t know, does it? I mean I think that there are always aspiring writers and publishers, say, that listen to our podcast, but they’re still writers and publishers. They’re just at earlier stages of their careers. I always think that the only people who listen to us are the people who work in publishing or are writers.

DDB: It’s impossible to know exactly who’s listening to it, but I don’t know. Unfortunately, we don’t get cool demographic info. I think the only other info we get is with Spotify or Apple, where there might be suggested topics for people who are readers, and I think that’s maybe the only other category [of people who listen to us]. I don’t think those “regular old folks” are listening to us...

JSL: Sometimes other podcasters listen to us!

DDB: Definitely. I listen to 500 podcasts a day, but I love finding out about a podcast from another pod- cast. I think we’ve gotten listeners because Jen and I are guests on other podcasts that are not specifically about writing. So, I think that might be the only other way people find out about us. I’ve been on a few comedy podcasts, so I think that might be the only other way, like, “Oh, this person has a podcast, too.”

JSL: I’ve been on pop culture podcasts.

DDB: Me, too.

JSL: And we might have gotten a few listeners that way.

FP: Interesting. I think that’s something that’s really valuable. The feeling I get when I listen [to Can’t Lit], is you’re talking about people I know, not personally, but usually online, so it’s so exciting to me that finally someone is saying these names—

JSL: Ha!

FP: For example, I know about all of these sort of intimate fights and controversies and I just want to hear someone else talk about them. I wouldn’t want it to be too widely known, or an international thing, because I think the familiarity of CanLit is so perfect.

JSL: I mean, I wouldn’t mind it going international if it meant we’d get invited to a podcast festival somewhere cool...

DDB: Yeah, that’d be super nice. One time, I didn’t even tell you this, Jen, but we got invited to some festival in Chicago, and they weren’t going to pay us for anything, and I was like, hard pass. Goodbye.

JSL: I think you did tell me.

DDB: I was not into it. You want us to travel during the height of a pandemic to a place that has a super high rate of COVID and not pay for anything? Seems very cool.

JSL: Nope. No thank you. I mean, Asian women get pushed in front of subway trains in the United States; I don’t go down there anymore.

DDB: Yeah, no. I mean, I would be carrying Jen in a BabyBjörn, but for adults, and I would be punching people the whole time.

JSL: Well, I would travel like that if this is on offer.

FP: Naben [Ruthnum] was your most recent guest, and Jen, you self-described as a “craft” nerd in that one. You were talking about some of the craft aspects of Naben’s most recent book, and I was wondering what from your perspective CanLit has craft-wise—because I don’t think that’s talked about a lot—that’s different from everywhere else.

JSL: That’s a good question.

DDB: It is a really good question.

FP: Thank you, I tried to write one good one.

DDB: All your questions have been great so far! I’m loving this.

FP: I’ve never interviewed anybody before!

DDB: Well, you’re doing a great job.

FP: Thank you so much. I’m not fishing for compliments, either.

DDB: No, you’re doing great!

JSL: I think Canadians, what are they in to craft-wise.... What are they doing? God. I read a lot of manuscripts at my day job.

DDB: I feel like this is a good question for you! I think in terms of poetry, I feel like there really is a difference between what is happening here and what is happening in the U.S., for example. I don’t know! I feel like people here started to get way more formal, but in a subversive way. I don’t know if I’m correct about this, but from running a poetry magazine for years, that was something I saw quite a bit. For a long time, there was that trend of writing a poem that was this [very] tiny—

JSL: [Laughs]

DDB: Like, the one-inchers. Where your whole poem has to look like a needle.

JSL: In terms of being specific to Canada, in terms of prose, particularly with fiction, a lot of writers are doing this really flat dialogue, where nobody sounds excited.

DDB: Yes!

JSL: I called it “emotionless distancing” or “millennial distancing”—I called it that in an editorial meeting. There’s a move away from hit-you-over-the-head emotional trauma porn, which I think we were doing for quite a long time in Canada, particularly for writers of colour or other marginalized or under-represented groups.
And then, lately, it’s been more like, we’re going to undersell the emotion, and we’re going to make the reader fill in the blanks. Or maybe everyone’s just numb from the pandemic, this could also be true, but it’s this flatness. I have to get used to it. Obviously, it’s not going anywhere, it’s been a couple years that I’ve been noticing this; it’s not going anywhere, and, looking at it reminds me how people can be very flat online, on Twitter. There’s either a period, or no period, there’s never an exclamation point, if you use all caps, people get upset, because you don’t want to be like Kanye West.

FP: Especially now!

JSL: Yeah, especially now. So, I think the online world has contributed somewhat to the lack of punctuation, the lack of quotation marks, the lack of exclamation points. That flatness is really interesting. I don’t know if it’s just Canada. I feel like it probably isn’t.
Also in Canada, in prose in particular, in non-fiction, in memoir, and in fiction, people are very porous with their timelines. I feel like that’s a new thing. Chapters can be very short, and they’re very porous about past, present, memory, current experience.

DDB: You think there’s more of a lack of that traditional narrative form?

JSL: Yeah—

DDB: I’m not reading as many manuscripts as you are, so this is interesting.

JSL: It’s interesting to me that many people have been writing things that are hybrid genre forms. Mashing up speculative fiction and literary fiction, horror and whatever, that’s been happening for a number of years, but what I think is really interesting is that Canadian authors are playing with the idea of memory in those genre forms. It’s quite specific, because obviously the memory is not, like, slam-dunk. It’s not something that is always accurate, and I think that’s a running theme with the structure of the books, too, because that is something that can be reinforced structurally with the way timelines are a bit porous or the way that memory plays tricks on people, and it can also be a plot device. Often is.
I’m thinking of every sort of fiction-y thing I’ve read lately, and the fallibility of memory has been a plot device.

FP: Interesting.

DDB: Oh, Jen. So smart.

JSL: I’m not! You made me think of it. Fawn made me think of it. I just thought of it now.

DDB: Well, it’s good.

FP: It is. I think that is interesting also. I wonder if it’s also that there is never enough money in CanLit publishing. I know there never is anywhere, but I think in the U.S. there’s this push to make it big, especially the closer you get to New York, and we don’t have any room for that. I don’t think anyone is getting million-dollar deals, like, maybe one person a decade. I wonder if there are more people experimenting for that reason. We’re not going to get anywhere; we might as well try to create something genuine and real and artistic, and not just what’s going to sell.

JSL: I mean that could be true, I think when you’re looking at an average advance for an independent publisher, you’re looking at anywhere from two to six grand. It’s not a six-figure thing that we’re gambling. Not me, anyway.

FP: No, same! I’ve seen two-book offers that are one thousand dollars. It’s crazy.

JSL: Yeah, less! Especially for genres like poetry or even smaller presses.

DDB: I think that is especially true for poetry. I think people are able to do their weird work the way they want to because there’s no, you know, it doesn’t mean there are no stakes, but it’s not the same. You’re not playing in that. It’s still competitive, and there are still lots of people who deserve to be published who aren’t.

JSL: Right.

DDB: But I think there are some. I definitely think what Jen was talking about is happening in poetry too. If you’re only going to get a $200 advance, or not going to get one at all and you’re just going to get paid out in your first royalty statement or whatever—just go for it.

JSL: Yeah, I mean maybe we’re just saying Canadian writers are weird little jerks.

DDB: I absolutely agree with that statement!

JSL: We love them, those weird little jerks!

DDB: That would be a great anthology for CanLit.

JSL: Weird Little Jerks?

FP: I feel like this question is maybe overused with women and it’s also International Women’s Day, which is annoying, but I was thinking of the other lit podcast I know of, and they’re all run by men. I’m not a huge podcast listener, so I could be missing some big ones, but I like that the longest-running one that I know is still around is yours, and it’s run by two women. How do you think that affects the way that people receive you and your work?

JSL: Well, I think that if you’re taking about guests, and I think our guests feel comfortable with us, or safe, I don’t know if that has to do with us as women or that we’re also weird little jerks.

DDB: Hashtag “weirdlittlejerks.”

JSL: The podcast jokes a lot about topics that people might think are of specific interest to women. like we joke about Britney Spears a lot. We don’t even really joke. We’re earnest about Britney Spears.

FP: No, that’s a real cause!

DDB: Yeah, we’re just pro-Britney, we’re anti any type of conservatorship.

JSL: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re also constantly talking about our uteri—uteruses? Uteri?

DDB: It’s not just that! Even if we’re talking about the literary community, we are joking about dark stuff and, you know, the bad men of CanLit and the jerk-offs of CanLit. Not the weird little jerks, the jerk-offs.

JSL: It’s funny because you know realistically the majority of people who work in CanLit—

DDB: Absolutely ...

JSL: It’s run almost entirely by women, and I wonder if we are the only literary podcast run by women. If we’re the only ones who offer some measure of representation for the thousands of women who work in publishing.

DDB: I know Jenna Lyn Albert and Rebecca Salazar Leon were cohosts of that podcast, but it was when Jenna was the poet laureate of Fredericton. So, I think that project ended. But that is the only other podcast I know of that wasn’t two dudes.
I think another thing that’s interesting is that we’ve been doing this for a long time—next year will be ten years—and this is only the second time that anyone has approached the podcast in terms of anything promotional or publicity-related.

FP: Hmm.

DDB: Or to talk to us, and the last time was the UBC radio station magazine [Discorder Magazine], which is an amazing publication, and they sent a photographer and took photos of Daniel [Zomparelli] and I, but this is the first time Jen and I have been approached to talk about this in a publication together. Maybe that says in a way that, I don’t know, maybe people don’t really like or respect us? I don’t know!

FP: I don’t think that’s true!

DDB: But you know what I mean?

JSL: We talk too much about hemorrhoids for them to respect us.

DDB: Listen, if they don’t wanna hear about hemorrhoids, they’ve got a lot of pain coming their way.

JSL: Don’t deny it! The hemorrhoid comes for everyone.

DDB: Comes for us all. Comes for you all. You think those bleeders don’t come for you? They’re coming for you!
When I say that people don’t like or respect us, I mean I think there is maybe something to that idea that, you know, it’s not that exciting for two women to be hosting a podcast about CanLit.

JSL: I think Dina and I are well-used to being underestimated, individually and together. It’s not a situation that is unusual for either of us, quite frankly.

DDB: We are very used to it.

JSL: Sometimes the glory arrives! And often it doesn’t.

DDB: You get a moment of glory.

FP: I’m glad Ampersand is the glory.

JSL: There you go!

FP: I think there is something to that. Jen, you said you talk about uteruses, and I think talking about things like that causes people to start to pigeonhole media a certain way. If someone talked about their dick on that podcast—that would just be a podcast. It’s neutral, and everyone would laugh. But as soon as you talk about breasts, and periods, you get framed in this pink, frilly way. I think that’s part of what you were talking about, Dina, about not getting that media attention, and when you do, which is why I didn’t want to ask you about being women, it’s all about that. Like, how does it feel to be such strong girlbosses, that sort of thing.

JSL: We are having conversations about that stuff, and you’re right, Joe Rogan talks about that stuff every single day. He is giving credence to TERFs, he is giving credence to Men’s Rights Activists.

FP: Exactly.

DDB: He is talking about his dick! He is injecting it with ivermectin, or whatever he does. And some things we say may be controversial, not to our listeners or our guests, but if anybody else actually listened they might say, “Is Mrs. Del Bucchia really telling people to steal from the rich?” And yes, that is what I’m saying.

JSL: Which, by the way, is nothing we think is controversial. No, our podcast is not designed to ruffle or start a revolution, and if it did what a happy accident that might be.

DDB: Congratulations, everyone!

JSL: The CanLit revolution is happening!

DDB: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JSL: One of the things that I think Dina and I do is we often have authors who have had a history with people asking them really uncomfortable questions, about things like their identity—whether that’s racial, sexual, gender-based, or whatever—and one of the things we try to do is keep it about their work.
How did you do this thing, this character is amazing, everybody wears nice clothes in your book, please tell us about how you did that. And then we also like to throw in a couple fun things. Everyone wants to talk about their teenage sad diaries, don’t they? Doesn’t everyone want to talk about Kermit the Frog, or Britney Spears?
So, I think there’s an understanding between us as women, because when you’re a female author promoting a book, you get asked those difficultquestions. In my case, as an Asian woman, I get asked horrible questions and know how that feels, so we don’t make the podcast like that. That’s why I think people might feel safe as guests and as listeners, too.

DDB: Yeah. Very good point.

FP: Unfortunately, I’m running out of time on this free Zoom call. I’ll ask you one last question: who are you just dying to have on the podcast?

JSL: Oh, wow.

DDB: Alice Munro.

JSL: Alice Munro ...

DDB: I mean, she’s really old! You know who else I want to have on the podcast? Fred Wah.

JSL: Oh ...

DDB: I love Fred Wah so much. The last party I went to before the pandemic was at that Christmas party, the East Van Publishers party, and I made Fred Wah take a selfie with me, and he was so happy, and I told him I was going to use it for my Christmas card, and I didn’t, and I regret it.

JSL: I mean I would love to have Ann-Marie MacDonald on the podcast. That’s a ’90s thing for me.

DDB: Are you kidding? She’d be AMAZING.

JSL: Also, putting it out there, Joshua Whitehead.

DDB: Joshua Whitehead, come on the podcast! And when we got Eden Robinson on, we were nerding out, because she’s just the best.

JSL: I mean Eden Robinson’s a superstar. We got very lucky that time.

DDB: That was incredible. She’s incredible. That was awesome. There’s so many people. Maybe Dionne Brand—

JSL: I would pass out, but sure.

DDB: I would just be like, I don’t know how to ask you any good questions, so maybe if you could just talk for an hour?

JSL: Please tell us about this beautiful pantsuit you’re wearing, because Dionne Brand is always wearing a beautiful pantsuit.

DDB: Yeah. Tell us about your cool style.

FP: Okay my real last question. You can answer in as much or as little depth as you want to, but I was wondering if the podcast style or the podcast experience has changed throughout COVID.
Are you finding people are responding to you differently because we’re all in our homes again, whereas before it was just an aspect of listening and entertainment, or are you finding it pretty steady since before the pandemic at this point?

JSL: Go ahead, Dina. You might know that better than I do.

DDB: Are you asking about the audience response to the podcast, or the guests?

FP: The audience response, the engagement on social media, etc.

DDB: One thing I’ll say is we’ve been able to do a few live episodes, where we’ve been able to talk to people and have a lot of people join us, and that’s been a really fun way to engage. I think engagement—especially at the beginning of the pandemic—really went up. I was super depressed, and I was like, I can’t make the podcast, I can’t learn new things. I do all the recording and editing, and I was just like, on a personal level, I can’t do this right now. Too many things. I had just bought this beautiful new piece of equipment and we got to use it one time. It really only works if you’re sitting in a room with mics together. But when we came back, we got way more followers on Twitter and for a while, too, our listenership did go up. So I think the pandemic defin- itely did contribute. Also, our live episodes have been incredible. I think we’re going to have another one in April.

FP: Oh, nice.

DDB: Special poetry month nerd-a-thon... verse-a-thon. But I think it’s also been that we’ve been able to do a little bit more outreach in a certain way.

JSL: It’s easier for me doing it all online, personally, because I’m at home with the kid and stuff.

DDB: Whereas for me it’s a lot more difficult because I have to go to work, and I have to leave my home and do all these things physically, so this has been way more tiring for me because I’m always doing stuff. But the engagement has been incredible.

FP: Okay, I’m out of Zoom time! I don’t want to get cut off without thanking you. Thank you so much.

DDB: And if you have any follow-up questions, just let us know. And amend everything about hemorrhoids. Everything else is great.

FP: I’ll keep everything else in. Thank you both!

Two Short Interviews with Independent Presses

FEATURING PHUONG TRUONG OF SECOND STORY BOOKS AND HAZEL MILLAR OF BOOK*HUG PRESS

SECOND STORY PRESS

Fawn Parker: Has your experience as a feminist press in CanLit changed significantly over the thirty-plus years that Second Story has been in operation?

Phuong Truong: I joined Second Story Press in 2004, so while I can’t speak to what it was like in the ’80s and ’90s, I can say that in my eighteen years with the company, it has seen a huge growth in size and stature. When I first started, SSP felt like the underdog, very much a niche publisher. We were doing important books, and while some were hugely successful, many seemed to not get the recognition they deserved. Our mandate of publishing books of substance for women and children has remained largely unchanged, but I think that readers, by necessity, are now seeking out and discovering the kinds of books that we publish in much larger numbers.

FP: Could you talk a bit about the role of grants in small publishing in Canada?

PT: Grants are hugely important in independent publishing in Canada. As in almost every industry, there is a volume of scale that increases profitability and sustainability. The reality is that small, independent publishers cannot print tens of thousands of copies of a book, as a large multinational company might do. We don’t necessarily have the purchasing power and the budgets to get the best possible deals from our suppliers and vendors. The support we get from grants helps to even the playing field, so that we can price our books competitively and continue to produce books that we feel are worthwhile.

FP: Your website features a list of organizations Second Story has worked with (e.g., Plan Canada International, Breast Cancer Society of Canada, etc.). Do you think major presses, both national and international, are doing enough partnering with these types of organizations? Do you see this work as integral to publishing?

PT: We’ve been very fortunate to be able to partner with organizations that share many of the same ideals that we have. I wouldn’t say that these collaborations are integral to publishing, but they can certainly be mutually beneficial to both the publisher and the organization. Books can bring a tremendous amount of awareness to a particular issue, and if the books are for children, they can introduce ideas and empathy and a different way of seeing the world and the people around us. For publishers, having a recognizable seal or logo from a reputable organization on a cover may be enough to pique a reader’s curiosity or lend more credibility to a book.

FP: What do you feel is most valuable and/or unique about small press publishing in Canada?

PT: We publish many first-time authors, which I think is very important. That first book is the hardest to write, the scariest to share. And many of these writers, without representation or connections, would likely never be published by a larger house. Small publishers take on that risk of publishing an unknown and put in the time and work to really help develop a writer’s confidence and craft.

BOOK*HUG PRESS

Fawn Parker: Has the Book*hug Press mission or mandate changed significantly over the nearly two decades the press has been in operation?

Hazel Millar: Yes, it has. We have always been most interested in literary work that is bold, dynamic, innovative, and takes risks; writing that feels necessary and urgent. Our tagline states that Book*hug is a radically optimistic Canadian independent literary press working at the forefront of contemporary book culture. Our mission is to publish work that meaningfully contributes to and reflects

culture and society; books that challenge and push the boundaries of cultural expectations. In 2016, we committed to helping build a more equitable and inclusive CanLit by publishing culturally diverse voices whose work has been historically underrepresented in the publishing landscape. More recently, we committed to producing born-accessible editions of all our titles.

FP: Could you talk a bit about the role of grants in small publishing in Canada?

HM: As an independent literary press, we are very fortunate to be eligible to access funding support for publishers in Canada. Without it, it would be next to impossible for us to have a fighting chance to oper- ate effectively in the domestic Canadian marketplace, which is small and one of the world’s most saturated book markets. Branch plants of multinational publishers take up a lot of space here, and their books get more attention across the board: in the market, the media, in bookstores, even in the minds of the reading public. The federal and provincial funding we receive is essential for us to continue to support an independent Canadian literary culture, one that is created by Canadians for Canadians. It allows us to invest and take chances on emerging voices and support established voices who want to publish their work with Canadian-owned firms. Government agencies’ investment in Canadian-owned publishers means that everything invested by that company in an author stays in Canada and is not funnelled else- where. Presently, it can be difficult for emerging publishers to access funding. While we are incredibly grateful for all the years of investment that arts funding agencies have granted Book*hug, we would love to see institutions expand programs so that newer publishing firms can more easily meet eligibility requirements to access funding. How will Canadian literary culture evolve without new publishers at the table with new ideas?

FP: Do you ever feel external pressures to publish or market work in a way that goes against your values as a publisher?

HM: There are sometimes external pressures for us to publish work that doesn’t reflect our core values or to operate in ways that feel unnatural to us. But that isn’t the game that we want to play. It is essential to stay true to our core values and ensure that the work we acquire reflects the publishing program we have worked tirelessly to build over the last eighteen years. We are thankful to join other publishers in a larger conversation about literary culture. We appreciate that there is room for all types of books and writers at the table. We believe that the work our authors contribute to the literary landscape in Canada is important and has tremendous value. If we gave in to eternal pressure (or gave up entirely), the resulting culture would be lesser for it.

FP: What do you think is most valuable and/or unique about contemporary CanLit?

HM: Canadian Literature is multifaceted and not easily defined. Something will shift and change as soon as you think you have it pinned down. As a national project, CanLit, whatever it is, is still quite young, and has evolved beyond how it was defined fifty-plus years ago. Yet, interestingly, many writers and publishers who helped shape and define it then are still actively writing and publishing. The result is a constant push and pull around an unfixed point.

 Horror, Television, Pseudonyms, and Novels:

Will the real Naben Ruthnum Please Stand up!

A Conversation with Naben Ruthnum

Naben Ruthnum

is the author of the novel A Hero of Our Time and the horror novella Helpmeet, as well as the long essay Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race. As Nathan Ripley, he’s the author of two thrillers. Naben also writes for film and television, often in collaboration with Kris Bertin.

Managing Editor Tali Voron had the privilege of (virtually) sitting down with Naben Ruthnum, novelist, screenwriter, and 2022–2023 Writer-in-Residence at Sheridan College. This is their conversation.

Tali Voron: So, this is a question you probably get all the time. How did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Naben Ruthnum: As far as it being my career, I sort of backed myself in. It ended up being the only thing I was good at, at an age where I really needed to decide how I was going to make a living. I was attracted to reading first. I loved reading, and it still remains my preferred channel of entertainment and learning about anything, really. I wanted to join the life of books somehow, and I thought initially that would be as a critic or a literary journalist. But I also wanted to be involved in movies, things like that. I realized that the way to make all this make sense was to hone my fiction skills. So, I started doing that at a fairly early age.

TV: That’s really cool. How old were you when you started writing and entering the world of fiction?

NR: I guess I actually shouldn’t have said that, because usually when people say they started at an early age, they mean they wrote their first novel in crayon, whereas for me it was when I was fifteen and started writing poor screenplays. That was my first serious attempt at writing something at length. It was in my early twenties when I took a stab at a short story, and then started writing a novel when I was twenty-three, which was a big, baggy mess. It wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t good, certainly. By twenty-five and twenty-six, I was trying to get really serious about shaping my skills through writing short stories.

TV: I would still say that’s very young! Can you share what your writing career has been like so far?

NR: Oh, pretty good. I think. It probably looks like it was more fortunate and blessed from the outside than it feels like from the inside, because once I started getting published, book-wise, it’s been pretty steady. My first book came out in 2017, and there’s been four since. It’s only 2022, so that’s great. But I would say ages twenty-seven to thirty-five were quite the grind. I didn’t know if I should give up or not. I didn’t have early fantasies of getting a short story collection published, and it making me a million dollars—nothing completely unrealistic like that. But I had begun to feel that the kind of writing I wanted to do was completely out of step with what the market, readers, publishers, and agents wanted. It was quite the uphill battle, and I still haven’t entirely shaken the notion that my writing falls outside of what people are looking for. But I think that doubt helps me stay grounded about even the good things in my career. And that career is still riddled with failure, with more projects that don’t get published or don’t reach the screen, or don’t get optioned.

And yeah, as a side note to that, I developed my screenwriting stuff alongside the book stuff. It opened up a whole new dimension of struggle and failure, as well as many more chances to make a little money here and there and also to work collaboratively, which I really love.

TV: That’s a perfect segue. I was going to ask you about your screenwriting; I’d love to hear how you managed the two side by side because it’s really fascinating; I cannot imagine doing them in parallel.

NR: I mean, I can’t imagine doing them separately. But in order to get any momentum in working on screenplays, I really needed my cowriting partner, Kris Bertin. We don’t write all our projects together in the screenwriting world anymore. But we certainly needed each other as a resource in those earlier days, when we were also very much struggling to make ends meet financially in our separate writing and working lives, and really concentrating on getting good, polished books out. We started by writing a spec script for a horror movie together and sent that out to whoever wanted to read it. From there we started getting a little bit of work here and there.

The early great stroke of luck I had was related to my novel. Find You in the Dark by Nathan Ripley [Ruthnum’s pseudonym] was my first thriller novel that was optioned by eOne up here, and they brought on a showrunner and a writer. When I told him that I write too, I wouldn’t be too controlling of the project, and would love to be involved, he got me a job in the writing room of his current show at the time, Cardinal.

Having the books granted me so much more credibility in the screenwriting world, as well as some very well-founded hesitation from TV and film professionals of a novelist making the jump. You have to first respect that you’re learning something different. And I continue to learn in those worlds.

TV: So, was it around 2017 when you were also getting into screenwriting, then?

NR: Around 2017 is when Kris and I finished our first script together. I’d made attempts before. Like, I cowrote a college-comedy-type movie in my midtwenties with my friend Simon McNabb, who’s since gone on to become a successful TV writer.

Anyway, that spec was my first serious run at a script as an adult, and Kris and I have a good combination of sensibilities. We can also argue productively and advance things without hurting each other’s feelings. So, it was a good relationship, and it remains one.

TV: That’s incredible. Have you done any writing collaborations outside of the screenwriting world?

NR: I wrote a short story with the writer Andrew F. Sullivan. I found it both really cool and also something that I’m not sure I could ever do again. I don’t know if it’ll ever work—Andrew has since gone on to collaborate with Nick Cutter (Craig Davidson’s pseudonym), and they have a novel coming out with a big American publisher. So, ha, I really should have stuck to that with Andrew. He had the right idea. But Kris and I have actually thought about taking some of the original screenwriting ideas we had, and sort of inventing a new pseudonym, or just a collaborative name and writing them as novels, because, like I said, I think the reason I got credibility and noticed at all in the screenwriting world was because of the books. It can be a very roundabout, frustrating way to develop something from an original screenplay if you’re not somebody with a reputation in screenwriting, which we certainly are not. Whereas, just having a book gives you some sort of weird automatic credibility.

TV: Is there one of your novels that you’d be especially excited to see turned into a film or TV show?

NR: Well, it’s hard to pick … my last two books have recently been optioned, and I’d love to see them both make it. Helpmeet I’m super excited about because it’s a crazy body-horror type concept. And if all goes well, Kris and I will be very involved in working on it. A Hero of our Time is a novel that would best be adapted by a different writer and production team, with me weighing in as needed. That’s actually a really exciting feeling, too. Watching someone make something quite different out of the thing that you envisioned in book form would be interesting to see.

TV: I’m going to keep my fingers crossed that we see both of them on the big screen soon.

NR: That’s another thing. Not succeeding all the time has been very helpful for me in this specific lane as well. I think a lot of writers when they get a book option, you’ll see them announce it as though their movie is coming out soon. Your movie is not coming out soon, even if everything goes well! It can be a while. It’s good to be reconciled to that in advance.

TV: For sure, and it must be great to be familiar with that side of the industry. I’m really glad that you mentioned Helpmeet and A Hero of our Time. Congratulations on both books by the way; two books in one year is huge and must be super-duper busy.

NR: One of them is very small—Helpmeet is 18,000 words or so. A novella, but still a book, technically, so yeah, I’ll still take the compliment. Thank you.

TV: I wonder if first you could tell me about what inspired Helpmeet. When I was reading about it, it just seemed so different from everything that you’ve written before.

NR: Horror is huge for me, and I think that’s the reason people really responded to this one. It’s probably been my most well-liked thing I’ve done, and I think it’s because in those few pages you can tell that this is a person who’s been obsessively reading the past two hundred years of horror fiction since he was a little kid. There’s a lot of Henry James in it, and David Cronenberg, and Clive Barker. There’s a historical backdrop and the prose reflects that, but it’s also really visceral, modern, nasty body horror. The idea just really came to me. It’s one of those things where I can pretend to overly intellectualize it, but it’s a story that I saw the shape of pretty early on. Initially I was thinking about it in terms of film. So, in that first iteration, there was an earlier introduction of a villain, and a sort of third-act faceoff, which actually might be, if it ever appears as a film, stuff that might all come back.

In terms of the way it turned out as a book, I really just sat down and typed it for five nights. Because I had an idea of where it was going, it was my fastest written thing.

TV: Out of curiosity, from an editorial perspective, if you wrote it in five nights, how long did it take you after that to get it to where it is?

NR: Unusually, and I don’t want to use this as an example to anybody else or myself in the future, but I ended up writing it at night, and editing it in the morning for like an hour. By the time I reached the end of that fifth night and sixth morning it was almost ready to go.

But I don’t think that approach is good for a full novel, at least for me. It worked for this length, the novella, very well. I’m not a superb short story writer. I’ve written some good ones, but I don’t think I’ll ever break through to that higher level. A novella makes better use of the things I’ve learned as a novelist, but you can write it at a sprint. It’s just short enough to sort of contain the whole thing in mind and I feel like when you can hold a whole story in your head it’s easier to write a first draft or a draft that is quite close to the final draft. With Helpmeet, I’m sure the length helped a lot.

TV: Let’s jump back to A Hero of our Time. Its description as “a vicious takedown of superficial diversity initiatives and tech culture, with a beating heart of broken sincerity” gripped me right away. You’re tackling such incredibly timely and important topics, and I would wonder how this novel came together for you. How did you know that the approach you took was the one that you wanted for these issues?

NR: I realized that the matters in that little blurb, and others, were all things that bothered me, and my discussions of them were always private. And I thought, how do I write about this in essays and in non-fiction? Because finding that line of ambiguity where it’s clear that you’re not being, you know, some silly “anti-woke” crusader who’s pretending that everything progressive is hypocritical, nor are you saying everything that’s progressive must naturally be correct, and there can never be anybody who’s exploiting the system for power because to say that would undermine everything and we’ll lose all the progress we’ve made.

The answer was obvious. It just didn’t immediately occur to me that this is what a novel does; it’s how you have this extremely complex conversation and discussion where you let the reader sort of feel that imbalance of rectitude and power grasping, and how they can sometimes exist in the same person, and how that person can be good or bad. I felt that the thing that I’ve done right in it is that there is, as the “hero” in the title ironically makes clear, no hero in the book. Heroic is how Osman, the protagonist, might feel on this crusade, and he may be tilting at someone that we recognize as an antagonist, that we recognize as exploitative: but this villain also has goals that actually might end up helping people. Whereas Osman doesn’t. He just has this very hollow mission and a ton of hatred, and he’s a person who can’t even spend time with himself. I think that was sort of key to making this not a manifesto, which is not something I could even do, because I don’t have a long-organized list of fixed values and moral credos myself. Beyond a few dozen that are, you know, just normal ones like not killing people.

TV: That does make a lot of sense.

NR: There’s just some things that you can do in fiction that you can’t do in other genres.

TV: This is a great time to turn to talking about genres. Do you have one that comes to you most naturally or that you prefer to work in?

NR: It’s in that baggy world of literary fiction. That’s where I usually go, and I think that’s the reason why what I’m working on now is a horror novel or horror-leaning literary novel. I think they occupy the same space a lot, especially in today’s market.

I love thrillers and crime, and I feel like fifty years ago they had a lot of overlap with literary fiction. I think the thrillers that do the best today are so page-turning and propulsive, and readers’ expectations have become quite fixed on driving plot.

I feel less at home in the thriller genre than I did five years ago. I like those books, and I continue to read thrillers. I find that more often than not, I’m reading thrillers from 1978. Not that year in particular, but you know.

TV: That’s interesting. And you said you’re working on another horror novel?

NR: Now, yeah. I have two novel ideas in mind, one of which I really want to push through. I’m excited to get to the end of that horror novel so I can start on my other project, and actually that’s something that the time that being Writer in Residence at Sheridan is really going to help.

TV: I was just going to ask you, when do you find the time to write in between everything you’re doing?

NR: A lot of writers do talk about what a struggle it is, and of course it can be a struggle. But I have friends who become parents, and have seen them thrive even with this new, seemingly all-consuming demand in their lives. There’re other ways that demands are introduced into a human life, of course, like a full-time career aside from writing. But I’ve seen writers who used to get a thousand words done over four or five hours, cope with a more constricted schedule by squeezing in the same word count into the hour they now have to themselves between 5:30 and 6:30 in the morning, or late at night. I think that’s a function of your subconscious helping you when you’re not at the desk much because you know that your time is becoming more and more restricted. I try to do that as much as possible. It’s not exactly discipline; it’s just to not fool myself. Knowing that I wrote eighteen thousand words in five days just a few months ago shows me that I can do that. So, when it comes to why my current project isn’t advancing even in a month as busy as this, I have to admit I’m just taking too many breaks. I don’t necessarily inflict that sort of “don’t be easy on yourself” philosophy on other writers, especially student writers. But I find it’s useful for me.

TV: I’ve heard that a lot. There’s definitely something to be said for when you have less time to spend on something, you can get it done faster. When you have an endless amount of time, you’ll use it all to get something done. So, when you have a smaller window, you just make things work within it. At the same time, it does take a lot of discipline to know that.

NR: You know you’ll use that window to sit down and work. The more that my entire income becomes attached to being able to produce writing, the easier it is to put that pressure on myself. Again, it’s not that I definitely think it’s a good thing, or the right way to be a writer.

TV: I mean, is there a right way?

NR: Absolutely not. In fact, in many ways, the only-writing-as-a-career way is arguably the wrong way. Unless you’re quite comfortable financially coming into it, or you have the promise of financial security ahead of you, I think you can actually damage your relationship to the enjoyment of writing by tying it to cash. And also, you know, lead yourself into possibly some pretty bad places financially. Unless you’re willing to do a ton of things and really work at it all the time.

TV: I really appreciate that. I feel that only until quite recently that aspect of being a writer was never really spoken about.

NR: The thing is, you often find writers who say it’s impossible to make a living writing, and well, I have made a living writing for a few years, but I also know what they mean. It’s very difficult and improbable to lay down a secure foundation for a future with just writing. When I’m talking to younger writers, I like to remind them that they can have a very full and happy writing life in conjunction with a day-job career that involves writing, or doesn’t, but that allows their creative output to not be the foundation of their subsistence. That can be a really happy and good way to live, I think.

TV: What kind of work were you doing outside of writing?

NR: I’ve had all kinds of jobs. The most recent job before books and screen money picked up, was social-media-writing-based. It was a lot of scheduling and editing and organizational work. I also had a long stream of customer service jobs and a lot of secretarial office jobs.

TV: Very cool.

NR: I was an ESL teacher many times as well. One-on-one, that was good, but I finally had to face the fact, which is tough for me, that after getting a master’s in English, I’m not a great classroom teacher. I’m good at doing a one-off seminar. I think I’m good at working with students one-on-one, going over manuscripts, but teaching a semester-long creative writing seminar seems so high pressure and difficult. I’ve been guesting in classes recently, just watching the teachers teaching. It’s not just a gift or an act. Of course, there’s a bit of that, but there’s actual work that goes into it. It’s a lot and it’s an impressive feat. I realized pretty late that I couldn’t really do that for a living. It caused me to think about a different backup plan, which ended up being really serious about TV and film.

TV: Wow, so initially you were planning to go into teaching, and then you switched to TV and film.

NR: That was my thinking while I was drafting my first thriller, and I was at McGill doing my master’s, thinking, “Well, I’ll teach college and then I’ll also write. But the college teaching will be a steady source of income, whether it’s sessional work or not.” I taught a couple of semester- long courses at a college and didn’t think I did a great job at them. I thought that the students who were already pretty good continued to do well, but in terms of pulling students who were struggling with essay writing up like 10 percent or 15 percent, I felt that I just wasn’t good enough, and it was not a good feeling. I didn’t really know how to improve because of course, I hadn’t really learned any pedagogical skills. I did learn how to analyze literature, and to some degree write it.

*

TV: I wonder if you could share what your writing process looks like, and if you have any habits or rituals that you follow.

NR: I have to boringly say no, but something I do that I think not everybody does is when I’m writing something long, I tend not to outline at all and just sort of plow forward on momentum until about page one hundred of the book, and then at that point put it aside, or put it aside very briefly, and then pick it up as if I’m doing a redraft of it—usually a full second draft. That’s when my thinking about outlining happens. Not before the project.

TV: So, you usually don’t know what the next one hundred pages or the end will look like?

NR: Usually I don’t really plan out every step until the end. My planning stage is during that redraft of the first chunk of the book.

TV: Wow! That’s really, really cool. So, do you ever find that what you’re working on ends up taking you in a completely different direction than you initially expected?

NR: That’s what happens almost every time. For example, with A Hero of our Time it wasn’t as ambiguous. The main character was never heroic, but the antagonist was definitely way more black-and-white bad. And then I realized that was such a shallow way to approach not just humanity, but a complex political issue like this. I thought it would be interesting to suggest that Osman just doesn’t have enough insight to see that this person is being evil and manipulative on an everyday level in service of a very lofty goal. It becomes an ends-justify-the-means story, and I thought that was both something I didn’t have to delineate and I could just suggest. It made the character so much more interesting to me.

TV: It’s always so fascinating how writing can take on a life of its own as you go through the process.

TV: Let’s go back to your work with TV and film. I wonder if you can speak to how it’s similar and different to writing a novel.

NR: There are two big differences that come to mind. A screenplay is always way more structured from the beginning. I think if you try to write the screenplay freehand without a structure, you’re going to run into many problems. I do a lot more outlining with screenwriting. When Kris and I work together, or if I’m working alone, I know what every scene is and it’s in an outline before I actually write it. The other big difference is that with screenwriting, it becomes collaborative and other voices get in at a much earlier level. I think that’s because it’s a mass-audience-facing form: you know that in order for these things to exist, for them to actually ever achieve investment and screening, even if it’s the strangest, most esoteric artistic idea, it’s still going to cost more than a million dollars. This idea needs to have an audience for it to get made, so you’re letting those other eyes in much sooner.

TV: Does that sort of perspective influence whether an idea you have will be written as novel or a screenplay?

NR: Absolutely. A lesson I learned has been that if you have a really strange idea, or something that you really want to keep distinct and strange, it might be best to write it as a book or story first, even if your ultimate intention is for it to exist in film, because you can prove that it works on the page. So, there’s a strong argument that the way it was first envisioned might actually be correct.

TV: Would you say it’s easier to get a book published, or to get something turned into a TV show or movie?

NR: Neither is easy, of course, but getting a book published is easier. I don’t have a ton of evidence for that. But I think if you just look at the financials it takes just to get somebody with the power to push the button to make the TV show to look at your script, there’s a higher chance of success with turning a manuscript into a book that somebody else publishes for you.

TV: I’m really curious to learn more about your pseudonym, Nathan Ripley. You’ve written two thrillers under the name. Can you share why and how you chose Nathan Ripley?

NR: I always knew I wanted to write literary fiction, ever since I was a teen. But then I also like werewolves, and action movies and Stephen King … so I assumed, like a lot of authors, it makes sense to have more than one identity. Just so you can write as many different things as possible, and I was always very transparent about the pseudonym; on the back cover of those books you’ll also see Naben Ruthnum.

As for why I did it, it was to make sure my audience, not that I have one or necessarily have one right now, knew which kind of book they were getting. And that’s why I said, you know, horror and literature being a little close together, I can definitely imagine somebody who enjoyed A Hero of our Time possibly being into Helpmeet.

But I have a harder time picturing a lot of my readers of Find You in the Dark enjoying Hero of our Time. So, there’s a little more bleed between that sort of horror and literature category. I just don’t want someone to pick up my book and be disappointed by what kind of book it is. So that was the thinking around it; basically, it’s helpful for readers and it helps to not lose them.

TV: Do you think if you chose to write in a completely different genre that you would adopt another pseudonym for that?

NR: No, I don’t think so. But if I get another idea for a psychological thriller, I will write again as Nathan Ripley. You know, for better or worse, my branding has not been awesome except for the two thrillers. All the books I’ve written have been quite different from each other, including the first non-fiction book. The good thing that’s come out of it is now whatever readers I do have or whoever looks to review a new book of mine knows at a glance that this is a person who writes many different kinds of things. I feel like it initiates a hesitation in the reader like, “Well, what kind of book is this by him?”

TV: Yeah, that makes sense. And we haven’t spoken about your first book at all. Let’s talk a bit about Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race, which was published by Coach House Books in 2017. How did it come to be? It’s also very different from your other work.

NR: Yeah, it was part of Exploded Views, a non-fiction series that kind of took the form of the novella to the non-fiction world. It’s too long to be an essay, but too short to be a non-fiction book. So the editor, Emily Keeler, reached out to me to ask if I had an idea, and a few days later I realized that my interest in food culture could blend with my ideas of how I think South Asian writers get funnelled by the industry into writing a certain kind of thing—and that’s also something that can be said about women writers or queer writers or Black writers, etc., etc. So, I could stay in my lane and also talk about pop culture and food and a ton of different books, and I felt that that was the way I could fill up one hundred pages and make them interesting and linked together. But it had never really occurred to me that I would write non-fiction. I certainly never dreamed that my first book would be non-fiction. I got into it through writing book reviews, and then arts essays. It was a surprise to me, but I realized that this was something I could do.

TV: Let’s talk a little bit about publishers and the publishing industry, because of course, you’ve worked with some of the Big Five, and also independent presses. What was your experience like?

NR: I’ve learned that it’s impossible to guess where the advantage lies. For example, Helpmeet came out with a micro-press called Undertow Publications, which has a lot of direct contact with people in the horror community, and huge respect. I can’t imagine a major publisher doing a better job. As the book market shifts, it becomes less imperative, advance aside, for you to think of the success of your book being entirely rooted on finding a big corporate publisher. I’ve had really interesting experiences with all the publishers. You run into some really idiosyncratic and strange personalities, but I don’t have any horror stories, thankfully. All of my publishers and editors have been pretty great. But there are sometimes petty tyrants in the world of publishing.

There are bad experiences to be had in the small press world that may not necessarily echo the bad experiences to be had in the major publishing world for writers. The bad experience with a major publisher, probably, tends to be some variety of indifference. If you’re unlucky with a big publisher, you get the sense that nobody knows what to do with your book. But I haven’t had that experience either. It’s been great so far and hopefully it stays that way.

*

TV: Being a writer is incredibly challenging and of course I feel like that in and of itself is an understatement. I was listening to an interview the other day that you gave back in July, where you mentioned that you only started your full-time writing career six to seven years ago, and you alluded to that as well earlier in our conversation. So, what does it take to lead a writerly life?

NR: I’ve learned that there are so many different ways to lead a writerly life. My friend Andrew F. Sullivan is a great example of someone who’s such a committed writer, who has great books in the world, and will continue to have great books, but he also works a very serious full-time job. I think making a writing life work takes being open to the idea of doing more than one thing, and probably accepting that you are not a genius who is owed a living.

I think if you get in the mindset of only writing being what you value, you’re going to shrink the number of opportunities you have and readers you have, and also the excitement you get out of writing because unless you really strike a certain chord like Elena Ferrante or Sally Rooney, you might find yourself not really able to put together the other parts.

The life part of the writerly life is how you’re going to subsist and continue creating the work. So for me, variety has been how I managed it.

TV: That’s a really great answer, thank you.

TV: What are you currently reading?

NR: I’m finishing The Satanic Verses and I’m also reading Jim Harrison’s Brown Dog: Novellas, which are literary fiction, but also really fun, light reading. He’s one of my favourites; he has a very flowing, first-drafty style, but with countless superb poetic lines.

TV: So, you’re also reading two books at the same time.

NR: Yeah, I often do that. And the latest one I read just before that was this horror novel that was pretty great: Cunning Folk by Adam Nevill.

TV: What is the best piece of advice, writing-related or not, that you’ve ever received?

NR: You’re not too good for anything. I know that sounds grim and perhaps sinister, but I think it’s a good way to think of life.

TV: I agree. That’s a good one. And one final question, as a writer, what is your least-favourite question that you’ve received?

NR: I tend to be so open to questions, but it would have to be, “Why, don’t you write more of X kind of book?” and that’s really what Curry is all about in terms of people. So there are many variations. That question for me specifically would be like, “Oh, why don’t you write more stories like ‘Cinema Rex’” early in my career where like that was the one story I’d written about Mauritius, where my parents are from, and brown people.

But even that question isn’t that bad, it just means somebody really liked something you did, or thinks you’d be really good at writing a certain kind of thing, and they just wish you would. It can feel critical but really it’s saying, “Oh, I really liked this thing you made. I wish you’d make more like it.”

 Surviving COVID:

How Toronto’s TYPE Books kept their customers reading through the Pandemic

The urge to shop locally has skyrocketed in the recent years. It seems there has been a call to action—evident, perhaps, on the faces (quite literally) of all the people who chose to purchase handmade masks instead of disposable ones and the increased holiday shopping at local retailers. (1) But once lockdowns began, small businesses found themselves struggling to stay open. For some, the solution was to move to curbside pickup and delivery.
Shopping online is not a new concept, and it would be fair to say that many customers are happy to shop for their favourite products without having to leave their home. For introverts, this grants the additional benefit of fewer human interactions. But some things lose their luster in the switch from a brick-and-mortar experience to a virtual one, and book shopping is definitely one of them.
For the dedicated browser, there is no greater feeling than walking into a bookstore, looking at all the gorgeous covers, and perusing the jacket copy. The old saying about not judging a book by its cover is put to the test, especially for online shoppers who only see a small thumbnail image of the cover. Perhaps the best part of book-shopping is talking with people who enjoy books as much as you do and getting their personal recommendations. At independent bookstores, that personalized experience is important to their customers, so how do booksellers provide this service during a lockdown?
I sat down (virtually, of course) with Kyle Buckley, manager of TYPE Books’ Queen Street location, to discuss the obstacles that independent bookstores faced during the pandemic.*

Krysta Belcourt: Would you mind starting out by telling me a bit about the history of TYPE Books and your role there?

Kyle Buckley: We are an independent bookstore in Toronto, Ontario, and we are fifteen years old this year. We now have three brick-and-mortar stores, and I'm talking to you today from our Queen Street store, which is our very first store. I have worked at TYPE for pretty much all of those fifteen years.

Disclaimer: From here on, Krysta Belcourt, interviewing for The Ampersand Review, will be referred to as AR.

AR: What sort of challenges did TYPE Books encounter during the pandemic?

KB: The major challenge was that we had to close our doors. That happened, of course, more than once during the pandemic when there were lockdown measures in place for retail spaces. That meant we did not have customers in our stores, which is not something we had ever encountered before. It’s not something we had ever really imagined happening.
There were other things, as well. Getting information was a real challenge throughout the pandemic. Customers would have questions like, “oh, when do you think you’ll open back up?” or, “when will certain restrictions change or when?” And we didn’t know any more than other citizens knew. We were getting our information from watching the news conferences just like everyone else. That’s when you rely on things like having great relationships with your neighbours—businesses that we have been next to for years. You combine your knowledge, you get together, and you discuss what you’ve heard, what you know, and what we think the best ways forward will be.

AR: Were there times when you couldn't operate at all, or were you able to provide delivery and curbside pickup throughout the whole pandemic?

KB: Thankfully, we were able to avoid a situation where we weren't able to operate at all. So even on the very first day that we closed our doors—which was in March 2020—when we had no idea what the future would bring and what everything would entail, we were able to at least provide curbside, contact-free pick up. Right away, we had people calling us and we were selling books over the phone. Quickly, we were able to get some protocols in place to be able to do deliveries in Toronto.
Then we got our online operations—we have an online store that started during the pandemic. Our online store is our 4th store really—that's TYPEbooks.ca. We have a curated selection of products. In the early days of the pandemic, we were just taking peoples’ addresses and delivering things on our own if we could, working really hard to try to make sure that we weren't leaving any of our customers or our community behind. But then our online store made that a lot easier for us.

AR: Now that the stores are back open for customer shopping have you found that more people are still preferring to shop online, or are you finding that the online sales have slowed down because people can come back in store now?

KB: There is a balance, but by-and-large we do most of our sales in person. When you're shopping for books, it's best to be able to be in a store and look at the back-cover copy of a book, look through it, and get recommendations from people who are working there, and who you may or may not already have relationships with. But there is still a balance—our online store will always be part of our business now.

AR: Did you find yourselves making any other changes to accommodate customers during lockdown, or were there any other initiatives that you brought into play?

KB: A huge change for us too was the way we used social media. When things were unsure, we wanted to let people know they could still call and make purchases over the phone, and that we can provide curbside pickup and deliveries. So, we started using Instagram with frequency on a map that we had never done before. We started posting as much information as we could, and we made lots of videos. I think in our stores, we really feel like we're part of the communities that we’re in, and we were able to keep those connections because of social media.

AR: Speaking of social media, can you tell me a bit about the process of navigating from doing those in-person events to all virtual events? How did that go? Were there challenges?

KB: The challenges were largely that I'm not a particularly technologically savvy person. There are simple things to figure out, like how to do an event over Instagram Live or Zoom. And yes, we certainly stopped doing any in-person events. It was a pleasant surprise to be able to do some of the things we would be doing otherwise just as virtual events, because there's pluses and minuses to virtual events.
The minuses are that you lose out on the interpersonal aspect of things: everyone getting together in the same space and you're part of a live event, the questions and engagement from the audience is different—and if you're interviewing an author, or if an author’s reading from their book, it always seems to have a different energy when it's live and there are people there. It's always nice to be able to get people into our stores, which are just really nice spaces to be in, and that all adds to the overall quality of a literary event.
At the same time, some of the pluses were that we could reach out to authors that we otherwise wouldn't have been able to do an event with at all. One of my favorite virtual events we did during the pandemic—we reached out to an author named Lucie Elven, who's a writer in the UK. We were able to do an Instagram Live event with her. It's not as if we would have, in other times, been able to say, “hey, we’ll fly you to Toronto and come and do a reading in our little store.” So, this was a terrific thing that we realized. Our scope is larger if we think about events virtually because it means that you can reach out to authors or writers anywhere, which I really do think is genuinely exciting.

AR: Do you think in the future you'll continue to do those virtual events, or a balance between the two?

KB: Yeah, I think that I would love for there to be a time when we're participating in in-person events again, whether that's in our stores or in other spaces. I also think that there's advantages to virtual events, and it can be accessible to a whole lot of people. I’d love for us first to maintain a balance of both of those things going forward.

AR: You talked a little bit about the benefit of being able to have events in the store, especially for literary events where it just sets the environment. Obviously, that is part of the appeal of independent bookstores—the in-store experience of being in there and getting the customized service. So, looking forward, do you think that there's a way that independent bookstores can offer something virtually to substitute that in-store experience?

KB: I think the answer is yes and no. One of the things that we try to do—which I think is working well for us—is curate our online store. Our stores are all different from each other because they respond directly to the neighborhoods and the communities that they're in. So, we tried to curate an online store with all the same amount of care as we know we do in our actual stores. That said, I love selling books to people—talking to people about books that we both read and making recommendations—I love everything in that kind of exchange. There's nothing virtually, as of yet, that's been a way to substitute for that. But who knows, maybe that is what the future might bring, but I'll always love the in-store shopping experience.

AR: Nothing beats walking into a store and looking at all the covers and being able to talk to someone else about books that you love. That desire to provide that curated experience, is that where the mystery bags originated from? How did that come about?

KB: Absolutely, and that's been one of the most fun and interesting things for us during the whole pandemic—is doing these mystery bags for people. That came about from trying to find a way to satisfy our regular customers, who we already knew what they liked or didn't like. They would come in and just be like, “okay, what's new that you think I might be interested in?” And then being like, “oh absolutely, I saw a couple of things just last week that for sure would interest you. Take a look at this and this and that.”
When we weren't able to do that, because we weren't able to have customers in the store, the mystery bag became a really great solution because people could just tell us what they liked and what they didn't like. There is a little questionnaire that we have on our website that can be filled out, or we can do it a little more informally over the phone. It's great because there is the element of mystery and surprise to it—you don't know what it is exactly you’re going to get, but it's also not random. These are picked with your interests, your reading history, and your likes and dislikes in mind.

AR: Have you found it to be a big hit with customers?

KB: We've had a great response from it, and we love doing it. It's a lot of fun because you just have to imagine yourself into a customer’s life—what do I think they would really, really, want? You can't know for sure—it's a bit of a guessing game. But also, you’re solving a mystery in a sense.

AR: Almost like trying to buy a Christmas gift for a friend—trying to find the best thing that they're going to enjoy.

KB: Yeah, and that’s the exciting part about gift-giving, right? Gift giving is trying to figure out what would really excite, or just interest, or delight someone, and that's what we get to do when we put together these mystery bags.

AR: Have you noticed any changes in customer shopping trends over the past couple of years, with either how they're preferring to shop or the specific products that they're buying?

KB: We've certainly noticed different things at different times. In the early days of the pandemic, we started selling a whole lot more jigsaw puzzles than we had ever sold before. The same thing with books about how to make sourdough bread. Because these were the funny trends that really picked up, especially during the early days of the pandemic. Even though these are private activities that people were doing in their own homes, because they weren’t out socializing, there was a communal aspect to it, in a sense, that everyone was doing these things at the same time. I don't know if that's a lasting or concrete change, but it was an interesting and fun moment for us when it happened. All of a sudden, we were making videos on Instagram about all the new puzzles we would get in, and the next day, as soon as we opened the store, the phones would be ringing with everyone just wanting the puzzles they had seen on Instagram.
At different times too during the pandemic we realized that the big titles, like the writers and books that people already knew about, were selling en masse a lot more. It was a lot harder to sell the more niche books and books that might be more interesting to us. Maybe they’re from smaller presses, maybe they're just from authors that someone at the store really loves, but an author that isn't necessarily as well known. It became a lot harder to sell books like that because that relies so much on our relationships with our customers. So, if someone who works at one of our stores knows a customer a little bit when they come in, they can say, “this is an author I really like, you’ve maybe never heard of this writer, but I really love this person’s books and I think they’ll appeal to you.” You can show them the books, you can put them in their hands. So that was harder to do whenever we were in full lockdown.

AR: So now that you're back open and things are starting to return to some semblance of normal, have you found new challenges with the supply chain shortages? Has that affected you, both with book printing and the cargo ship issues?

KB: The one thing about all these issues around the supply chain is that, at least this was a situation that there's been a lot of discussion about, so it was on our radar nice and early. What we've done is—really early—we launched into all of our Christmas holiday season ordering and buying. So, we're doing everything we can to just be ahead of any supply chain problems that could come. There are still going to be some things that happen. There's going to be books that the print run of which might sell out in early December or in late November, and are simply not going to be reprinted again until sometime well into the next year. So, we figured the best thing for us to do is just be as proactive as possible and let everyone know that they can shop as early as they like and that we're ready for it.

AR: What initiatives, specific to TYPE Books, are you most excited about that have come about in the past couple of years?

KB: The initiative that I’m the most excited about overall is the fact that we were able, through whatever means—whether it was over social media like on Instagram, or through different things we came up with like our mystery bags—to just find a way to make our outreach be as personality-based as possible. Everyone at our store participates in our Instagram account. Last year during December—and it's something that we're hoping to continue again this year—every day, we would post a new video of one of our staff members picking a book of the day. We talk about it for about a minute and then we post it on our Instagram account. It's great because it's the amazing personalities of the people who work here at the store. It's easy to think of virtual things as cold and impersonal, so it’s been exciting for us to try and be as personality-based and as much ourselves as we can be, even when we're reaching out over social media.

*This interview has been edited for length.

1 | Recent data from Twitter Canada found that 40 percent of Canadians on Twitter stated they would be more likely to shop locally for the holidays. Read more about the data in this Retail Insider article: https://retail-insider.com/retail-insider/2021/11/canadian-consumers-intend-to-support-local-businesses-ahead-of-december-holidays-interview/

KRYSTA BELCOURT

is the Editorial Intern for The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing. She currently resides in Muskoka, living the small-town, cottage country life and using all of her free time to read as many books as she can. She is currently working towards her degree in the Honours Bachelor of Creative Writing & Publishing program at Sheridan College in Mississauga.

Earthway

by Canisia Lubrin

zone one.

We open the door of a motherless city
Find the soil is bearable

Two lifetimes of extinctions swim into our mouths
The future—a figure of speech

We laugh ourselves into a bruise, a midday shadow
spills ruined copies of old cities at our feet

      Lobs their printed heads
      at the death-fetching sergeant

We meet in the procession on our way to something
      blue and scorching

Do I sound the Atlantic’s long rage?

Octave a girl’s symbol of a god’s
hatching toward god-shaped 

Invisible, this skip of a stone at night
toward a vision of the world tested
on saltwater though never earned

Dark cargo, long ago, bending today
where you could skip a stone on this light

The whole weak-eyed plan from dog
to woman, bicce fined to speak hourly 

What should we make of them…
the knotted strands of that last frame?

New distance between nouns and consolation
Or symbols: mother, caretaker, wife, a certain
something threading doors, lines of salt

Calcine an armoured eyebrow: lift any weight
and I am unprepared for anything you ask

The roots and air

We live in the everything else
The lower harbour where the tide erases
itself as would a photograph
entombed in its chemical wash

We erase the paper that marks us present
because we are nowhere with Lucille Bogan
in the earbuds

And being nowhere I have no plans but to blink
all day, I wash my mind in this rust of stars
that makes the shore, the cosmic effluvia yawns

Besides, I’ve given us both my teeth

My aerosolized liver, my once-crushed spleen
I gave us both my teeth, do you remember?
Both of them decayed:

 CANISIA LUBRIN

is a writer, critic, editor, teacher, and winner of the 2021 Windham- Campbell Literature Prize for poetry. Her book, The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland & Stewart, 2020), won the 2021 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category, and appeared notably in such venues as The New York Times, Quill & Quire, Jewish Currents, Humber Literary Review. Lubrin’s international publications include translations of her work into four languages. Her writing has been listed for, among others, the Toronto Book Award, the Journey Prize, the Gerald Lampert, the Pat Lowther. She received a Writers’ Trust Rising Stars award in 2020. Voodoo Hypothesis (Buckrider Books, 2017) was published to wide acclaim, and named a CBC Best Book. Find her work in Poetry, Brick, Poetry London, Poets.org, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Lubrin’s debut fiction, Code Noir, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.

Dear Ranchers, Wolves Are Kind

by Eva H.D.

Wolves are good. Wolves love cream cheese.
A wolf walked my daughter home once, gratis,
without ever trying to steal a kiss or jugular.
Wolves laugh, too, just like coyotes and landlords.

Wolves are a great species. They have been captured
on film. A wolf can suck on hard candy without
ruining her teeth. Wolves are pack animals, they
have self-restraint, they need no toothbrushes.

Wolves have hackles just like the ones that stipple
the backs of the women that you, Dear Ranchers,
touch without asking; the hackles rise and rise, a wave
of encomium, awkward gawking of the tiptoe crowd.

Wolves love summer for how much it resembles
winter, its elder sister. They love homemade popsicles,
how the juice that trellises down their silvering jowls
is made of real juice. Wolves have a powerful thirst.

 I myself have known wolves. Tone-deaf, immune to
criticism, abandoned and admired by the pack, in
equal measure, wolves I have known have failed,
repeatedly, to keep their word. The lacerations linger.

Wolves I have known to be among the best of wolves.
I have known wolves with whom I would trust my
ranch, wrench my right arm from its den of tendon.
Some of my best friends are men who dress in wolfskin.

Dear Ranchers, wolves are kind as their kind can be.
Their kits eat the same snacks after school as yours do.
They acquire a taste for blood as you did, hot wolf milk
scalding their infant throats. Like men they have been 

known to howl all night long—and to die,
right on schedule, before their time.

EVA H. D.

wrote Rotten Perfect Mouth (Mansfield Press, 2015), “38 Michigans,” and “Bonedog” (from the film I’m Thinking of Ending Things). She works in your favourite bar.

 Fail

by Gary Barwin

GARY BARWIN

is a writer, poet, composer, and multidisciplinary artist and has published twenty-five books of fiction and poetry. His national bestselling novel Yiddish for Pirates (Random House Canada, 2016) won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award, and was also a finalist for both the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His latest book, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, was just released by Random House Canada. He was Sheridan College’s writer-in-residence 2020–2021. His latest album is Golem. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and at garybarwin.com. 

A Note on the Use of the Term Genocide

by Randy Lundy

A few, scattered flakes of snow,
and you want to say they drift down
like ash from the chimneys of Auschwitz
or Birkenau, but you cannot claim that
history. Perhaps you have no right even
to write a poem in the long shadow of that
time.

And what of the sixty million dead in the Americas
in the first hundred years after contact? But that’s
too abstract. Just statistics.

And you’ll be accused of confusing, of conflating.
Let it be so. 

                              What about the hands
of each and every woman who had her child ripped
away from her by disease, hunger, or by another’s hands?
(It still goes on today.)

Can you write about that? What about those trembling
hands? A trembling like nothing you can say, not in this
or any other language, no words for that kind of pain.

Let’s do the math: that’s six hundred thousand dead each
year; fifty thousand dead per month; twelve thousand dead
per week, almost two thousand dead each day.

Four thousand hands trembling with loss every day.

Perhaps it is impossible to write a poem about such things.
Certainly, if you try, you should not speak of trees and birds
or dogs, or the violence of your childhood home. Your Irish-
Norwegian father. Your nêhiyaw mother. And fifty years later,
you, still just a frightened, confused three-year-old boy. Do not
speak of it. Do not try to make a link. Connect nothing.

Fortunately, most of those who might read this will not recognize it as a poem.
Still, if you managed to read this far, if you remember one thing when you reach
the end of this page, I ask that it be this: the pain we each carry, brother or sister,
the pain in every brown face, is not just our own.

And this is no confessional poem.

 RANDY LUNDY

is Cree, Norwegian, and Irish and is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation. He was born in the mining community of Thompson, Manitoba, and grew up in the logging community of Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan. Lundy has published four books of poetry, most recently Blackbird Song (2018) and Field Notes for the Self (2020) with the University of Regina Press, where he currently serves as editor for the Oskana Poetry & Poetics series. He recently joined the English Department at the University of Toronto Scarborough, following the university’s TRC-response search in Creative Writing, Indigenous Literatures, and Oral Traditions.

 Integration Loop

by Liz Howard

the liver of a moose

frozen straight through

a bloodrock I jump on

years before I met you

in Michipicoten, the rush

against my throat as if

it had been my head

in that water instead

of your foot

LIZ HOWARD

was Sheridan College’s inaugural writer-in-residence in 2020. Her first collection of poetry, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (McClelland & Stewart, 2015), won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her latest collection is Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, published by McClelland & Stewart in 2021. Born and raised on Treaty 9 territory in northern Ontario, she currently makes her home in Toronto.

 End of Cronos

by A. F. Moritz

My progeny? I ate them.
They tried to murder me.
And then I would have lain here,
and you too—just lain here
“till the end of time” as you like to say.
No. Longer than that and shorter,
no time at all. All would be
an uneroding statue. As it is,
I grabbed them, chewed their bodies in half,
drooled their blood and bile all down
my hairy many-breasted chest
and I’m bursting with health
and I continue and remain
younger every day.

A. F. Moritz

A. F. Moritz’s most recent books of poems are The Garden: A Poem and an Essay (Gordon Hill, 2021), As Far As You Know (House of Anansi, 2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (House of Anansi, 2018), as well as a new edition of poems in Greek translation (Vakxikon, 2021) taken from The Sparrow. He is presently the Poet Laureate of Toronto.

 Hearing from You

by A. F. Moritz

O my belovèd monster, I can’t say
that when I first saw you I was stricken
and filled with fear, or astonishment,
or horror and disgust, or awe
at immensity, beauty—that these things were real
and did exist somewhere and were greater
than I was ever told,
had ever dreamed. I was only shocked
so much that I was nothing but the shock. I was a splinter
flying in the explosion of your coming.
A streak of that fire. Flying
from you, a part of you. Then I lay
on the ground later
and recalled, after a long or short not knowing
anything, that I am you. Still in this quiet
motionlessness, where the birds, to my stunned awakening,
are brighter and sweeter, fluttering,
whispering, as soon I too will again
start doing, I am being
thrown here from you.

A. F. Moritz

A. F. Moritz’s most recent books of poems are The Garden: A Poem and an Essay (Gordon Hill, 2021), As Far As You Know (House of Anansi, 2020), and The Sparrow: Selected Poems (House of Anansi, 2018), as well as a new edition of poems in Greek translation (Vakxikon, 2021) taken from The Sparrow. He is presently the Poet Laureate of Toronto.

 Deliverance from the Tenth House

by Victoria Mbabazi

dear god I was looking for a solution
but I’ve learned a house that exists on bones only haunts
I know you did not expect a celebration in your absence
but I couldn’t help it you died I start the applause
you thought to deliver me from evil and I sank into it

I found what loves me underwater
I became light on the dark side of the moon
you thought chaos would lead me to heaven
I saw your wrath and ran from it no god I don’t do love by myself
no I became a ghost and hoped it’d lead me to you

but those who love me brought me back to life
and those who love me don’t ask when you’ll save me
all my dreams of paradise are the hell you described
and all my dreams come true no I can no longer beg you to love me
if I don’t know what it is to love you no I am done begging to love
no the apocalypse is all or nothing thinking isn’t that something
I find love you cave with the house but I don’t wish to rebuild it
if I have to save you for the house to stand then I’ll leave it in ashes

I can’t sacrifice myself there is no authority if what’s left is worship
and if I have to worship to love than I’d rather be loveless
but no the rapture doesn’t find me looking for a saviour no
I won’t be on my knees when I pray you don’t answer
the kingdom was made with bloodied hands
I won’t be saved in isolation no if I have to be swallowed by sky
to go to heaven I’d rather die underwater

no deliver me from obligation no deliver me into freedom no
deliver me into a love that isn’t Holy dear god
I learned to love and no you don’t do it no I learned to love
and no I do it I didn’t find love in the kingdom you left for me
no I know you don’t love me because I found it no I know love
because of me I keep the tenth house in ruins I let your demons
haunt the space and when I invite them to dinner I sit at the head
of a table of ashes and when we start our feast I know we’ll end full

Victoria Mbabazi

Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. chapbook is available with Anstruther Press and FLIP is available with knife | fork | book. Their full-length collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, is coming out in Fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.

 Ingest the Second House

by Victoria Mbabazi

oh brother it’s just as you promised

the walls are gingerbread gates lifesavers the gummy kind

if I wreck my teeth it’ll feel sweet before cracking the witch of the house

is famished she wants me for dinner and I want to get ate but right now

my appetite is bigger she’s a stone witch a master of endurance

she’d rather have me seasoned and sauced on the table

I know her strength taught her patience her skin is softness our kisses are

appetizers she likes my kinks she says: “love I’ll watch you binge the house down”

the pipes are filled with wine the desserts are running with poison I’m happy

I’ll be full for her and perfect for dinner

you said I belonged to you that you knew

I was lust at first sight you said yearning is everlasting especially when it’s stolen

I was not worried about my aching teeth your lips still tasted like sweetness

you lit a candle chocolate taste better melting I was not worried about the wine

I wanted to be blacked out you wrapped me in a soft blanket your lips pressed

against my neck wind blowing through the window I tore

through I was so full I fell asleep oh brother you never

warned me I could die in the oven

Victoria Mbabazi

Victoria Mbabazi’s work can be found in several literary magazines. chapbook is available with Anstruther Press and FLIP is available with knife | fork | book. Their full-length collection, The Siren in the Twelfth House, is coming out in Fall 2024 with Palimpsest Press. They’re currently Canadian in Brooklyn, New York.

 Decisions

by Ann Yu-Kyung Choi

On the day of Cindy’s funeral, I arrive early to secure a parking spot, but there is only one other car in the lot. My anxiety ebbs and flows. A wind from the north sends pollen and dust through the open car windows. This isn’t my first student funeral. After teaching for close to thirty years, student deaths are inevitable. I have attended parent deaths, sibling deaths, and the deaths of colleagues. But student deaths are the worst. Teaching high school locks you into a time warp. The students age a mere four years before disappearing into the unknown. I, on the other hand, have aged almost three decades.

It’s two weeks into July. Most teachers would have ignored the email that was sent by one of the secretaries on behalf of the principal. The subject line was: Important news, please read. I spent the following days debating whether or not to read it.

When I opened the email, I was stunned to read that one of our students, Cindy Lee, had passed away. Funeral details were included. Who would attend the funeral? Few teachers would have taught this student. Cindy was enrolled in a community program. In my school board, students with developmental and cognitive disabilities are grouped together in what we call Community Classes. Despite everyone’s best intentions, these students often existed in their own bubble and rarely interacted with the larger school community. I doubted any students, even if they knew that we had lost a student, would attend.

I had been surprised by how many people attended my mother’s funeral three months earlier. At ninety-two years old, she had outlived all of her close friends. It was different with my dad who died in a car crash when I was in my early teens; all of his family and friends were around to pay their respects.

It had been my mother’s fear that no one would attend her funeral. The closer we got to her inevitable passing, the more anxious I became. My thoughts often turned to The Great Gatsby and the scene with Nick, who on the morning of Gatsby’s funeral, tried to convince people to attend. It was the epitome of futility. In the end, I had worried about nothing. People came, mostly from Mom’s Buddhist temple and her apartment building. As an only child without an immediate family of my own, I was forced to welcome them alone. Thankfully, the temple elders had religious protocols to follow so I just kept in step with them.

When you don’t have kids of your own to pick up from daycare after school, there’s always an unspoken pressure to supervise more extracurricular activities. I made myself available to students, helping them during lunch and after school. I even coached the girls’ volleyball team for a few years. For a long time, I was genuinely interested in students’ passions and hobbies. But this job does something to you over the years. At first I did my best to ignore the classic signs of burnout, but they came at me, relentless and constant. Buried in student work, new school initiatives, government demands, and talks of a strike every four years, I found myself fantasizing about car crashes and serious illnesses that would take me out of work for a month or even a semester.

“Try to see the glass as half full,” a therapist had once advised when I told her how I was feeling. But what if there was no glass to look at? I left before I could tell her that my glass had shattered long ago. Luckily, summer holidays usually rolled around by the time I hit my lowest, and the escape from school for a couple of months, was enough to snap me out, if only temporarily.

Cindy’s casket is alarmingly small. Surrounding it is a wall of flowers, formidable as mountains. On the casket is an elegant mix of white flowers: orchids, roses, and carnations. The arrangement is almost as big as Cindy. Seeing her crushes me. Squeezes the air from my chest. A panic, somewhere deep inside, threatens to seize me. I force myself to breathe.

Cindy’s father recognizes me and comes over. He reaches for my hand and misses because I pull away by pretending to reach for a tissue in my purse. As much as possible, I avoid being touched. It’s always been that way. But I’m not so lucky with Cindy’s mother. Mary squeezes me in a tight hug and thanks me profusely for coming.

A pendant swings in my mind—tugging me to pull away as I struggle to breathe, and at the same time, trying to stay put and play the role of a nice teacher.

“Mom, Mom … this is one of Cindy’s teachers,” Mary says. Cindy’s grandmother starts to get up from her seat. I wish she wouldn’t, but she comes toward me, slowly, gripping her cane all the way. She smells strongly of fried fish and ginger. She, too, thanks me with a long hug. Every muscle in me tenses in an effort to get away.

“Her death was a deliverance,” she whispers and releases me.

Cindy’s younger sister saves me by popping her bubble gum loud enough for her granny to turn to reprimand her. The sister’s nails sparkle with gel polish, the same shade of pink as her Hello Kitty cross-body purse.

I take a seat at the back of the room and off to one side, closest to the window. Outside, a woman walks past adorned stylishly in leather heels, a black suit, and hat that exposes only part of her face. Who wears funeral hats nowadays, I wonder.

Dusty light filters through the window. More people arrive. One older woman has a dry, deep-chested cough that makes me cringe. She stands by the casket a long time, as if to make certain that the girl is dead. Another appears to be examining the flowers in depth, smelling and touching them. No one seems to notice the small brown mouse dash across the floor a few seats ahead of me. I might have screamed seeing it, but not today.

Fifteen minutes before the service begins, the room is about a quarter full. I’m beginning to feel bad for the family when the woman with the funeral hat sits down next to me.

Why would she do that when there is so much space? Annoyed, I don’t acknowledge her. The scent of her perfume, spicy and floral, will soon give me a headache. Perhaps, I could explain that to her as a means to sit somewhere else. She hasn’t gone up to see Cindy yet, perhaps then I could move.

“How do you know Cindy?” the woman asks.

“I’m a teacher at her high school,” I reply. With her hat angled the way it is, I can’t see her eyes, which rattles me.

“What do you teach?”

“I teach Family Studies now, but I used to be a guidance counsellor. I registered Cindy when she arrived at our school.”

“I see. Did you know her well?”

I shake my head. Most people don’t know that teachers, the pawns that make up a school, are moved from class to class based on a master school timetable. After gaining my additional qualifications in Guidance, landing a job there and learning that role, I was moved out to English and Family Studies the following year. Seniority doesn’t mean much when a school has a shrinking student population; teachers get assigned to whatever classes need teaching. In September I’ll be teaching Family Studies and History, a course I haven’t taught in twenty-one years. But of course, the woman doesn’t know any of this. Trying to be kind, I add, “No, unfortunately. I wish I had known her better.” Then because I find it odd that she is sitting so far back, I ask, “Are you a family friend?”

“No,” she says. “I’m actually Cindy’s mother. Or, I used to be. My name is Linda.”

Her voice is remarkably even. Baffled by her disclosure, I can’t help but wonder if she’s lying. But what possible reason could there be for her to deceive me? Was Cindy adopted? I try to recall Cindy’s registration details. It was three years ago. The file had been thick, which is the case for all students with special needs.

What is Linda doing here? Did she have a right to be here? I feel caught in a sudden wind, the gap between being home and here widening.

In silence, we watch as a few more guests wander in. My eyes are fixed ahead, daring only the occasional glimpse out the window, the possibility of escape. So far, the grandmother hasn’t gotten up for anyone else, so I am feeling somewhat honoured. Everyone takes turns consoling Mary, the grieving mother.

“I was hoping to see some young people here. Perhaps some of Cindy’s friends or classmates,” says Linda.

How can I tell her that I barely knew Cindy? It was the same with her schoolmates. Should I even be talking about Cindy? I thought about students’ privacy rights. But what did it matter now? Linda’s body stiffens ever so slightly, probably sensing my hesitation.

The service should have begun by now. Were they waiting for more people to arrive? A dull pain starts on one side of my head. I should excuse myself and sit somewhere else. Leaving isn’t an option only because Mary and the rest of the family would notice.

A pinging sound draws our attention. A man is tapping his smartwatch, but it keeps pinging. The woman next to him, perhaps his wife, shushes him loudly.

“I forgot my reading glasses in the car,” he says loud enough for us to hear. “I can’t read a damn thing on this stupid screen.” He gets up abruptly, digs in his pockets and fishes out his keys. As he leaves, my principal enters. I turn to look outside; I’m not in the mood to talk to anyone. My headache worsens.

In the distance, Mary scans the room and sees me sitting with Linda. What if Mary thinks I know the woman sitting next to me?

“Does her—does Ms. Lee know who you are? That you’re here?” I ask.

Linda shakes her head. “She seems to be a good mother …” Her tone raises like she’s asking me a question.

I recall meeting Mary for the first time. She wanted to know if her daughter could be integrated into any regular classes. We settled on visual arts, and with the help of a talented teacher who designed her entire lesson plans around Cindy’s strengths, we had a good first semester. But that teacher left the next year and we lost yet another educational assistant who supported students with complex needs like Cindy. I was upset, but Mary said she was used to setbacks parenting a child with special needs.

“They’re going to cremate her,” Linda says.

I nod; it had said so in the funeral notice.

“I wish they weren’t going to do that. It’s terrible for the environment.” Her hands are trembling, so I suspect that there’s a lot more than just the environment on her mind.

I close my eyes, trying to climb out of the darkness that threatens to swallow me. I try to erase the image of my mother’s casket engulfed in flames. I watched through a window that shielded me from the heat of the actual flames, but winced, feeling a burning sensation in my arms and neck. No one had prepared me for how traumatic it would be to witness a cremation. When I asked how long the process would take, I was stunned that it could take up to five hours.

“But we only invite you to witness the beginning,” the person said.

At least my father was buried and I was spared.

I close my eyes and scramble for something to focus my mind on. It lands on flowers: lilies that symbolize sympathy, roses symbolize sorrow, carnations symbolize remembrance, and gladioli, the tall-stemmed flowers that look like soldiers, symbolize honour. I’d learned all of this while planning my mother’s funeral.

When the ceremony ends, guests are told that refreshments are served in an adjoining room. My throat feels dry. If the woman weren’t sitting next to me, I could easily slip away now. What if she wants to talk some more?

Looking back outside, the air is still, and I imagine it to be hot and sticky. It’s already close to thirty degrees and will feel closer to forty soon. Maybe when I get home, I’ll take a bath. I have no other plans for the day. I close my eyes and picture myself turning on the taps and listening to the water running into the tub. Just thinking about the scent of pink grapefruit and orange bath oils and feeling the silky cloud of bubbles lifts my mood.

“I was forced to give her up,” Linda says. “I didn’t give her up because she was born disabled. There’s other reasons for giving up a child.” She tilts her head so that her gaze swings into mine, her eyes are the same pale grey and shape as Cindy’s. She smiles, perhaps to break the discomfort she senses from me.

Mary and the rest of the family are walking out.

Linda watches Mary and the rest of Cindy’s family, now all standing at the entrance of the hall, thanking people yet again for coming.

Linda says, “I suppose this just proves one thing: our intuition is never wrong.” If she wasn’t chewing her lower lip, I might believe her.

Then she adds, “Thank you for being here—for Cindy.” Her voice cracks ever so slightly.

“She liked to read,” I say. “Her favourite books were mystery stories. She liked to swim. She liked to draw. She drew a lot of rainbows, but always included the colour pink in them because that was her favourite colour.” Truthfully, I don’t know why Cindy included pink, but the detail, I hope, makes it real for Linda.

Linda’s hand settles on mine. I don’t pull away.

“Thank you,” she says.

I drop my eyes, feeling a blush spread across my face. Someone is calling my name. I look up. My principal is waving at me. He cuts across an empty aisle and heads toward us. Soon, he’ll be standing by the window, blocking my light. How should I introduce Linda to him? Should I tell him who she really is? Such questions send prickles down my spine.

But Linda saves me by walking away. Quickly, she blends into the exiting crowd, all dressed in black. I sigh with relief.

“Thank you for coming,” my principal says. “I’m so glad we had at least one teacher show up today. I called Becky, but she’s in Ireland, and Yash is away too. But you came. Thank you. Hopefully you’ve also made plans for the summer?”

Summer. A teacher’s deliverance.

Outside, I sit in my car until all of the cars have gone. I’m relieved that I have no other duties or expectations. The afternoon sun blazes. I scan the empty parking lot. Several spots are shaded by the large maple trees that surround the area, but I’m content sitting in my own sweat with the windows rolled down. I marvel at how still things suddenly become, and ease into a welcome moment of silence.

Ann Yu-kyung Choi

is a Toronto-based author and educator. Her novel, Kay’s Lucky Coin Variety, was a Toronto Book Awards finalist and one of CBC Books 12 Best Canadian Debut Novels of 2016. In 2017, the Korean Canadian Heritage Awards committee recognized Ann for outstanding contributions to Korean culture within Canada. Ann currently serves on the program advisory committee for gritLIT, Hamilton’s literary festival, and manages The Authors Book Club, an online initiative she co-founded to connect authors with readers in Canada.

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 After Birth

Joseph Donato

The refrigerator opens and Philco climbs out. The basement kitchen is flooded in warm light. Philco tests the tile like bathwater, closes the door and the room is swallowed in familiar darkness.

The steps don’t creak when Philco tiptoes upstairs. Philco has memorized the steps to Mother and Father’s bedroom door.

Father faces his alarm clock, his hand tucked under his pillow. Mother faces the cradle in the corner of the room. Her hands are folded across her stomach. Philco stands over the cradle. Baby wears red pajamas and sleeps sprawled out on top of the blanket.

Father snores. Mother stirs. Philco reaches into the cradle.

Mother’s stomach is a moon. Her skin stretches like a water balloon with its mouth around the faucet. She lies still on her bed with her legs in metal clamps while Midwife squints inside her. Mother stares at the ceiling so intently that a fly might land on her eyeball and go unnoticed.

“She’s exhausted,” says Father, who stands in the doorway with his arms crossed. “Been throwing up all morning and all last night. All April, really.”

“To be expected. Nothing to worry about.”

Midwife moved into Mother and Father’s home three months ago. He sleeps in the spare room in the basement.

Philco watches at Mother’s bedside.

“How did Baby get inside her tummy?” Philco asks.

Father’s eyes wrinkle when he smiles. He looks to Midwife who is smiling, too. “She ate the baby!” The adults laugh.

Philco stares at Mother’s stomach. “What did Baby taste like?”

Midwife leans forward. “What do you think babies taste like?”

The curtain dances in the breeze.

“They taste soft, like salmon,” says Philco.

Midwife and Father chuckle, and Midwife says, “Well, I think babies taste like peppermint and cotton!”

They laugh more. Philco wonders what peppermint is.

Mother stirs in her bed.

Midwife looks at her, then at Philco. “Would you like to feel the baby kick?” Philco glances at Mother’s stomach. “It’s okay, the baby will only kick, not bite.” Midwife holds out his hand.

A moment passes and Philco gives Midwife a hand, which he places firmly on Mother’s belly. Philco’s hand recoils from the chill of Mother’s skin, but Midwife keeps the palm flat against Mother. They wait for a kick, but it never comes.

Philco feels movement under Mother’s skin; tiny pinpricks of pressure against Philco’s palm. Not a kick, but Baby’s own little hand. Philco lets Baby drum its fingers against Philco’s own.

Mother screams.

Philco’s nails sink into Mother’s stomach in an attempt to clasp Baby’s hand. Philco presses deeper into her skin until being yanked away by Midwife.

“Don’t do that!” Father shouts, running to Mother’s side and stroking her hair.

There are nail marks in Mother’s stomach. Her eyes water. She watches Philco as tears roll down her cheeks.

Midwife pushes Philco toward the door.

“It’s best you wait outside until we’re done.”

Philco waits outside.

Midwife is interviewed by Mother and Father in August, two weeks after Mother discovers she is pregnant.

“We want to be in control this time,” Mother tells him. She leans against the kitchen counter, playing with her dress. Her stomach is still flat. “We didn’t …” She looks to Father. “After the last time, I wasn’t sure I could get pregnant again.”

Midwife grins. “Sometimes, babies come when you least expect them.” He clasps his hands together. “I appreciate your caution. Home births are a safe and natural alternative to hospitals.”

“And you’d be willing to move into our spare for the duration of the pregnancy?” Father asks. “She’ll need round-the-clock support. We won’t have a repeat of last time.”

“I’d be happy to. For an additional fee, of course.”

Father nods. Mother looks ill. The men shake hands.

Midwife grins. “My kid and I will move in at once, as we discussed last week.” He looks to Mother. “Your baby will be in good hands, ma’am.”

Mother nods. Her eyelids droop and she stumbles backward into the cabinets, hitting her head on the corner. Midwife helps her into a chair while Father sputters. Midwife touches the bump on Mother’s head and tells Father to help her into bed, asks where to find frozen peas to fight the swelling. Midwife is sent to the basement to retrieve the bag of peas. Midwife takes a left when he ought to have taken a right and finds the refrigerator in the basement kitchen.

It’s dark inside the fridge, warm, stinks like bleach and blood and rotten fish. Midwife stares into its stomach and Mother yells from the floor above. There is only an opaque jar inside, some shredded newspaper. No peas. He mutters to himself that childbirth is not as dramatic as it seems, assumes that nothing is listening. He leaves the refrigerator door open in his haste.

When returning upstairs empty-handed, Father explains that the refrigerator in the basement kitchen has not worked in years, that he meant to send Midwife to the freezer in the cellar.

Mother screams in pain.

Mother gasps for air. She grips the toilet seat and more thick, grey liquid spills from her mouth and splatters onto the wallpaper.

Philco watches from the corner of the bedroom, behind the curtain. Mother clutches her stomach and rests her forehead on the porcelain.

Mother calls to Father, who rushes into the ensuite. He rubs her back, combs the vomit-slicked hair from her eyes, tells her she is beautiful.

Mother throws up again, curling her toes. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Father tells Mother that the second trimester will be easier, that the pain and the mess will be worthwhile when the baby arrives. He embraces her despite the vomit on her cheeks. They laugh and cry at the same time. Philco makes the same facial expressions, soundless, behind the curtain.

“Everything looks perfect,” says Midwife, pulling away from between Mother’s legs.

Father and Mother share a look. Mother’s stomach is larger than ever. She will give birth any day now.

“Are you sure?” Father says. “Apologies for our persistence, but you must understand our nerves.”

Midwife smiles. “Of course. But rest assured, women who deliver a stillborn once are perfectly capable of successful future pregnancies.”

Mother closes her eyes. Father nods.

“I understand your concerns, I do. But you have nothing to worry about now. This baby is healthy and is excited to meet you. Delivery will go smoothly.”

Mother smiles, but her eyes are still closed.

Midwife stands from the chair at Mother’s bedside and turns to Father. “Now, do you have time to take a look at my bedroom door? It doesn’t latch properly; always opens on its own when I sleep.

Father frowns. He does not want to go. “Sure. Yes, let’s take a look.”

Father and Midwife leave the room.

Mother sits up in bed, exhaling slowly.

She rubs her stomach, hand caressing the five little nail marks. The curtain moves. Two small feet poke out of the bottom.

“Hello,” Mother says.

Mother lifts from the bed, bends her knees to be eye level with Philco. “You don’t have to be shy.” Her voice is gentle like morning rainfall. “Come here.”

Philco slowly pulls back the curtain and steps forward. Philco looks at Mother with such admiration, eyes wide to swallow her whole.

Mother smiles warmly. “There’s no need to hide. We’re grateful to have you with us.”

Philco stares.

“You know,” says Mother, her voice barely a whisper, “you have beautiful eyes.”

Philco’s gaze drops to Mother’s stomach.

“Don’t worry about this, okay?” She rubs the nail marks and leans forward. “Do you want to try again?To feel a kick?

Philco nods and gives Mother a hand for her to place on her stomach.

She reminds Philco to be gentle. Philco doesn’t recoil at the cool touch of Mother’s flesh this time. There’s movement under Philco’s palm; a kick.

Philco looks to Mother, who is watching closely.

“Did you feel the kick?”

Philco nods.

“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

Philco frowns. Mother tilts her head.

“What’s the matter?”

Philco steps back from Mother, hands folded in front of Philco’s own stomach.

“Will Baby die again?”

Mother’s smile slips.

“Excuse me?”

Philco makes crying faces but no sound comes out.

Father and Midwife re-enter the bedroom, discussing locks.

Mother blinks at the adults as the door closes behind them. When she looks back for Philco, Philco is gone.

Philco stands over the cradle.

An owl is perched on the tree branch outside the bedroom window. It hoots, swivels its head to watch Philco reach for Baby.

Baby’s hand is tiny in Philco’s. It’s soft and warm like roasted marshmallows. Baby’s eyes blink open and Baby starts to whine, tries to pull its hand back.

Philco leans over the cradle. Philco places Baby’s hand between the frontmost teeth and bites down. Baby erupts into tears. Philco rubs his stomach.

Mother wakes, sits up in bed so quickly she might have been electrocuted under the sheets. She jumps to her feet and throws Philco to the ground, hoisting Baby out of the cradle and backing into the wall. Father sleeps through it.

“You’re a monster!” Mother yells. “Get out! Now!”

Philco is already hurrying down the stairs. Philco climbs back into the refrigerator.

“A piece of finger, gone! It’s outrageous.”

Father is pacing back and forth in his office. Midwife sits in the guest chair, hands folded neatly on the desk.

“It’s not unheard of for a child to grow jealous of a newborn. Could that be the case?”

“I don’t see how that matters,” says Father.

“The problem must be solved at the root. Clearly, this child wants something. Could it be attention?”

“That is not the proper way to ask.” Father bangs his fist against the wall and the bookshelf rattles.

“My wife and I are at our wits’ end. That child has behaved questionably in the past, but this is our final straw. Our newborn is our priority, our reason for being. We will not have anything around that threatens them.”

“Have you considered sending your child to a school that will teach them the proper ways of behaving?” Midwife raises his chin, proud of that idea.

Father stops pacing. He looks to Midwife and cocks his head.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that perhaps they will be rehabilitated at a boarding school of some sort that will—”

“No, no. What do you mean ‘our child’? That is not our child.”

Father and Midwife stare at one another. The room becomes cold.

“No?” Midwife arches an eyebrow. “Whose child is it, then?”

“The child came with you when you moved in,” Father asserts. “It’s your child.”

Midwife shakes his head. “My son decided to stay with his mother in Colorado—he’s never been here. And besides, he is a teenager, not a child.”

Father shudders. “That child has been living in this house for months, lurking in our periphery, and you mean to tell me that they belong to no one?” His voice cracks.

Midwife stands from the chair. “Where is the child now?”

Father calls for Mother, but she is asleep upstairs.

The adults run from the room. The office curtain billows.

Mother and Father are at the hospital six years ago.

Mother screams so loud that Father is not concerned about her volume disrupting the doctor. He grips her hand tight and assures her that he’s right beside her, that the pain will be gone soon, to push.

Mother screams louder and the doctor positions herself in front of her legs. Father’s eyes are wide, Mother’s are clenched shut. The baby is born dead. It doesn’t breathe once. The midwife cuts the umbilical cord, wraps the baby’s body in a towel and hands it to Mother to hold as she wails. She yanks her hand free from Father and hugs the baby close to her chest, sweat rolling down the bridge of her nose and dripping onto the baby’s limp shoulder.

“Ma’am?” A nurse presents Mother a red organ attached to what remains of the umbilical cord.

Mother blinks, unable to see through her tears.

“You requested the placenta be preserved following your child’s delivery, for consumption.”

Mother stares at the placenta. “I—I don’t want it.” She waves it away.

Mother can’t stand the sight of the afterbirth that outlived her child. The thought of the placenta re-entering her body turns her stomach and she holds the baby closer.

Father notices how Mother’s face pales. “Perhaps,” he says to the nurse, “perhaps you might preserve it still, for her to consume tonight?” Mother makes a sound in her throat. “Or tomorrow morning?”

The doctor looks between the two, then nods. “Of course. I will prepare the placenta for you to preserve until you’re ready.”

Later, the doctor pulls Father aside and whispers under his breath, “Again, I’m very sorry. There was nothing to be done, it’s an unfortunate day.”

Father nods, arms crossed. “Nothing to be done.” His voice is hoarse.

The doctor turns the doorknob. “Make sure that she eats the placenta within two days, or you should bury it. It’ll do no good to sit.”

Father put the placenta in a glass jar and left it in the fridge in the basement kitchen.

Philco stands over the cradle.

Reaching inside, Philco grabs a hold of Baby’s hand. Philco rubs Baby’s finger where a chunk of flesh is missing.

“Sorry, Baby.” Philco makes a crying face.

The cradle is right beside the bed now, on Mother’s side. She faces the side of the cradle where Baby’s head lays. Philco pushes the cradle away from the bed, scratching the hardwood floor underneath. Baby stirs, but remains asleep, as does Mother. Father is still as a corpse.

The bedroom door is wide open. The silver lock is in two pieces on the floor. Midwife has returned home. Two packed suitcases lean against the bedroom wall.

Philco stands over Mother. She is beautiful when she sleeps, hands folded over her stomach, eyelids fluttering. Philco presses Mother’s chin, pulls it down so that her lips part.

Philco puts a finger inside Mother’s mouth, resting it on her warm tongue. Philco adds another finger, then a hand.

With both hands on Mother’s soft lips, Philco opens Mother’s mouth as wide as possible. Mother wakes, alarmed, her screams muffled as she tries to sit up. But Philco’s weight keeps her down.

Her jaw breaks with a crisp snap, like a crackling fire. Philco steps into Mother’s open mouth, squeezing inside. Mother squirms, reaches for Father.

Philco twists and turns, fitting. Mother’s mouth is warm as a hug. Mother glances at the cradle and Philco wishes she’d look anywhere else. Philco wants to be Mother, to be Baby, to be.

Mother’s hands fall still while clenching fistfuls of sheets. Philco’s body writhes inside Mother’s stomach, elbows and shoulder blades jutting out of Mother’s flesh like a mountain range. Baby is crying when Father finally wakes.

In the basement, the refrigerator door is left open. The jar is smashed on the ground. The tile is wet and the refrigerator is empty, as though nothing inside had ever existed at all.

Joseph Donato

is super cool and popular. He is editor-in-chief of Block Party Magazine & Press and overlord of Horror Pop Mag. Donato has won three Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, and six Olympic gold medals for real. He looks a little like Jesus and enjoys Tic Tacs, Nebraska, and Weezer.

 Polyp

Kayla Czaga

Since his diagnosis, my father-in-law thinks

everyone has nasal polyps. His daughters. His dog.

His phlegmy priest. And now me.

At the dinner table, he angles his soup spoon

for a view, then volunteers to teach me the waltz

just so he can tip me way back. Polyp:

a rogue growth. Cellular excess. A flesh curdle—

akin to the spider I found crumpled

in a library copy of Paradise Lost or the proverbial

gum wad thumbed onto the underside of anything.

Among the rooms of his big suburban home,

my father-in-law wanders. King of the corner lot.

Baron of looking important before a barbecue

but now he’s got these teardrop-shaped errors

inside his face and maybe they’ve always been there,

maybe they’re everywhere. He touches a succulent

on a windowsill and whispers, Polyp.

He touches the Last Supper his wife cross-stitched,

lets a finger rest on Judas’s left foot. He moves along

to the dishwasher. The garburator switch. His daughters’

graduation portraits. The sun-warmed spot

on his bedspread. His chin, its reflection

in the master bath mirror. Polyp, whispers

my father-in-law. Polyp. Polyp. Polyp.

Kayla Czaga

is the author of three poetry collections: For Your Safety Please Hold On (Nightwood Editions, 2014), Dunk Tank (House of Anansi, 2019) and the forthcoming Midway (House of Anansi, 2024). Her work has been awarded the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award and has been nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry and the BC and Yukon Book Prizes’ Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She lives with her wife on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen people.

 The Worry Eater

Leighton Schreyer

it was a grubby little thing, a stuffed animal

of sorts, striped olive green & kinder-chocolate

brown with a flat face that doubled as its body,

stubby arms & stubby legs & wide-set eyes,

a blood-red zipper as its mouth.

the worry eater loved to feast

on your fears & frustrations, to fill its belly

with the fantasies of your mind; the monsters

under your bed & the ones in your closet—

the despicable devil always dancing on your back.

if what it touted was true, then you could be free

of your worries in just three simple steps: 1. write

down your worries, 2. pop your worries

into the worry eater’s mouth, 3. zip it up!

perhaps it’s saying something

that my mom thought a worry eater,

not a beyblade or barbie doll (the kinds of toys

typical twelve year olds played with)

would make me happy. as if learning to

swallow my worries

would somehow also solve them. & i tried—

i really did—to swallow my worries. i dutifully

wrote them down, popped them into

my new friend’s mouth & zipped it up, the way

i was told i should.

& the worry eater kept

its promise, always

gobbling up my worries, always

swallowing them whole. so,

i fed it like a mother—

lapped up what dribbled & dripped down

its chin & wiped away the crumbs on its cheeks,

the credence of its crimes. i scolded

it for chewing with its mouth open &

taught it not to talk

with it full—manners were important

after all. the worry eater ate until it lost

its appetite but, by then, it didn’t matter anymore;

i had gained my own appetite, had turned

my own mouth into a drawer.

Leighton Schreyer

(they/them) is a writer, poet, and critically Mad queer activist in Toronto, ON, whose writing explores themes of gender, sexuality, mental health, and the human condition. Their work has been featured in some of the world’s leading medical and literary journals, including The Sun, The New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, Hippocampus Magazine, Redivider, and more. Their writing has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. As a current medical student, Leighton is passionate about recentering the fundamental role that story plays in healthcare and caregiving, and about using narrative as a powerful tool to foster healing and human connection.

 Rain

Jaime Forsythe

To summon it, a pack of girls in blue

rub their palms together at dusk. Downfall

approaches on foot, the gathering sizzle of

June’s campfire, the spot where, by day, they

drifted, bellies teardrop-shaped cutouts

in green lake. Each face an oily sun beneath

the firehall’s dimmed pot lights, smell of

urinal pucks and chalk, chorus of snapping

fingers, clicks rising like steam. Leaf claps

into leaf, softly slapping in the fog. Thirsty

for the bliss of disappearance into a cluster

of notes in tune, as into forest’s cover, as

into the lake’s navel, forever skirting final

head count. Applause. A girl recognizes her own

metered leakage, prays to Mary, specifically she

who surfaced on the pharmacy’s weathered brick,

for camouflage. Hands strike the floor, hooves

cresting an epic plain, climactic until they conduct it

in reverse. Uniforms awash in headlights. Hiss on

pavement like butter touching a hot pan, mothers tap

cigarettes out truck windows while girls play gritty

tile, scales in contrary motion, typing from home

row, sound ebbing toward a beat soaked

in stillness. Flock of shadow puppets

suspended as the night turns onto its side.

Jaime FOrsythe

is the author of two collections of poetry, I Heard Something (Anvil Press, 2018) and Sympathy Loophole (Mansfield Press, 2012). Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Arc Poetry Magazine, Grain, Geist, This Magazine, and EVENT. She lives in Halifax/Kjipuktuk, Nova Scotia.

 ggirl in five acts

Vange Schramek

This piece would not have been possible without Sachiko Murakami.

Thank you to Alicia Elliott for reading it.

I STUCCO-LAND

she couldn’t make it aesthetically possible

since she didn’t know that that was the question

she sits beside the front door, glass shards from the stucco

rubbing the grooves of her corduroy overalls

old Ford pulls up outside, his Friday night come down saunter up the stairs,

package of noodles and a six-pack in a plastic bag swishing and tinker-

ing what is to be abstracted anyways? his paycheque? her day-care fees?

the price of her first cavity? he wishes he could leave her

with the neighbour, but what would happen?

next to the neighbours, but not of them

she’s a second-generation for crissakes

if we moved any farther east, we’d cease to be legible

if we can’t abstract the pieces of ourselves out of this

then let’s just get rid of the pieces altogether

II Best coast

He had taught her how to chop up garlic really finely and how to tie a bowline so that the small dinghy that was their mode of transportation to and from the island would not float away. She was making spaghetti sauce (his recipe) while he lay on the back deck in the afternoon sunlight, smoking Players’ Regulars and talking on his cellphone. She didn’t know who he was talking to, but she hoped that he would get off the phone soon and come and validate her sauce. He was only there two nights a week, and otherwise she lived alone in the woods, in a four-walled shack without running water or electricity. Every morning she awoke at 6:00 a.m. to walk down the hill, jump off the dock in her bathing suit, swim to their dinghy on the mooring, get the motor started, scoop up her dry clothes she had left on the dock and boat across the Georgia Straight to her job as a gas girl at Secret Cove Marina. Every night she would come home alone, walk up the hill in the dark and light a candle from a matchbox she always kept in the same place. Every night, that is, except Friday and Saturday, when her dad would come up from working on the mainland. She waited for him all week long, made sure to keep the cabin spotlessly clean for his approval, and did her utmost to soak up every second and fibre of love and interaction she could attain from their forty-eight-hour visits. That was her shot at having a dad: a few weekends a summer, before she was shipped back to her mother’s for the school year, the courts having decided that he was an unfit fulltime parent. But she knew it was better than what most people ever got from a parent, because her dad was fun. He took her fishing, and they went running together. He taught her how to make cocktails with clam, tomato juice, and vodka, and how much she could drink before she got too spinny or out of control. He came out with her when her cabin friends were up visiting for the weekend—he’d come down to the dock with her at night and teach her that people would like her more if she was more confident; taught her that in life there were leaders and there were followers and that the former was always the desirable position, at whatever cost.

“Smells good, g girl,” he said as he re-entered the cabin, nose in the air, his lean body always strutting around like he was under a spotlight. She was proud that he liked the way the cabin smelled; it made her feel good to have her hard work acknowledged. “Is it time to put the noodles on?” she asked. By this point he was standing on the couch, looking at himself in the mirror, doing exercises with his eyebrows and flexing his arms. He didn’t answer her. She asked again, “Noodles on now?”

“I’m just going to take some sauce back to the city with me. I can make noodles down there,” he replied between an eye-widening facial stretch.

“I thought we were having dinner together, it’s Saturday,” the girl replied.

“Aww g girl, I gotta go back today. Have some stuff to take care of.”

“Like what?”

“Just some personal stuff, but it’s all good.” He pulled out a mat and began doing push-ups, breathing in and out audibly, making the girl have to listen to noises she would not get to listen to for the amount of time she had been promised. She crawled up the ladder to her cot in the loft above the one-room shack and pulled out her notebook. Noticing she had left the kitchen, he called up to her.

“You writing about your feelings again?” he said teasingly between exhales. The girl scrawled hard against the paper, hoping he could hear her disappointment through her pen.

III vestigial

“That should be in your book.”

“What?”

“Your pills, in your bag. They sound like maracas. You just toddering along, your happy pills swishing, making your music for you.”

She laughed, wrinkled up her face, thinking about times in the past in which she may have needed happy pills, but how now, thankfully, the pills were just for physical, and not mental, pain. It was a pleasant sound, though. The whole thing was pleasant: the man in the blue teacozy hat, a gift made by an aunt or sister-in-law with good intentions but less craftsmanship, striding down the street, chest forward, nose up, tobacco fumes in his wake. His nose pointed towards the sea, as always, toward the sea or the mountains, like a drug-hunting German shepherd at the airport. She could not keep up with his pace, as she usually could, the incision on her right side crippled her a bit, made her favour one leg, made her a limping snail, like the accumulation of eighty-seven years of walking on twenty-something legs.

“What’s it about, anyways?” he asked, staring straight at the horizon, not looking at her, breathing through his nostrils audibly as though he were showing off in basic training.

“My book, you mean.” She smiled, lilting the word book, like letting a kite fly off into the high-circling wind. Like when she said the word that way, that it was real, it was free, it was moving.

“Well, you’re doing sumthin’ in Toronto, aren’t you?”

“It’s about you, Nellis.”

“Oh, Nellis, that’s nice for me. There’s lots to say, that’s for sure. Don’t call the guy a legend for nothing.”

“Fer sure.”

The legend within and the legend without are different tales, she thought. This kind of thinking just poured out of him, as if on a feedback loop. She watched his brain circle like a vulture hovering over a thought, but then getting distracted by another thought catching the light of the sun for a moment, and then that thought becoming the new centre to be circled around, until a new shiny object appeared, and so on. This kind of thinking was his character and his fate, and though she was his eldest, and though she knew she possessed much of him, she hoped she could beat it. It was a comfort to this end that they had extracted her appendix, and yet his remained inside him. She was adapting beyond him, she could feel it, she would prove it.

IV theoretical fatique

When she bumped the door open with her bum and saw the new graffiti, a smirk curled her lips. She knew Michel would be furious; he would be storming around the parking lot and in the courtyard and on the grassy area by the entrance to the mailboxes of 183 Huron. He would probably swear in French at a level more than audible, but then he would see one of his cats, Mee or Moo, and revert to English drenched in French inflection and intellect, light a cigarette and forget about the new red shiny bulbous word dripping down the wall of the building.

She liked the sound of his foreign swearing—even though she knew what the words meant, they sounded more passionate, more loaded in French. That he could get so worked up over something that seemed to happen once or twice a month, and elicit the same reaction, without fail, each time, made her feel more sane. She remembered the definition of madness to be something like “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Were the most likely teenaged culprits stoned on crappy weed even in ear shot when Monsieur Michel spouted his displeasure about their artwork? She didn’t think so, but then again, maybe they kept up their practice just to wait around to hear the reaction. She was not tired of the graffiti, nor the profanity that followed it. Out in the parking lot, she examined the word, four letters, not making a word that she knew in her own tongue. Crudely sprayed, their artist not seeming to have had any instruction in representing dimension. But the red that they had used was very beautiful with the white winter sun behind them. She looked at the sun and blinked with the harshness of its imprint and layered that image over the new installation. The red looked like it was bleeding now, pulsing.

Repetition and madness, repetition as madness. While an esteemed queer critic entertained her class, she wrote notes and tried to pay attention, amidst irritating questions from her peers. Graduate school was about asking the right question, to show that your brain was capable of consistently producing the right questions, so you could get funding and reference letters to spend your life coming up with such questions. Rarely were real questions asked, it seemed to her, questions that brought the abstract theories they read back into context. People were afraid to ask such questions, lest they be thought dumb. But the only way to leave dumbness behind and move towards smartness in the distance was to ground yourself in your dumbness, truly understand it, and then begin to inch slowly towards something better. Now you could only ask questions that you didn’t understand when they came out of your mouth, using as many abstract terms as you could: “Was there a post-deconstructionist praxis for breaking down the effects of the cultural milieu upon the proletariat’s new historicist self-realization?” The students in her class may as well have recorded such a sentence on their phone and pressed Play when the professor acknowledged their raised hand. She wrote in the margin of her loose-leaf paper: what is my madness?

Cass was thirty-something-years old. You are not supposed to date the bartender; she knew that. He had a deep, scratchy voice, a dark full beard, and was in the upper of the height scale for beings. He was so incredibly typical; he so completely embodied his clich that she was taken aback, immediately guarded. Bartenders always make promises they don’t intend to keep, she thought. But she also questioned as to where she was getting her information from? What cultural or social source made her both terrified yet fascinated by this character? After work that night he asked for her number; after work that night she gave it to him. A week later, he drove her to IKEA, since over text she had explained that since she had just moved and was still getting organized with school and work that she was probably too busy to get together right away. His response was to offer to help her get organized.

She told herself that this outing was just for research purposes and to get some stuff for her place. But watching him drive brought her back to high school when her first boyfriend got his license at sixteen and he would pick her up and drive her around. That was freedom, and here it was again in a Pavlovian dream. He shifted gears, he changed radio stations, he smoked a joint while driving and offered it to her. There was more to Ontario than just Toronto—there were highways that led to malls and strip malls. But she felt as though the highway was being built as Cass accelerated along it. She was right where she was most happy at sixteen, and she didn’t know if this was escapism, or habit, or whether this sort of behaviour ought to stop, or whether he really was a bad guy; whether she could enjoy this and not think about it in terms of what it meant, or if it would happen again. She breathed. She wanted to be right here. When he dropped her off, he didn’t kiss her. She took her items from IKEA, two tupperwares and an oversized tote bag, into her apartment and put them down and lay back on her bed.

V I love sports feminism

But one look, one acknowledgement from this bearded man, well, it made her want to move into his bachelor pad, clean the kitty litter up off the bathroom floor, devise an extravagant plan to get him to take her home to meet his parents. This is what happens when a feminist meets a bachelor; both have developed systems for living without one another, and yet with contact suppressed biological tendencies are stirred. “I’ll gather if you hunt,” so said the young woman’s biological unconscious. But this was the twenty-teens, gathering and hunting had taken on less primal associations and roles were no longer prescribed. How was one to negotiate their biological drives amidst the breakdown of animalistic behavioural survival patterns? She thought, and the thought overwhelmed her for she didn’t know what she was: animal, woman, girl, independent feminist. She sank into his couch, ignoring his dirty T-shirt, which was acting as a head rest. He was watching football: men in jellybean-coloured leggings swerved and bashed into each other amidst excessive pomp and glory from the announcers. Every five minutes commercials would roll, driven by excessive market research, knowing that exactly these two kinds of people would be watching: men who liked watching other men run around and women who liked being around men who liked watching other men run around. Shiny cars coursed over the screen, larger-than-life cheeseburgers with bacon and novelty toppings with novelty names to go along with them, half- dressed girls bringing beer to parties. This is it, she thought. I’m the girl that gets to feel inadequate about not being that girl.

VI Coda

on the other

side of al-

dente noodles,

an abundance of weightless pretense, too much auto fellatio, enough

therapy for the entirety of the TikTok user base

she is facedown, uncloaked of a girl-ness that once seemed the only

route to

here

VANGE SCHRAMEK

’s (she/they) writing appears in Feminist Media Studies, Canadian Literature, The Ex-Puritan, The Humber Literary Review, Fashion Studies, the Martlet, Grain Magazine, the chapbook Poems from the Round Room, the University of Toronto Quarterly, Plenitude, and is forthcoming in the Toronto Chic Anthology. From a small island on the remote west coast of BC, as well as the unceded territories currently known as New West, East Van, and Vancouver Island, Vange currently resides on the traditional territories of the Mississauga and Haudenosaunee nations where they are completing a PhD in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.