Off The Page Blog

What We Carry: Fall 2026

admin@49thshelf.com (Justine Yu) — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 20:49:14 +0000

Layaway Child by Chanel Sutherland (House of Anansi Press)

“I smouldered in silence, having to learn the language of longing and the weight of waiting. A language of children left behind but not forgotten. Layaway children. We were old enough to remember something of our mothers – their embrace, the smell of their skin, the way we were carried on hips and heads, the way they left us, faces obscured by morning fog, or was it distance? We remembered in fragments, each piece dissolving in the sea of time.”

Layaway Child is a stunning and searing collection of short stories by Chanel Sutherland tracing the lives of mothers working abroad in Montréal as housekeepers and nannies, and the children left back home in the Caribbean archipelago of Saint Vincent.

While capturing the strength and resilience of these women and girls, Sutherland also always finds a way to gesture to the larger oppressive systems that have given them little choice but to be anything but strong and resilient, and she does so in such poignantly cutting ways.

In my favourite story, With Friends Like These, Sutherland tells the story of Shelly, who ventures to the affluent neighbourhood of Côte Saint-Luc to meet her white friend before a party. Upon arrival, she is greeted by her friend’s nanny, a Caribbean woman who reminds her of her own mother. Shelly is confronted, for the first time, with the wholeness of her mother.

“But standing here, face-to-face with this woman who spoke like her, I saw it. Not the labour. Not the uniform. But the dignity in her posture. The quiet precision of someone used to being both essential and invisible. And for a moment, it was like seeing my mother through clean glass.”

As a Filipina-Canadian, I couldn’t help but feel a deep kinship with these characters and stories, so reminiscent of my own people. Layaway Child is a luminous collection that honours the complex lives of the people who care for so many of us.

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Kisapmata by Bianca Miranda (Playwrights Canada Press)

*Full disclosure: I had the profound privilege of working as the copy editor for this book, and have written alongside the wonderful author, Bianca Miranda, through Living Hyphen’s writing circles.

We have a saying in Tagalog that goes, “kilig to the bones!” It’s meant to express the sheer euphoria that often comes with romance, the butterflies in your tummy that won’t stop fluttering when you’re crushing on someone. And let me tell you – Kisapmata is absolutely kilig to the bones!

Kisapmata tells the story of two queer Filipino women, A and B, who meet at work and fall head over heels for each other. Shared lunches, flirty texts, and late-night phone calls send us all into this whirlwind romance.

But like any compelling teleserye, their love must overcome a not-so-simple obstacle. B is returning to the Philippines in just two months, and together they must navigate and negotiate the cultural differences between homeland and diaspora, especially when it comes to queerness.

What emerges is a bittersweet untangling of the nuances of identity expressed in the delicious wrapper of iconic Filipino love songs and grand gestures reminiscent of the many romcoms that have shaped so much of our expectations in love.

Winner of the 2024 Betty Mitchell Award for Outstanding New Play, Kisapmata is a charming delight!

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Leila & Khaled by Nyla Matuk (House of Anansi Press)

I didn’t expect to learn so much from a romance novel, but as Kathryn Mockler writes in her blurb of this book, “Come for the romance; stay for the history lesson…”

Leila & Khaled tells the story of Leila, a Palestinian-Canadian film scholar who travels to Palestine for the first time as part of a delegation of academics. There, she meets Khaled, a younger Palestinian tour guide who has lived under occupation his whole life. The attraction between them is instant and simmering with tension, though in ways far more complex and tangled than simply romantic.

Throughout her trip, we learn about the history of Palestine’s occupation through conversations between the two characters, making for an intense and intimate conversation between diaspora and homeland, between those who stayed and those who were forced to flee. It is an important conversation to reckon with as readers bearing witness to and living in the midst of settler colonialism.

Nyla Matuk’s storytelling is sultry, absorbing, and deeply provocative.

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Naoyak by Norma Dunning (Douglas & McIntyre)

Such a delightful and unconventional read with an unforgettably rambunctious protagonist who leaps from the page and into your heart!

Naoyak Aupak is a young Inuk woman determined to make a better life for her young son Andy by leaving Iqaluit for “The Easy Life” in Canada’s southern parts. She does so by following a stereotypical white man with whom she has slept with all the way back to his home in Edmonton. It’s a chaotic and outrageous journey as she wiggles her way into his life while charting a path toward her own independence.

In the midst of all this, the spirit of Nao’s anaanatsiaq/grandmother battles it out with Kiviuk, the giant guardian who has watched over generations of her family’s women, as they both work to help Naoyak navigate the new world she finds herself in.

Norma Dunning weaves social satire and Inuit folklore with such hilarious mischief, fierce tenderness, and an unapologetic refusal to accept the assumptions placed upon Inuit women. It’s a wild ride you don’t want to miss!

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Giller Prize 2026: The Chat with Nazanine Hozar

admin@49thshelf.com (Trevor Corkum) — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 13:36:52 +0000

Nazanine Hozar was born in Tehran, Iran, before coming to Canada as a child. Her debut novel, Aria, is an award-nominated bestseller that was published to international acclaim. The Small Ones is her second novel. Nazanine Hozar lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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What scares you most about writing fiction?

Being bad at it.

What did you learn about yourself as you worked on The Small Ones?

To have faith in my instincts, and that it’s ok to push the boundaries of structure and form, or what we might deem as “the conventional novel.”

The Small Ones is set in Iran in the 1980s. It follows a group of children caught up in the Iran-Iraq war. What can you tell us about how this story first came alive for you?

It came alive so many years ago, when I was maybe six or seven years old. It took another forty-odd-years to materialize and become this book. When I was a child, I used to see footage of these child soldiers on TV and was so upset by it. It didn’t make sense to me that children so young would be allowed to be soldiers, yet it also seemed normal, given the environment we were living in. I knew I had to tell their story someday.

What was the biggest challenge in writing the novel?

The uncertainty of it. Not knowing how others will react to it, or if it’s any good, especially when you’re already fifty thousand words in.

Finally, what’s a great Canadian book that has changed you in some way?

A Fine Balance. It’s a master class in storytelling.

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Excerpt from The Small Ones

He slumped forward slowly, like a man mourning his own death. But he wasn’t a man. He was a small boy. His arms fell at his sides, broken wings, and his neck was heavy. He looked like a figure in that painting I saw in a gallery in Helsinki, the one with two boys, one sullen, one caught between anger and determination, bearing a stretcher atop which sat an angel, her head wrapped, eyes downcast, a wing stained with the faintest hint of blood. The angel held the stretcher’s side with one hand, afraid to fall. In the other hand, she held snowdrops.

Mehdi, our boy—he, too, had tried to grab hold of the thing carrying him, but it was a boat taking us to safety, away from war and the battle we had deserted, away from other soldiers, from death and loss. Mehdi’s arms were too short to reach both sides at once. His body couldn’t help us steady the vessel or ourselves. I didn’t mind. I thought back then that I could save him, or at the very least I would help Clay save us both.

Sometimes, to remember everything, I see the world like a bird does. I fly over the river bends and spy the insects between blades of grass. In my memory I search for runaway children, a trio who have taken it upon themselves to sort out their lives. The river Karun is beneath me, and its currents push me where I must go. This is where I land in the story of my life. I, the bird, watch the three boys: one of them so small and broken he cannot walk on his own, sitting in the center of the boat; and the other two, his guardians, steering through the waters, through the narrow twists and turns. This is the Karun, and it has a mind of its own. The children move north, against the river’s flow, away from the Persian Gulf and its desert.

One of the boys looks like me. It must be me, then, I think. He holds his head the way I held mine: with a slight inquiry, asking only questions he already knows the answers to. He was born to fear the unseeable but also grew up with the story of the hoopoe bird who says, “I am complete, and only when I lost myself did I gain all others.”

I am like a bird for only a moment, only to see my life from a distance, to tell it as a whole. Then, in this strange memory of mine, this memory of the thing called “my life,” I am a boy again, hungry, cold, and my vision narrows. I become one of the guardians. I wait for the other boy to tell me what to do.

The other boy, the other guardian, is called Clay. He knows almost everything. Certainly, more than me. He is stronger than me in mind and soul and strength. He turns his head and I know that I must force my weight to one side, to balance us again, so that we do not drown in that river. Clay has found a branch and turned it into a paddle. It relieves him from his reliance on his hands, which have turned blue in the cold waters. One of his hands is bigger than the other. It is large and grotesque. The shoulder above it bulges out, and the forearm is so heavy Clay cannot lift it easily. Everything he does with this arm is done through concentration. If it weren’t for his beauty, his strong face, his arching brows, the intention of his gaze, Clay would be scary to look upon, a monster from a fairy tale. His other arm and hand are like mine, slim and long. They belong to a child, thirteen. But Clay looks nothing like a child, and he looks older than me. The larger arm, his left arm, the one close to his heart, is triple the size of the other. It is so big it tilts Clay over. The pain in his neck as its muscles are pulled and stretched has become unbearable. This is what I see throughout this journey of recollection and contortion.

Published with permission from Knopf Canada.

Author photo credit: Laura Pak

Publisher Spotlight: Kegedonce Press

admin@49thshelf.com (49th Outreach) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 23:49:39 +0000

This month, we’re getting to know Kegedonce Press, an Indigenous-owned and operated press that has been sharing beautifully written and designed Indigenous literature since 1993. From poetry and fiction to graphic novels and children’s books, Kegedonce Press celebrates Indigenous voices and stories while involving Indigenous Peoples at all levels of production.

Tell me the story of your publisher and when you arrived on the scene.

Kegedonce Press started in 1993. At that time, Anishinaabe poet Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm felt that Indigenous literature was not treated with the same respect as settler literature; within the broader BIPOC subcategory, it seemed as if Indigenous books were a sub-subcategory. It was all very siloed. What if, she asked, Indigenous books were celebrated for what they are – great works of fiction and poetry – and not as an adjunct to some large publisher’s diversity mandate? And so she decided to take matters into her own hands and create a press devoted exclusively to (Canadian) Indigenous works in English. This was a novelty back then, and it is still very rare; we are the only all-Indigenous trade publisher in Ontario. Since then we have seen a flourishing of Indigenous literature, but as far back as the early 90s that wasn’t assured.

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What are the broad themes of your publishing program? Alternatively, what is your publishing philosophy?

Our mission is to publish great works of literature by Indigenous authors in just about every genre and topic, from children’s picture books to oral traditions to the Sixties Scoop through to YA fantasy and literary short fiction, though true to Kateri’s background as a poet, Kegedonce has always prioritized poetry. We are also proud of our bilingual titles, such as those by the perennial Anishinaabe knowledge-keeper Isaac Murdoch, or Nipugtug, by Emma Metallic, which combines a Mi’kmaq translation as well as gorgeous illustrations.

We make a point of involving Indigenous people at all stages of book production, calling upon Indigenous translators, editors, illustrators and management staff (for the sake of transparency, I am of settler descent). We take particular pride in the books themselves as works of art: a lot of care goes into design, something that becomes apparent when you hold a copy of one of our more recent titles, the horror anthology Zegaajimo. Anishinaabe artist Don Chretien’s striking bearwalker image is at once beautiful and terrifying, and the overall book design, by Chantal Lalonde, is simply exquisite. We care about books and their authors.

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What are some commercial standouts that readers might recognize?

We have one heck of a track record. Richard Van Camp started his career with us when he signed our contract for Angel Wing Splash Pattern way back in 2001; it subsequently saw a 20^th anniversary edition and remains a huge seller. We have published many Indigenous Voices Awards winners, including Nathan Adler’s short fiction collection, Ghost Lake, and Smokii Sumac’s poetry collection, you are enough. The aforementioned Nipugtug by Emma Metallic is in the IBBY-UNESCO Collection of Remarkable Books for Young Readers in Indigenous and Endangered Languages.

Commercial standouts include the super exciting A Wolf in the Sun YA fantasy tetralogy by Coltrane Seesequasis, now on volume three, The Crucible of Pain, with the final instalment scheduled for a year from now. Isaac Murdoch’s books, as well as the late Basil Johnston’s, are extremely popular. Their works present Anishinaabe oral traditions, especially the ever-popular Nanaboozhoo stories, and are cornerstones of our Anishinaabemowin revitalization efforts. And then there is the amazing Zegaajimo, which unites such luminaries as Drew Hayden Taylor, Waub Rice, Tyler Pennock and others in the scariest book we’ve ever put out.

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Are there any upcoming titles or projects that you are particularly excited about?

At the moment we are working with graphic novelist Neal Shannacappo and our Québecois counterpart, the Wendake-based French language Indigenous publisher Éditions Hannenorak, on the finishing touches of Niikaniganaw. This is a graphic novel which examines, through three narratives, the biases and racism encountered by Indigenous people when accessing the Canadian health care system. The title translates to “all my relations”, which is the notion of continuity among all beings, and a principle foreign to Canadian health care. The sponsors of this book are the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the University of Ottawa, and the book was commissioned as a teaching and training tool for students in the U of O’s health care programs. We’ve never done anything like this before and can hardly wait till it hits the shelves.

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Lastly, can you make a list of books that give us a sense of who you are as a publisher?

Lists are terribly unfair, but if I had to distil it down to a few titles, I would offer the following, though ask me tomorrow and I would present a different list!

Amik, by Sharon King
Angel Wing Splash Pattern, by Richard Van Camp
The Crooked Good, by Louise Bernice Halfe – Sky Dancer
Ghost Lake, by Nathan Adler
Honour Earth Mother, by Basil Johnston
Secrets of Stone, by Coltrane Seesequasis
These Are the Stories, by Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith
The Trail of Nenaboozhoo and Other Creation Stories, by Isaac Murdoch
Without Reservation: Indigenous Erotica, edited by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction, edited by Nathan Adler and Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm

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Is there anything else you'd like to share with our readers?

3 words: read Indigenous books!

The Representation Question, or How to Find Asexuality Everywhere

admin@49thshelf.com (Kerry Clare) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 20:29:49 +0000

In recent years, critics and advocates of many different intersectional stripes have looked to cultural representation as one front to be struggled over. Cultural representations can open things up and allow people to experiment with new steps, to build new choreographies that could transform spaces. Cultural representations can introduce a tension, a discomfort, a friction, that can move people to change, to make things more or less possible. Representations can give people licence to halt or enable others’ movement.

Even if change is slow, inertial, there’s a kind of hope in representation.

At the same time, representation has a narcotic effect where, like Narcissus, we can finally find ourselves caught by our own image, recognizing and recognized, confusing the aesthetic illusion of a transformed world for the world itself.

More and more, I find I don’t really need to see my asexuality reflected back, though I experience a strange elation when I see it. It’s an elation I have trouble trusting. I also find I’ve developed a bad habit of seeing asexuality everywhere, a side effect of finally having the words to name my experience. Again, a little untrustworthy.

What does representation give us other than a map to engage with our shared material conditions? Representation is only as good as what we can learn from it. Positive representation can nudge the needle, but I like bad representations of non-sexuality as much, if not more, than good, gold-star representations of the perfect asexual, because I can learn more about how other people really see me, the real fantasies they are projecting on me.

Positive representation can nudge the needle, but I like bad representations of non-sexuality as much, if not more, than good, gold-star representations of the perfect asexual, because I can learn more about how other people really see me, the real fantasies they are projecting on me.

If asexuality is the invisible orientation, it makes sense to advocate for visibility with representation as a particular remedy.

Representation is such a strange thing for ace advocates to pin their hopes to. Representation depends on a whole theatre of visibility that is striated by race, by gender, by class, by the ways each of us presents ourselves and receives everyone else, by the way we slide behind the faces that make social interactions easier, by the way we shift to the spots in the room that best adhere to our understanding of where we belong. Representation is directly tied to material experience. It articulates the ways we can live and relate, and it gives us scripts through which we articulate ourselves and, in turn, articulate others. It shows us what choreography corresponds to us, sending us reeling into the match game of experience.

In one sense, cultural representation constitutes a code that determines how we can respond to other people. Someone else’s face appears in front of us, and we sort it based on what we know about other faces that look like it. We use the stories we’ve been told, the stories we heard as children that have burrowed under our skin, the stories that circulate through our communities repeatedly, the stories that we’ve repeated to others. Our glaring eyes pop like projector bulbs, and we understand that other person’s face without them saying a word or performing an action.

This is not a fair way to encounter others in the world, but we do it nonetheless.

Visibility does not always mean freedom. Freedom sometimes requires being out of view. To be visible means that people can see you, and if people can see you, then correction follows. Because freedom is a collective production, if you’re moving with the flow of the room, moving according to the dominant choreographies and their representational logics, you feel free because the others in the room are enabling that freedom, making space for you. But if you’re moving against the grain, the room becomes stifling, claustrophobic, corrective.

The gamble for representation, then, is that it opens up space for living. On the one hand, representation opens up room to do things because it expands a social repertoire, providing a social logic for encounter that gives permission to make space for different modes of living and being. On the other hand, the visibility that accompanies it offers both the power and vulnerability that comes with spectacle as others pay attention to what you’re doing and whether you’re supposed to be doing it. In the hot light of spectacle, it’s understandable to wish for a little invisibility.

Visibility does not always mean freedom. Freedom sometimes requires being out of view.

So much of our everyday lives together is mediated by screens. They throttle us endlessly between compulsion and care. The push of the screen up or down or left or right (or wherever) is a repeated step in the choreography of looking for a sign of a corresponding step, an anchor to better grasp the world, a hit of dopamine.

Jia Tolentino writes about Tabitha Soren’s Surface Tension, a series of photographs that record the greasy tracks of an iPad screen as they smear overtop of news photos documenting moments of crisis and emergency, and poses that the screen is the place “where our warm animal bodies collide with this cold and infinite knowledge of the world.” Touch is the mode of making connection, but there’s a split in what gets touched. Soren’s photos make it clear that our intimacy is with the screen itself, even though we long for a connection to and with whatever is being represented on the screen. “We keep touching the surface in the hope that the act of witnessing will make us more human, and not less,” Tolentino says. The never-ending ache for relation.

I think about the sludge I leave on my own laptop’s trackpad and my smartphone’s screen. Fingerprints left in the toxins as they seep out of my skin. Life on screen just the accretive comport of one more take, one more complaint, one more cry for help, one more joke, one more glad hand, one more thirsty look, one more consumptive stance.

I feel driven by a fear of missing some detail, squeezing the whole from its fragmented parts. The seduction of the screen and the doomscrolling it facilitates is a search for something, an understanding of the way the world works and the knowledge that somewhere in that mess of information, of images, of stories, somewhere in the great vibrating mass of everything, there are signs of ourselves, that we fit and make sense in the seemingly celestial mechanics of the world we share with others.

Learn more about Ace Theory: An Essay in Fragments

Current opinion always holds asexuality to be invisible. Hence the notion of a happy, gentle, jubilant asexuality is never to be found in any text. Where are we to read it, then?

In this revelatory book, critically acclaimed poet Ryan Fitzpatrick works through the ways in which they have interfaced with a sexual world as an asexual person. Often defined as the orientation of those who don’t experience sexual attraction, asexuality is tied to a shared logic wherein our lives are shaped by sex, by romance, by economic and social pressures that determine what a good life looks like.

Leaping from the eureka-moment of finding the right words to name an unnameable experience, Ace Theory upends rigid definitions by turning over the pieces of a supposedly broken life. Through intellectual analysis, cultural criticism, and personal reflection, Fitzpatrick tangles with the trenchant knot of compulsory sexuality, putting a squeeze on the many pressures that make asexual people feel like they simply don’t fit.

Most Haunted: Montreal's Dorchester Square

admin@49thshelf.com (Kerry Clare) — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 18:41:27 +0000

Montreal is one of the oldest cities in Canada. I would also say one of the most spectacular. It was founded in 1642 and has been home to many groups of First Nations people dating back over twelve thousand years. The first Europeans showed up to trade furs in 1535, and with that comes a long, long history of humans in one spot.

Wherever you had human settlements, you usually had epidemics, many times brought on by our own ignorance. Cholera, for instance, was passed through untreated sewage that found its way back into the drinking water. It causes severe dehydration and, to this day, kills between 30,000 and 130,000 people a year. Sometimes known as the blue death—it often makes the skin of those afflicted turn blue due to extreme dehydration—it’s treatable these days, but it certainly wasn’t hundreds of years ago. Because no one really understood how the illness spread, you couldn’t keep the deceased lying around, so as soon as a person had died (or, as we will discover, possibly before), you needed to bury them fast.

Let’s do a little thought experiment, shall we? You’re a Montreal city planner in 1852, and you have a cholera cemetery dating back to 1799, but it’s not being used for anything because, of course, there hasn’t been a cholera outbreak in over twenty years. The question is obvious—what would you do with that land?

If your first impulse is cover it up and build a park, you wouldn’t be the first to think so. Dorchester Square, a popular and integral part of Montreal’s downtown, started life as the Sainte-Antoine Cholera Cemetery and is the permanent home to an estimated seventy thousand skeletons belonging to the unfortunate epidemic victims.

“If you are trying to create a haunted public space, this is pretty much the perfect recipe for it.”

It is a popular “traffic filter” for people going about their business downtown, and many have no idea anything at all is going on until they experience their own encounter. The square has also been the home to rallies and other gatherings, and cutting through the park is a great way to get where you’re going a little faster.

Nathalie is a Montrealer who is far more aware of Dorchester Square’s history than she would like after having paranormal experiences there. “If you are trying to create a haunted public space,” she said, “this is pretty much the perfect recipe for it.”

The first time she experienced something that she couldn’t explain, it was evening—when most ghostly encounters take place. She had broken up with her now ex, was feeling a little melancholy, and just needed to get out and be in the fresh air around other people. Little did she realize that not all of the people around her would be alive.

“I was sitting on a bench at dusk, and the park was strangely still. It took me a beat or two to realize that things had . . . changed. I don’t know what other word to use. I suddenly felt the hair on the back of my arms and neck stand up, but nothing had changed. I cautiously looked around me, fully expecting to see someone staring at me or walking toward me. But there was no one around. I could not shake the creepy feelings that seemed to be moving around me like a mist. That’s when I started hearing the mumbles in old-style French. I could only catch a few words here and there, but they were prayers. I kept looking around, as I was trying to put together the voices with people, but there was still no one there.”

"I could not shake the creepy feelings that seemed to be moving around me like a mist. That’s when I started hearing the mumbles in old-style French. I could only catch a few words here and there, but they were prayers. I kept looking around, as I was trying to put together the voices with people, but there was still no one there.”

This was when Nathalie decided she had had enough; she was thoroughly creeped out. As she got up to leave, scared but still cautious, she saw something she couldn’t explain. “It was so odd. You couldn’t look fully at them, or they would disappear, but if you let your peripheral vision take over and only focused on them there, you could see what looked like lights, really faint, quite large balls of light moving slowly around.”

As you may know, many people have reported Corner of the Eye Phenomenon (COTEP). The theory behind this phenomenon is that, as early humans, we were still susceptible to predators, who would usually attack from behind or the side. Our peripheral vision seems to catch movements that our forward-facing vision can’t, and now that we are no longer as worried about being hunted, that includes paranormal activity.

Learn more about Canada's Most Haunted:

From urban hauntings in big cities to intimate stories in small towns, Canada’s Most Hauntedshares never-before-told stories and gives fresh perspectives on the country’s most famous hauntings. Read the hair-raising tales of:

The victims and murderers of 108 Mile House, South Caribou, BC
The actors and dancers wandering The Palace Grand in Dawson City, YT
Night staff’s chilling encounters at the Western Development Museum in Saskatoon, SK
Why Nahanni National Park Reserve in Dehcho Region, NWT is nicknamed Valley of the Headless Men
The rebels and military men haunting Fort Henry in Kingston, ON
An unexpected paranormal friendship at The Four Sisters in St John’s, NL

Guided by experienced storyteller Ian Gibbs—ghost-walk guide, host of the Ghosts ‘N Bearspodcast, and author of three ghost story collections—discover thirty-two chilling stories of ghosts and hauntings, with stops in every province and territory.

Giller Prize 2026: The Chat with Michelle Good

admin@49thshelf.com (Trevor Corkum) — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 13:15:09 +0000

Michelle Good is a writer of Cree ancestry and a member of the Red Pheasant Cree nation in Saskatchewan. After working with Indigenous communities and organizations for 25 years, she obtained her law degree as a 43-year-old single mom, and then spent 14 years advocating for residential school survivors. She earned her MFA in creative writing while still practising law. Her debut novel, Five Little Indians, became a #1 bestseller and won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Kobo Emerging Writer’s Prize, and CBC’s Canada Reads, and was nominated for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Giller Prize, among other honours. Good’s bestselling book Truth Telling: Seven Conversations about Indigenous Life in Canada was shortlisted for the Basillie Prize for Public Policy. In 2025, she won the Indspire Award for Arts and was admitted as a member of the Order of Canada.

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What scares you most about writing fiction?

Nothing scares me about writing fiction. I am challenged by it but the desire to tell the story far outweighs anything else.

What did you learn about yourself as you worked on Eliza Sunshine?

How much I love immersing myself in the story, allowing the worlds of the characters to emerge from my imagination.

Eliza Sunshine follows Eliza, a residential school survivor, and her daughter Ella, a university student. How and when did Eliza and Ella first announce themselves as characters for you?

The novel is based on the lives of my mother and great grandmother. They were always key characters even before there was a single word on the page. I also knew there would be a fictitious daughter – the third generation – to round out how oral history passes from one generation to another and what purpose it serves.

What was the biggest challenge in writing the novel?

Aside from the inherent challenges in writing about one’s own mother, broaching the subject of how many people of my mother’s generation felt compelled to step away from their cultural identity in trying to escape the brutality it attracted. It was a challenge to write that in a way that did not appear judgmental and more in keeping with the pressure of colonial policy to deconstruct Indigenous people.

As Frantz Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, “The Colonial system nurtures the colonized people in such a way as to make them believe that salvation lies in their identification with the colonizer’s values.”

It was a challenge to write that in a way that did not appear judgmental and more in keeping with the pressure of colonial policy to deconstruct Indigenous people.

What’s a great Canadian book that has changed you in some way?

Not just one. The Diviners, by Margaret Laurence. I had never before experienced a woman protagonist shine on the page as Morag did. The Stone Angel also by Laurence. The brilliant generational storytelling is an inspiration. Ethel Wilson, The Swamp Angel. I read this as a teen and reading of a woman who deliberately and successfully wrangled her life out of the hands of societal expectations and went her own way encouraged me to do the same.

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Excerpt from Eliza Sunshine

I was born at the beginning of the end. I was given the name Swan. It was not, though, for the power and grace of that bird that I became its namesake. I was given this name for the drive in me to see and understand everything. My father, Maskwa, sometimes called me Long Neck, teasing me about my need to have my beak in every conversation. Remembering the mirth in his voice makes me smile even now. Back then, it assured me of his affection. His teasing was tender, not barbed or scolding. An old woman now, no longer an oblivious child, I look back realizing what I didn’t know— that the end to our days of freedom and plenty was a bitter wind touching everything, even then. I see my parents’ and grandparents’ faces as I knew them as a child, so filled with love and confidence. But the truth of that ending is also etched on their faces. I see the burden of worry in their eyes. I feel the tension in their embraces. I was born in freedom and couldn’t possibly have understood that my childhood world and everything we knew and treasured could crumble around us like a riverbank in a flood. It was something beyond even imagination.

I try not to think of those bitter times. I remember with my eyes. I see all the destruction and suffering as though it was happening again. Those awful sights create a wave of pain so strong I feel it in my body and cry out to the ones taken from me for mercy and forgetting.

And now Eliza has come home from that school today and I hardly know her. She is thin. Starvation on her like a dark cloud. Her beautiful hair, touching the backs of her knees when she left, is cropped rough and short and no longer shines. Her eyes, those bright, curious eyes, are dull and listless. I recognize the pain in them. It is my pain and the pain I’ve seen again and again in the ones I love. Too much for a little girl. I told her mother, Sarah, she is to stay with me in my tent until she is taken back. I will take her out gathering with me, like we did before, and the prairie will remind her of herself. She doesn’t know of the great suffering. How could she, and why should she have to? But I will tell her. That way she can carry it back with her to that place. She will know, through it all, I did not surrender and neither must she.

My life before the destruction was not an easy life, but it was so good. I remember with such fondness our summers along the Milk River in what is now known as Montana and Alberta. With the end of winter and the arrival of the awakening time, when the tender green shoots of spring rise, determined and assured, from the earth, we began thinking of when we would head south from our winter ing grounds. My father, the Okimâw, made his rounds to the lodges, smoked with the men and teased the women. Our camp was so big— more than two hundred lodges—it took my father all day to visit each family to speak with them about the best time to break camp and move south.

He always started with the wise ones, the old people, our revered keepers of the proper ways of being. Then, lodge by lodge, one by one, the decision to leave our wintering place came into being like a wide, lethargic river rolling into narrowing banks, speeding up and dancing between the shores. Ripples of anticipation ran through the camp as each lodge came to know that soon we would head for the new grass and the buffalo. After a long winter of dried meat and pemmican, and occasionally fresh game, we were hungry for the endless supply of fresh meat the buffalo offered up to us every year. We looked forward to the long summer days, our most carefree time. Yes, we laboured hard and long, working the hides to repair or replace our lodge covers, our clothing, our moccasins, fashioning tails, tongues, bones and teeth into our implements and utensils. But we did it basking in the soul warming sun, laughing and teasing among ourselves.

Author photo credit: Silk Sellinger

Bodies of Work: 10 Recent Poetry Collections Addressing Labour

admin@49thshelf.com (Kerry Clare) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 16:56:15 +0000

Not everyone has a job, but everyone works. We all perform labour. We participate in society, fulfill responsibilities, and care for ourselves and one another in myriad ways. Some of this work is crucial to our survival and well-being; much of it is seemingly pointless, designed to prop up an economic system to which many of us have valid objections. Whether we are facilitating the system’s continued functioning, or meaningfully resisting it, we are inevitably called to work. Here are 10 poetry collections from the past 6 years that have a lot to say about labour, and how we enact and embody it—all of which I highly recommend reading.

Still, by A Jamali Rad, in tautly precise poetry, depicts constructions of the body and the self within the context of extractive capitalism and ubiquitous surveillance, both of which are often related to spheres of labour. This collection is very much aware of, and metatextually concerned with, how language shapes our understanding of these central aspects of our selves and lives.

Plenitude, by Daniel Sarah Karasik, is a contemplative and playful insider look at the work of grassroots social and political advocacy, fully attuned to the necessity of conceptualizing and striving toward better futures for our world, both inside and outside of labour rights. This collection also recognizes how an important component of such work is calling to task a society’s prevailing and often oppressive beliefs and practices related to gender, sexuality, migration, incarceration, et al.

Shadow Price, by Farah Ghafoor, examines the potential value and perceived cost—both figurative and literal—of living as human beings amid capitalism and climate crisis, and the consequences of humankind’s decisions for the flora and fauna around us. This collection is tenderly attentive to the responsibilities demanded of us by virtue of our interdependence.

Harrowings, by Cecily Nicholson, considers various, and what at first may seem disparate, forms of labour: intellectual, agricultural, abolitionist. It also confronts the place of work in the lives of people who are incarcerated, for whom the structures and strictures of work may be different than those the non-incarcerated are accustomed to. Whenever I am called upon to recommend books I almost invariably include something by Nicholson on the list, as her work is so reliably thoughtful and innovative.

Bad Weather Mammals, by Ashley-Elizabeth Best, draws attention to the work of living with disability and trauma, and to the related labour of navigating burdensomely bureaucratic social assistance programs—a terrible irony given that such programs are often designed to provide financial support to people who, temporarily or permanently, are unable to do regular paid work. This collection also highlights the crucial labour of creating and sustaining disabled communities.

Save Your Prayers—Send Money, by Jónína Kirton, deploys memory, humour, and hard-earned wisdom to explore the necessary personal, interpersonal, and communal work undertaken by people who are directly impacted by pervasive anti-Indigenous racism and its attendant intergenerational trauma, and people who who are disabled or chronically ill and who must therefore take on an often unhelpful medical establishment, frequently predatory ‘wellness’ purveyors, and the daily barriers of an ableist society.

Allodynia, by Nisa Malli, uses speculative poetry, with an eye toward space and the future of humankind, to reflect on the grind of chronic pain and illness, the fraught relationship between humans and technology, and the work required of us all to build livable worlds. In “The Illness Factory,” Malli writes: “In my fever, I laboured. I did the work/ of diagnostics and daily maintenance, of pretending/ to be well.” This sentiment is perhaps particularly resonant for those of us who live with disability, though I suspect is relatable for anyone tasked with keeping a body—their own or another’s—alive.

Attic Rain, by Samantha Jones, reveals the labour that living with a mental health condition like Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder adds to one’s daily life. Jones’ quippy, clever, approachable poems are likely to strike a chord with those of us familiar with the slog of navigating through our days while living with mental illness, neurodivergence, or any other deviation from prescribed norms in a society that is little inclined and ill-equipped to tolerate, never mind foster, flourishing for us.

Rebellion Box, by Hollay Ghadery, is, if I might be so bold to say, a perfect complement to my collection, in that it so eloquently articulates the joys and trials of a sphere of labour that is essential to humankind’s survival but that is largely absent from my book: mothering. Nurturing the next generation is venerable work, though I am hardly the right person to comment on it. Ghadery, by contrast, is the mother of four children, a kind of literary fair godmother to so many of us, and a remarkable writer in her own right—I struggle to think of anyone I’d rather hear from on the subject.

Shadow Blight, by Annick MacAskill is, in its own way, a different kind of complement to Ghadery’s text, unveiling as it does the sombre flip side of motherhood: pregnancy loss. MacAskill’s incredible poetic dexterity gives us surprising, insightful, moving poems about the emotional and psychic labour of moving through a very particular kind of grief. MacAskill is also a hardworking writer; her eminently careful dedication to her artistic practice always leads to books deeply worth reading and I won’t miss a chance to recommend one.

Learn more about The Work Is Done When We Are Dead:

The Work Is Done When We Are Dead considers work in all its many forms, with a particular interest in types of labour that are unpaid, underappreciated, or even entirely unrecognized. These poems, by turns frantic and playful, lyric and experimental, probe at how the diffuse responsibilities we have to ourselves and one another might all be interpreted as kinds of labour, and ask whether that is a fruitful framework for our lives. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is a collection that is as poetically indulgent as it is urgently existential. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is Jade Wallace’s sophomore poetry collection.

Healing in a Language I Wasn't Taught

admin@49thshelf.com (Kerry Clare) — Mon, 26 Oct 2026 15:41:59 +0000

In one of my earliest memories, my father is crying. I am only three years old, but even as a child, I know this is a rare sighting.

In that murky memory, I recall the harsh words, the smashed picture frames, and my mother’s anguished sobs. But as was typical in my childhood, no one pays me much attention. My father cries and my mother slams the door and no one notices me watching.

We never spoke of that moment. It slipped quietly into the crammed family archive full of Things We Do Not Discuss. For years I questioned whether I’d imagined it, until three decades later, when my sister confirmed it over steaming bowls of phở.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “That definitely happened.”

The relief I felt at being right was short-lived. More than anything, her confirmation filled me with sorrow. That moment had been buried for so long. I wondered how much more had been hidden over the years. What other memories were we running from and hoping would fade so we might one day convince ourselves they never happened at all?

Silence was not unusual in our family. Like many children of immigrants, I grew up fluent in the language of doing. We communicated through tasks and obligations. There was no time for talking about feelings. Care was expressed through action: peeled fruit on the table, elaborate dinners cooked after impossibly long workdays, cash pressed into our palms without question. Love was practical, efficient, and, often, without any words at all.

What other memories were we running from and hoping would fade so we might one day convince ourselves they never happened at all?

My family’s Chinese restaurant was the centre of everything. It was our livelihood and social centre. Because our world and lives revolved around it, our conversations did, too.

“Can you make an order of wontons?”

“Linh, there’s a customer at the register.”

“Garbage full. Take it out.”

“It’s busy. Help mummy and daddy do dishes.”

When our conversations weren’t focused on everything that needed to be done, we chatted in superficialities.

“Are you hungry?”

“Was it busy?”

There was no room for intimacy when our family’s survival required all of us to focus on our respective tasks. Feelings? What feelings? Those were to be managed quietly and alone, or, preferably, pushed deep into a locked vault to be ignored for the rest of our lives.

My father was often the quietest and most stoic of us all, unless he was talking about the war. War, it seems, is every father’s Roman Empire. But for my dad, the obsession wasn’t just theoretical. He was remembering.

“When I was nine years old…” he would begin, and we’d brace ourselves.

He told us about growing up in Vietnam during the war: about bombings, starvation, fear, and two-hour-long walks to school through the mountains. These stories were usually told strategically to remind us we had no right to complain. We were spoiled and soft. He would shake his head when we left rice on our plates or complained about the bitter winter winds on our five-minute walks to school.

We found it profoundly annoying. To us, these were the ravings of an out-of-touch Chinese man. We wanted to get back to our CD players and TV screens, where English words could drown him out.

There was no room for intimacy when our family’s survival required all of us to focus on our respective tasks. Feelings? What feelings? Those were to be managed quietly and alone, or, preferably, pushed deep into a locked vault to be ignored for the rest of our lives.

My mother hated these stories even more than we did because they actually meant something to her. They meant reliving her most traumatic experiences—memories she’d long buried and left behind in humid Vietnam. Remembering was painful and dangerous. It threatened to undo all the careful psychological work she’d done to move forward and survive.

We all collectively closed our ears to my father. We prayed he’d stop speaking. Silence, again, won out.

When I talk to my friends who also grew up in immigrant households, they tell me this was a familiar dance in their families, too. I hear how their parents were too busy working and trying to put food on the table to do things like nurture tenderness. My parents came to Canada with zero dollars to their name—you bet your ass that working and making money was their top priority.

Because of that, we grew up knowing our parents’ routines, sacrifices, and rules, but not their interior worlds. They weren’t even really people to us. They were providers. We were not privy to their fears or to knowing the versions of themselves they left behind. We could see their labour as clear as day, but were kept in the dark about their dreams and feelings. The distance between us was normalized: a relationship built on duty and logistics rather than any real intimacy. We learned not to ask too many questions or to be an inconvenience.

We grew up knowing our parents’ routines, sacrifices, and rules, but not their interior worlds. They weren’t even really people to us.

I first put that lesson into practice when I was five years old.

I was in kindergarten, and it was there that I discovered the magical water table—the most coveted toy in our class. Kids lined up for the chance to grab bucketfuls of water and gleefully submerge various sea creatures beneath the flowing spiralling water slide. This confused me. Back home, whenever I tried to play in the bath, my mother would suck her teeth at me and rush me out of the water. After her long day at work, she didn’t have time to indulge my bathtime adventures.

At school, the rules were different. Play was encouraged. It took me weeks to finally muster up the courage to join the long line. I wasn’t sure I knew how to play properly. What if I did it wrong? When it was finally my turn, I dove in with abandon. I clutched at the bright red crabs and the blue-and-yellow fish, and made them swim and dance with each other as water splashed all over my clothes. I never wanted to stop.

Even when the pressure came low and slow in my lower belly, and then increased more aggressively, I kept playing. I ignored the calls coming from my own body. I dismissed my own needs. It wasn’t until the warmth seeped through my pants that the crab and fish stopped dancing. Shame swept through me. Now I definitely had to stop.

My teacher was kind and fetched me an oversized pair of brown corduroy pants from the lost and found. I put them on without complaint. The alternative—calling my parents—felt unbearable to me. They were busy. They were tired. I couldn’t be a bother.

I never even told them what happened. And I never played at the water table again.

How many children of the diaspora become well versed in self-denial? How many are experts in ignoring their own needs and keeping secrets from their parents because they don’t want to be a nuisance? We absorb the belief that goodness is measured by how little space we take up. We play our part to perfection in the hopes we might get a small smile and a scrap of praise. When we do, it’ll feel even better than splashing in the water. It’ll feel like everything.

How many children of the diaspora become well versed in self-denial? How many are experts in ignoring their own needs and keeping secrets from their parents because they don’t want to be a nuisance? We absorb the belief that goodness is measured by how little space we take up.

Excerpt from That Asian Girl is a Problem: Confessions of a Recovering Good Girl, Rachel Phan, 2026, Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. Reprinted with permission from the publisher.

Learn more about That Asian Girl is a Problem:

In a world that tells women of colour they are either too much or not enough, Rachel Phan asks: What if being a “problem” is actually the point?

That Asian Girl Is a Problem is a bold, witty, and uncompromising collection about what it means to live as a racialized woman in spaces that were never built for you. Drawing from her own experiences, Phan dives into the contradictions of being the “problem” woman in the workplace, in family, in faith, in marriage and even in her own body. With sharp humour and unflinching honesty, she exposes the absurdity of a society that demands gratitude, silence and smallness from women of colour—and explores what happens when they finally refuse.

From a court transcript satirizing how racialized women are “tried” for being too much at work, to a tongue-in-cheek recipe for the perfect Asian female body, to searing reflections on filial piety, interracial marriage, queerness and imposter syndrome, That Asian Girl Is a Problem blends memoir, cultural critique and playful experimentation to expose the pressures racialized women face—and the thrill of living on your own terms.

Part social commentary, part coming-of-age, part rebellion, this book transforms every insult and “flaw” into an act of resilience and defiance. For anyone who’s ever been called difficult, too much, or simply a problem, Rachel Phan offers both recognition and a rallying cry: being a problem might be the most honest and freeing way to live.

Reading the Book You Need to Read (and Writing the Book You Need to Write)

admin@49thshelf.com (Kerry Clare) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 17:41:28 +0000

What book changed my life?

There are several answers to that question, but first real adult Canadian fantasy I ever read was The Kissing Man by George Elliott, published in the New Canadian Library in 1962, and it is definitely on the shortlist.

It lived mainly in memory until last week. But recently I’ve been re-reading books that opened doors and magical windows to me when I was a kid, and by “kid” I mean anywhere from remembered childhood to teenaged years. You have to understand that this would be a lot of books: I come from a family of voracious readers and before I started Grade One at four years old, I was already reading. We kept the local library very busy and everyone in the family read all the books that we brought home. In addition, my parents believed that as kids we would only extract content that matched our understanding at the time, so we weren’t censored. I remember reading The Age of Fable in Grade Three, and Forever Amber a couple of years later, but from them I gained neither a folklore degree nor any sex education: I skipped everything that wasn’t relevant, and what I was interested in was nothing fancier than Story.

I put The Kissing Man on the re-reading list when I was asked to write this commission.

Overall, my re-reading goal is to see if these books “hold up” to modern scrutiny, to the massive changes in culture that 60 years have wrought. Whether they are good changes is another matter for lengthy discussion, but in general I have to say that yes, social changes have until recently been for the most part upward and better. Recent lapses in the evolution of mass consciousness, at home (in Alberta) and abroad have only served to highlight how far we have come from the casual racism, sexism, heterosexism of those post-WWII years that were supposed to be so rosy and had such dark shadows.

In the 1960s America was confronting segregation, colonialism (in the form of the Vietnam War most obviously), sexism, and homophobia. In Canada, we partook vicariously but had a better marginally better record: Diefenbaker was championing a new Bill of Rights, which meant that by association many disenfranchised citizens finally got the vote. Pearson got the Nobel Peace Prize, while on newly-widespread TV we watched the first space flights and the moon landing, Freedom Marches and race riots, peace marches and sit-downs, the moment when a Vietnamese police chief shoot a man in the head without trial, the assassination of two Kennedys, and the horror of the Kent State massacre in 1970.

Did the books I loved in the 1960s share those shadows? Some had their heads in fantasy-lands but were their feet mired in darkness and intolerance?

After re-reading a lot of my childhood bookshelf, I’m only a bit closer to an answer—but looking again at The Kissing Man I found a whole new landscape of understanding taking me in a completely different direction, at right angles at best, into another universe at worst.

Because I realized when I re-read this particular book—a book I’ve been recommending and raving about since I read it at 15 or 16—that I didn’t recognize it at all.

The Kissing Man is a linked set of eleven short stories, all set in the same nameless Ontario town and with different, overlapping townspeople for protagonists. It is characterised by a prose style that infuses intensity and significance to everyday events, and a magic realism that randomly turns these events extraordinary.

I vividly remembered the title story: Froody is also 16, I think, about the age I would have been when I read it, and she works in the dry goods store. She is full of longing and, as I did, feels disconnected from her town, her history, and her future. Into this shadowy, dusty realm come the old women of the town to match embroidery threads and buy fabric and hat trim: always in the shadows of Froody’s melancholy, they hardly exist for her. Until—a man comes in, walks directly to an older and unhappily-married woman, sees her, takes her in his arms and kisses her, then leaves. This happens twice more, with a spinster and a widow. The third time the kissing man is seen by a judgemental (male) townsperson, and he flees out the back door. Knowing she won’t see him again, Froody asks him, “Why didn’t you come for me?” He calls back to her, “You’ve been one of the lucky ones. You don’t need me yet.”

Maybe I was 15. I’m not sure.

I didn’t know much about George Elliott until I did a rabbit-hole dive this last week. I discovered very little, but certainly more than I’d known for the last six decades. Born in 1923, Elliott was a newspaper journalist turned Toronto ad executive turned Minister-Counsellor for Public Affairs at the Embassy of Canada in Washington D.C. (from 1976 to 1980). After The Kissing Man, he published no fiction until 1995, but wrote (or brought to publication, which is different) three more books during his retirement to St. Jean Ile d'Orleans, Quebec. He died in 1996 and one more book was published posthumously in 2010. I’ve ordered these books, but they haven’t arrived, and I’m honestly a little trepidatious about reading them. I want to keep The Kissing Man as special. It was a trigger for me into a whole new way of writing and seeing the world.

I want to keep The Kissing Man as special. It was a trigger for me into a whole new way of writing and seeing the world.

Just because, since I went down the rabbit-hole and I insist you must too, here’s what a scholar named Gerald Lynch wrote in 1997, in the one scholarly essay I found in my initial search¹:

The Kissing Man, like Duncan Campbell Scott's In the Village of Viger (1896) and Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), is distinctively a story cycle of place… It anatomizes a small town, looking at the characters, institutions, traditions, mores and rituals that give a place coherence over time… it analyzes what makes a physical place a human community, for good and ill, and signals what threatens the continuance of small town life and communal values… the story-cycle form, in its cross-sectional sampling technique, is ideally suited to such an anatomy of place as well as to the interrogation of identity and subjectivity in postmodern culture…. When place still figures as the locus of attention in a contemporary story cycle, as it does, say, in Jack Hodgins's Spit Delaney's Island (1976), the theme is most likely to be dispersal and fragmentation rather than place as site of identity.

The Kissing Man differs most noticeably from its literary and generic predecessors in style: it is neither local colour, nor humour, nor social or psychological realism; nor, for that matter, is it seldom conventional representational fiction. The Kissing Man draws more obviously on the styles and techniques of myth, fable, and fairy tale, mixing the mundane and marvellous in an unapologetic manner which by 1962 had already long been termed "magical realism"… Angel Flores could in fact have been predicting The Kissing Man when in 1955 he described South American fiction writers generally as evincing "the same preoccupation with style and also the same transformation of the common and the everyday into the awesome and unreal", and characterized their prose style as one that "seeks precision and leanness"...

But if The Kissing Man anticipates Canadian magic realism and some of the dominant stratagems of postmodern fiction, it is also true that in terms of deep-structuring subtexts it relies respectfully, in high modern fashion, on older stories drawn from a variety of sources ranging from the biblical account of Jacob and Esau ("When Jacob Fletcher was a boy") to Irish folklore ("A leaf for everything good") to various North American folk tales. With the notable exceptions of Howard O'Hagan's Tay John (1939) and Sheila Watson's The Double Hook (1959), it remains true that The Kissing Man was unique in the world of Canadian fiction for an elliptical prose style that can make Norman Levine's look florid, and for a mundanely marvellous presentation of fictional events.

The Kissing Man also arrived at a very particular time in Canadian literary history. In the late 1960s, professors, who were sometimes writers too, such as Henry Kreisel in Edmonton, were looking for contemporary Canadian books to add to a mainly non-Canadian literary curriculum—and, as John Clute might say, to update the internal year of Canadian readers. Within an astonishingly-few years of its publication The Kissing Man was on university Canadian Literature courses, and Kreisel was teaching it to my sister and our friend Betty² at the University of Alberta in 1968.

That’s when I read it—I was nine years younger than my sister, just into high school—and it exploded my brain. In a good way, need I say? The stories are rife with a kind of magic that, rather than high fantasy such as the Lewis, Tolkien, and Nesbit that I was reading, grew from ordinary life. Ordinary life seen sideways. Magic that was brought into the ordinary life of the small-town dwellers by strangers, or known in some osmotic process by neighbours, or simply discovered by the wayside and recognised without turmoil. Several of these pieces of magic stuck with me for almost 60 years, the “stickiest” being the story I summarised above.

But when I reread the whole book last week, I recognised almost none of it. That also exploded my thinking. How could I have been raving about and recommending this book for at least five decades and recognise only three of the stories, and only one completely?

How does a book transform a kid, lodge in memory, inform a writing style and a belief in the extraordinary magic resting within the ordinary—and yet be so completely different than I remembered it?

What I have understood, which is now supported by some other re-readings I’ve done since, is how much my own formative needs filtered the books for me. The richness I found there was the richness I needed at the time. I valorised the parts of the narrative that helped complete a process of seeking that was bigger than each individual book.

What I have understood, which is now supported by some other re-readings I’ve done since, is how much my own formative needs filtered the books for me.

Even in sometimes unexceptional and sometimes ambiguous narratives, and certainly in The Kissing Man, I found windows into glistening places of imagination and style that were special only to me.

Because I wasn’t just reading to shape my sense of self. I wasn’t just looking, in literature, for the kind of person I wanted to be and for what I wanted to believe in. That was true, but I was also casting about for what kind of writer I needed to be.

To achieve that Great Work of Time (to quote a John Crowley title) I took only what I needed to carry with me. The parts of each book that didn’t shine at that moment were left there, while my soul and my spirit accumulated depth and understanding.

I have to note that the through-line from The Kissing Man is one of the three most direct I’ve found to influence my style and my fondness for magic realism³, while many other books were revealed during the re-read as dated, trite, derivative, indefensible for their inherent “isms”, or just plain invidious. It fascinates me to discover what nuggets of nutrition I took in from these flawed narratives, while ignoring, shaking my head at, or dismissing their issues.

All this to both lead to and confirm my thesis: especially as early and mid-grade readers, but probably all our reading life, we don’t read the books that are there, we read the books we need to read.⁴

But more than that, as writers, we also gather from the huge database of books we read⁵ the skills and experience to later write the books we need to write.

Our hard-won styles and themes and pre-occupations may later prove to be justifiable in fancy critical language when someone asks us about them in an interview. We’ve all done that: made our fuzzy process high-falutin’ so we look more thoughtful, intentional, and reasonable as writers. We comb our hair and go out in the world and pretend we are tidy, disciplined persons who understand our own process.

But really, we writers have our feet in an amorphous and little-known swamp that, however questionable its contents, is rich enough that from it we can—often unconsciously, occasionally intentionally—filter, distill, or extract by purification the shining insights, prosodies, stories, and meanings that we place into our work.

From well-remembered and little-remembered sources, and from the stuff of the self that our lives, our hearts, and our special books helped us become, we make our magic.

We writers have our feet in an amorphous and little-known swamp that, however questionable its contents, is rich enough that from it we can—often unconsciously, occasionally intentionally—filter, distill, or extract by purification the shining insights, prosodies, stories, and meanings that we place into our work.

Learn more about At the Freak Show:

Asa has spent their whole life seeing another face in the mirror, the face of their conjoint twin who died during a catastrophic attempt to separate them at age three. The lone survivor, Asa has lived their life in between. Assigned a gender for surgical convenience, Asa has at time identified as male, at other times, female. But through music, Asa finds acceptance of their true, non-binary, gender-fluid self.

Asa is unashamed and unafraid, but life outside the binary is not easy. As Asa becomes a famous musician, they must face the people who find their existence a threat. Life as a lone twin is also not easy. Asa knows themself, but must always wonder what could have been. Throughout their journey, Asa experiences visions of alternate universes, some that include the survival of their conjoined twin Angelo, who Asa calls mirror boy.

A stunningly original work that breaks new literary ground, At the Freak Show smashes together speculative fiction, coming of age, social justice fiction, rock biography, and literary mastery to create a timeless, human story about the search for belonging and self-acceptance.

*****

[1] Lynch, G. (1997). "'To Keep What Was Good and Pass it on': George Elliott’s Small Town Memorial, The Kissing Man". Studies in Canadian Literature, 22(1). Retrieved from https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/SCL/article/view/8259

[2] My sister gave me hers in about 1970, and I got Betty’s when she died: Betty’s is full of her class notes whereas my sister’s has only her bold signature on the first leaf.

[3] (accompanied by an English book called Crab Village by Julia Clark that I have written about elsewhere, which holds every bit of its impact for me 65 years after I first read it, and A Chance Child by Jill Paton Walsh which I read in adulthood and which similarly shaped me)

[4] Probably not a new thought, but always interesting to remind ourselves (—as writers as well as readers, but that’s a whole other essay).

[5] At least, I hope that for most writers it’s a huge database. After all, probably the best way to learn to write is to read, and to read so many books that we lose track of what we have learned from each one.

Giller Prize 2026: The Chat with Tara Gereaux

admin@49thshelf.com (Trevor Corkum) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 13:21:26 +0000

Tara Gereaux is the author of Saltus, which was shortlisted for the 2022 ReLit Novel Award and three Saskatchewan Book Awards; and Size of a Fist, a teen novella, which was also shortlisted for two Saskatchewan Book Awards. Tara holds an MFA in creative writing from UBC and has worked as a writer and story editor for film and television. She is a citizen of the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan and lives in Regina on Treaty 4 territory and the homeland of the Métis.

_____

What scares you most about writing?

I’m terrified of not translating the story that’s in my head and my heart onto the page in the way it deserves. I worry I’m not going to do the story justice or honour it in the way it needs to be honoured. Ultimately, I’m afraid of failure, which I think haunts almost every writer.

What did you learn about yourself as you worked on Wild People Quiet?

I learned more about my Métis culture and history, and more about my family—how we’re connected to that culture and history, how we’re a part of it. Without meaning to sound grandiose, I feel as if I understand more about my place in this world and how I came to be.

Wild People Quiet tells the story of Florence, a woman who decides to hide her Métis identity while living in small town Saskatchewan in the 1940s. Tell us about Florence and how she first came alive for you.

Like all my characters and stories, Florence came to me slowly over many years. I was inspired to write this story because of a question I had about my own family’s history, which was why we never talked openly about being Métis. I also knew very early on that I wanted to explore this story from a woman’s perspective because we know so much more about the men in Métis history, but we hear less often about the women, though it was the women who played a vital role in preserving and passing on the culture. These were the seeds for the idea of Florence, and when I finally put pen to paper after many months of thinking about her, the very first section I wrote, which is a section that takes place at Nick’s Diner where she runs into a person from her past, it was in that moment when she came alive to me—I saw her fear, her vulnerability and her humanity.

I was inspired to write this story because of a question I had about my own family’s history, which was why we never talked openly about being Métis.

What was the biggest challenge in writing Florence’s story, and the novel more generally?

My biggest challenge was overcoming the fear and the doubt I had that I should even be writing her story. I did not grow up in my culture so I questioned whether I had a right to tell it. I only overcame that fear by continuing my reconnection journey and listening to and learning from community. While on this journey, I’ve come to understand that my and my family’s experience of our Métis identity is a Métis experience.

What’s a great Canadian book that has changed you in some way?

Just one?! There have been so many it’s hard to choose, but because I’m being asked these questions as a result of my latest novel, I have to highlight Maria Campbell’s Halfbreed, a memoir about her experiences as a Michif woman. It’s fierce and unflinching, but there’s love in there too. So much love. I was electrified while reading it because it taught me so much about what it means to be an Indigenous woman in this province and this country. (And if I can cheat and slip in a second book, it would be David A. Robertson’s memoir Black Water. So beautifully and lovingly written, it was a helpful companion as I was navigating my own reconnection journey.)

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Author photo: Chris Graham