Koh-i-Noor: The Playlist is here! 

Michael Eddy has curated an official playlist for his debut novel Koh-i-Noor. Michael has also written sixteen vignettes, explaining how he associates each song with his book! Michael crafts a fascinating mixtape-essay that walks us through his early love of Hip Hop, his art school days in Halifax’s “Golden Age”, and later his time living and working in China, all of which heavily inspired the writing of Koh-i-Noor. Take it away Michael!

Listen to the whole playlist here.

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“Your Wildest Dreams” by The Moody Blues

I associate this song with a memory of standing outside on the asphalt in front of our house on Fenwood Road. Our parents’ friends had loaded up their car and were preparing to leave, having decided to move back to the United States, to Boston. They hugged, got in, and we watched their car roll down the hill. I remember my mother crying. Maybe the song played that day? I listen to this song now and I project this emotion I thought I witnessed, of devastation and loss, onto everything in my own life that could have been. Their names were Ken and Karen.

“Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre 

The Chronic was the first album I chose on my own to purchase (1993) that wasn’t Weird Al Yankovic content or TV or film soundtrack. I had no idea what they were saying when I first heard it at Summer Camp, but I hallucinated a beautiful Californiacartoonscape over the sky-dried grass and in the worldliness in the green eyes of Jabula, the older American boy with the tape. I carried my fervour into junior high—commending Luis Ramirez’s Snoop Doggy Dogg t-shirt on the first day, sealing our friendship—and went on to procure further baffling testaments such as Outkast and the Wu Tang Clan. I remembered that I had been born in New York and blocked the more Scotian flecks of my accent, the effect of which continues until today in my nonspecific manner of speaking. The album opened the door on an era of fervid, ineffable devotion to rap music that lasted into the new millennium, at the expense of all other genres. Today, as the next generation takes a renewed interest in 1990s rap music, I urge them to keep an open mind, son. Purity is no buckler against the deserts of this contemporary world, and certainly there is no secret knowledge anymore.

“Robbin Banks” by Jeffrey Frederick, Michael Hurley and the Unholy Modal Rounders

First encountered in the Rockies on a tape or CD player around 1999. My task for weeks was preparing a pair of lodgepole pine logs with a straight draw knife that ate huge pink blisters into my palms. I liked to chew the strips of root-beery phloem that I flayed off. The goal was to thin the log out to the point where it could be soaked and bent into an arc for a little footbridge leading up to the great stupa of Dharmakaya. At night we drank Jim Beam if we were lucky and sat before a campfire with the Nepali craftsmen overseeing the accuracy of the sculptural production (the Western master had been rendering the figures too sexy, their ankles and other joints weren’t sufficiently puffy like those of the gods). I was no longer present, but I understand that when the attempt was made to bend the logs, they snapped.

“Patsy Cline” by The Guthries

We all know which market the Guthries are talking about. They are talking about the original Halifax Farmers Market location in the old Alexander Keith brewery. At the Market, you saw everyone, your friends worked at the stands, it was the weekend, you were off. If you didn’t see her at the market, and you couldn’t find her anywhere in the North End, and she didn’t respond to the messages on her answering machine, perhaps it was some kind of ghost or apparition you were after.

“She’s Stepping Out” by Piggy

Every place where I have lived, my arrival was too late, the Golden Age had passed. That said, were Halifax in my early 20s up for Golden Age election and I had to nominate one contender, it would likely be Piggy. A calypso ensemble, crystallization of the anarchist possibility of a place like Halifax, where you could make your own radical culture and community. Of course, these days they’d be considered extremely woke. To you that might be a pejorative term, but if you recall, in the early 2000s we hadn’t been beaten to an absolute pulp by the right wing. Well, okay, Bush Jr., Iraq War Jr., War on Terror the First, etc. But we felt we could live well together, there was an ethical spirit, and we were art students. The famous Tre Arrow (born Michael Scarpitti in 1974) cooked Food Not Bombs meals with us a few times in our apartment until he disappeared. He was later denied asylum by Canada and remanded to American authorities to face 14 counts of arson and conspiracy committed on logging and cement trucks in Oregon as part of the Earth Liberation Front. You see? Golden Age. Piggy or the Piggy spirit was playing in the old wooden church on North Street for the party before our departure. It was to be the last time I lived in Halifax. We left on a cross-continent hitchhiking trip that turned into 11 years living outside of Canada.

“I Like Chopin” by Gazebo

The first time I visited Beijing was in 2005. I walked around aimlessly, daunted by the scale, confused about where to go and what to do. I hated it. Perhaps I was on the way to Red Gate Gallery, which used to be located in the 600-year-old corner tower of Dongbianmen, an appropriate destination for someone to go if they are completely oblivious, and I wandered the alleys southeast of Chang’an Boulevard. In one makeshift stall in the wall of a squat domicile, I came across some tapes for sale. Thinking I was finally chancing on some current Chinese music, I bought a tape with partially nude figures and a dragon, fantasy motifs one might see on the cover of a Conan the Barbarian comic book. When I finally had access to a tape player on which to play it, this was one of the songs, and I had no idea what it was, as there were no labels, or at least none that I could read. Also, I was somewhat disappointed. Somewhere along the line I lost the tape. The song becomes one of the many lost tunes that have lurked in my brain for decades. One day, thirteen years later, living in Montreal and listening to podcasts while working in my studio in the old Bellechasse canning factory, I heard a scrap of it unexpectedly used in an episode of the (frankly, often overproduced) podcast Radiolab. I wrote to the producer immediately and armed with a timestamp asked what songs had gone into the episode. The reply: “All of the music was original. We sampled a variety of things throughout, but by and large it was all written in house. Sorry to disappoint.” The term gaslight doesn’t even come close to such a betrayal of the promise of relief from decades of uncertainty. I was so upset I laid out the whole scenario wild-eyed to my partner, and showed her the clip. It was familiar to her. Give me a couple days, she said. She came back with a different version, in Japanese. It had been covered by Asami Kobayashi in 1984. The original authors, Gazebo, were an Italodisco outfit (a genre I had only vaguely heard about at the time), and listening to other similar songs—confirmed when Michael Bedford’s “More than a Kiss” came on—I realized the whole forgotten Chinese tape must have been an Italodisco sampler.

“Permanence” by Soft Boiled Eggies

The choice to move into a doomed old danwei complex in Beijing’s Central Business District when I first arrived in 2008 did not make it easy to survive my first year of life in China. I didn’t know anyone but my coworkers at the gallery, and didn’t leave the neighborhood much. My closest friends were a family who operated a malatang stall on a backstreet. They let me give them each their English names: Michael Jr., Michelle, and Mickey Mitch, and I drafted plans for a conceptual lighting system above their vats of bubbling spicy numb soup. I would cross back over the howling Chang’an Boulevard to my apartment in the shadow of night and skyscrapers, listen to MP3s I had brought along with me, such as the Softboiled Eggies, and produce hesitant art work in my empty sitting room.

Only last year, reading the book Where Art Belongs, I was zapped by Chris Kraus’ profile of Janet Kim (singer of Softboiled Eggies) and the Tiny Creatures space. I realized that I had been listening to the now-vanished band at the precise moment when their little scene in Los Angeles reached its apex and then dissolved. My own engagement with such a collective experiment (HomeShop) trailed that of Tiny Creatures by only two or three years. This discovery was particularly poignant for some reason. The shock of seeing a zeitgeist behind me in the mirror.

“If You Touch Me I Break” by Daniele Brusachetto

The danwei complex was almost empty. The sound of maul hammers on cinderblock was constant, with new gaping holes between apartments cropping up daily. An elderly neighbour showed up at my door holding ownership documents and asking if I could get my journalist friends to look at what was happening to these buildings and their tenants. The journalists I found (not my friends) said, “Sorry this kind of story is no longer news in this city.” Not long after, an eviction operation took place in which hundreds of police cordoned off the courtyard to remove one man in his 50s. I took photos from my apartment but I wasn’t sneaky enough. Cops came up, questioned me and forced me to erase my photos. It was an analog camera—I showed them the blank black square under the viewfinder on the back, where the photographer normally puts a scrap of the film’s packaging to remind them of the type and speed of film, “See, no more pictures,” and the cops seemed satisfied enough, The next day my boss arranged to meet at a café, not at the gallery, and she told me to take a week off for my stupidity. She didn’t want any heat. Daniele Brusachetto’s early albums were on heavy rotation in my lot of MP3s.

“We Could Be Skweeroes” by Eero Johannes

I had finally met some potential friends and we were supposed to meet at a music festival funded by the Scandinavian countries, held in one of the new leisure palaces of Sanlitun. It was new for me to have a mobile phone, and I can’t remember if we ever managed to actually find each other in the crowd that night. I believe vodka was being served for free and I took advantage of it. When the Finnish musician Eero Johannes came on stage in a t-shirt and demonstrated his specialized Nordic sub-genre Skweee on an assortment of piatars and samplers, I was so energized and drunk that I immediately fell in love with him and called out to him from the front row, shouting aggressively for more when his set was coming to an end, and did he want to hang out. The excitement of cultural exchange, of money flowing from foreign governments and brand sponsorships to juice up these relations, and I HAD FRIENDS, somehow all descended on poor Eero’s sweaty blond bangs.

“月亮代表我的心 (Moon Represents My Heart)” by Teresa Teng

I don’t have to introduce Teresa Teng to most of you—over her career she recorded 1,700 songs, in her native language, Mandarin, but also in Hokkien, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Japanese, Indonesian, English, Italian, and arguably holds the title of Dreamiest Singer of the 20th Century. This remains the only Chinese song I can really sing at Karaoke.

“Shake the Disease” by Depeche Mode

I shared my studio at HomeShop with Gao Bei, a children’s book illustrator who referred to me as “crazy man.” I had made a chair and table from scraps bound by rope and they teetered like a stack of plates as I worked. I recall Gao Bei’s eyes switching instantaneously from perturbed annoyance to glossy and warm when she heard the plea sung by Martin Gore on my laptop to understand him. She repeated it after him, her head cocked sympathetically.

“Reed Mouth Organ Leap (Lushengtiao Group Dance)” by Naxi People Troupe

The tourist literature calls Naxi folk orchestras a “living fossil of Chinese music” characterized by the Three Olds: Old men, Old instruments, Old songs. In my opinion, the sheng, or Chinese mouth-organ, is the sickest-looking instrument in the Naxi folk orchestra, which is saying something, because the guzheng, the erhu, the snakeskin zhongu, the metal and walnut sugudu, the shimian yunluo with its ten mini-gongs in a frame, and the dizi bamboo flute, all look friggin sick.

“#3” by Aphex Twin

Some of Koh-i-Noor was written with the 10-hour loop of #3 playing, either on speakers blasting out the studio windows over Griffintown, or in my head as I stared at the Lachine Canal.

“That’s Where I Went Wrong” by The Poppy Family

I do remember that this was one of the forgotten songs lurking in my brain at one point. But I have forgotten when and where it had been originally heard and where I had heard it again and came to know its name, which is a different sort of agony.

“This Town” by Rotary Connection

A man wakes up in a nondescript windowless room. He can’t open the door, the television plays undated tape, he is fed the same nauseating food every day, until it starts to rot him from the inside. Weeks pass, he thinks, then months, maybe—he has no sense of time. To count the “days” he scrapes almost undetectable numerals with his plastic fork against a little patch of concrete hidden under a flap of wallpaper, but one day they disappear. He wakes up with a bandage on his head and recalls that the previous night, or previous morning, he had been striking his head against the wall, trying to end it all. More time passes. One day the door opens. He departs the room and stumbles out of the building. The sunshine burns his skin and eyes.

“The Last Waltz” by Cho Young-Wuk

Warning: Contains spoilers for the movie Old Boy (2003)

The man finds the city has changed. He walks straight into traffic and gets walloped by an electric car speeding silently along. Knees shaking, he quakes his way into a sushi restaurant and points bleary-eyed at whatever is in front of him. It happens to be a live octopus that he stuffs into his mouth and he faints with its tendrils caressing his protruding cheekbones. When he wakes up he has been adopted by a young woman, a waitress at the restaurant, who nurses his ravaged, Jesus-like body back to health. She streams his process of recovery online, and teaches him how to interact with the chat. He minds her plants when she is at work. He feels peace for a while, despite their age difference. He has discovered he was locked in the room for fifteen years. He is smiling as he reveals to the chat the emptiness he feels. I must find out what happened to me, he confides, otherwise I can’t live out these remaining years in happiness. When the young woman comes home, she urges him to be satisfied with the life they have. Let’s just be free in this world, as free as we can be, she says. But he isn’t smiling anymore. He’d followed the link sent to him by a devoted fan in the chat. You’ve been making money off of me for fifteen years, he cries, this has all been for subscriptions. That’s just it, darling, she replies with a sad smile, we’re rich!

Jelly, Baby: The Playlist is here! 

Therese Estacion has curated an official playlist for her debut collection of essays Jelly, Baby: Essays on Disbaility and Vulnerability. Therese has also written thoughtful blurbs for each song, explaining their relevance to her writing process and the themes explored within her book! Take it away Therese!

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Yield by cktrl— When I think of the essay in my book “My Prosthetic Legs” and the emotions I was able to sort out through writing it, I think of this song.

Power a COLOURS show by Annahstasia— I used to listen to this song when I was working on my final edits of the essay “Post Mortem”. I feel connected to more than my own personal experience of grief when I hear this song. I feel collective grief and its collective release.

Everything is Romantic by Charli XCX featuring Caroline Polachek— There’s so much ambivalence present in this b-side version, and I think that’s what I am trying to reach with this book. I loved listening to this song as I made my final edits.

Going Home by Alice Coltrane— This was the song I was listening to when I was walking with my dog, Scooby, in the winter months I wrote the essay “The Aswang Complex”—which is its final vignette.

Count Me Out by Kendrick Lamar— This whole album, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, gave me the confidence and bravado to write the essay “Once,”. It can be scary to write with the intent to expose those who have done you wrong.

Plantasia by Mort Garson— This album was a refuge for me when I was writing. It calms down my central nervous system.

Listen to the whole playlist here.

For Short Story Month, we’ve compiled a list of ten essential short story collections from our catalogue that everyone should check out! From speculative worlds to flash fiction and well beyond, these impressive collections prove that, while the stories may be short, they pack a powerful punch that will leave a lasting impression. Discover them for yourself today! 

1. PS) In celebration of Short Story Month, we’re having a sale!

Save 20% off all short story collections from May 25 to 31, 2026.
*Sale excludes forthcoming releases and subscription packages.

Without further ado, here’s our Short Story Month Essential Reading List:

How You Were Born by Kate Cayley 

The stories in How You Were Born examine the difficult business of love, loyalty, and memory. Sharing the bizarre and tragi-comic of life—whether in present-day Toronto or in small towns of the early 20th century—Cayley champions the importance of connections, even when missed or mislaid, and the possibility of redemption. 

Places Like These by Lauren Carter 

A widow visits a spiritualist community to attempt to contact her late husband. A grieving teenager confronts the unfairness of his small-town world and the oncoming ecological disaster. A sexual assault survivor navigates her boyfriend’s tricky family and her own confusing desires. A mother examines unresolved guilt while seeking her missing daughter in a city slum. A lover exploits his girlfriend’s secrets for his own purposes. Whether in Ecuador or San Francisco, rural Ontario or northern Manitoba, the landscape in each of Carter’s poignant short stories reflects each character’s journey.

Anecdotes by Kathryn Mockler 

With dreamlike stories and dark humour, Anecdotes is a hybrid collection in four parts examining the pressing realities of sexual violence, abuse, and environmental collapse. These varied, immersive works bristle with truth in the face of unprecedented change. They are playful forms for serious times.

The Handsome Man by Brad Casey 

The Handsome Man is a collection of linked stories that follow several years of the life of a young man as he is drawn around the world: from Toronto to Montreal, New York, Ohio, New Mexico, British Columbia, Berlin, Rome, and Northern Ontario, along the way meeting hippies, healers, drinkers, movie stars, old friends, and welcoming strangers. He isn’t travelling, however; he’s running away. But as far and fast as he runs, the world won’t let him disappear, and each new encounter and every lost soul he meets along this journey brings him closer and closer to certain truths he’d locked away: how to trust, how to live in this world, and most of all, how to love again.

Just Pervs by Jess Taylor 

In Just Pervs, contemporary views of female sexuality are subverted, and women are given agency over their desires and bodies. Through these characters, sex is revealed to be many things at once: gross, shameful, exhilarating, hidden or open—and always complicated. These stories explore the strange oppression and illumination created by desire, the bewilderment of adolescence, and the barriers to intimacy both discovered within and imposed upon ourselves.

Her Body Among Animals by Paola Ferrante

In this genre-bending debut collection merging horror, fairy tales, pop culture, and sci-fi, women challenge the boundaries placed on their bodies while living in a world “among animals,” where violence is intertwined with bizarre ecological disruptions.

Coconut Dreams by Derek Mascarenhas 

Coconut Dreams explores the lives of the Pinto family through seventeen linked short stories. Starting with a ghost story set in Goa, India, in the 1950s, the collection weaves through various timelines and perspectives to focus on siblings Aiden and Ally Pinto and their experience of growing up in a predominantly white suburb with innocence, intelligence, and a timid foot in two distinct cultures. Here, Derek Mascarenhas takes a fresh look at the world of the new immigrant and the South Asian experience in Canada.

A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News by Cary Fagan 

Multiple award–winning author Cary Fagan displays his extraordinary range and talent in this propulsive new story collection that is by turns sensitive, surprising, and outrageously funny. With witty dialogue, compelling characters, and superb writing, each of the five exquisite stories in A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News differs vastly from the next, yet together conjure a world fuelled by the power of our wildest imaginings.

Rats Nest by Mat Laporte 

Mysterious and sometimes hallucinogenic, Rats Nest builds a narrative out of the complexity and dialectical uncertainty that many people feel about being alive in the 21st century. In this collection of sci-fi stories, Mat Laporte introduces readers to a protoplasmic, fantastical underworld, as navigated by a self-reproducing 3D Printed Kid made especially for this purpose.

We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie 

This linked stories in We All Need to Eat revolve around Soma, a young Queer woman in Vancouver. Through thoughtful and probing narratives, each story chronicles a sea change in Soma’s life. Lyrical, gritty, and atmospheric, Soma’s stories refuse to shy away from the contradictions inherent to human experience, exploring one young person’s journey through mourning, escapism, and the search for nourishment.

Today, we invite Jennifer LoveGrove to the blog to share the story behind the writing of  Amber: resting place of departed souls, one of the poems in her latest collection The Tinder Sonnets. Read on for insight into the various associations Jennifer drew from the word Amber, and how this shaped her writing. Take it away Jennifer!

Content Warning: This piece discusses SA and violence towards women. 

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When I started this poem, I began brainstorming associations with the material in which scarabs are encased: amber. At first, I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. It’s not a gemstone or a mineral. It’s a solid made from a liquid. It’s fossilized pine tree sap. It resists easy classification, it seems ambiguous, it traps small creatures, it preserves souls. It is attractive to poets.

To see where a poem featuring amber might take me, I delved into the folklore and history of amber’s uses, and like many of the poems in The Tinder Sonnets, it was impossible not to see metaphors for dating habits and human connection and relationship rupture in much of the myths and uses of amber.

Remember those yellow teething rings for babies? Or those amber anklets purported to release pain-relieving matter through toddlers’ skin? Soon came associations of baby rattles, rattling sounds like chattering teeth. Not just an analgesic, amber is said to also eliminate fears.

Female fear–it’s a staple in pop culture and porn. Fear is a powerful motivator. For some, causing fear is arousing. For some, feeling fear is arousing. Our fear is pathologized, commodified, and sold back to us. We amass rituals and strategies to provide an illusion of safety. But safety is never guaranteed.

Climate anxiety and dread also weave their way into this poem with the sun’s sweat dripping, ominous shorelines, and pit mining devastation. I couldn’t write about amber without acknowledging the negative impacts of its pursuit and harvest.

There is a lot of fake amber on the market. Besides enjoying the sound and sonic play with words like“polymer”, “vinyl” and “polyester”, I also explored notions of authenticity and counterfeit, of what and who is believed, and what is fake news. Who is assumed to be lying? We contort ourselves to believe that a man we know, even love, couldn’t have assaulted a woman, yet question and discount someone brave enough to name him.

There is no escaping that amber is not just a material, but Amber is also a woman’s name. There are Amber Alerts when a child goes missing, and there is Amber Heard.

The Amber Heard testimony in the Johnny Depp trials was happening during the drafting of this poem, and her treatment in the public sphere was so appalling. It made me consider how we as a society respond to “victims,” how as women we must be the “right” kind of victim or no one will believe us. So there is reference to that, like “All Ambers lie. Especially about / men.” We can be flawed human beings, messy, inconsistent and still be telling the truth. That too is an uncomfortable truth.

Obviously #MeToo and #BelieveWomen were on my mind a lot during the writing of this poem (and the entire book). I have been forced to confront my own internal biases regarding who I instantly believe and who I may silently doubt. I hope this poem helps others to examine these impulses within themselves.

Like so many, I also recognized vicissitudes of fight, flight, freeze and fawn responses in myself, and wove in some of my own unpleasant experiences into the poem.

This poem marks a transition in the writing of this book when the poems moved away from depicting pleasure and empowerment and began to reflect my growing disillusionment and anger at how men treat women in the current dating culture. The poems got angrier, but I remember feeling destabilized after drafting this one, surprised almost, that this was where itwas all going. Did I really want to write about the guy who bit me, and afterI lurched into a taxi,jumped in at the last second because it was safer for me than being alone with the driver!? HowI was more angry at myself than him that he then knew which building I lived in?

I also talk about how fortunate I’ve been to maintain resilience and avoid a lot of “could have been worse” situations, despite some of the risks I’ve taken in my life. My gut is never wrong. We should all trust our intuition: “Tune the antennae.”Amber is also said to attract good luck. Phrases like “Jackpot chant, sweepstakes tempo” reference how I feel like many events in our lives are arbitrary and random and stem from good or bad luck. I’m no fatalist. Cause and effect aren’t always so navigable. Many of the things that happen to us, good and bad, we don’t deserve.

The ending loops back to discuss believability. Whose truth is true, who is considered fake? Is it always worth reporting? Does it matter or is justice for women a fallacy? I chose to end with an em dash deliberately, like an interruption, an abruptness, this attempt to tell my truth either cutoff or aborted. I wanted to leave the reader with a moment that may impel them to consider those questions, and to perhaps confront their own perceptions of a“truth myth.”

Gold Star: The Playlist is here! 

Emma McKenna has curated a playlist of songs that inspired the writing of her poetry collection Gold Star. We hope you enjoy!

The Playlist: 

Today, we invite Liz Johnston to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how she began writing her debut novel The Fall-Down Effect! Finding initial inspiration through reading environmental articles on The Narwhal, as well as from the works of Annie Proulx and Kim Trainor, Liz details how she came to settle on the classic three-act novel structure, and how she chose to address current issues such as the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Climate Crisis through her writing. Take it away Liz!

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When I began writing The Fall-Down Effect, I’d been living in Toronto for eight years. The last time I’d visited Revelstoke, the B.C. town I grew up in, was when my partner and I moved here in the summer of 2010, driving from Victoria to Canada’s biggest city in a car weighed down with all our belongings. Revelstoke had been a quick stop along the way. We hung out with my sister for maybe an hour. I remember eating fresh peaches at a picnic table.

Going back to other places in B.C. in 2017, 2018, I was confronted with evidence of the wildfires I’d been hearing about from my siblings and reading about in the news. Even on Vancouver Island, you could see and smell wildfire haze that had drifted from the Interior or from Washington, Oregon, maybe even California. Of course, there’d been forest fires before, when I was growing up, but not like this. Thinking about that gone world I grew up in, maybe I wanted to preserve it to some extent, to remember what an Interior B.C. summer used to be like and get that down before the baseline totally shifted and non-stop megafires started to feel like how it’s always been.

I believe I was also reading Annie Proulx’s Barkskins around this time when I first conceived of my novel, which I originally referred to as The Forest. We’d published an excerpt from Proulx’s epic in Brick magazine, where I’m an editor, and, intrigued, I’d picked up a copy. It took me a few years to finally brave it. Reading about the long history of this continent’s deforestation by European colonizers got me thinking of all the people I knew from my hometown who were involved in the logging industry, people who’ve been loggers or foresters. My best friend from high school works at the lumber mill. Someone else from my class now has his own logging company. I remember seeing, as a child, a bumper sticker: Hug a logger. You’ll never go back to trees. Logging was ubiquitous where I grew up, and it’s not like I’d never thought about the destruction. Like Sylvia, one of the three siblings my novel revolves around, I read The Lorax and watched FernGully.

But reading Barkskins in 2018, breathing the particulate of forest fires, the environmental costs of the logging industry filled my mind. Books about logging and trees and forest management and megafires started piling up on my desk. I learned the logging term fall-down effect in one of them, a way to describe what happens when old-growth forests are logged faster than second-growth ones can reach the same “timber value,” and I tucked the words away for future use, not realizing they would become my title. I read so many articles on The Narwhal I decided to become a member to support their excellent journalism. And I tried to picture the shape my own book about forests might take.

I wish I could remember the context in which my friend, the poet and essayist Allison LaSorda, brought up the classic three-act structure. I picture us drinking tea in the living room of the sweet apartment she had at the time, laptops on our laps. Maybe we were having a grant-writing get-together, each dreaming of having the funds to just write for a while.

However it happened, this idea of three acts, three parts, lodged in my mind. I decided that, in my novel, each act would take place in a different year. Part 1 is set in 1989, part 2 in 2001, and part 3 in 2020. Those first two parts are set in the B.C. Interior that I remembered, before wildfire haze became a summertime given. (In Kim Trainor’s recent book, Blue Thinks Itself Within Me, the poet pins the beginning of “the eerie, soft pink sci-fi light at noon in Penticton, in Edmonton” around 2015 or 2016. I mention this book because it deals, in part, with Trainor’s experiences participating in the Ferry Creek blockade against old-growth logging, news of which riveted me later in the process of working on this novel.) By part 3 of The Fall-Down Effect, we’ve entered this megafire world.

I figured setting that final section in 2020, a couple years in my future, would help ensure the novel still felt current by the time I completed the manuscript. (And here it is finally out in the world in 2026.) As I wrote, 2020 arrived, and with it the COVID-19 pandemic. By the time Toronto first went into lockdown, I had a partial draft of part 3, supposedly set in 2020, but a 2020 that was nothing like the one we were living through. I can’t recall now if I ever considered simply shifting my timeline: make all my characters a bit younger, adjust the major milestones in their lives, avoid processing and writing about the times we were living through. I probably worried no one would want to read about the pandemic; it was enough to have to experience it.

In any case, I did not change the timeline of part 3. Instead, I tried to record, with as much precision as possible, what those times were like. And the kind of magical thing is that the pandemic setting actually made sense of certain plot points that otherwise would have required me to add some other narrative justification. Sadly, soon enough there was a real fire to anchor the narrative’s events on, a fire on Mount Christie that caused hundreds of people in Penticton to evacuate their homes. I believe the “Thanks, 2020” tweet Sylvia sees when she’s looking for news of the fire is a real Penticton resident’s tweet I came across in my research.

A lot shifted from my initial conception of the novel to the final version readers can now hold in their hands, unsurprisingly. But the last element I want to mention here is point of view. The Fall-Down Effect is told in close third person through the perspectives of siblings Sylvia, Fern, and River and their parents, Lynn and Tom. Originally, however, I thought I would only use the perspectives of the three siblings. I started drafting from the middle, working on part 2 when the youngest, River, is graduating high school. That was the scene I could see most clearly to start setting down words. Like River, I graduated high school in 2001. Twenty-five years have passed since then, yes, but it was easy enough to think back and put myself in his perspective. I still very much remember what being eighteen felt like, those friendships, those anxieties, what I was thinking of when I approached the end of one phase of my life and got ready to embark on the next. River’s sisters, one nineteen and taking a “gap year” after high school, the other away at UBC doing a master’s degree, were equally available to me. And more importantly, the full story I wanted to tell at that point was available to them too.

When I started writing part 1 though, I soon came up against the limits and challenges of writing from only those three perspectives. With part 1, set twelve years earlier, my point-of-view characters were no longer teenagers and young adults, but now children, six, seven, and eleven. Of course, many writers have told sophisticated stories through the eyes of children. (I think of Shani Mootoo’s brilliant and beautiful Starry Starry Night, for one.) But for the story I wanted to tell, the sense of things I wanted to convey to the reader, I decided to bring in some adult perspectives. For a little while, it was a bit of a free for all; I’d pop into anyone’s head. When Lynn takes her children to blockade a logging road, part of that scene unfolded through the eyes of one of the loggers. Later, when the kids are first enrolled in public school, I had a scene in the teachers’ lounge, from Fern’s teacher’s point of view. These viewpoints did not stay in the manuscript long, but Lynn’s did, and it grew to take up more space, continuing through parts 2 and 3. Tom’s sections were a fraction of hers, and for helping me find his place in the narrative, I’m ever thankful to my editor, Meg Storey.

Between all that fiddling around on my own and working with Meg, there were other editors—friends in my writing group, first readers, even a generous editor at an agency I queried whose rejection was softened by a thoughtful editorial letter with advice for revisions. I’m grateful to them all, and you’ll find their names my acknowledgements. But the rest of the twists and turns the novel took between those first stirrings of inspiration and its publication are between me and them, at least for now.

Today, we invite D. Nandi Odhiambo to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how he began writing his latest novel Amapiano Eyes! While he initally set out with the goal of taking a break from writing, the book grew organically out of fragmented sentences jotted down during the Covid-19 Pandemic, with Nandi finding further inspiration from philosophical writings, personal loss, and Amapiano DJ sets on Youtube. Take it away Nandi!

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After moving to the North Shore on O‘ahu a decade ago, I started reading books on philosophy, in part because work I’d struggled through in my early twenties was suddenly easier to access. It was no longer like learning a foreign language. So, around the start of the pandemic in early 2020, I went all in, continuing to work on a book of literary criticism read through the lens of philosophy. While writing The Minoritarian and Black Reason: A Philosophico-Literary Investigation, I took notes for a companion piece, a philosophical novel set during the pandemic. When the book was done by the following year, I was eager to write fiction. However, I hadn’t taken a break since working on my previous one, Smells Like Stars. I’d also had some lingering health issues after getting a COVID shot. I needed to reset. Or so I thought.

It’s never clear to me how much time to take between books. Writing is an all-consuming form of life. The hours spent sifting through sentences have to be carved out of the seemingly impossible bustle of the day-to-day. So, I committed to being sensible and staying away from writing for a few months. The focus would be on getting healthy, teaching literature and creative writing at the university, and being better at reaching out to family and friends. Recently, my Dad’s health had declined because of early-onset dementia, and so I found myself looking back at emails I’d exchanged with him over the years. Many of them, written when he couldn’t sleep, reflected on philosophy and the history of Africa, the continent where our family had lived before immigrating to Canada in the late 1970s. Also, my sister, Debra, had recently gotten me watching Major League Djz Amapiano Balcony Mixes on YouTube, recorded at a variety of locations. Rooftops. Balconies. Stadiums. Mountainsides. Nightclubs. I put together a playlist on my iPhone and, good to go, I embarked on my healthy regimen.

Part of me enjoyed the freedom from the compulsive obsession that can take over when I’m dropped into a project. Another part was restless. I’d vaguely (idealistically) thought the pandemic would lead to greater cooperation between human beings, everywhere, finally joined by a common cause and fighting a common foe. But that hope quickly fell apart with the increasing divides over how to deal with COVID. Mandates, Restrictions, Boredom. And I began to wonder whether our own self-destruction as a species was written into our DNA. Sleep, always a challenge, became even harder to come by. So, instead of lying awake with my unsettled thoughts, I got up and began piecing together an outline for a story from my notes. This didn’t technically mean I was working again, I thought, since I was only writing lists made of sentence fragments. That was it. But unsolicited, the fragments became sentences, and soon paragraphs followed. Since I’ve always enjoyed working late at night before the commitments of a day encroach, I focused on a storyline set in the 1930s with Kwaro, the protagonist’s grandfather, who had been exhibited in human zoos staged in different European cities. However, this writing didn’t really count as work, I told myself. I was merely laying a foundation, priming a canvas. Yeah. I hadn’t made a commitment to the project yet. And as the words piled up, I saw more clearly the central relationship between Daliso, a DJ and existential philosopher, and Norrie, his girlfriend.

The late-nighters weren’t sustainable, and I needed to find a way to (not) write more efficiently. So, I stopped doing them. Cold turkey. I went all in, sticking to a daytime schedule: at least one hour, five days a week (not the full seven, like when I’m in the swing of things). During this fruitful time, Carmen, my wife, and I moved to the leeward side of the island on the south shore, and running with our newly adopted dog, Asta, helped tire me out enough to get longer stretches of sleep. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but the routine was working. And one day, while lost typing pages on a computer, Carmen asked how my break from writing was going.

I was quick to explain that technically I wasn’t working at all. No. I was reading what presented itself as thought, in fact. And remember, I concluded, I was only doing it five days a week.

She was unconvinced.

I tweaked a schedule that began at 4:30 in the morning. And despite dips in energy in the afternoons, I was getting a handle on how to write a philosophical novel that didn’t get its meaning from scientific, psychological, or anthropological frameworks. Not that I had a particular beef with any of them. Daliso did. For him, their emphasis on objective description and measurement led to logical abstractions. Instead, he was drawn to existentialism’s emphasis on lived experience, authentic thought, and fundamental concerns about existence. While figuring out the way forward with his ideas, I listened to a great deal of Amapiano music. Nice. Funky. Inflected with Africa. And after four months of (sort of) working, I had a decent first chunk of a draft.

To be honest, looking it over was a setback. I only saw the gaps. The lack of a sufficient break was to blame, I thought. I should have taken a month off. Or two. Maybe more. Why was I always chasing the next idea as it percolated out of somewhere, nowhere? When I began to question whether writing was ever enjoyable, and ask myself if I was wasting my time, I figured I should talk to Carmen, mein Herz. She reminded me that I always went through these periods of doubt (I’d forgotten), and offered to read what I’d put together. While awaiting to hear her thoughts, I made a point to remember that I’d been here before. Since Carmen is the person I talk with the most about our work as writers, I braced myself for a delicately worded confirmation of my misgivings. So, later, when she told me, enthusiastically, how much she liked what I was doing, I felt hope returning. Calm, I thought. A slight wobble. Happens. Pushing on, I shared the pages with Malcolm Sutton, the editor I’d worked with on Smells Like Stars. He, too, was encouraging, and so I returned to the manuscript in earnest. The aim was consistency without burning the candle at both ends. If I couldn’t write during the day, I’d put in the work before I went to bed.

However, despite all of this positive momentum, Dad’s health was deteriorating, and it weighed heavily on everyone in the family. Our conversations were becoming increasingly difficult, and it made me realize how much I’d depended on them over the years. However, one topic we continued to circle around was the importance of getting an education. Mum had been a school teacher who had all the kids doing homework, even in the holidays, and Dad, a lover of books who, as a boarding school student, would read Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle at night under a blanket, with a flashlight, in his dorm. In fact, one thing I appreciated was getting to tell him I learned about writing by first looking at and then learning to read the lengthy novels, biographies, philosophies, and histories he collected on our bookshelves. But our chats were getting shorter. Change was coming, and I felt helpless in the face of it.

When Dad passed away in the summer of 2023, I was heartbroken.

After the funeral, working on the manuscript was the last thing I wanted to do. It took months before I could return to it. I missed him.

Oddly, it was an envelope from Mum, with notes Dad had written for a memoir he’d envisioned, that drew me back to my novel again. They were handwritten in italics on green notepad paper, a style I’d imitated as a child while learning to write (and to become a writer). Knowing that he, too, had struggled with insomnia, I imagined him, at his desk, working on ideas he felt compelled to explore when sleep would not come, the whirl of a life pressing in around him. Births. Bills. Marriages. Deaths. An emphasis on the importance of caring for others, the way he made it through.

And as I looked at those green pages, where sentence fragments became sentences and then paragraphs, I felt close to him.

Today, we invite Camilla Gibb to the Book*hug blog to share the story of how revisiting collage work saved her from writers block, and subsequently led to the writing of her debut poetry collection I Used to Be a Pisces ! Take it away Camilla!

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I finished writing my last novel in 2019. A novel subsequently published into the great hollow carved out by the pandemic.

Often, toward the end of writing one novel, different ideas, ideas for a new novel have started swirling. But not in this case. I didn’t really know if I had another one in me. I still don’t. It takes a particular feeling of urgency or necessity to drive one to live so long in a single project.

The impulse to create was still there, but where it took me, was back to something I did a lot of earlier in life. Collage. Working with paper, images, scissors, glue.

Oh, the tactile pleasure of it all. The relief, freedom and joy of not having to be particularly talented or professional. And the gratification of taking something from inception to completion in a matter of hours or days, rather than years.

My return to collage started with a course in “altered books” at the Toronto School of Art in 2019. I had found a book about walks in the Yorkshire Dales left on a sidewalk, and this was the book I would spend months altering.

Sometimes this involved found poetry. Sometimes, erasure poetry. It had me thinking about words differently—about the visual of print, about blank space and how we pare things down to the exacting, to the just enough.

With the images here, and collages I subsequently and continue to create, I am interested in interactions within and between characters ((human or otherwise) in different environments. Connections, tensions and disconnections between people, species and ecosystems elicit complicated and often contradictory emotions.

It is time for part two of the 2025 edition of our annual Book*hug Wrapped series, where we ask our staff what their favourite books of the year have been (which luckily coincides with gift giving season). We hope you enjoy this year’s selections, and that some of these titles will end up on your wish list! Happy reading!

Britt Landry, Publishing Assistant 

Saturn Peach by Lily Wang

Palestine and Feminist Liberation by Nada Elia

Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid

Reid Millar, Sales and Marketing Coordinator

Shotgun Seamstress: The Complete Zine Collection by Osa Atoe

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

Girl Gangs, Zines, and Powerslides: A History of Badass Women Skateboarders by Natalie Porter

Hazel Millar, Co-Publisher

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Encampment: Resistance, Grace, and an Unhoused Community by Maggie Helwig

My Autobiography of Carson McCullers by Jenn Shapland

Malcolm Sutton, Fiction Editor 

Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell

Flower by Ed Atkins

The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam by Lana Lin

It is time for the 2025 edition of our annual Book*hug Wrapped series, where we ask our authors what their favourite books of the year have been (which luckily coincides with gift giving season). We hope you enjoy this year’s selections, and that some of these titles will end up in your to be read pile! We sure know they’ll end up on ours!

Michael V. Smith, author of Soundtrack: A Lyric Memoir

Inciting Joy by Ross Gay

I Feel That Way Too by Jaz Papadopoulos

The Fun Times Brigade by Lindsay Zier-Vogel

Shani Mootoo, author of Starry Starry Night

The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien

The Migrant Falls in Reverse by Vinh Nguyen

The Last of Its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert, translated by Aleshia Jensen

Cary Fagan, author of A Fast Horse Never Brings Good News 

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

The Hustler by Walter Tevis

The Last of Its Kind by Sibylle Grimbert, translated by Aleshia Jensen

Andrea MacPherson, author of Reckless

The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee

Householders by Kate Cayley

The Wedding by Gurjinder Basran

Tamara Jong, author of Worldly Girls: A Memoir

Bloom: Letters on Girlhood by Nicole Breit and Claire Sicherman

All Our Ordinary Stories by Teresa Wong

Seeking Spirit: A Vietnemese (Non) Buddhist Memoir by Linda Trinh