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Pickle Me This

April 3, 2023

New Book Quiz!

Which one of these fantastic books is your next favourite read?

Take my new quiz to find out!

Yep, I’m back with some literary matchmaking after far too long and I’m THRILLED to be setting readers up with some books I’ve loved lately…

Get started now.

December 8, 2022

The Best Books I Read in 2022…That Weren’t Published in 2022

September 23, 2022

My Hilary Mantel

I arrived at Hilary Mantel during what turned out to be the most impressionable and formative parts of my reading life (so far!), during the years after my undergraduate degree when I was living abroad, first in England and then in Japan where my favourite occupation was buying Penguin paperbacks from Wantage Books in Kobe. This was the period where I first started reading favourites like Margaret Drabble, and Joan Didion, and yes, Hilary Mantel, whose own expatriate novels, EIGHT MONTHS ON GHAZZAH STREET and A CHANGE OF CLIMATE inspired the novel I’d write for my Masters thesis a few years later. It was her dark comic novels I loved best though, EVERY DAY IS MOTHER’S DAY and it’s sequel VACANT POSSESSION are horrifying and hilarious (and based on Mantel’s experience as a social worker; I’d also worked for social services while I lived in England and deeply recognized the disturbing realism in these works). You will notice I don’t have her historical works on my shelf—I read WOLF HALL, but (forgive me!) it just didn’t do it for me, which was FINE, because it certainly had enough other readers to go around. I think what I love about Mantel is how wide ranging were her passions and preoccupations over the years, which means there’s a Mantel shelf for every kind of reader and I am so grateful this is mine.

October 13, 2021

Class Reunion: ENG 369Y 20 Years Later

During my third year of undergraduate studies, from 2000-2001, I was part of ENG 369Y, a creative writing workshop led by Dr. Lorna Goodison through the Department of English at the University of Toronto.

For so many reasons, many illuminated below, this class would be an unforgettable experience, though it seemed especially remarkable when—two decades later—four of us from the class would all be publishing books within the same year and a bit.

  • Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife was published in April 2020, and it was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize that year, as well as the 2021 Trillium Book Award, among other accolades.
  • Faye Guenther’s Swimmers in Winter came out in August 2020, and it has been a finalist for both the Toronto Book Award and the 2021 ReLit Award.
  • My book, Waiting for a Star to Fall, arrived in October 2020, and the Montreal Gazette called it, “Subtly complex […a] romantic drama tailor-made for the #Metoo age.”
  • And Rebecca Silver Slayter’s The Second History found its way into the world this summer, with no less than Lisa Moore writing that it’s “one of the most honest renderings of romantic love I’ve ever read. [A] truly mesmeric story, tender, unflinching, quakingly good.”

To me, the serendipitous occasion of our new releases after all this time seemed like an splendid opportunity for us to reconnect and reflect on our time together, as well as so much that we’ve learned about writing in all the years since then, and so the four of us shared our thoughts and ideas via email.


tell us about 20 years in the writing life, about the trajectory of your writing life since our class together in 2000.

Kerry Clare: I don’t think I had a focussed relationship to writing at all in the first ten years after our class together, even as I completed a MA in Creative Writing at the University of Toronto from 2005-2007. There is a line in Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life that I may have misremembered, but it’s about a superficial idea of writer-dom being analogous to one admiring the way one looks in a particular hat, and I always thought she was talking about me, which was mortifying.

When I finished graduate school, I worked for two years reading financial documents all day long, which was not fun, but gave me stability and a salary, though little in the way of creative inspiration. It also gave me parental leave benefits, which I used when I had my first child in 2009, and becoming a parent really seemed to up the stakes for me writing-wise. I became invested in the world in a more meaningful way, and therefore had more to write about. My first big success in writing was an essay about new motherhood I published in 2011, and this led to my first book, the essay anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, which I edited and was published in 2014.

At this point, I wasn’t sure that writing fiction was going to be my destiny, and was even making peace with that (throughout this entire period, I’ve been blogging, which has been a creative lifeline), but then something clicked shortly after my second child was born and I finally figured out how plot works. My first novel, Mitzi Bytes, was published in 2017, and I’ve been writing them ever since, and though I am constantly terrified that one day I won’t know how to do it anymore, it seems to keep happening.

Souvankham Thammavongsa: I am not a very good example of a writing life because my trajectory isn’t a simple one and it is not for everyone. I don’t think anyone would want it. I worked for fifteen years in the research department of an investment advice publisher, I counted bags of cash five levels below the basement, I prepared taxes. This work helped me write what I want and it didn’t take away my desire to write. I still have that from 2000, this desire to write, but it wasn’t anything someone taught me.

Faye Guenther: I stayed at the University of Toronto to do undergraduate and graduate degrees in English. Then I went to York University and did a PhD in English. While I was a student during those years, the jobs I had to support myself weren’t related to writing, but they showed me things about the world and this is useful to a writer. I’ve found that no matter what you do, the key is to make the time to write. My writing life has also been shaped by who I’ve met along the way, including fellow writers. In 2017, I published a chapbook of poems and short fiction, Flood Lands, with Junction Books. In 2020, I published a collection of short fiction, Swimmers in Winter, with Invisible Publishing.

That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.

Rebecca Silver Slayter
Rebecca Silver Slaytor

Rebecca Silver Slayter: I decided to stop writing not long after that workshop. I think, to reverse what Souvankham said, I worried my desire to write might be something someone had taught me. That I had lost track of why I wanted to write at all.

So I stopped for a year. Or two. Or three? It felt like forever because I was 20-something and everything was forever.

And meantime I decided to make my life and work writing-adjacent. I interned at Quill & Quire and The Walrus. I worked for a startup children’s publisher. I did odd jobs to complete the financial math, yardwork and errands. Eventually I was hired for my dream job, working as managing editor for Brick literary journal. 

Sometime in the midst of that, I met my husband, and told him, proudly, how I had made the tough, mature decision to give up writing, and he listened and nodded and then said, I know you are a writer, with such certainty that I didn’t know how to doubt him and I began writing again. And I found to my great joy what I had been missing in those earlier writing years; a desire to write that easily overtook the desire to be a writer.

I did graduate studies in Montreal, where I wrote the first draft of my first novel, In the Land of Birdfishes. When I graduated, I returned to Nova Scotia, and bought a house for a song in Cape Breton, which I will be renovating for the rest of my earthly days.

This is for me a very good place to write, near the ocean and the highlands, in a community where music and storytelling are woven into everyone’s daily life. Here I published my first book and then wrote and rewrote and rewrote my second book, which was just released this summer: The Second History. It took me eight years from first draft till now, mostly because I tried to write it faster than I’m able to. It turns out I’m a writer who needs to take my time… 

That is probably most of what I’ve learned in these two decades. How to take in all the advice, all that you’ve learned from other things you wrote, from things you read, from other writers, and then listen very hard for the tiny sound of this book calling for what it needs from you.

what was the best thing the writer you were in our classroom had going for them? And what writing advice would you give that previous incarnation of you? (Though would you even have taken it?)

ST: My intuition. I listened to everyone, and knew when not to. This taught me how to pick through edits. When we see edits, sometimes it’s about the person and their life experience and it doesn’t mean they are right or know but you have to be generous and allow them to have their thoughts.

I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it. I want myself to encounter and work through those difficult and lonely moments. I don’t want anyone to hold my hand or do me any favours or make it easier or easy. I like the difficult, and I want to continue with that difficulty. 

RSS: One of my clearest memories of that workshop was of Professor Goodison saying, as we discussed one of my poems, “You come from preachers, right?” 

I was tongue-tied with confusion. “What?” 

“Your people, they’re preachers, right?” 

I had absolutely no idea what she meant. “No….” I stammered. 

“Then why are you preaching at me?” she asked. 

Oof. Caught. I was constantly preaching. Trying to find a much-too-simple way of understanding much-too-large things. I had a weakness for sentences that began like “Love was…”

I think somewhere in this is both my weakness and strength as a writer (probably as a human too). It is writing-in-bad-faith to just polish up pretty turns of phrase that sound truish. To go around making tidy summaries of untidy things. But… I think if I mine deeper I can find underneath that impulse what drives me to writing still, and to reading itself… The sense that there is some luminous other way of noticing the world that will make it brighter, stranger, more visible. That certain words can be incantatory, a pathway to looking again and seeing more.

I have two small children, and have found it astonishing to witness language dawn within a person who formerly had none. How each child altered a bit around the language they used. How they learned what it was then to be nervous, even tired, even thirsty. How what began as the ragged, indeterminate longing of a baby’s howl became so clear, so precise, so unmysterious. And I miss a bit the mystery. The wonder of watching a peer being who doesn’t know what yesterday is. But I think there’s another way that language can give us back what experience has made ordinary. And I think that’s what I was searching for twenty years ago and search for still, but with a few degrees more purpose. And a lot more joy.

So I would maybe advise myself something like this: First, don’t write any more poetry. You are very bad at it. And for a time, don’t write at all. Wait until the desire to write is something you have to resist. Wait until it wells up in you. And then go find the joy of writing words that make you look again, more deeply.

I wouldn’t give myself any advice. I think advice can be a disservice to a writer. There’s a lot I didn’t know and I want myself to not know and to live in that not-knowing in order to know it.

Souvankham Thammavongsa
Faye Guenther

FG: I remember being openhearted and creative. The writing advice I would give my earlier self is to be bolder. I think when boldness is combined with a practice of being open with yourself and to the world, there is a sharpening of creative focus that can happen and a strengthening of creative perception, no matter what challenges life brings.

KC: The writer I was in our classroom had no idea how much she didn’t know, and far more confidence that she deserved to have, and I’m so happy she did because being 21 is hard enough. I was not a serious person or a serious writer AT ALL. (I remember that Souvankham appeared to be both, and it was such a powerful example for me, though I think I was still too young to fully appreciate it.)

What a tremendous opportunity to develop my skills that class should have been!! But I did not work all that hard, honestly, too busy checking out my look in the hat, remember? I mainly wrote poetry because you could finish a piece in a few minutes. This did not mean my poetry was good, however, although I think sometimes some of it was.

If I could give that writer I was any advice it would be to write something REAL, instead of something you think sounds like something that could be real. (And find writers you love, instead of reading all the writers you’re supposed to love.)  

For the record: I would not have listened.  

what roles have literary journals and small presses played in your writing career?

RSS: I know literary journals and small presses better as a worker than as a writer. But I am shaped permanently by my years at Brick literary journal, and by the trips I made then, twice a year, to Coach House Press, where the journal was designed at that time. 

The Coach House basement was a kind of church I visited like a disciple of those beautiful machines for cutting pages and laying type … and of the people who made them run and knew the stories of an older Toronto and the mesmerizing adventures then had by not-yet-famous writers. In a way that is both corny and essentially true to me, that is what I feel a tiny part of when I write: all the people in all those tiny offices and studios and nooks making small-press books and magazines; their labours of love, their care and bravery, those parallel arts of ink and paper, alongside those of prose and plot. 

They taught me what was foundational to writing; the courage and the care of the work. And the kinds of community it can build.

FG: Reading literary magazines gave me an awareness of community. They were the first space where I was published, and I know this is true for many writers. Smaller presses often foster innovative and ground-breaking work. They frequently publish voices and stories that historically have been marginalized. I think smaller presses are important for energizing and sustaining a vibrant creative culture.    

My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance

Kerry Clare
Kerry Clare

KC: My first piece of published fiction was in The New Quarterly in 2007. I will never forget the joy of receiving that acceptance, especially in the wake of the novel I’d written for my Masters thesis that went nowhere (because it was boring!) because I was really feeling kind of discouraged, and then this message from the universe arrived suggesting maybe I should keep going after all. In the next few years, I would publish pieces in TNQ and other journals, and the high of an submission being accepted has never diminished for me. And then Goose Lane Editions, a remarkable Canadian indie press with an impressive history, published The M Word, and did the book such justice. Without literary journals and small presses, I’d be nowhere.

ST: Literary journals teach you things a writing class or editor or a dear friend and family cannot. They don’t love you and are not beholden in any way. They teach you about rejection—what that feels like, what to do with it. They are often the first place where we get to see ourselves in print. It’s important for a writer to understand the difference between seeing yourself in print and publishing a book. They are not the same.

what are your favourite memories of our class?

Souvankham Thammavongsa

ST: I remember the talent and fun. There were so many writers in that class who are more talented, more ambitious, more interesting…but they aren’t here, or with books. They became lawyers and engineers and professors. I always keep that in mind. Having a book doesn’t mean I am good.

KC: I have so many memories! I don’t know if we were particularly interesting as a group, or if it was the work of Professor Lorna Goodison in creating community, or just the particular mix of experience and personalities in our class, but I felt very connected to everyone. I think we were a well written cast of characters.

I remember Souvankham on the very first day, and how she impressed me so much with her sense of herself. I remember we had to write a poem inspired by postcards, and mine had a field of sunflowers and said, “Welcome to Michigan,” and I wrote a poem with the line, “I won’t forget the motor city.” I remember REDACTED who wrote a poem with the line, “Let’s make love in the astral plane,” and I was seriously impressed by how sophisticated he seemed. And someone else who wrote a poem about someone sucking on her toes while listening to Robbie Robertson sing “Somewhere down the crazy river.” Everyone seemed to be having a lot more sex than me. (One could not have been having less sex than me.)

I remember Faye seemed especially interesting, partly because she seemed kind of badass with a shaved head, and we always sat in opposite corners of the room. And how I was in love with the name “Rebecca Silver Slayter,” which belonged to the woman who often sat in the same corner as me and whose work I felt very drawn to.

I think it’s kind of wonderful that in addition to the four of us, plenty of others in that group have gone on to very interesting careers in academic, television writing, and more.

One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.

Faye Guenther

FG: I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to learn from our teacher Dr. Lorna Goodison. One of my memories of the class was discovering what a literary reading could be—the ways prose and poetry can be shared beyond their existence as words on a page and become something like music in a public space.

RSS: This sounds like very cheap, opportunistic flattery, but honestly, though I remember well many of the talented, interesting writers in the class and their poems and stories, what I remember most clearly is the three of you. 

I remember how beautifully Souvankham’s work was always laid out on the page in lovely, tiny type—the form so perfectly echoing the work itself, the grace and economy and polish of her words; how her work seemed always already complete, and I was stumped on how to write any feedback that didn’t just feel like tampering. 

How Kerry’s writing was funny and powerful at the same time, and I hadn’t even known that was possible. How she seemed so at home both on the page and in the classroom, warm and open and at ease in a way that awed me. I remember Faye’s compassion for her characters, their rich interiority. How reading her stories felt like someone whispering in your ear, that intimate.

My strongest memory of the class was the first one. When we went around the room and each offered up our names. 

Souvankham was near the end, seated at the table perpendicular to the one where Professor Goodison sat. 

After she said her name, Professor Goodison asked, “So what do you want to be called?”

I was caught off guard by the question, but Souvankham answered clearly and immediately. Without blinking or skipping a beat, she said: “I want to be called a writer.”

Professor Goodison looked at her and Souvankham looked back. Then she said, “I’m going to call you Sou.”

And I was as astonished as if Souvankham had wafted out of her seat and up into the air between us. I was at that time so uncertain, so full of twenty-one-year-old desires to be interesting, to be brave, to be invisible and/or famous. I would have probably told Professor Goodison she could call me whatever she wanted. Or tried to guess what she might prefer me to be named.

Year by year over these last twenty, I get a little closer to what Souvankham already had then. That certainty. That clarity of purpose and identity as a writer that struck me silent when I was twenty-one.


April 28, 2021

New Literary Quiz!

November 6, 2020

Has Women’s Fiction Helped to Save Us?

Almost four years ago exactly, against the background of a horrifying US election outcome and a world I didn’t recognize, I wrote a blog post entitled “How Women’s Fiction Can Save Us All.”

Which was more than a little bit self-serving, of course, considering my debut novel, Mitzi Bytes, was coming out the following spring.

So it was kind of like your mechanic telling you how replacing your muffler kills fascists, or the real estate agent explaining how buying a town-home is the only sure route out of an authoritarian disaster. My post was totally ridiculous, over-earnest and embarrassing, but those were heady times and also—and here’s the pivotal thing—I wasn’t wrong.

And just how wrong I wasn’t occurred to me this morning as I scrolled through bestselling author Emily Giffin’s Instagram stories, which have been my go-to through this strange uncertain week while American votes are counted. All week long, Giffin has been unwavering in her confidence that America—and her home state of Georgia in particular—would deliver the Biden/Harris ticket a victory.

For months, Giffin’s feed has been decidedly political, anti-Trump sentiments, pro-LGBTQ and Black Lives Matter. Amidst snapshots of Charles and Diana, and Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, of course—Giffin’s Insta is a world onto itself. But no matter the followers who threatened to unfollow and or to boycott her novels, Giffin has been insisting on making it political most of the time.

(It only underlines my thesis too that Stacey Abrams— whose fight against voter suppression since losing her Governor race in 2018 deserves huge credit for turning Georgia blue—includes “romance novelist” among her many other accomplishments.)

And Giffin has been taking her politics offline as well. Her 2018 novel All We Ever Wanted was a powerful exploration of toxic masculinity and the ways in which privileged white women are culpable in perpetuating it.

It joined other novels like Jodi Picoult’s A Spark of Light, also published in 2018, delving into the personal stories behind the polarized issue of abortion. 2018 was also the year Tayari Jones published An American Marriage, which would go on to win the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction, painting plain the reality of being a Black man (and a Black wife) in America.

And these books were not anomalies. Candice Carty-Williams’ Queenie was billed as a Black Bridget Jones when it came out in 2019, but where Bridget was sliding down fireman’s poles (and more power to her!) Queenie was writing about US police shootings. Chick-lit queen Jennifer Weiner’s 2019 novel Mrs. Everything takes on more than a half-century of American misogyny and missed opportunities for women to succeed.

Celeste Ng’s smash hit 2017 novel Little Fires Everywhere is a devastating indictment of race, class and privilege and the outsized role they play in a very unequal America.

And Meg Wolitzer’s Female Persuasion, and Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half, Such a Fun Age, by Kiley Reid, Miracle Creek, by Angie Kim, and so many more.

In Canada, novelists Marissa Stapley and Karma Brown have penned fierce and furious feminist bestsellers with The Last Resort and Recipe for a Perfect Wife.

In further signs of progress since my post four years ago, the commercial fiction landscape in Canada has evolved beyond being a boring monolith of white writers, with the success of books like Uzma Jalaluddin’s Ayesha at Last and Farah Heron’s The Chai Factor, both of which manage to tackle racism and anti-Muslim hate in the context of love stories (no mean feat!). And even better, underlining that “diverse stories” (I hate that phrase) aren’t just a flash in the pan—both of these authors have new novels coming out next year.

And more commercial novels by Canadian authors of colour? Check out Jane Igharo, Roselle Lim, Jennifer Hillier, crime novelist Ausma Zehanat Khan, and YA novelist SK Ali, among others. The very existence of books centring the experiences of characters of colour is a political act, and many of these authors don’t shy away from more overt politics either, as they write plots that are also romantic, compelling, and great.

(Um, and yes, I have a new book out again, a novel about power and politics and the myths we create about ordinary men and leadership, and what we do about men who might not be monsters but whose behaviour is not okay.)

This week I listened to the CBC Pop Culture podcast Pop Chat, which considered the pop culture response to US politics over the last four years, determining that the output (mainly bad Saturday Night Live sketches) had been fairly disappointing, films like Get Out and Parasite aside. (They didn’t even mention Demi Lovato’s “Commander in Chief” though! I love that song!)

The consensus being that a US president who sucks all the air out of the atmosphere as the 45th did (DID. I’m doing past tense. I’m going there. It’s been too long. I AM READY), who is so over-the-top and in defiance of credulity and reality, whose entire construct of the world seems to be a fiction—well, what are artists meant to do with that?

But the women who write commercial fiction have done a lot, responding to the moment and truly rising to the occasion.

These books—part of a genre that so rarely gets the respect it deserves—are one terrific legacy of this terrible, awful time. When people look back at these works published during the second half of the last decade—at the questions these authors have been grappling with, the issues confronted head-on, the taboos finally broken, voices being heard, stories that are finally being told—I hope it’s going to seem obvious that the patriarchy was on its final legs, quaking in its ugly boots.

And good riddance.

October 18, 2020

How I Made My Children Readers: My ONE Magic Secret

Summer reads…

Okay, as everybody knows, my children are readers because LUCK and because they happened to be born with those inclinations, and because they are fortunate that reading comes easily for their brains. LUCK also that neither of them decided to hate reading out of spite, because their mom was just way too into it. (I was anticipating this. Have done my best—and no doubt failed—not to be too much about the whole reading thing, and give them space to develop their own tastes and connection to reading that was not just an extension of mine.) This is probably 75% of the formula.

In addition, books and reading are an essential part of our family culture, they see me and their dad reading all the time, I’ve surrounded them with excellent books since before they were born, and it’s rare that they’ve ever taken a journey that didn’t end at a bookshop (and then ice cream).

But my magic secret to raising readers is none of these. My magic secret is much less wholesome, is sexist and outdated, and is available in digest form at your local grocery store. My magic secret to raising readers is ARCHIE COMICS.

And here’s why.

1 ) I buy them at the grocery store checkout, along with milk and cheese and breakfast cereal, underlining the point that reading materials can be staples, sundries just as essential as toilet paper and dish soap. They’re always appreciated, and special enough to turn up in Christmas stockings, but they’re kind of viewed there the way that socks in the stockings are. Nice to have, but ubiquitous.

2) Ubiquitous, which is to say accessible. They’re cheap. Can be taken for granted. Unremarkable. They’re just always around.

3) Being so accessible, they’re also disposable. They’re the books my children bring to the table at lunchtime because nobody cares if they get splattered with soup. Nobody has to be precious with a book like this.

4) These are also stories that ask little of their readers. They don’t require a lot of attention or brain power. They’re perfect for if you’re really tired. My daughter likes to read one as a palette cleanser after reading something intense or demanding before bed. They’re not edifying. In short, they are basically literary candy. Unlimited literary candy. And unlimited candy is basically every kid’s dream. (Just don’t tell them that they’re building literacy as a lifelong habit!)

5) I bought two comics last week when we were waiting in the drug store for our flu shots. Archie comics pass the time, and because they’re broken up into pieces, you can read them at three minute intervals or for ages and ages. Picking them up and putting them down is easy , and so they’re really easy to integrate into the course of one’s day. SEVERAL TIMES.

And because they’re so ubiquitous, there’s usually a small pile of them within arm’s reach anyway. Nobody has to go out of their way, which is just the way literacy training ought to be.

October 5, 2020

New Lit Quiz: Fall Books to Fall For

September 25, 2020

How to Be a Champion, and Not a Sycophant

Some of my most important mentors have been the people who said no to me, the people who couldn’t accommodate my request, who didn’t want to help, who had better things to do than answer my email. From these people, I have learned that I too can set my own boundaries and limits, that none of us are required to be everything to everyone.

And so similarly was I impressed last spring when I approached a fellow author-friend for a blurb for my forthcoming novel, and she responded with a caveat—she would agree to read my book, but not necessarily to endorse it. Because how could she know if she hadn’t read it yet, and as a person who aspires for everything to mean what it means, this was a particularly powerful moment.

This story has a happy ending too, because this person really liked my book. And how much more her endorsement meant to me because it wasn’t granted automatically, because it meant something. But even if she hadn’t endorsed it, I would have admired that too. A sign that honesty and integrity are not as rare as one might think. And yes, my ego would have taken a bit of a bruising, but every public-facing person benefits from such an exercise from time to time.

Last week I wrote about the importance of making space for promoting books and reading, but this doesn’t require one to have to love everything. “The standards we raise and the judgments we pass…” Virginia Woolf refers to in “How Should One Read a Book,” and those standards and judgments are important. Not because they are the law, because they aren’t, and different readers and critics will have different standards and judgments, which is just the way it should be (and this is the great thing about making space—there can be enough of it to go around).

If you are making space and not adhering to your standards and judgments—raving about books you thought were terrible, blurbing books you’ve never read, recommending titles about which your take was mostly “meh,” holding your nose to post about a title your favourite publicist has sent you which is not your cup of tea, writing about a book that was rubbish but the author is super nice—then the space you are creating is not going to be very meaningful. And sometimes these kinds of situations are difficult to avoid, particularly if you are new to a community or less sure of your taste or less confident as a critic. But I would advise you to find yourself in these situations as little as possible to preserve your own literary reputation, your sense of self, and on behalf of the cause of better books, which is a cause we all can believe in.

Here’s how you can do it.

  • If you can’t say no outright to review/blurb requests (it takes courage to be that bold) then you can make excuses. A lack of time is something nobody is going to argue with. Be vague. Don’t reply to emails. They’ll get the point. (There are people who will claim I am being unfair here, and that you owe it to authors to be honest and upfront. I have tried this. It has never gone well, and I will never do it again.)
  • Build your wheelhouse. Most historical fiction, books about young men coming of age, novels with child narrators and fiction about philosophers I’ve never heard of are outside mine, which makes it easy for me to ignore these books without compunction.
  • If that author on Instagram is super nice (even if she is me, although I am not that nice) and her book just didn’t jive with you, you don’t need to post about it. Even if she put it in her mailbox with her own two hands. The favour you did her was trying out the book at all. It’s not your fault if it didn’t work. And perhaps you can write a critical post that highlights the book’s redeeming features, but if none of those features can be found, just let it go.
  • Be as brave as my friend and don’t agree to blurb a book you haven’t read yet. If you do agree to blurb a book that turns out to be terrible, fail to meet the deadline.
  • Understand that a book may not be to your taste, but someone else might enjoy it. And that is terrific. Because you got to be honest with yourself and your audience and the book still got love. There is enough to go around without you bending over backwards.
  • Know that it is not your job to take care of everybody
  • And understand that your word is only ever going to mean anything if you mean the things you say. Your platforms matter. Use them wisely, smartly, and don’t water them down. And yes, we could be all throwing up our hands about declining ways to get the word out about books (and we do! And we are!) but that makes it all the more important to preserve the integrity in the places/platforms that are still available.

September 18, 2020

How to Do Self-Promotion

“There is nothing wrong with self-promotion!” someone tweeted at me a few weeks ago, an attempt at encouragement that demonstrated that they don’t know me very well, because clearly, I already know this . If I could afford to buy billboards for my selfies, I probably would. I really do hope that you will pre-order my new book (coming October 27 from Doubleday Canada!), is what I’m saying, but also that all self-promotion is not good self-promotion. There is a certain kind of grace required.

This all started because I have the best part time job ever, and I work with the best people , who fill my life with goodness and have been so supportive of my work for the past nearly-ten years. And my job involves getting excited about Canadian books, which is the greatest pleasure, and comes pretty naturally to me. But I am careful not to use this particular platform to promote my own work. I have other platforms after all, and it would be more than a little gauche. For me to include my book on the site’s Fiction Preview, for example, a project I care very much about and work hard on compiling.

So I didn’t, and my friend/colleague Kiley didn’t notice (it was a very busy summer!) until my book ended up on the Toronto Star and CBC Books’ Fall Previews the other weekend. And then she tweeted from the 49thShelf account about my forthcoming book, and how I hadn’t included it on our list. I replied that it’s kind of tacky to put your own book on your own list, and that it is to be hoped instead that somebody else might be anticipating my book, someone who isn’t even me—a gamble that had paid off (phew!) because at least two media outlets were.

Um, and yes, props to my fantastic publicist at PRH, of course. I suppose it’s easier to be kind of laissez faire when you have such people in your corner. It’s not all karma, is what I’m saying. But some of it actually is.

And what I mean by this is that the best way I know to do self-promotion is to create the space, instead of focusing on my own book specifically. This is a long-term goal, of course. You don’t start this six weeks before your pub date. Instead, you use whatever platforms you have—both digitally and in the actual world—with the intention of creating meaningful conversation, in my case about books and reading in general. Supporting a culture of literature in the places I hang out in, connecting with others who do so. And this culture matters. As Virginia Woolf wrote 95 years ago of the importance of readers in her essay “How Should One Read a Book?”—“The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work.”

So how to create this space? Maybe you have a book blog. Maybe you interview writers on Youtube. Maybe you started an online literary magazine. Maybe you post about the books you love on Facebook. Maybe you run a reading series. Maybe you post photos of your library haul on Instagram. Maybe you talk about books exuberantly to the people you encounter in your everyday life. Maybe you support independent bookstores/ Maybe you read conspicuously in public. Maybe you do things to support the spaces that were created by other people, attending literary events, buying books, reading book reviews. Maybe you listen to books podcasts, and then tell other people about the books podcasts. Maybe you write Goodreads reviews, and leave reviews on Amazon—although even typing this makes me nauseous because nothing associated with Amazon is good for anybody, so if these are your tactics, perhaps think of one more.

The point of this space you’re creating is still not to promote your own book. Forget about your own book, for now. This is not about you. The point of this space you’re creating is to make more room in the world for books and readers, and even just a little tiny bit more space means something significant. And you’re benefiting from this space, because you are a reader, and you live in the world, and you’ve done your part to make the world a little closer to the kind of world you want to see—where books and reading matter.

And then, yes, because there is more space, there will also be more room for you and your book. Because you’re steeped in the atmosphere of books and reading, it will not seem so awkward to make your own book a part of the conversation. And because you’ve cultivated connections and built relationships, you won’t be the only person talking about your book either, which is the kind of promotion that really matters, which is really just living the dream.

But first, you have to make that space. Talk about and share the books you really love. You are not in competition with other writers—a world where people love and value books is good for everyone, even if the books they’re loving and valuing aren’t yours. There is room enough for everyone, especially if you’re making space. The success of any writer can be a success for all writers.

Of course, feel free to take all this with a grain of salt because modest success is all I’ve ever known anyway. I’m a blogger after all, inherently on the margins. But still.

When you hear someone asking for a book recommendation, resist the urge to suggest your own book (because of course you’re going to suggest your own book). Not because there is anything wrong with self-promotion, but because it’s just too easy and obvious to create any meaningful connection. You really do have to go the long way around, but it’s worth it. Because it’s real.

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