November 24, 2025

Two Book Giveaways

Who wants to win a copy of CALL ME GRAY, by Andrew Larsen, Bells Larsen, and Tallulah Fontaine? And how about Jennifer Whiteford’s MAKE ME A MIXTAPE?

To enter to win CALL ME GRAY, comment below with your favourite winter tradition. To win MIXTAPE, comment with your favourite ’80s song. (And leave the same comment on my newsletter too if you’d like TWO chances to win!!)

Giveaway closes at the end of November. Canadian addresses only.

June 9, 2025

Theory of Water, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Both the big and small pictures in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson Theory of Water meant a lot to me, although the entire book is underlined by the understanding that the micro and macro are the very same, and that we can’t make a distinction, certainly not in the case of water, which flows and flows, escaping containment. Water is inherently connection, sometimes in the most surprising ways imperceptible to the naked eye. Simpson’s own connection to water comes from skiing, from water in winter, and she introduces me to the concept of “sintering,” which is when a snowflake forms bonds with other snowflakes to create “the fabric of a snowpack.” One thing leading to another, ordinary and miraculous at once.

The waterways that Simpson writes about are the rivers and lakes most familiar to me from growing up in Peterborough, and spending my summers on lakes in the Trent Severn System, and it occurs to me how little I really got to know these lakes and rivers. How I took for granted (or barely thought about) the few places where Jackson Creek had been allowed to surface in downtown Peterborough (and never made the connection between its burial and the massive floods that occurred in 2004), and never considered how the lock system, which permitted my family to so easily pass from Sturgeon to Cameron and then to Balsam lakes, changed and damaged the eco-system, destroying the wild rice on which Indigenous peoples had based their economy. Simpson writes about the eels that used to come from the Sargasso Sea and populate the Great Lakes and lakes in the Kawarthas and beyond until the St. Lawrence Seaway made their passage impossible. She writes about how giving waterways over to commerce and capitalism has been corrupting, and the necessity of a different kind of future.

So many answers to questions about what this land is and who we need to become to live well here are found in littoral places, shorelines whose boundaries are neither here nor there, hard to map, bursting with biodiversity and possibility, the places where life happens. We are not just of the water, but water is literally so much of what we are, and exploring this idea is key to a livable future.

June 6, 2025

My Grade 5 Science Project

Marc Garneau has died, the former MP and first Canadian in space, less well known for doing my Grade 5 science project when we somehow mailed him a cassette tape on which I asked him to record answers to my questions about being an astronaut—AND HE DID IT! And sent me photos and CanadARM stickers to use in my display, and it was the only science project I ever did that won a prize. What a thoroughly decent human being.

November 8, 2024

The Making of a Story Girl

L.M. Montgomery made me a story girl. Throughout so many of her novels, the characters showed me what being a writer entailed, the practical matters, beyond the mere precociousness of declaring oneself as such (though I did that too). It wasn’t simply that Anne and Emily were themselves writers to the marrow, bursting with romantic ideas and florid vocabularies, but that they were unabashed in pursuit of this vocation. In Emily of New Moon, Emily is devoted to practicing writing vivid descriptions in her “Jimmy-books,” which were blank notebooks provided by her supportive cousin. Anne and her friends begin a Story Club in Anne of Avonlea, writing and sharing their own creative works, a conscious act of “cultivating” their imaginations. And I was always fascinated with (and envious of!) the cousins in The Golden Road who manage to create their own household newspaper, full of tales, tips, and teasing, inside jokes and local gossip, and spent my childhood coming up with inferior imitations. Through these different narratives, Montgomery demonstrates not only that a writer is someone who writes, but also how this is done and how storytelling can connect us to each other and the wider community….

Thank you to Sarah Emsley for inviting me to be part of your Maud 150 celebrations.

Read the rest of my post over on Sarah’s blog.

March 11, 2024

Bury the Lead, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti

“There’s nothing to worry about, Glenda. It’s just routine. There’s no way the cops will think a butter tart feud is enough motive to kill someone. This isn’t Midsomer Murders.”

I first read BURY THE LEAD back in January in preparation for Bookspo Podcast (the episode went live last week!) and returned to it again this weekend as I’ll be interviewing co-authors Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti (who are friends of mine) as part of House of Anansi Press’s Beer and Book Club at Henderson Brewing this Wednesday March 13. And it’s something to read a mystery novel a second time, when you already know whodunnit, and can pay attention to how the machine is working, all the moving parts. For some books, that might take all the fun out of the experience, but not this one, which I liked even more the second time around. I loved the humour, the similes (the old newspaper that “looked like it had been typeset with a machete”), the fact that it’s concerned with newspapers at all (veteran journalist Renzetti brings her years of experience at the Globe & Mail, and a passion for locals news and journalists in general), the fierce feminism, the small-town Canadian cottage-country setting. It’s the story of Cat Conway, who’s turned up in Port Ellis (where she’d spent summers with her grandparents years before) on the burnt out trail of a marriage and a career both gone out in flames. Very soon, however, it seems that her new, smaller, quiet life is not going to be so quiet after all when the lead in local theatre production (who is a world-famous actor) turns up dead on opening night, and not of natural causes. Ever the reporter, Cat is determined to get to the bottom of the story, along with her posse of news colleagues, a motley bunch if ever there was one, except that it seems like somebody in town is intent on getting between Cat and the truth. But is there anyone more indomitable than a middle-aged woman fuelled by rage who has nothing left to lose? Bury the Lead is pure delight.

August 8, 2023

Book Launch!

Celebrate friendship and fiction with the launch of ASKING FOR A FRIEND, Toronto author Kerry Clare’s third novel, which is partly set at the Lillian H. Smith Branch, and is the story of an enduring relationship between two best friends that unfolds across decades.

Bring your bestie and listen to readings from audiobook narrator Kate Keenan, take part in a BFF-themed quiz show by Shari Kasman, get your picture taken in the photo booth, and pick up a copy of the book, on sale from A Novel Spot Bookshttps://www.eventbrite.ca/e/asking-for-a-friend-kerry-clare-tickets-682361881757.

May 25, 2023

Snow Road Station, by Elizabeth Hay

An essential part of my writing process is getting to the point where I know my characters well enough that that every bit of dialogue becomes essential to my story, no single line that’s incidental or something that anybody else would say to any other person on the planet. This is especially true with fictional people who’ve known each other for decades: there is no small talk, every sentence loaded with meaning, with freight. In Elizabeth Hay’s new novel SNOW ROAD STATION this can be disorienting for a reader, like walking into a room in the middle of a conversation, but this is also what fiction should be, I think.

I really liked this book, though its effect was more subtle than powerful, which is fine because it’s a slim read and I have time to pay attention.

I really liked this book, a story of late middle age and long friendship (“Theirs was a childhood friendship that had lasted, enduring long spells when it existed out of sight, but then there it was again, like strawberries in season.”) but it was not until its final paragraph, which hits with such a force, nothing subtle about it, that I began to really understand the project, what a complicated fascinating book this quiet story really is.

April 13, 2023

Diagnosing Minor Illness in Children, by Kerry Ryan

There is a line from Kerry Ryan’s first poetry collection THE SLEEPING LIFE that I’ve been thinking about for almost a decade and a half since I first read it, the line about the click of her partner’s glasses on the bedside table at the end of the day: “I wait for it all day.” And what remains just as true about Ryan’s vision all these years later as I picked up her latest DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (and read it in a single sitting) is the way she manages to capture those moments of every day existence so fleeting that most of us fail to notice until we see them articulated in a line of her poem, and declare, “Yes, THIS. The miracle of existence in a nutshell!”

Or, as I wrote in my blurb for the book: “Once again, Kerry Ryan’s singular vision and attention to perfect details works to render the ordinary absolutely extraordinary, the world shown anew through these poems about bodies, birth and motherhood, and the wildness of all of it.

Meeting Kerry Ryan at my husband’s colleague’s wedding fifteen years ago (he was marrying her sister!) was such a fortunate event for me, which I was not wholly expected when I was introduced to “another Kerry who likes books.” What are the odds that that other Kerry’s debut poetry collection would be so dazzling, speak so clearly to my soul? That she would end up contributing one of my favourite essays to the anthology The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood, “Confessions of a Dilly-Dallying Shilly-Shallier.” That she would introduce me to the wonderful Ariel Gordon! We’d also hang out in her home of Winnipeg in 2014 where lines from her second collection Vs. (about being a bookish non-sporty girl who takes up boxing) were displayed outside her gym.

So I’ve been waiting a long time for a new book by Kerry Ryan, and I’m thrilled that DIAGNOSING MINOR ILLNESS IN CHILDREN (with gorgeous cover art by Julie Morstad, who is my favourite!) is entirely worth the wait, Ryan turning her eye to parenthood and its excruciating wonderment, to losing a parent, to love and marriage in middle age, noticing everything, those perfect details. This is truly a book to savour.

June 30, 2022

Gleanings

• Keep singing and dancing, drawing and planting gardens. This is no insignificant thing in the face of a movement that wants to make everything plain and ugly, cruel and sour. There is radicalism in refusing to judge. There is radicalism in listening. There is radicalism in saying, gently, ‘That’s not how I see it.’
• This doesn’t happen often. I am not a violent person. But right now, with broken families, broken hearts, beautiful cities torn apart by war, the consistent and constant gaslighting by politicians who could take measures but won’t, no authentic dialog, muddled truth, no compromise toward solutions, all leading to a sense of helplessness. it’s just time to break something. And cry.
• How on earth do we grow compassion, understanding, tolerance and acceptance on such stony ground?  By welcoming one and all to the table.
• I remember rotary dial phones as a kid, which morphed into touchtones, then to call-display and the magic of voicemail. I remember when everything went through receptionists. If the person you wanted to speak with on the phone wasn’t there, the receptionist would write the message down on a special message paper, roll it up and pop it into a pigeon hole in a box that sat at the front of her desk (I say her, because back then they were never he).
• I think I want to write more about my life when I feel less sure about it. When things are a little dim or grimy or blurry and I turn to a Google Doc like it’s a magnifying glass or a flashlight.
• Minus our group’s cumulative, ongoing commentary and the special alchemy of our interactions and earned trust of each other’s opinions, adding words of criticism or praise here have no fair context. Does that make sense? And doesn’t that confirm that the secret sauce here is the book lists and information coupled with the chemistry of our fellow readers?
• For one, I’ve been highly reactive with the kids lately. My reaction time to kid-squabble-teen-bitchery is unbeatable. There is nothing faster, literally. My mouth and mother-hat are tilting wildly at windmills. At speed, mind you, which does not mesh well with health and wellness.
• I want to be open to the unexpected. Sometimes, opportunities fall into my lap; sometimes I pursue projects that don’t pan out but I’m glad I tried because why not.
• I want to stop worrying about ‘not enough’. My shaking doesn’t make me ‘disabled’ enough for instance, and there’s so many other things like that I feel. I’m fucking 46 years old and I’ve been though a lot. I think I need to stop being quiet and know we’re all enough, more than that. We just are. I might start going deeper, or at least trying to, and that’s kind of exciting.
• If I’m going to survive, I must make warm drinks. I must boil the water, select the mug, and also the tea – the latter two must align with the season and match the moon and whether I wish to feel free or safe.
• Recently a lovely internet friend and photographer wrote something on her blog that I one hundred percent relate to because what she said parallels how I use this space as well. Donna wrote, “This isn’t a portfolio of perfect images or a gallery of my best work. Instead, it is a record of my experiments and efforts.” When I read that, I couldn’t help but exclaim out loud, “Yes, that’s me too!”
• To follow my spirit, to say NO to societal pressures, is to go against the herd. It is to say once again, after fighting so hard my whole life to escape the pain of it—I am all alone.
• I’m more in love with trees every day now that I live with a forest. Am learning how they’re a community and speak to one another and how sometimes what we might call ‘crowding’ they call protection and comfort. Left to its own devices a forest pretty much knows how to be.
• Some days I think, Why bother? Why bother with writing books that get lost in the ebb and flow of the literary conversation, their voices a little quiet and timorous for these times? Or quilts, because honestly does anyone need another one in a world filled with stuff? But my hands need the work, my mind needs what happens when my hands find their way to loop and tie and dip and stitch. The way I find myself weeping when I see the cloth hanging on the clothesline, the books arriving in a courier’s van. See, you did this. It’s not quite what you meant to do (is it ever?) but you did this. On the cover of handiwork, a whole little flock of painted birds, ready to fly.

January 23, 2020

Ten Years

I had some strange feelings about reflecting on the 2010s, mostly because I didn’t. There was a meme going around Instagram stories on New Year’s Eve in which we were supposed to list a highlight from each year, and I even tried to post it, but couldn’t figure out how to get the text to fit, which maybe means that the 2010s were the decade in which I stopped being technologically savvy.

But also, the years all blend together, and so much stayed the same. The decade before was much more filled with upheaval and revolution (they were my 20s after all) but in the 2010s were where the pieces started to fit. I stopped having babies, I began to have something like a career, I finally started publishing books, I made some wonderful new friendships, and maintained old ones. It’s been good, but the decade itself, its distinction, just seems particularly arbitrary. Like—even more than a decade should.

Or do I only think that because when the decade started, I was sitting in the very same place that I’m sitting right now?

Okay. not the exact same place. (We finally bought a new couch, remember?) But the same address, our apartment, which we moved into twelve years ago this April, the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere. I moved in as half of a young married couple, and now I’ve got two kids and I’m forty, and have been married almost 15 years. The little kids who lived next door moved out and went to university, and then moved back in again, although it didn’t do me much good when they did, because now they’re too old to babysit. But, as the middle section of To the Lighthouse, so astutely put it: Time Passes.

Imagining our own story as told from the perspective of the house as Woolf does in her novel (except with less war and death). The people coming and going, coats and jackets hung up on hooks and taken down again, early morning alarm clocks and dinners, and house guests, and holidays, and the quiet weeks where we’ve all gone away, and coming home again, an explosion of luggage, and the babies arriving, and late nights with the lights on while the world sleeps, and the babies grow, and all the books that come in and those that go back out again (returned to the library, or left on the garden walls for any takers), and the birthday parties, play dates, first day of schools, pencilled lines in the door-frame measuring from small to tall, and boots and shoes and sandals in a pile at the door, and the triumphs and disappointments, throughout anxiety and contentment, and these walls have contained it all. Even as spare rooms turned into nurseries and cribs turned into bunk-beds, and empty space turned into clutter—Lego, puzzles, and play-doh—and that ring on the carpet from where I put down a teapot and it melted. How places seem to hold us, even more than time does, and how a single place can hold so much, and so can a life.