We’re thrilled to share that today, on Wednesday, October 15, two Biblioasis books have been announced as finalists for the 2025 Quebec Writers’ Federation Literary Awards! UNMET by stephanie roberts was shortlisted for the A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry, and Lazer Lederhendler’s translation of The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard was shortlisted for the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation.
View the full finalists announcement on the QWF website here.
The winners of QWF Literary Awards’ seven prestigious prizes will be announced at the 2025 QWF Literary Awards Gala on Monday, November 10 at Cabaret Lion d’Or (1676 Ontario St. E.). The ceremony begins at 8:00 pm, preceded by a cocktail reception from 6:30 to 7:30 pm. The event will be hosted by broadcaster, arts journalist, and translator Shelley Pomerance.
Each award comes with a purse of $3,000. The cash prize for the Ian Ferrier Spoken Word Prize will be split equally between one to three winners.
This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon. It is the sun / or nothing else, you would scream / if you weren’t caught up in the chorus.
Leaning deliberately on the imagined while scrutinizing reality and hoping for the as-yet-unseen, UNMET explores frustration, justice, and thwarted rescue from a perspective that is Black-Latinx, Canadian, immigrant, and female. Drawing on a wide range of poetics, from Wallace Stevens to Diane Seuss, roberts’s musically-driven narrative surrealism confronts such timely issues as police brutality, respectability politics, intimate partner violence, and ecological crisis, and considers the might-have-been alongside the what-could-be, negotiating with the past without losing hope for the future.
stephanie roberts is the prize-winning author of the poetry collections UNMET and rushes from the river disappointment, which was a finalist for the 2020 A. M. Klein Prize for Poetry. Her work has been critically praised and widely featured in numerous periodicals and anthologies such as Poetry, Arc Poetry, Event Magazine, The New Quarterly, Verse Daily, Crannóg (Ireland), The Stockholm Review of Literature, and elsewhere. Winner of The Sixty-Four: Best Poets of 2018 (Black Mountain Press), she was born in Panama, grew up in NYC, and has lived most of her life in Quebec.
Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize in Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
Lazer Lederhendler is a veteran literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. He has also translated 20th-century Yiddish literature. His work has earned distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the USA, most recently the French-American Foundation’s 2025 Translation Prize for The Hollow Beast. Among the authors he has translated are Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, Catherine Leroux, Alain Farah, Itzik Manger and Melekh Ravitch. He lives in Montreal with the artist Pierrette Bouchard.
Winner of the 2025 French-American Translation Prize in Fiction • Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title
1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master of epic comedy.
Lazer Lederhendler is a veteran literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. He has also translated 20th-century Yiddish literature. His work has earned distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the USA, most recently the French-American Foundation’s 2025 Translation Prize for The Hollow Beast. Among the authors he has translated are Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, Catherine Leroux, Alain Farah, Itzik Manger and Melekh Ravitch. He lives in Montreal with the artist Pierrette Bouchard.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/QWF_web.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-10-15 15:32:212025-10-15 15:32:22THE HOLLOW BEAST and UNMET shortlisted for the QWF Literary Awards!
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A few notes from John Metcalf, followed by a Biblioasis interview with Elise Levine, author of Big of You
When I happened upon Elise Levine’s stories in 1994 or thereabouts I was editing for Porcupine’s Quill press. What struck me about even her earliest work—and I do mean ‘struck’—was how polished and sophisticated it was; she was aeons ahead of her contemporaries having been reading Beckett at the age of fifteen.
“In his works I find a means with which to capture the psychic and emotional states of betweenness, constraint, defiance, the craft involved in giving shape to the tension between the abjection of self-exile and the unyielding human voice. I grasp how what is not said on the page can speak volumes: how silence itself can render an eloquent and moving subtext, and wrenchingly convey the unspeakable” (Elise Levine, Off the Record, Biblioasis 2023).
She refers more than once—though not directly—to Beckett’s play Not I (1973), a play in which Billie Whitelaw was shrouded entirely in black cloth with only her mouth illuminated—and the spotlit mouth delivered at tumbling speed a flooding monologue. This is the way I hear Elise’s fictions; her stories can be described as instruments performing a voice. She has no patience for plot, for ‘what happens next’; her stories are intricate solos; she wants us not to think but to listen; she demands our surrender to the performance.
John Metcalf
A Biblioasis Interview with Elise Levine
DB: Big of You was my introduction to your work. I loved it so much, I’ve been working my way backwards through your catalogue. I’m curious to know how you see Big of You as being different, or a shift away, from your previous books.
EL: Thank you for the love! Big of You extends what I’ve done in previous books, in which I’ve explored questions about power and voiced-over lives and defiance. I carried these concerns with me in writing Big of You, but I also saw it from the outset as more focused than my first two story collections and at times lighter in tone and more sardonic than my novels and novellas. This book full-on centers ambition, striving, the puncturing of expectations, the capacity for self-deceit, and the delight in potentialities and capabilities. Before I began writing the stories in Big of You, I saw it having a clear overall architecture: I would braid the stories together by linking some of the characters through paired narratives in which the characters appear at different points of their lives or otherwise intersect with the situations and preoccupations of other characters. I knew too, before I began writing any of the stories, that I would lean heavily on fabulist or surreal elements to capture lives lived—or entertaining the possibility of living—beyond imposed expectations, and that these elements would help get at the strange internal weather and sea changes over time that personhood can entail.
Elise Levine. Photo credit: Britt Olsen-Ecker.
Big of You strikes me as primarily character-driven. It’s also very attentive to language, but I imagine largely as a means of representing the peculiarities of character (correct me if I’m wrong). What is it about character that appeals to you? How do you discover and approach a new character? Do you ever find the seeds of character in your own life?
I’ve always been a character-driven writer, and yes, I use language—foregrounding it, even—fully in service of evoking character, because in character lies the Big Question: we have these single lifetimes—as far as I know—and what do we do with them? In view of the dark door of individual extinction we all must pass through. And the possibility, that continues to rapidly feel more pressing, of the extinction of humans as a species, along with every other living thing on this planet. My initial ideas for character strike out of the blue and then I spend time in what I think of as a pre-writing stage: writing partial scenes, especially the opening and endings, and making notes on who the characters might be, what their situation is. Fully developing the character, their story, typically takes me a scandalous amount of time and a crazy number of drafts in which I keep digging deeper, further in, asking what does this character really want, what do they fear? Sometimes characters do initially lift from my own life. I mean, I was once a teenage girl let loose for a summer in Europe, as in the story “Arnhem,” which opens the book. I once lived in an apartment in which the living room was dominated—menaced?—by a baby grand piano, as in “Penetrating Wind Over Open Lake.” But with both of these stories, as was the case with others in which I borrowed details from my own life, when I began writing them in earnest the narratives soon wildly diverged from my personal histories and took on their own beast lives.
Don’t miss Big of You and other great Biblioasis titles on the Globe and Mail’s Fall 2025 books list!
One of my favourite stories in Big of You is the three-part “Cooler.” For those who haven’t read it yet, the first part follows a sad-sack casino worker, the second an isolated spacecraft, and the third part features a grumpy, supernatural creature with a blue tail (these short descriptions really don’t do the story justice). The three sections are wildly different in tone. In a recent interview with The Ex-Puritan, you explain that the story arose from an interest in the concept of “coolness” and how what’s cool might be variously depicted. I love that, and wonder if any of the other stories in Big of You began in distinct ways (even if not necessarily derived from a concept)?
Yes, each of the other stories in the book did begin in distinct ways, but usually with a strong sense of character and situation, and a sense of voice and form. For example, I knew from the outset that for “Return to Forever,” which is about three older women who vacation together in the desert at Joshua Tree, while a fourth friend remains back home in a memory-card ward, I would use the first-person-plural point of view and sweeping, single-paragraph sections to evoke a communal voice. In “Witch Well,” the final story, I knew I wanted, before I even began writing it, to use a heightened fabulist approach and a kind of Stepford Wives vibe—along with a tone of perky defiance—to portray a woman’s grief and confusions over a profound loss against a backdrop of the seductive erasures of affluence.
Read Elise’s new interview with Zilla Jones in All Lit Up.
I mentioned that “Cooler” is one of my favourites in the collection. Do you have a favourite story, or perhaps a character that you still think about with fondness or a sense of kinship?
I do feel a weird tenderness toward the main character in “Once Then Suddenly Later,” Adrien Tournachon, a nineteenth-century historical figure whose older brother, Gaspard-Félix Tournachon—better known by his pseudonym Nadar—is a central figure in the history of early modernity. He was a noted proponent of heavier-than-air flight—which led to the development of airplanes—which he advocated for through a series of catastrophic balloon flights. Along the way he invented aerial photography and air mail and underground photography, and was celebrated for his vivid, individualistic photographic portraits of luminaries such as George Sand, Victor Hugo, and Sarah Bernhardt. But his younger brother, Adrien, my main character, suffers from living in the shadow of his older and successful brother. My character is his own worst enemy: he drinks and squanders his time and lesser talents, at one point steals his famous older brother’s identity, lies about his own whereabouts and stature, and never fails to wallow in bitter self-pity. I don’t feel kinship with him, but I do feel for him: he stands in for the perils of striving to lead an artistic, creative life.
You’ve been a professor for a while now, and you teach in the program at Johns Hopkins University. How do you think teaching writing has influenced your own work?
Teaching fosters the excellent practice of generosity as a reader: it keeps me reading closely, open to a multiplicity of stylistic and formal approaches, and with an admiration and respect for other writers’ willingness to explore the infinite ways of what it means to be human. All of which keeps the creative wheels spinning in terms of my own work. Beyond a doubt, it’s a generative circuit, teaching writing and writing.
Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?
Well, a ton of books! But I’ll try to keep myself decent and mention just a few. The story collections Other Worlds by André Alexis and Hellions by Julia Elliott: both are great examples of using fabulist elements to explore the shifts and surprises of selfhood, and both use language and form in innovative ways. Two Booker-longlisted novels: Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flesh by David Szalay, both of whose previous books I’ve loved. In these latest by Kitamura and Szalay, each very distinct from the other, language and form are nearly electric, and used to pose questions about hairpin twists and turns of identity. Another novel, The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana, I admired for its brilliantly controlled sentences and pacing, its taut and suspenseful narrative and vivid interiority—and its ability to generate tremendous empathy, despite the moral horrors it depicts. I also recommend two poetry collections, also quite different from each other: New and Collected Hell by Shane McCrae and Little Mercy by Robin Walter. Both books possess tremendous formal clarity and a just-go-for-it approach to digging deep into what it means to be conscious in this strange world we inhabit, for better or for worse. I habitually read a lot of books in translation and I’ll mention here just one of my favourites (okay, it’s actually a two-fer): On the Calculation of Volume (Books I and II), part of a seven-novel series by Solvej Balle, translated into English from Danish by Barbara J. Haveland. These first two in the series offer a lovely, surreal portrait of a woman experiencing suspended time, and uses a circumspect, minimalist tone and style—which achieves a nearly hallucinatory quality through its ultra-grounded and slow-paced approach to revealing the beauty and constancy of the many ordinary details of existence. I can’t wait for the remaining books in the series to come out in translation.
Self Care by Russell Smith: “Smith is still at it in this story of a female journalist whose relationship with a man she’s ostensibly interviewing for an article on incel culture starts crossing into risky sexual and emotional territory.”
Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney: “The Irish author’s follow-up to the Booker-nominated How to Build a Boat involves a woman who [returns home] in the wake of her mother’s death and her father’s cancer diagnosis.”
Big of You by Elise Levine: “Reading the still criminally underappreciated Levine is a visceral experience that seems to demand engagement of all one’s senses.”
Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton: “[Heighton] believed the short story was his greatest contribution to literature. For this collection, [his editor] Metcalf assembled 15 of what he deems the author’s best.”
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Daily Mail and on FictionFan’s Book Review Blog:
Daily Mail: “A furtive, cagey novel reminiscent of Macrae’s Booker-shortlisted gem, His Bloody Project . . . In recounting one murder, Macrae subtly introduces the idea of another to produce a consummate slice of alternative true crime.”
FictionFan’s Book Review blog: “Burnet’s writing is wonderful, as always, and diving deeply into complex characters is one of his great strengths . . . Highly recommended.”
Marcello Di Cintio was interviewed about Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers on the Collisions YYC podcast: “From farms to care homes, Marcello illuminates a hard truth: we rely on foreign labour to survive, yet deny these workers a place to truly belong.”
Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in Necessary Fiction: “Chadwick’s prose is rich and poetic, containing surprising images and gorgeous complexities . . . leaving the reader hungry to see what the author will do next.”
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Elaine Feeney’s latest novel, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way, which comes out next week, has been called her most ambitious. And not just by me. It is about many things: colonialism, tradwives, inherited trauma and shame, the politics of the domestic space, the end of love and a second chance at it. The novel follows an Irish woman named Claire who returns to her family home after many years in England. Her parents have recently died. Her long-term relationship ended. She’s alone and spiraling. So she does what most of us do these days: go online and admire those leading perfectly curated lives. And like the best of us, she takes it too far.
What I loved most about it is how the story unfolds, its structure (“baggy, complex” and “hugely satisfying” as Barney Norris in the Guardian said of it in his review), with a narrative that shifts back and forth across time to show us Claire’s past and how the effects of the violence inflicted on her family echoes down the line—and how she tries to change. It’s almost like a sociological approach to literature, telling a story about the institution of repression in Ireland and its connections to modern tradwifery.
It has been great seeing the response to the novel so far, and how the story resonates. It was even included in the inaugural Booksellers’ List from the Canadian Independent Booksellers Association, making it one of the top 20 books of the fall season as voted on by independent Canadian booksellers. Thank you to CIBA and all the booksellers who voted for it.
And if you’re into bookish events, Elaine will be visiting North America later this month for readings and conversations in Vancouver, Ottawa, Connecticut, and New York. Stop by if you can.
And now what you’ve all been waiting for: the interview. I had a chance to ask Elaine a few questions over email. Read on if you’d like to know her thoughts on her book.
All my best,
Ahmed Publicist
A Biblioasis Interview with Elaine Feeney
Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this book came about?
I live in the west of Ireland in a 1970s bungalow surrounded by fields. It’s one of those Bungalow Bliss houses built from Jack Fitzsimons’ guide back in the 1970’s, this was popular in Ireland where these houses were usually on family land next to the “home house”—a small turn of century cottage that was pretty much just a big kitchen and a loft. Those spaces, and their complicated history, really inspired Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way.
The novel follows the O’Connor family from the west of Ireland, the Black and Tans era right up to the slightly surreal world of tradwife influencers today. I’ve always been drawn to the political power of ordinary domestic spaces, especially the Irish kitchen, which holds so much hidden history and tension and sadness (violence) in Ireland.
You’ve said previously that you see your three novels so far as examining different institutions: As You Were looked at the hospital, How to Build a Boat looked at the school, and now Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way explores the home/the kitchen. Why the home this time, and what draws you to institutions?
The kitchen has always fascinated me. In Ireland, it’s never just been about cooking or comfort—it’s where history happened. The Black and Tans terrorised people in their kitchens and I really wanted to try to write about this in tandem with Ireland’s dire history of its treatment of women post colonisation: Women were judged, removed, and incarcerated based on what happened within those four walls. It’s been a space of ceremony, loss, survival, and control. I have worked a lot with the long history of institutions in Ireland, and the kitchen seems the most political.
Across my books, I keep coming back to places where care and coercion live side by side. Hospitals, schools, homes—they’re all institutions that are supposed to help, but have historically often end up judging or punishing people instead.
The novel starts with a quote by Annie Ernaux about shame. What role does shame play in the family and the story?
Shame runs deep through the O’Connors’ story. After Irish independence, land ownership became a symbol of respectability and survival. Families clung to that image, and women were made the moral gatekeepers. A spotless house, well-behaved kids, clean laundry—it all reflected on the family’s name. This fascinates me with the rise again of fascism and tradwifery.
Claire, the oldest daughter in the novel, inherits not just her family’s bungalow, but the silence, secrets, and expectations that come with it. The shame of what happened to her mother weighs on her heavily. It becomes this silent, suffocating burden that shapes her actions and her grief.
Read an excerpt from Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way featured in Literary Hub.
Claire and her brothers also grieve their parents very differently. What were you trying to show with that?
I wanted to show how siblings experience family history and loss in very different ways. Claire retreats into obsessive domestic rituals to avoid facing her grief and the painful truth of her mother’s death, while her brother Conor carries the family’s legacy in a more external way.
The family is haunted not just by recent grief, but by the trauma of a century of violence, loss, and silence. In Ireland, history has a habit of lingering at the kitchen table, and for the O’Connors that’s definitely true.
Claire turns to a tradwife influencer as a way of coping, which on the surface seems to help her. Where did that idea come from?
It came from my own doom-scrolling, honestly! I kept coming across these soft-spoken, perfect women on Instagram or TikTok, arranging lemons or lighting candles in perfectly curated kitchens while the world burned outside. It fascinated (and unsettled) me. Was it harmless escapism or a soft return to old-fashioned control of women’s roles?
For Claire, following “Kelly Purchase”—my fictional tradwife influencer—isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about desperately trying to impose control over a life that feels completely out of control. It gives her temporary comfort but ultimately isolates her even more.
I love how the novel is structured, moving back and forth across time. Why did you decide to shape it that way?
I wanted it to feel like the piecing together an old family heirloom that’s been damaged or lost over time. Claire’s mind is fragmented, disoriented by grief and avoidance, so the structure mirrors that. It is also very much about the juxtaposition of banality and brutality. (The present in tandem with the future).
In a way, it’s also how so many Irish family histories are passed down—in fragments, in silences, and in stories half-told around the kitchen table. The shifting timelines let me explore how unresolved trauma and silence can distort identity and memory.
Is there anything you hope people take away after reading the novel?
I hope people think about what domestic order hides as well as what it provides. The Irish kitchen has been a place of warmth and nourishment, yes—but also of judgement, punishment, and even violence.
This tradwife trend might seem harmless on the surface, but I wanted to explore how it risks reinforcing systems we’ve fought hard to dismantle. Claire’s journey shows how dangerous it can be to seek safety through compliance and control.
Seamus Heaney said, “Whatever you say, say nothing,” but I wanted this novel to say something: that history is never truly in the past, and silence can become a prison.
In good publicity news:
Self Care by Russell Smith was featured twice in the Globe and Mail:
Reviewed by Emily M. Keeler: “Smith’s bleak, horny comedy holds up a funhouse mirror to an aspect of the human condition that feels unique but has always endured . . . There is an undeniably stylish brutality to his portrait of desperately lonely urbanites; when it hits you, you just might laugh.”
Benbeculaby Graeme Macrae Burnet appeared in several outlets this week:
Reviewed in The Scotsman: “Elegant, eerie . . . Perhaps the most impressive feature of the novella is the sense of simmering . . . Macrae Burnet conjures an atmosphere of suppression.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in Alberta Views: “A short, incisive, at times rollicking book.”
Seth’s 2025 Christmas Ghost Stories were reviewed in The Book Beat: “Each story, from cover to inside decorations . . . sets the scene and mood, while never giving anything away: They’re the creaky door that invites you inside, the things bumped into in the night.”
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An introduction to Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio
InPrecarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, which publishes next Tuesday, Marcello Di Cintio travels across Canada (from the Okanagan, to Leamington, to Goose Bay, Newfoundland) to document the experiences of migrant workers, destabilizing the popular notion of Canada as a safe, welcoming space where migrants can escape the hardships of their home countries.
Contrarily, Di Cintio highlights a recent UN report that describes the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.
There was so much I didn’t know about migrant policy and programs, about the prevalent unsafe housing, constant harassment, and unstable pay experienced by the workers every day. Or I knew about some of it, but only vaguely, at the back of my mind, the way I imagine millions of Canadians “know” about these issues. Precarious is filled with many of the harrowing, chaotic stories of precarity that make up the modern migrant experience in Canada. In a time of heightened, near-propagandistic Canadian patriotism, Precarious feels like such an important book to recalibrate our sense of identity, and our sense of what can be done to improve, rather than abolish, migrant labour in Canada.
I recommend taking the time to read Di Cintio’s beautifully angry op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, which he writes in response to Poilievre’s call to scrap the TFWP and deny visas to new migrants:
“I wonder . . . how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away—about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico—who showed up to take the job of a local resident.”
And I hope you’ll find the time to read the following excerpt from Precarious—taken from the introduction—which lays the groundwork for the book by pulling from Di Cintio’s familial experiences of migrant labour, and how these differ drastically from more recent experiences uncovered in later chapters.
Dominique Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
An excerpt from Precarious
Introduction
My grandfather was a migrant worker before such a thing existed.
Amedeo Sorrentino was born in 1923 and hardly a man when Mussolini forced him into the Italian infantry. In my favourite photo of him, he is wearing his army uniform and holding a cigarette between his fingers. My grandfather never smoked, but the photographer told him the cigarette would make him look older. After the photo was taken, the army shipped Amedeo across the sea to North Africa, handed him a rifle, and sent him out into the desert. British soldiers quickly decimated his regiment, and Amedeo was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a London POW camp.
After the war, Amedeo returned to his hometown of Lanciano and learned that his mother had died. Shrapnel from a grenade struck her in the back and killed her instantly as she sat in the village square with Amedeo’s youngest brother on her lap. My grandfather never hesitated to retell his war stories, and they were harrowing, but he didn’t like talking about what his family endured during those years. “The real war was back home,” he’d say before growing quiet.
My grandfather met my grandmother, Giulia, a few years later. Amedeo was not the first suitor to come calling. There were “lots of boys to choose from,” she once told me. One was a police officer, but policemen were not allowed to marry until they were thirty, and Giulia didn’t want to marry an “old man.” She chose Amedeo because he was the only one to make her laugh. Their courtship involved walking back from church together with family chaperones following a few paces behind them.
An interview with Marcello Di Cintio in the Calgary Herald.
Because they were both poor, Giulia and Amedeo waited until after Easter to announce their engagement so they wouldn’t have to give holiday gifts to each other’s families. Giulia’s mother, Guiseppina, did not approve of the engagement. “Why do you want to marry someone poorer than you are?” she asked her eldest daughter. They married on a rainy day in 1948 after their borrowed car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled free by an ox. The family ate the wedding dinner in Giulia’s parents’ bedroom, the largest room in the house. Afterwards one of Amedeo’s friends set off firecrackers he made from unexploded artillery shells he’d found in the fields.
Amedeo vowed never to leave home again. He’d found happiness with Giulia and wanted to raise a family with her in the country that he loved. Their first daughter, my mother, was born later that year, then two more girls in the years that followed. Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. The landowner allowed Amedeo to keep and sell only half of the harvest. With no sons, Amedeo did most of the labour himself. He found extra work at his uncle Nicola’s olive oil press. Though Amedeo had little education—he’d reached only the fifth grade before leaving school—he was good with numbers and did his uncle’s accounting.
For all his love of Italy and his promise to never leave it, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men were leaving Italy every day to find work abroad, and Giulia persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Canada, at least for a couple of years. Amedeo obliged and set off in 1956. He sent back a photo of himself waving from the deck of the Canada-bound ship. A note on the back written in black ink read: “As soon as I lifted my hand, my first thought was of returning soon to my family, and to my beautiful Italy.”
Before World War II and the Great Depression preceding it, most immigrant workers to Canada came to develop the agricultural economy of the Prairies. After the war, though, Canada’s booming industrial economy needed urban workers: people to build things, not just grow things. Many Italians ended up on construction sites in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and in my grandfather’s case, Calgary. Amedeo poured concrete during the day and tended to greenhouses at night. Years later, my grandfather would look out at the Calgary skyline and point to the buildings he helped build, including Foothills Hospital where I was born.
With the money Amedeo sent back to Italy, Giulia was able to buy a bicycle for her daughters and a record player for herself. One day, a vinyl record appeared in the mail from Canada: a recording of his cousins singing songs in a small Calgary studio. Amedeo was on the album, too. He had recorded a message for his wife and daughters, telling them that he loved and missed them. There were no telephones in Lanciano at that time, and this was the first Giulia had heard her husband’s voice in over a year. The arrival of the record was both a blessing and a tragedy. For all the marvellous joy it brought to hear Amedeo’s voice, the record reminded everyone that he was far away.
My grandfather didn’t want to stay in Canada. He wanted to save enough money to build a better life for his wife and daughters back home. Maybe buy some land and a bigger house. He wanted to be temporary. After two years, though, he and Giulia decided that it would be better for the family to live in Canada than to reunite back in Italy. Nonno resisted, but Nonna was stubborn. With the money Amedeo had sent them, Giulia and their daughters boarded the RMS Saxonia for the long, seasick journey west. The girls insisted on bringing their new bicycle with them. It lasted for decades, and I used to ride it around my grandparents’ neighbourhood when I was a child. Nonna left the behind the album that brought so much happiness for the family with Amedeo’s sister, Ersiglia. When Amedeo and Giulia returned to visit Italy years later and inquired about the album, Ersiglia claimed the mice ate it.
I doubt Amedeo and Giulia knew the role their whiteness played in their journey to Canada. The entry of non-white immigrants was restricted until 1962 when the federal government expunged overt racial discrimination from our immigration policy. Even afterwards, though, bigotry proved a tough habit to break. Anyone from anywhere was now permitted into the country as long as they demonstrated they could succeed here, but preference was given to people from Europe. And only Canadians from the United States and certain European and Middle Eastern nations could sponsor the immigration of their siblings. In the early sixties, my grandfather sponsored his sister and two brothers to come to Canada, a privilege he wouldn’t have enjoyed had he been Black or Asian.
My nonno died in July 2020 during the first fraught COVID summer. He’d been living in an extended-care facility since a stroke felled him a couple of years earlier. Nonno received initial treatment at the Foothills Hospital, and during a particularly painful injection quipped to my mother, “I never should’ve helped build this place.”
Due to the pandemic restrictions, fewer than fifty invited family members, masked and distanced, attended his funeral mass. When I stood at the front of the church to give his eulogy and looked out at the sparse attendees, I knew that the church would have overflowed with mourners had Nonno passed even a few months earlier. My grandfather was one of the first links in an immigration chain that brought dozens of families to Calgary. No doubt hundreds of the city’s Italians can trace their history back to my grandfather’s reluctant passage across the Atlantic.
Circumstances have changed for workers from abroad since then. Even though my grandfather came to work and never intended to stay, Canada granted him landed immigrant status upon his arrival. He had a choice to immigrate or not. Had my grandfather made the same journey even a decade later, he’d likely be considered a “temporary foreign worker”: welcome to work but not to remain. A labourer, yes. Not a link.
Nonno’s passing made me think of his contemporary counterparts. My grandfather only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn’t want you to stay? Bring your arms and backs, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don’t need your stories.
But I did. After my grandfather died, I set out to hear the stories of migrant workers in Canada. I knew nothing about these newcomers. I wondered about their days in our country, the lives and loved ones they left behind, and what compelled them to first make their long journeys here. I wondered, too, if they believed their time in Canada made up for their sacrifices and absences. Was our country worth it?
I spent the following three years travelling the country to meet workers and their advocates, pausing my wanderings for intermittent pandemic shutdowns and travel restrictions. I quickly learned that my image of a migrant worker was sorely limited. I thought I’d be spending all my time speaking to Latino farmhands and Filipina “nannies.” But I found that migrant labour exists within all aspects of Canadian society. Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee. Many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions are propped up with the foreign tuition paid by international students who, most of the time, are also migrant workers. The complexity overwhelmed me at times. The more people I spoke to, the more threads emerged. I wish I could have followed them all, but the diverse workers I did manage to speak to expanded my perspective of what migrant labour encompassed.
For the most part, I heard the kinds of stories I expected to hear. I learned about how calamities back home—a sick child, a dying wife, a hurricane—compelled people from around the world to seek financial opportunities here. I heard stories of redemption, reinvention, and romance. I learned about workers sending their overseas families gifts of maple syrup and Toronto Maple Leafs caps to stand in for the physical embraces their long separation denies them. I smiled at the baby photos on their cellphones. I cheered workers on soccer fields and watched the dance videos they recorded in their greenhouses. I heard about lovers the workers had left back home, and the lovers they found here.
What I didn’t expect, though, was how often Canada itself was the source of the migrants’ trauma. Despite the sufferings many workers escaped, a sea of troubles awaited them here. Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten. The abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens. I realized I wasn’t just looking into the lives of workers who’d long been invisible to me; I was seeing a Canada I didn’t recognize. The more I learned the migrants’ stories, the more I learned our own. And the portrait of Canada I started to see wasn’t flattering.
Interview in the Calgary Herald: “What started off being a book about other people, about these workers, really also became at the same time a book about us, a book about how Canada has treated these people . . . I feel I’ve written an unpatriotic book in a very patriotic time.”
Op-ed in the Globe and Mail: “For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.”
Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in Heavy Feather Review: “Brilliantly oscillates between a focus on the inner world of a flawed woman’s personal journey through the land of modern romance and a spitting commentary on what it even means to be a wife, mother, and woman in the 21st century.”
Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton was reviewed in the Washington Review of Books: “Reading Dalton, one really gets the sense that there was a poetic process enacting the selection process . . . I thank [Molly] Peacock for bringing the series to life, and [Anita] Lahey and Biblioasis for keeping it alive.”
Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in That Shakespearean Review: “You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus.”
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Tribune: “This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-09-26 15:07:412025-09-26 15:07:42The Bibliophile: Welcome to work but not to remain
The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.
The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.
A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.
From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson
This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.
In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/JWDafoe-Crosses-Bourrie-2.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-09-26 10:25:542025-09-26 10:25:55CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!
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***
On the Death of a Happy Warrior for the Public Good
I was walking into work the last week of August when Elaine Dewar called. She had just got back from holidays at a cottage with her daughters and grandchildren. I was waiting on the last round of edits for her new book,Growing Up Oblivious. But she was calling with much more dire news. She’d developed a pain on vacation, thought it might be gallstones or appendicitis, so went to emergency to get it checked out. They’d done a scan and it was cancer. There was no word on the origin or the extent of it yet, but she’d asked to see the ultrasound and had spent far too much time over her life as a science researcher looking at medical records not to know that it was almost certainly terminal. She hoped she’d have six months. She wanted to talk about the book. I demurred, said we didn’t need to now, that she had other things to worry about. But Elaine wasn’t having any of it. “Of course I’m going to worry about it, honey,” she told me gently. “It’s my last book, and it’s with you. So what are we going to do about this?” And with that, we got to work.
Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.
When Sam Hiyate wrote to me in early December 2015 with a proposal for Elaine Dewar’s book The Handover, about the sale of Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart to Random House in contravention of Canada’s cultural protection laws, I knew little about Elaine’s work or reputation. Nor was this book, a work of deeply-researched nonfiction, our usual fare at the time; Biblioasis was much more strictly a literary enterprise in those years, borne forward by the ignorant hubris necessary to lay claim to such a designation. How else to continue in a world, even a small, purportedly literary enclave of the same, which cares so little about what we do? Our list in 2015—it strikes me now, at a time that one year pushes into another with almost no distinction, that 2015 was our break-out as a publisher, with three Giller nominations, a Writers’ Trust shortlisting, and a GG win, among other accolades: perhaps we wouldn’t have been sent Elaine’s proposal if that hadn’t been the case—was almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and works in translation; our only experience with nonfiction was literary criticism, with a sideline of regional history and more commercial titles to try and pay the bills. Reading Elaine’s proposal, I was worried that we didn’t have the publishing chops to pull it off. I knew that we didn’t have the money to properly fund its writing: I don’t think we’d ever paid an advance of more than a couple thousand dollars at that point. But we thought Elaine’s was an important story, so I pushed my envelope and offered $4000, which seemed a big risk for a press consistently skirting insolvency, and was able to swing her an additional $3500 in Writer’s Reserve funding. And for that Elaine produced what Jack Stoddart justifiably claimed to be “the single most important book about Canadian publishing . . . published in fifty years.” It garnered her a Governor General’s Award nomination and reams of press coverage, and resulted in a range of important conversations among anyone who cared about publishing or culture in Canada. It’s probably no surprise to those who knew her that it garnered Biblioasis’s first serious threat of a lawsuit, by a former Minister of Culture who had signed off on the sale of M&S, though when they learned that Elaine had dug up government documents that showed exactly what Elaine had claimed, this person (& their lawyer) thankfully never again darkened my inbox.
Elaine’s office and desk, with the research for Growing Up Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.
Because that was the thing about Elaine: she always had the receipts. There were times earlier in our working history that I doubted her claims, but I quickly learned that she always had the proof somewhere in a manila file folder on one of the multiple desks in her sprawling basement office; there was always a footnote. She taught me to read those footnotes with care as I read her manuscripts. She was a meticulous researcher, with a tenacity I’ve yet to see in another. Though she described herself, earlier this week, as being as “spiritual as an old sock,” she nevertheless believed her role as a journalist involved a sacred trust: to follow the facts as far as they would take her; to pursue the truth at all costs; to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. She did all three with regularity until the end.
Elaine, during our numerous editorial exchanges, offered me a first-rate education in how to edit and publish researched nonfiction, perhaps to the chagrin of those authors who’ve followed her. The key was to “never to be afraid to look stupid”; to clarify and keep pushing when you’re not clear on something; to keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. To fight over every word, every footnote, as the need arises. And we did, it seemed, fight over everything. Those initial Handover editorial rounds were bruising, unlike anything I’d experienced before as a publisher and editor. But as hard as it was, she never took it personally, as she trusted that we had her own, and her book’s, best interest in sight. She trusted in the process.
Poster for the Fourth Annual National Magazine Awards.
And in the process, she helped to reshape the direction of the press. Having been through the fire with Elaine, we knew better how to do these kinds of books, and knew, from her research, that one of the primary consequences of the sale of Canadian publishing to foreign interests was the decline in researched nonfiction. There was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, but more importantly a gap of intellectual responsibility. She fervently believed, despite her noted concerns about Canadian nationalism, that Canadians should be in charge of which Canadian stories were told. And that it would take Canadian writers and publishers to hold the powerful within Canadian society accountable. Elaine felt an intense sense of duty to tell the truth, and hated, as she called them, lying liars who lied. She used her formidable intelligence and research skills to untangle those lies, and we’re all better for it, and as another journalist wrote to me this week, now far lesser for her loss.
Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Growing Up Oblivious.
What drove her was her indomitable curiosity about just about everything. She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn’t make sense. This curiosity led her to begin digging into the origins of COVID when we were all in lockdown, reading the scientific papers, and discovering right away that there were things that didn’t add up; it led her to uncover connections between Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the labs at the centre of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan, and gather evidence of the Chinese government’s infiltration of this lab that would have national political ramifications thereafter. What amazes me about the research that became her On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is that, though it was perhaps the first serious book-length enquiry into the origins of COVID in the English language (quite a feat, I must say, for a provincial publisher!), it has stood up remarkably well, with the consensus opinion moving closer and closer to Elaine’s own over the ensuing years. She followed the facts where they took her, and as usual, she ended up pretty close to the mark.
The Handover and On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years by Elaine Dewar.
Her last book started with a January 1st, 2022 email from psychologist and Native Studies professor Roland Chrisjohn asking her to investigate “‘the cover-up’ of the Canadian government’s ‘genocide’ of Indigenous people.” But in her research, she became pre-occupied by questions of what was known when, by whom; and how she, growing up in the prairies, hadn’t known about the plight of Indigenous people in the surrounding communities. She turned her sharp journalistic eye on herself, and in the process wrote a kind of journalist’s autobiography and an investigation into the mechanics of what she calls obliviousness. The book is also an investigation of Indigenous health, segregated hospitals, and how the government used the lure of health care to conduct unethical experiments on wide swaths of the Indigenous population. There are some very disturbing revelations that Elaine uncovered by doing what she did best: following the trails of footnotes to uncover what had up to now largely escaped notice. Growing Up Oblivious will be published at some point in early 2026; it may well be her most important book.
Poster from the Eleventh Annual National Magazine Awards.
When it became obvious that we didn’t have months but weeks, and then, really, days, I went up to Toronto to spend Monday and Tuesday with her in the Palliative Care Unit at Bridgepoint to work on the final edits and the conclusion. She was surrounded by family and friends who’d flown in from around the world to be with her. Though her body had completely failed by this time, and she was self-administering her pain medication as we spoke, she remained as sharp, funny, and caring as ever. We worked on a round of final edits and questions until she needed a rest; then did a second round; she did a long, wide-ranging audio interview with Marci McDonald about the book and what she uncovered, and was brilliant at it despite everything; then she shifted gears again, devoted to the attentions of her daughters and friends who were waiting for her. The next day she did another long interview with a national radio program and then we worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world. She never, she told me, liked the word decency: it was a weasel word, could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. We needed something more specific to the issue at hand. We went back and forth for a while, and then it hit me. Dignity? “Yup. That’s it. Now let’s cut the rest of the fat and get it done.” And so we did.
There was so much love in that room, so much laughter, so much dignity, that it dispelled death’s shadow. It was a pleasure and honour to be there among her loved ones, if only for a little while. She seemed able to keep everything in those final days in perfect balance, the professional alongside the personal. Though perhaps, for her, that distinction wasn’t as sharp as it was for others. It didn’t seem possible that, when I took my leave, she’d be gone in less than 48 hours. And though I spent this morning watching her funeral, I still can’t quite believe she’s gone.
Family photos of a young Elaine Dewar.
Elaine once described herself as aspiring “to be a happy warrior for the public good.” She was that. She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person, matriarch to what I’ve learned is an incredible family, and a very good friend. She was, always, inspiring, and never more than in the last days; she approached her fate with resolve. I still haven’t entirely processed these last, intense few weeks, those days alongside her and her family and friends at Bridgeport, but I’m grateful once more for the gift of her time, intelligence, care, and compassion, and we will all at Biblioasis try to live up to the example she set.
Dan Wells, Publisher
In good publicity news:
Sacred Rage: Selected Stories by Steven Heighton was reviewed in the Globe and Mail: “[Heighton has] a cool mordant tone and sharp eye for human indignities at once sad and funny; an ear for how actual people sound and the confidence to let them sound that way on the page.”
Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Nov 11) was reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly: “The author once again proves his mastery of moody psychological thrillers.”
Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat was reviewed in Booklist: “A disquieting and beautifully written warning of young adult masculinity gone terribly wrong. Strongly recommend to readers interested in chilling, psychological crime fiction and the concepts in Netflix’s popular drama Adolescence.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-09-22 09:32:192025-09-22 09:32:21The Bibliophile: In Memoriam: Elaine Dewar (1948–2025)
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Next week is the Canadian publication of Russell Smith’s novel Self Care, his first book in a decade and first novel in fifteen years. Most of you may know Russell Smith as one of Canada’s sharpest satirists who first came on the scene with the Governor General’s Award–nominated novel How Insensitive (1994) and who followed it up with several more novels often poking fun at our contemporary culture. But my own introduction to Russell’s work was his last book, Confidence (2015), a collection of short stories about people in Toronto and their conflicting desires, loneliness, and disappointments. When I read it, I got hooked by his dialogue and his humour. I felt that each story had just the right balance of being both wickedly funny and rather sad, which, I think, is a lovely combination for a story to be.
Self Care by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.
Self Care is the long-awaited return of Russell Smith, and it is also somewhat of a departure from his earlier work. Here we still have that satirical edge and that perfect pitch dialogue, but it’s also a rather dark book focusing on the particular dissatisfaction affecting people today and the online communities and culture that enable it.
A provocative modern fable about sex and self-loathing, Self Care follows a young woman who, despite her better judgement, starts a relationship with an incel. It’s a dark twist on a love story (a “Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment,” as Mark Kingwell put it), and a righteously funny and tragic novel about our desire to care and be cared for in return.
I got the chance to speak with Russell about his new book. Read on for that conversation.
Thanks for reading,
Ahmed Abdalla Publicist
An Interview with Russell Smith
Could you start by telling me how Self Care came about?
This is my tenth book and it’s a departure for me in that it’s not about my life at all. It is from the point of view of a young woman and it’s about a world of people much younger than I am. I taught creative writing for several years and I was inspired by talking to lots of young people. I stayed in touch with my students after I stopped teaching in that MFA program, mostly through social media. I became fascinated by certain problems that they had that I didn’t have when I was their age. In many ways I wanted to write about what it’s like being young today in North America. The main pressures that I wanted to describe were financial ones that these young people with degrees in the humanities just have no idea how to make a living. There are very few options available to them.
Also, one of the things I noticed women talked about a lot online were frustrations with men and particularly with “cool” boyfriends who wouldn’t commit to relationships. But another thing that really struck me was a couple of women in private conversations with me started talking about incels and incel culture. A couple of women admitted to having a fantasy of taking one of these guys and showing them what a true relationship could be like and changing him. And I think that’s a fantasy that all of us have. The idea that I can change him. I thought that was maybe not such an uncommon fantasy, so I thought I would invent a story around it.
You said Self Care is a departure for you because it’s not really about yourself anymore. Is part of that why you chose to write from a woman’s perspective? Most of your previous work up to this point has been from a man’s perspective.
I just really wanted to write about what I was seeing among the young women who were in my own circle who struck me as quite sad. I wanted to describe a particularly contemporary kind of sadness. I also think people are less and less interested in men. I’ve written a lot about men and their sex drives. I’ve really played that out. I’ve done enough of that lustful man character.
And there are satirical elements, but it’s not a full-on satire. Just like my last book, Confidence, a collection of short stories, this is a more serious book than my early works.
Confidence by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Gordon Robertson.
How satirical did you intend this book to be? Because it makes fun of a lot of different people, but also gets quite serious as the story goes on.
It’s a dark book, but there’s humour in it. There are various contemporary milieux or situations that I just find ridiculous. Primarily my own milieu. Satire is always written by insiders. I’m writing about me and my friends often in everything I write. The targets of satire here are the kinds of people who work for online health journals and the reason that they have to write nonsense is that they’re not paid enough to do any actual research. They just repeat faddish ideas and trends.
Another thing that I’m making fun of is the obsession with mental health that young people in university environments have at the moment that seems to be encouraged by social media. What I mean by that is that everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as mentally ill. You’ve heard the word neurodivergent suddenly rise in popularity over the last five years, when ten years ago we never heard that word at all, and now every single sensitive person claims to be neurodivergent. I think it’s more salutary to realize that if everybody is neurodivergent, then nobody is. If you’ve ever suffered from depression or anxiety, and who hasn’t, you’re neurodivergent. But that just means you’re normal. Also, there’s a million quizzes you could do online to prove you have ADHD. Anyone can come up with these quizzes. If you take one of these quizzes the answer will always be that you have ADHD. People are desperate to identify as disabled in this way. I’m amazed by how thrilled people are with this diagnosis.
Suicide is also a big part of this book, and suicides of artists in particular. Why is that?
There was a weird period in my life a couple of years ago where there were a couple of suicides close to me, in a cluster, and that was just a coincidence. But that gave me the idea of an imagined epidemic of suicide of people in the arts.
There is a strange fixation with suicide in the culture right now. The more that people say you have to be sensitive and cautious about the idea of suicide and you have to put trigger warnings on top of anything that mentions it, the more the idea is brought up and discussed and you are creating one giant trigger. This is one of these paradoxes. It’s like the Streisand Effect. The more you say “Don’t mention the war” the more you mention the war.
Gloria lives in a world in which there are literal, physical signs everywhere about suicide. Some of those really exist. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in the past did have big posters all over the city with the slogan “Not suicide. Not today.” I’ve quoted that in the book. So you’re trying to get people to be aware of the dangers of suicide and you’re putting up posters reminding people of the possibility of suicide all over the city. That struck me as paradoxical.
The idea that we should all be proud of being fragile and vulnerable, that we need to identify primarily with our limitations, that we need to label ourselves with them and notify everybody of them—this is a new pressure and I don’t think it’s healthy. The book is not an essay. I’m not lecturing anybody about anything. It’s a love story about two people that fails, but if we’re talking about the satirical aspects, I couldn’t help having fun with this.
Can you talk about how sex and intimacy has changed because of the internet? It seems as though all these characters are dissatisfied with their sex lives and they turn to the internet for something. Daryn with the incels and Gloria with her social media and wellness blog. But even they seem to get dissatisfied with that as the story goes on.
Daryn and Gloria’s dissatisfaction are very similar and they have similar complaints about the world, although their solutions are wildly different. Daryn is upset about income inequality, that he can’t get ahead. He works in a Best Buy and doesn’t come from a privileged class, so he has no advantages in the world. Gloria is preoccupied with the same things, just as her leftist friends are, but it’s just that Daryn’s solutions are different.
Daryn is dissatisfied and unhappy and so he turns to a community of unhappy men online for companionship, while Gloria is talking to women all the time who are disappointed in men because they’re on dating apps. The apps give everybody so many options that nobody’s willing to commit. Even the cool, sensitive, educated men that Gloria and her friends want to date, they know the right language, they know how to speak feminist language and they know the sensitive things to say, but they’re extremely insensitive about women. They like to have a bunch of women on the go at any time, and that makes all those women unhappy.
Although it should be pointed out that Gloria has refused to go on dating apps. Only her friend Isabel has been on the apps, but Isabel also posts a lot of sexy selfies. She has an anonymous Instagram account where she posts them and that’s simply for own self-esteem. She tends to post sexy selfies, as a lot of people do, when she is really down and lacking in self-esteem.
Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 are available to preorder!
Why do you think more people are dissatisfied and unhappy?
The culture of the image is making people unhappy. The culture of competition around appearance is exacerbated by Instagram. It’s terribly unhealthy. There’s an instant gratification in being attractive. If you’re attractive and you’re having an attractive day, and I’m sure this applies to men too, you put an attractive photograph of yourself up and lots of people respond positively, it is validating and gratifying in the short term. There’s a little rush that comes with that that I’m sure can be very addictive but not fulfilling in the long run. And Daryn also needs validation from people to find that he’s not alone in feeling miserable and rejected and that the whole world hates him.
In a way they become isolated in their own online communities, where they get their insecurities or anger amplified. The more obvious one causing harm being that of the incels, but Gloria’s social media and online wellness culture can seem just troubling. Were you trying to compare the two?
Yes, and as I said Daryn’s concerns and Gloria’s concerns are very similar. They’re upset about inequality in the world, they’re both lonely and find it difficult to find loving, committed partners.
Now Daryn’s hasn’t really tried. He doesn’t try because that’s what incels are like. They don’t try and they’re subject to a kind of delusion. They feel they’re unattractive. I was inspired here by reading a lot and watching documentaries about incels. You can actually see some video interviews with young men who are incels online and they say “I’m so ugly. I’m unattractive.” And they’re absolutely normal looking guys. They’ve got a kind of body dysmorphia. They look in the mirror and they see someone ugly and the rest of the world doesn’t, but they’ve convinced themselves that they are ugly. They’re convinced that women don’t like them, but they don’t associate with women at all. They don’t know women. They don’t try, I think, for fear of rejection, for this decision that they’re not the right kind of guy. They don’t know women enough to know that women aren’t looking for what they think they’re looking for.
What links Gloria and Daryn is a sense of dissatisfaction with the world generally.
It’s almost like Daryn thinks his appearance is also out of his control too, similar to how he feels like he can’t get ahead financially. And Gloria starts her relationship with Daryn almost as an experiment in control, of wanting a sense of control because every other part of her life is in flux.
Control is a great word, because that’s the problem with both of them. They have no power in their lives. Gloria feels powerless in her career and her love life, and the same with Daryn.
Gloria doesn’t really know what she wants. She’s very confused. She doesn’t know why she’s going after Daryn. At first she thinks it’s just because she hates him and wants to punish him. But then she realizes she’s actually intrigued by the idea of a boy falling so helplessly in love with her. She tries to resist the idea, but it’s a very attractive idea since all of her hipster boyfriends have been unable to do that. She finds that there’s something in Daryn’s twisted worldview that is actually appealing to her and that’s the idea of traditional gender roles, his idea of a monogamous relationship in which a man takes care of a woman, like a knight and a princess. Something about that idea really lights up her brain because that’s the absolute opposite of what all the boys in her life were too cool to give her.
Now why did she start first having sex with Daryn? Well she wants sex, but she’s nervous about him. She doesn’t know if he could be an actual violent man. It’s funny enough, but the men who scared her with possibly violent acts during sex are all the cool, sensitive hipster boys. Those are the ones who know that some women like to be choked during sex and so they’ll do it without asking your consent. That’s how the novel opens. Gloria is really nervous about power imbalances in sex with someone who’s declared himself an incel. So she puts herself in the role of a dominatrix, which doesn’t come naturally for her. She’s not really turned on by the sex, but that’s the only way she can feel safe in having sex with him. But also, she wants to teach him a lesson. She’s mad because when she first saw him, he was participating in a neo-nazi, anti-immigrant demonstration. In her mind, she can’t separate the desire to love and the desire to punish. She wants control of him, and the only way she can do it is through this particular kind of sex.
Is there anything you would like people to take away from reading this?
That you read books just to find out what happens in the story, not to learn a lesson about anything. But if there’s any one message it’s possibly just that you can’t change people. In a way, Self Care can be seen as a modern retelling of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. Are you familiar with that?
No, I’m not. Can you explain it?
You’ve maybe heard some version of it with different animals, or sometimes it’s a young girl and snake, but it goes something like this with different variations depending on what people or animals are involved:
There’s a forest fire on one side of the river, and the scorpion wants to flee the forest fire by crossing the river, except he can’t swim. But he’s next to a frog who obviously can swim. The scorpion says to the frog “Listen, would you do me a big favour? Can you carry me on your back and swim me across the river?” and the frog says “Why would I do that? I know you’re dangerous and that you sting and kill frogs. You’re going to hurt me.” Then the scorpion says “No, absolutely not. Why would I do that? If I sting you as we are crossing then we both drown. So it wouldn’t help me. We both need to get out of here. Just do me this one favour and I’ll never harm you or your family as long as we live.” So the frog agrees. He puts the scorpion on his back and swims him across the river. As soon as they get to the other bank, the scorpion bites the frog and poisons him. As the frog is dying he says “Why on earth would you do that?” and the scorpion says, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”
Sometimes the punch line is simply the line “It’s in my nature.” It’s a parable that applies to Gloria and the incel.
You don’t think Daryn could have ever changed?
No, I don’t. Daryn is messed up. He gives hints at his violence from early on, but she’s blind to them because she’s desperate for love. And we’ve all done that. We’ve all ignored red flags, and I’ve even been the red flag, and we all kick ourselves and say “What was I thinking?”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio: “One of the most engrossing and activating books I’ve read so far this year . . . both thoroughly researched and deeply nuanced.”
Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocideby Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra: “It’s impossible not to be moved by these devastating, honest human accounts dispatched from on the ground.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor: “Gillmor covers an impressive amount of ground in this slim 134-page volume.”
On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “A compelling and jam-packed argument against the banning of books . . . Long live literature and reading for pleasure!”
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Woodlot: “Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be . . . Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different.”
Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star on the ongoing Alberta censorship campaign.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-09-12 15:46:312025-09-12 15:46:34The Bibliophile: The Scorpion and the Frog
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***
Elise Levine’s Big of You comes out next Tuesday, September 9 in Canada. I’ve been waiting, with anticipation, for about six months—ever since reading that first story on my work computer between emails—for everyone else in the country to pick up this unsettling, strange, beautiful book.
Big of You ranges across Europe, North America, and space. It includes all sorts of characters, from a mythological, millennia-old creature, to a nineteenth-century inventor and photographer, to a group of older women vacationing in the desert. What I find most stunning about Levine’s writing is her ability to convey the expressive interiority of each character. Tonally, her characters are wildly, humourously, iconically individual. These are some of the realest people I’ve ever encountered in fiction (and by real, I mean so exceptionally unique they border on the surreal).
Below is an excerpt from Big of You’s opening story, “Arnhem.” Coincidentally, this piece also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2021 (edited by Diane Schoemperlen). I hope you’ll love this one—and the others—as much as I do.
Happy reading,
Dominique Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
Photo: Big of You by Elise Levine. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.
An excerpt from “Arnhem”
My husband leaves—I asked him to, or I didn’t, I can’t keep it straight—and I’m thinking, two girls on a hill. Heidelberg, or Conwy in North Wales where there’s also a castle. Two girls, telepathic as ants, making fast along a wet street. Oxford or Bruges. One girl’s freezing in her white summer dress. The other girl’s clad in army surplus pants and a baggy turtleneck sweater. Both of them seventeen, smug as cats, having blown off the archaeological dig on Guernsey, for which they’d secured positions six months earlier by mail. Mud labour, fuck that shit. On the appointed start date they simply hadn’t shown. Instead they thumb around, do all the things.
In a fancy café in Brussels, they order frites, which arrive on a silver platter, grease soaking into the paper doily. North of Lisbon they sleep on a beach one night. They run out of money in Paris and panhandle, not very well but they get by.
Who do they think they are?
Who did I?
I think we went to the zoo in Arnhem. I think we met a composer at some youth hostel who was from Arnhem. We met two young Italian men at a hostel in Mons. No one else was around and they tried to kiss us near the bathrooms when we went to brush our teeth that night. One of the young men forced one of us against the wall of the repurposed army barracks and thrust his pelvis a few strokes, while the other man stood back with the other one of us and watched. One night in the hostel in Amsterdam there was a phone call for one of us, and we both trundled barefoot down the stairs to the hostel office in our prim cotton nighties. Turns out one of our grandmothers was dying, the grandmother of the one of us who still had a grandmother.
I was the friend. We were friends.
I slept beside her in a roomful of older young women, all of us on cots half a foot off the damp floor. This was Cambridge. Dew on the windows all night, late June. The women were real diggers, by day excavating a nearby pre-Roman site. The men diggers, including my friend’s older brother who we were visiting, and the reason we’d dreamed up the scheme of ourselves volunteering on a site, slept in another large room, down the hall—so much for the men. But the women—solid, practical, tough. Intimidating to the extent that when I say I slept, the truth is I barely did, cold, legs aching, bladder wretched because I was too scared to get up. To be weak. To even think it. Be that person.
Which one was I?
Not the one in the summer dress. The one in the Shetland turtleneck.
*
If I were telling this to my husband, I’d say: the next morning in Mons the sky was clear. Awake for much of the night, my friend and I rose early and packed and picked through the continental breakfast array in the main hall. Individual portions of spreadable cheese wrapped in foil. Crisp rye flatbreads. Ginger jam. I’d never seen anything like it. The Belgian couple who managed the hostel, in their mid-thirties probably, kindly asked how we’d slept. We spilled the beans about the young men and the couple’s eyes grew round and their foreheads pinched. They would have a word with those guys.
By the time the couple did, if they did, and it’s true we believed them, my friend and I were gone.
*
We left Lisbon broke and caught rides up the coast. Mostly guys, some with their own ideas. Sometimes a woman who’d ask if we were okay. We were okay.
*
The beach was small with large-grained sand. We didn’t bother to take our shoes off.
The man who drove us there was slight of build. His mustache was light brown. At dusk he parked on the street and led us down to the water where we thanked him and said goodbye. He’d asked if we wanted to sleep on a beach that night and we’d said yes, please. Anything for an adventure to recall later in life. To say, How cool was that?
The sea frothed at our feet and the air smelled of brine. We toed a few half-circles and the sea erased them. We stretched our backs, yawned. He refused to take the hint. Thank you, okay?
He made himself understood then. He was spending the night with us. He’d called a buddy from the roadside café he’d taken us to earlier, where under his guidance we’d eaten squid in black ink very cheap and drunk cheap wine. Soon his friend would be here to meet us too.
It’s not like the driver had a tent or sleeping bags. Was there even a moon that night? There was a family camping nearby. A woman, a man, a child maybe eight-nine years old. They had a tent. Sleeping bags, no doubt. Judging by the track marks, they’d dragged a picnic table over, and the fire on their portable stovetop burned brighter while the sky grew darker and the man and my friend and I sat on the sand waiting, he for his friend, my friend and I for some notion of what to do, clueless as sheep.
It grew dark-dark. A flashlight made its way toward us. It was the woman. With her nearly no English and our no Portuguese and a little French between us, she ushered my friend and I into the tent with her husband and son.
How did we all fit? I must have slept the sleep of the dead, for all I can remember of the rest of that night.
Check out Elise Levine’s interview with Katherine Abbass in The Ex-Puritan!
*
When we first got together, my husband complained I slept like a swift. When things went from infrequently to occasionally bad to totally the worst between us, he said I slept like a fruit fly.
I pull the covers over my head. He’s not here to stop me, he’s at a friend’s—his, not mine. A week since yesterday. Good thing I brought my phone with me, light in darkness, all that. Especially with the news bulletins the past few days. Will I be okay? Will he? I hit his number and hang up when he answers. He immediately calls back, probably to yell, and I press piss off.
I ferret my arms out from beneath the covers. Stop calling me, I text-beg. Please.
For the next hour, while I still have my phone on, and for the first time in several years, he does as I say.
*
Around midnight I run a bath. I’m thinking again about the beach in Portugal, the family’s tent—the next morning my friend and I woke and stretched and crept back out. The driver lay curled like an inchworm on the sand near the waterline, no friend in sight.
He did drive us back to the highway, game of him. We girls, young women, once again stuck out our thumbs. Auto-stop, they call it there.
I switch off the bathroom light and climb in the tub for a long soak. My phone is still off, but I’ve got it holding down the toilet seat, in case.
My husband is in IT. He’s never once in his life hitchhiked. Like never even tried? No, he said on our first date, dinner at a pasta bar before a movie. Pale noodles, pale sauce, what can you expect for Cleveland, I thought, having recently moved there for the second of what turned into a seemingly endless stream of visiting assistant professor gigs. Before adjunct was what I could get. Now, not even that.
Like not even once? I’d pressured him that night over dinner. Never ever?
My date—who became my husband, at least for awhile, if I understand his intent by hightailing it to a friend’s, if I understand my own intentions—said no in a way that I knew to shut up about it for good.
*
Before he left us that morning by the side of the highway, the Portuguese driver tried to kiss me. I bit his lip to stop him. Where had I ripped that idea from? Some movie or book.
He got mad. Pushed me from him and fingered his mouth. Looked like he was considering options.
Later, in the back seat of our next ride that day—a Spanish couple returning from holiday, non–English speakers—my friend turned to me and said, I thought he was going to hit you. Why on earth would you do that?
I shrugged her off. But I’d also thought he was going to deck me. Some memorable story, one for the ages, something to one day tell the kids.
*
Weeks before Portugal, immediately after the phone call at night to the hostel in Amsterdam—when my friend learned her grandmother had cancer, and might not make it, and I took this news in grave solidarity, assumed a mournful expression that said I understood, I was by my friend’s side forever in all things—we sat on the floor outside our hostel room, nighties tucked around our legs. The old woman. The fights she fought with my friend the raging vegetarian, she of the curly hair she refused to tame. The stubborn fact of the fierce old creature—gone? Weird to think. But I nodded, weird I knew. The previous summer my father had an affair, and my mother told me about it, and now I told my friend about it. How the woman called my mother on the phone and said she and my father were in love. You’re only in love with his credit cards, my mother told the woman.
My friend put her feet flat on the hostel floor and rocked back against the hallway wall, she laughed her ass off. My god, she gasped. What a stupid cliché.
Earlier on the trip, fresh off the plane, well before we’d hit the road thumbs out, we’d stayed in London, and things hadn’t gone so well between us. At Trafalgar Square, on our third afternoon away from home, my friend undertook a spat with me. Talk to me, she semi-shouted. You literally dumb bitch. You need to tell me what you’re thinking, share your thoughts. Otherwise I might as well have left you at home.
The sun is nice today, the sun is too hot. Another beer, why not. Look at that old man over there. In Madrid, I told her I was afraid of morphing into one of the numerous homeless some day. You won’t, she said airily, you have family, friends. This sun is too hot.
Photo: The chapter title page for “Arnhem.” Interior by Ingrid Paulson.
*
I will share this: after my friend’s first suicide attempt, when we were fifteen and she was in the hospital over March break, I declined her single working mom’s invitation to host me at their house so I could help my friend through this difficult period. Instead I went to Myrtle Beach with my parents and little brother. Every afternoon the sib and I rode the Monster, tentacled and huge, at the sleazy mini-fairgrounds down the street from our efficiency motel room. Mornings we crossed the street to the hotel that actually was on the beach and baked in the sun by the heated pool. We swam too, hotfooting across the sugar sand to plunge in the icy waters, before reverse scampering and jumping in the pool to feel our skin burn. What else? I got mild sunstroke on our last day. For six bucks in a tourist shop, I bought my friend a pickled octopus jammed into a small jar.
You bet it was expired. Worse, by fifteen my friend had already gone vegetarian. When I got back home, more red and blistered than tanned, I paid her a visit in the hospital, and presented my gift. The look on her face. The shapeless blue gown, the big bandage around her wrist.
This was before Europe. I had no excuse. It was before my friend told me, that night on the Portuguese beach—sitting on the sand beside the driver who spoke little to no English, waiting for his friend to arrive, and before the family with the tent rescued us, that time in between, when the scope of our situation was beginning to sink in—that I really did not want to lose my virginity this way. Believe her, she knew all about it, having lost hers that spring, in the sleeping bag she’d borrowed from me, so she could go camping with this guy from our history class. He’d been a child actor in popular TV commercials and evolved into a cute teen actor doing same. Years later, years after this night in Portugal, he became a handsome adult actor, with a dimple so deep it nearly cleft his chin, and portrayed a cooped up astronaut in a popular show, and penned screenplays about the world wars, assigning himself the tortured-hero roles.
The night my friend and I slept in the tent in Portugal, I hadn’t heard the ocean waves, though they couldn’t have been more than twenty, thirty feet away. I hadn’t felt the pounding. Like I said: sleep of the dead. Those waves crashing closer, shuffling farther out, and neither my friend nor I possessing a clue about tides.
We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in the Seaboard Review: “Sarah’s verse is an antidote to the soul’s virus . . . Her diction seems so direct, but between the words and lines she meditates in musical nuance and wit to cast doubt on simple and complex truths.”
On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in The Book Beat: “A concise state-of-the-horror appraisal of humanity’s addiction to petroleum products, combining first-hand experience, historical research, and interviews with petroleum experts.”
The shortlist will be announced on September 25, and the winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be named on October 14.
The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.
Congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.
From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson
This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.
In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.
ABOUT MARK BOURRIE
Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/JWDafoe-Crosses-Bourrie.jpg8002000biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-09-04 12:23:322025-09-04 12:23:34CROSSES IN THE SKY longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize
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An interview with Robyn Sarah, author of We’re Somewhere Else Now
Robyn Sarah has been a household name among Canadian poets since before I started reading poetry, and it’s been a privilege to work (even in my small way) on her latest collection—her first book of new poems since 2015’s Governor General’s Award-winning My Shoes Are Killing Me (maybe one of my favourite titles of the century).
We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024 by Robyn Sarah. Cover designed by Vanessa Stauffer.
We’re Somewhere Else Now compiles poems written between 2016 and 2024, documenting the pandemic years with a quiet, lyric attentiveness. The poems are full of lovely—alternately foreboding and humour-tinged—imagery. One of my favourite images describes a high-rise apartment in the midst of lockdown: “balconies / stacked skyward like open bureau drawers.”
Another highlight of this book is the extended sequence poem, “In the Wilderness,” a poem that combines various forms and voices, a meditative yet playful unmooring of faith and “jam session with Doubt.”
I had the immense pleasure of asking Robyn a few questions about her work.
Thank you for reading,
Dominique Publicity & Marketing Coordinator
A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah
It’s been ten years since your last poetry collection was published. In this time, your selected poems came out, and you wrote a music memoir. I wonder what you see as having changed (intentionally or not) in your poetry since My Shoes Are Killing Me? Have the experiences of writing a prose memoir and compiling a book of selected poems also altered your more recent poetic preoccupations?
I wouldn’t say that compiling a second selected in 2017 (the first was The Touchstone in 1992) altered anything in my poetic practice or preoccupations. Nor did working for close to a decade on an extended prose work—except in the sense that its completion freed me to write poems again, something I felt good and ready to do! The memoir was extremely demanding, and from 2016 until 2020 it took the place of poetry-writing almost entirely (though around 2018 I did begin scratching out fragments towards what would become the long mixed-genre poem in the new collection). I’ve always written both prose and poetry (first stories at the age of six, first poems at nine) and have also sometimes mixed them (there are prose poems in every collection I’ve published). Many reviewers have observed that my poetic practice and preoccupations have been remarkably consistent from one collection to the next (“stubbornly so,” as one put it).
Montreal is a consistent backdrop in We’re Somewhere Else Now. Early on in the book, the speaker is “buying a potted narcissus / at the Atwater Market,” and later on in the poems we get glimpses of intersections: Hutchison and Villeneuve, Parc and Villeneuve. I wonder how important a place—and specifically Montreal—is to your work?
Some writers find visiting new places indispensable to their creativity. I am not one. Travel is stimulating, but I find it very stressful and disruptive, so I minimize time away from home; I need stability in order to do creative work. I’ve lived in Montreal almost continuously since the age of four—that’s a lifespan—and have rarely left it for longer than a few weeks at a time. I watched the city grow and change as I grew and changed. If you live in a city for long enough, you don’t have to go somewhere else to find yourself in a new place: you see it become one again and again—for better or worse. The same with a street or neighbourhood, like the Mile-End block where I’ve lived (in four different flats) for more than forty years. The current view out my window overlays memories that go back forty years—not to mention memories passed on by immigrant grandparents who lived within blocks of here in the 1920s. I love this city and neighbourhood. You mention Villeneuve (referenced in poems set in 1981 and 2021). Villeneuve was the name we gave to a small press I co-founded in 1976—based at home, in a third-floor walkup on that street, and then in two successive flats around the corner on Hutchison. My kids grew up on this block—a two-minute walk to Mount Royal Park, a half-hour walk downtown along Avenue du Parc. Literary forbears also lived here: the poet A. M. Klein raised his family in the block above ours; Mordecai Richler apparently lived briefly on ours as a college student.
Photo (L to R): My Shoes Are Killing Me: Poems; Music, Late and Soon: A Memoir; and Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015 by Robyn Sarah.
Your poetry collections are usually varied on a formal level, and this one is no exception. I’m curious to know how you approach form: does it happen intuitively, or do you set goals for yourself? Is there a form you’d like to attempt that you haven’t yet?
Hard to answer, because what begins intuitively can later become more goal-directed. (I’m almost entirely an intuitive writer, but at a certain point in the process, unconscious intentions become conscious and begin to direct my choices.) I don’t go about looking for new forms to attempt, like learning a new trick—it’s more like one day I become aware of the formal pattern of a poem I may have known and loved for years without noticing it was in a form, and I become intrigued by the form and am inspired to imitate it in a poem of my own. (I wrote my first villanelle without knowing that the form I was imitating had a name.) I rarely begin a poem with a form in mind, but my training as a classical musician has always had an influence on how I write: I like my poems to have a shape or pattern, even if they’re free verse. I start a poem usually with a few lines that come into my head from nowhere, lines I like the sound of, and I let the poem grow from there, shaping as I go along. It’s more like working a piece of clay than like trying to impose a template on the words: you could say I invent new forms, some looser and some more obviously formal. But really it’s like I let each poem find its own form—either it begins to fall into a particular traditional pattern or it evolves into a shape I create just for that poem.
The second half of We’re Somewhere Else Now comprises a long sequence poem, “In the Wilderness.” I’m interested to know about the evolution of this one: did you set out to write a long poem, or did the various pieces eventually come together? Although thematically cohesive, I was struck by the variations in form and tone throughout (for instance, the playful, shorter lines at the beginning of “The Fiddler” are enticingly opposed to other, almost prose-like sections).
The title poem in My Shoes Are Killing Me, which I called “a poem in nine movements,” was not a suite of individual poems but an extended single work, meant to be read continuously as one, even though its nine sections have individual titles. At eleven pages, it was the longest single poem I had ever written, and it gave me the idea I might consider doing something similar, perhaps even chapbook or book length, on a single theme that had begun to preoccupy me: the irony that in a world where a glut of information on any topic was available at the click of a mouse, the effect seemed to be not to advance us in knowledge but increasingly to cast all knowledge into doubt. I had in mind, vaguely, an extended text that would be philosophical in impulse, but not theoretical—not a treatise on doubt, but an inquiry with a human face, in layman’s language. How does the human being anchor itself at times when truths that have been our common ground for understanding the world begin to break down? The poem evolved very slowly; for two years there was no poem at all, just an accumulating body of disjointed fragments (ranging from a few lines to the equivalent of a paragraph or two, sometimes prose, sometimes free verse) scribbled by hand and eventually filling the equivalent of a Hilroy notebook, mixed in with other jottings and failed poem starts. This was not at all how “My Shoes Are Killing Me” had begun. I had no clear sense of what I was doing or how to work with this material, and no confidence that it would ever amount to anything. But I had to start somewhere, so at some point I began transcribing the “doubt” fragments onto the computer in a single long document, in the order in which they were written, separated by asterisks. Each time I reopened the file to enter the next batch, I would find myself beginning to “ work” one or more of the fragments already entered—letting them grow in stages, sometimes to merge with other fragments, sometimes to incorporate and dialogue with quotations from literature, scripture, prayer, popular song, film, and other sources. Sometimes I moved them around as I saw sub-themes begin to emerge. I wanted the segments, in the voice of a lone speaker, cumulatively to enact the sometimes chaotic thought processes of humanity cast adrift from its moorings as technology pulls familiar ground out from under the world we once knew, erasing landmarks and disrupting our belief systems. I wanted this text to sound and feel improvisatory, like “thinking aloud” in real time—a sort of ad-lib soliloquy with starts and stops and rough edges—not like polished poetry. Hence the variability—moving back and forth between prose and verse, sometimes within the same segment; different line lengths and stanza patterns, different vocal registers and tonal shifts.
Your book is filled with questions. These often seem to point out, or dismantle, the absurdity of human logic: “Why put a name on a day? / How can it matter what a day is called? / The cat doesn’t know it’s Tuesday.” What do questions mean to your work? What do you think they contribute to a poem that a statement might lack?
Many readers have remarked that my memoir, too, is filled with questions. I’m not necessarily looking for answers. I think questions are my “way in” to something I wonder about and would like to explore. I’m a wonderer. Even when I don’t voice them in so many words, I think the impulse to poetry comes to me as a question. It can be directed to the poem’s subject or addressee, or it can be a question I ask myself. It may be a “question arising” from the poem or implied by it, left to linger unanswered. Questions invite a reader’s involvement. A question opens the way to thinking about something, where an answer or a statement tends to close it.
As a final question, I’m curious to know who your great poetry loves are. While writing this book, but also more generally—who are the poets who’ve guided you in your own work over the years? I might guess Gerard Manley Hopkins, for one, from the appearance of some of his lines in this collection . . .
Single poems encountered at the right moment, by poets I might not otherwise consider “great poetry loves,” have inspired many of my poems. Different “loved poets” have guided or influenced me at different times, and there have been so many. Generally, in my early high school years the poets I loved were A. E. Housman, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman; in my late teens and early twenties it was primarily T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, but also Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, Wilfred Owen, more ambivalently William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore . . . . Well, I could go on. Donne and Herbert and Hopkins. Philip Larkin was a later discovery, I don’t know how I missed him before. Of contemporary Canadian poets, I have especially loved the poems of George Johnston, Margaret Avison, and Don Coles. Along the way I’ve also read poetry in translation and have been inspired by poems originally written in French, Latin, modern Greek, modern Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Swedish, and Chinese.
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The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in Kirkus Reviews: “‘Some books are essential, others diversions,’ the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.”
Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio appeared on CBC Books’ Fall Book Preview: “Di Cintio investigates . . . and questions whether a system that relies on the vulnerability of its most marginalized can ever be made more just.”
Asymptote: “As long as these powerful voices continue to speak to us, we—and anyone with the power to stop this ongoing genocide—will repay them with our listening.”
Arab Lit Quarterly: “Their words go beyond the frame . . . [and] requires of the reader an emotional strength to see Gaza in depth, to follow day by day—or for as long the genocide allows them to write—the thoughts of Batool, Sondos, Nahil and Ala’a.”
The New Arab: “The artistry and creativity displayed by these four remarkable women both astonish and humble readers . . . Instead of cold numbers and abstract political jargon, these pages offer irrefutable proof of lives lived and spirits tired, but unbroken.”
https://www.biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/unnamed-scaled.jpg6172560biblioasishttp://biblioasis.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/BIBLIOASIS-Logo-500x500-White-300x300.pngbiblioasis2025-08-29 16:15:322025-08-29 16:17:05The Bibliophile: Like working a piece of clay
