The Mechanics of Obliviousness

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An excerpt from one of the last interviews with Elaine Dewar

I was heading down I-75 in Michigan on a short family vacation almost four years ago to the day that I am writing this note when my phone rang. It was Elaine Dewar. She’d been contacted by an Indigenous psychologist and teacher of Native Studies, Roland Chrisjohn, who had worked on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and he had urged her to investigate what he claimed were a series of unethical experiments conducted on Indigenous students by McGill psychologist Ewen Cameron as part of MK-Ultra. I was almost embarrassed to admit that I had no idea what she was talking about. She filled me in on the background. Her nose was tingling, she said; she could smell a big story, and though she wasn’t yet exactly sure of its contours, she knew she was on the cusp of something important. I had already worked with Elaine on two previous books and I knew enough to trust her instincts. I told her to keep at it and to let me know if she discovered anything.

Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science by Elaine Dewar. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

What Elaine discovered is the subject of her final, most personal, and arguably most important book, Oblivious: Residential Schools, Segregated Hospitals, and the Use of Indigenous Peoples as Slaves of Race Science. If she found no evidence that Ewen Cameron conducted such experiments on Indigenous students, she found ample evidence that a range of unethical and race-based experiments had been performed over several decades on large swaths of Canada’s Indigenous population, often under false pretenses, dangling health care as a lure to command obeisance. As she dug, she also learned about the segregated Indian hospital system, which brought her back to her childhood in Saskatchewan as the daughter of a doctor, and challenged her to question how it is that she had remained so oblivious to what was happening to Canada’s Indigenous people for so long. So Elaine turned her fierce journalistic eye on herself to fact-check what she knew, what she should have known, and what governmental and psychological machinery had contributed to her own (and all of our) obliviousness in what she came to think of as Mississippi North.

The resulting book is many things: it’s a memoir of a young Jewish girl who grew up in the post-war prairies—the best place and time to be Jewish in the history of her people—and the story of how she became one of the fiercest investigative journalists this country has seen. It’s also an investigation into decades of unethical race-based experiments conducted by leading academics, institutions, and the government that did irreparable harm to Indigenous communities. It’s an investigation into the segregated Indian hospital system which existed in Canada for most of the twentieth century and still remains largely unknown outside of academic study; and it reveals that we gave control of substantial parts of Indigenous healthcare in the country between the mid-50s and 70s to a former Nazi doctor immersed in that regime’s ideas of hygiene, who came to the country in the early 1950s as a farm labourer before getting his accreditation and heading to the North, where he wielded tremendous authority over Indigenous people. It’s a book about the serial betrayal of trust, and the damage that continues to the present day as a result of it; and what must be done to acknowledge it if we’re ever going to repair the relations between Canada’s Indigenous people, our institutions, and the rest of our population. And perhaps most importantly, it’s an investigation into what she calls variously the machinery and architecture of obliviousness, the policies and beliefs and institutions and stories that allowed people not to see, or to quickly forget, the evidence that our country was complicit in the genocide of its Indigenous people.

Photo: Elaine Dewar in hospice, with Greg Kelly and Nahlah Ayad from CBC.

Elaine Dewar died after a short battle with an aggressive cancer in September 2025. I went to Toronto to work with her in hospice to finalize editorial before she ended her life via MAID; working with her over those days was one of the greatest and hardest pleasures of my professional life. I try to keep her example front of mind when I feel overwhelmed: her intelligence, care, humour, and rage at injustice continued until the end. As did her faith in her readers. It was you, about to embark on this, her last book, which provided her solace; that she’d been given enough time to do this necessary work and lay out her case. In this way, Oblivious is both a private and public accounting. Like Elaine, I too place my faith in you, and together this book will teach us to face up to what most of the time we’d prefer not to see, in the perpetual hope that we can together continue to move the needle in the direction of justice.

With respect and appreciation,

Dan Wells
Publisher

Don’t miss our Toronto launch of Elaine Dewar’s Oblivious next week (April 29, at 6PM) at Massey College.

Below is part of an interview between Elaine Dewar and friend and journalist Marci McDonald, recorded on September 15, 2025.

MM: How did this whole thing begin?

ED: I got an email from a guy named Roland Chrisjohn who, in his younger years, was one of the founders of AIM Canada. So, back in the 1970s, he was already an activist with regards to Indigenous people. He sent me an email demanding that I investigate the genocide of Indigenous people in Canada by the government of Canada. And I sort of looked at the email, and the question in my head was: “Delete or not delete?” Is this just another guy who has questions he can’t resolve for himself and can’t let it go, or is this a guy who actually knows something? And it turned out he knew quite a lot, starting with what a genocide really is. So that’s how it started: one email, one query.

What was the most shocking revelation to you?

That there was a whole group of so-called “Indian hospitals” that were set up, mainly in the west between 1945 and 1981, where Indigenous people were treated in substandard conditions, by doctors and nurses who often did not have qualifications. And that I had walked by one of them probably every day for two weeks and never noticed the word “Indian” hospital—as in, segregated hospital—at all.

It said that I lived in a segregated society that was so perfect in its segregation that I never noticed. It resonated with everything going on in the United States with the civil rights movement, with what happened to Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1945 . . . It was inconceivable to me that we lived in the same society.

Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.

Now, this began with an assignment to find out if there was a genocide, which is a very charged word. And before I read your book, I didn’t know that it was coined in relation to the Holocaust. At what point did you realize that these two seemingly disparate narratives had a link?

The thing that disturbed me about the use of the word [genocide] was numbers. I was looking at 6 million people, at least, who were murdered between 1942 and 1945. Compare that to what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put forward as the possible numbers of deaths in the residential schools: between 3,000 and 4,500 over the course of 150 years. So 6 million in 3 years or 3,000–4,500 across 150 years. As soon as I looked at these numbers, I thought we can’t be talking about the same phenomenon. And yet, when I read John Milloy’s book—which he drew from the research he did for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s—the meanness, the torture, the unbelievable cruelty of the residential school system really began to change the shape of the ideas in my head about what a genocide is.

It also mattered that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called it a cultural genocide, which is not a term in Genocide Convention law. Cultural genocide, in [Milloy’s] view, was a way of escaping the truth. I wasn’t so sure about that, because Lemkin—who actually created the word—his view was that the genocide in Germany began with the rules and laws and regulations post the Nazi election of 1933, that cultural genocide is the precursor of physical genocide. And what Canada was doing was wiping out the cultural history, the sense of self, that makes Indigenous people Indigenous people. The point was to get rid of all of it, to turn them into taxpaying, non-revenue-receiving Canadians.

So that’s a theoretical / thematic link. When did you find there might be an actual link?

I was reading up on the science done by Nazi physicians on Jews, Slavs, prisoners of war. And what I saw was a level of cruelty that was just unspeakable. But not that far off the beaten path, in northern Canada . . . entire Indigenous communities became human subjects. The lure of medical care was used to allow physicians, physical anthropologists, nutritionists, to have free access on the grounds that they were acting in a beneficent way.

They [Indigenous people] were specimens, slaves of race science . . . No permissions. We know, from the survivors, that they thought they were just being treated for medical issues . . . except that it hurt.

Photo: Elaine’s office table, with her research for Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.

What about Otto Schaefer?

Otto Schaefer had a very interesting history, which he tried very hard to cover up. He was studying as a medical student in Nazi Germany, at Heidelberg. He studied under the leaders of Hitler’s hygiene program, which was their science of race. And their race science was based on the notion that Aryans were somehow the top rung of human beings, and everybody else was way down below, and at the very bottom were what were called Untermenschen, meaning ‘sub-humans’. Jews are described as sub-humans; Slavs are described as sub-humans; and to sub-humans, in Germany, anything could be done.

Photo: Otto Schaefer.

And Schaefer came to Canada why?

He apparently read Rasmussen and Boas, who were early investigators of Inuktituk societies. And he told everybody that that’s what he really wanted to do: to come to Canada and study the Inuit.

He ends up, within two years, in charge of the Arctic, in charge of medicine delivery to both Dene and Inuit communities across the North. By 1974, I believe, he’s in charge of research all across the Arctic for the government of Canada.

And he gets an Order of Canada the same year as my mum and dad. That was one of the more disturbing moments: when I realized it was the same year [1976].

This ends up as an indictment of the Canadian medical society. Willful ignorance, willful blindness . . .

Racism. The notion that some people are better than others. That some people deserve protection, and others do not. The CMA apologized to an Indigenous community in British Columbia, and I read the documents that they posted to explain the nature of their apology. What they clearly did was go through their own archival material to see how often they asked any questions about the health of Indigenous people, and what was being done and not being done. They missed almost all of it: they didn’t ask any questions. I don’t know how much deeper of an indictment I can come up with than that.

What do you want people to take away from this book?

That we can’t be oblivious to each other, that we have to respond to suffering. We have to look at it, in its face, and respond to it, and not run away.

Photo: Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Oblivious.

You talk about the mechanics of obliviousness. What does that mean?

One of the things I was really anxious to understand: Was any of this written about anywhere? And two things were just astonishing to me. One: there was almost no actual history written about Indigenous peoples in this country until John Milloy followed on his research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. And that’s in the 1990s. And the other thing: What about my senior colleagues? Did they write about this? Did they investigate it? Did they do anything about it?

The mechanics of oblivion and obliviousness seem to me about leaving things out of the narrative. And by leaving things out, you create the capacity to ignore what’s in front of your face. It’s not written about, not in a really thorough way. It’s not described with language particular to us. There is no history; there’s nothing until the 1990s.

So, all those years I’m oblivious, it’s because we’re leaving things out of the story. Because they’re uncomfortable.

So how do we change that?

We better be uncomfortable. We better be better journalists. We better remember who’s afflicted.

In good publicity news:

  • Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “You may be caught in the middle of a Jarman story wondering what exactly is going on, but you will never be caught in the middle of a Jarman story bored. Jarman’s language here, as always, is pyrotechnic.”
  • The Notebook by Roland Allen got a shout-out from Ryan Holiday on MSN NOW, as part of his recommended reading list.
  • Sacred Rage by Steven Heighton was reviewed by Anne Logan in I’ve Read This: “I think of Heighton as a true artist in every sense of the word . . . It’s a fitting tribute to a writer lost too soon.”

Our seasons

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An interview with David Macfarlane, author of On Sports

Photo: On Sports by David Macfarlane. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

The other week, in The Tyee, the writer Cole Nowicki wrote an excellent essay about sports and money, using David Macfarlane’s new book, On Sports, as a way to explore the ineffable magic of sports, fandom, and the ways money spoils the fun. It’s a great piece and I recommend you all read the full thing, but I’ll highlight this lovely bit of praise from Nowicki because it describes exactly what I love about this book:

“On Sports is a showcase of [Macfarlane’s] breezy control over the nuts and bolts of professional and amateur athletics, their cultural import as well as the rhythms (and seasons) of sports writing.

The book makes its most memorable connections when Macfarlane, with his often beautiful prose, tunes into that deeper emotional frequency—the personal, communal, spiritual and profound—that sports are uniquely capable of hitting.”

On Sports eloquently examines the ways money has worsened our enjoyment of sports today, but it’s Macfarlane’s personal anecdotes, about his childhood and his days as a sports reporter, that make this a fun and special read.

I was reminded this week that the NHL playoffs start tomorrow. And I think On Sports is the perfect book to read during the game’s commercial breaks. Its chapters are short enough and Macfarlane’s words are infinitely more engaging than the gambling ads they’ll push on you.

I had the chance to ask Macfarlane a few questions about his book and you can read his responses below.

All best,

Ahmed
Publicist

A Biblioasis Interview with David Macfarlane

Author of On Sports

Photo: David Macfarlane.

Can you start by telling me a bit about yourself and how this book came about?

From (approx.) 1980 to 2010 I worked primarily as a magazine/newspaper writer. I covered a wide range of subjects, but always enjoyed sports-writing assignments—even winning a few Sports Writing awards over the years. I’ve admired sports writers almost as long as I’ve admired athletes.

This is a book about your love of sports but also your discomfort with them today, primarily because of money (the gambling, the ticket prices, the salaries). Of sports, you write that “Athleticism is what redeems them. And money is what fucks them up.” What do you think is the worst way that money has fucked them up? What have we lost because of it?

No shortage of possible answers, but I guess it has to be gambling that is the worst—gambling as condoned by professional sports leagues and broadcasters. There are lots of other money-related problems: the cost of tickets; the demands of advertisers; the gap in earning power between male and female pros. But gambling is the nasty genie that we won’t get back in the bottle. I hope I’m wrong, but I think professional sports will be largely about gambling in the future. This is an enormous change. There was a kind of purity to sports—pure in that athleticism was the most important aspect. No more.

Windsor folks: Come see David at his launch at Biblioasis Bookshop on May 4, alongside Alex Pugsley (Silver Lake) and Don Gillmor (Cherry Beach)!

In the book you mention that the biggest story in sports today is the popularity of women’s sports. Why do you think that is? You also mention that going to a PWHL game was the most fun you’ve had recently at a professional game. Is because they’re not as fucked up by money yet, or is it something else?

It’s an over-used term, but I think toxic masculinity plays a big role in professional sports. But I don’t think the source, at least not the primary source, is the athletes. My theory (based entirely on anecdotal evidence) is that it is the ring of men (always men) who always surround athletes—the broadcasters, the advertisers, the publicists, the agents, the commentators, the journalists, the managers, etc.—who propagate and celebrate the bro myth. Because it gives them the kind of narrative hook that salesmen need. And perhaps there’s nothing inherently wrong with the bro myth other than how tedious it gets, but I find that it gets very tedious indeed. It was a great (and unexpected) relief to go to a PWHL game and discover that it was gone—and that good, exciting hockey remained.

Toronto readers can meet David at his other launch on May 7 at The Supermarket alongside Don Gillmor (Cherry Beach).

Can you talk about seasons? The book is broken up into seasons, and I know your friend, the writer Alison Gordon, who is mentioned throughout the book, was adamant about baseball never going over its regular schedule. And as a kid, it seems as though you would measure time by what sports you were playing. Why did you decide to structure the book as different seasons? And how important are seasons for how we think about sports?

To be born when I was, into a middle class North American family, made the overlay of sports on the calendar almost automatic. And that’s simply because kids played outside, and the weather dictated our recreational activity. Football, hockey, baseball were our seasons—summer being less single-minded in its athletic presentation. In this way, sports were almost always connected to weather. This is a deep, almost spiritual connection, and Alison was offended that baseball saw fit to extend its season, for no reason pertaining to baseball, into a season that had nothing to do with curve balls and double plays. No ball player and no fan in (let’s say) 1954 ever thought that the season was too short. It wasn’t. Like the dimensions of a baseball diamond, it was perfect. To malign perfection, for the sake of money, is (so Alison believed) a sin.

You mention that part of what you loved most about sports was reading about the games in newspapers, and you talk a lot about your favourite sports writers in the book. I see On Sports as kind of an homage to great sports writing. How did those sports writers influence how you watch and/or think about the games? And how have they influenced your own writing?

Around the time that I was starting to think I wanted to become a writer, I began noticing examples of what I now categorize as “good writing.” I’m not quite sure what that is in its specifics—some combination of cadence, clarity, wit, and love of language—but it was sports writing that first drew my attention to skillful, informative, entertaining prose. Of course, that may have had something to do with the fact that sports writing was almost all I was reading at the time. Nonetheless, until I hit James Bond, there were no books I found more exciting (thank you public library) than books about players, or teams, or coaches or games. And when I began writing for magazines, it was reading Roger Angell on baseball and Herbert Warren Wind on golf and John McPhee on tennis (all New Yorker writers) who opened the possibilities (for me) of what today is called long-form journalism. And I ended up having the same experience as a writer that I’d had as a reader. After a slog of political and business profiles, I was assigned a story on Maple Leaf Gardens. And writing about sports reminded me that writing (like reading) can be fun.

In good publicity news:

  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet has been shortlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and longlisted for the 2026 Crime Writers Association Historical Dagger Award!
  • Smash & Grab by Mark Anthony Jarman was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Jarman gathers disparate threads, memories, and digressions into something greater than the sum of its parts. As much as the outside world may disturb, in these pages, readers will find a rich inner life on full display.”
  • Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens was also reviewed in the print Literary Review of Canada: “The language is sensory, emotive, and inexplicably captivating. Arresting fragments emerge from a relentless invocation of half scenes, stitched together with the singular logic of poetic memory (which is to say, with mystery.)”
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Fiddlehead: “The performative nature of masculinity is something that Khurana captures with skill . . . The Passenger Seat, while no light read, is a genuine artistic statement—a simple story with deep resonances. While Adam and Teddy take the road to nowhere, this story might take the rest of us somewhere, somewhere better.”
  • Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mart Dalton was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “Best Canadian Poetry is an annual treat. I love the cream-skimmed aspect, the cross-section of what people are thinking about and how they are expressing it. It’s a sort of snapshot of the Canadian poetic zeitgeist.”

Night shift with the bicycle cops

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An interview with Don Gillmor, author of Cherry Beach

Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

Don Gillmor’s latest book—a layered literary crime thriller called Cherry Beach—comes out next Tuesday and has already been leading our Canadian sales for the past couple of weeks. It recently made the CIBA Booksellers’ List—a list of favourite spring releases voted on by indie Canadian booksellers. It’s always extra special when indie bookstores vote for books by indie presses, and honestly kind of annoying when they don’t. (6/20 of the books on this spring list are indie, but who’s counting?)

Cherry Beach is one of those novels that succeeds at being for all kinds of readers. Gillmor, who’s written on a wide range of topics over the course of his career—as a journalist, as well as a novelist—knows how to fill a story with the tidbits of information that make up the substance of real life. I learned some Toronto geography; I also learned how to make a nice jalapeño marinade for my pork tenderloin. On the one hand, this is a propulsive, gripping detective story. On the other, Cherry Beach has the qualities I love of a plotless literary novel, including the interiority of a lonely, slightly-delusional protagonist I can relate to.

Readers have been comparing Cherry Beach to The Wire for the ways it characterizes a city (Toronto in this case, instead of Baltimore), and the ways it balances racial and economic tensions while gradually revealing a complex, shadowy network of crime. But it’s also interesting to me that a 263-page book could even be comparable to a show that takes approximately 60 hours to watch. Yet it is. Gillmor doesn’t waste space, and I’m still thinking through some of the book’s connections, as the intensifying summer heat of the novel seeps into the hours spent away from it.

I had the pleasure of sending Don Gillmor a handful of questions about Cherry Beach, which he graciously answers below.

Dominique,
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

A Biblioasis Interview with Don Gillmor

Author of Cherry Beach (April 14, 2026)

Don Gillmor. Credit Ryan Szulc.

You’ve written many kinds of books (literary novels, a memoir, books for children, a field note about oil, a fictionalized history of Canada). What made you want to write a crime novel?

I’ve always wanted to write a detective novel. In university, I began reading some of the classic detective novels from the 1930s, 40s and 50s—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Chester Hines. It was partly a relief from Eighteenth Century British Literature courses. At the time I thought it would be interesting to write one. It took me a while to get around to it.

How much of Cherry Beach is based on true events and real people?

There are parts of the novel that are informed by, if not based on, real events or people. Years ago, when I was doing a lot of journalism, I wrote an article for Toronto Life on 51 Division, which was then sometimes called the Punishment Station because bad cops from other divisions were sent there. At the time, they were also experimenting with community policing—mostly young cops on bicycles engaging with the community. So there was a clash of cultures—two very different views on policing. To a degree, I revived that idea in Cherry Beach. I went out on the night shift with the bicycle cops and there are a few scenes that are taken from that experience, including the opening conversation with the sex worker. I also went out in police cars with the hardcore cops in the division. An interesting perspective.

I wrote a magazine article that took me to Kingston, Jamaica, looking for a suspected murderer (I didn’t find him), but the trip into the red hills and the conversation with the Justice Minister are based on my own experience there.

And Torontonians may recognize aspects of a former mayor.

Toronto readers! Don’t miss Don’s launch at The Supermarket with fellow Biblioasis author David Macfarlane (On Sports).

In Cherry Beach, Toronto is essentially the main character, and we witness its character development throughout the book. How was writing the character of Toronto different from writing a human character (or was it the same)?

I wanted the city to be a large part of the book. In part because it’s a complex place, claiming to be the most multicultural city in the world. So we’re sort of a global experiment. In many ways, we’re a grand success. But there remains a lot of work to be done. There are issues of affordability and racism, and our traffic is amongst the worst in North America.

As a reader, I always enjoy seeing cities from a literary perspective, whether it’s Dennis Lehane’s Southie neighbourhood in Boston, or Elmore Leonard’s Detroit, or the Venice of Donna Leon. So I wanted to look at Toronto from the perspective of its extremes—the privileged and the underclass. There was a time when the richest and poorest neighbourhoods (Rosedale and Regent Park respectively) were essentially adjacent to one another, though the area has since gone through major changes.

Don Gillmor’s other book with Biblioasis, On Oil, was recently announced as a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Shaughnessy Cohen Prize.

Detective Jamieson Abel is a great cook, and this book is full of wonderful recipes. I’m interested to know more about your decision to include this aspect of his character.

It’s mostly an extension of my own interest in cooking. I learned to cook as a matter of survival—a series of girlfriends with many wonderful qualities, but no interest whatsoever in cooking. So I started to learn. Cooking opens up a world. I think it’s one of the reasons for the success of cooking shows; they form a kind of community and bridge cultures. Abel is quite isolated—a single, middle-aged man who has alienated much of the department he works for. Cooking is a way for him to engage with the world.

What were some of your influences for Cherry Beach, literary or otherwise?

There are two different directions as far as influences go. On the one hand, Jamieson Abel is (sort of) in the tradition of what were once called hard boiled detectives—Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe et al. But there is also a tradition of literary novelists like Kate Atkinson, John Banville, and Michael Redhill, who all write detective novels as well. I understand the appeal of crime fiction for literary novelists, but it presents certain challenges as well. As a rule, literary novelists don’t have to concern themselves with plot. But with crime fiction, you need plot, and it has given me a fresh appreciation for those writers who do it well.

Bonus pic of our office dog Sammy with his copy of Cherry Beach!

In good publicity news:

  • Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor has been included in the CIBA Spring 2026 Booksellers List: “If the dayglo film-filtered cover of an aging high rise on a summer day doesn’t intrigue you, maybe a comparison to The Wire but ‘make it Toronto’ will do the trick. Cherry Beach is a propulsive genre mash-up of Canadian crime and literary fiction.” (Robyn York, Beach Reads Bookshop)
  • On Sports by David Macfarlane was featured in The Tyee: “A showcase of [Macfarlane’s] breezy control over the nuts and bolts of professional and amateur athletics, their cultural import as well as the rhythms (and seasons) of sports writing.”
  • Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simić) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Mima Simić translates all of this with clarity and verve . . . alternately riveting and heartbreaking.” The book was also featured in Electric Lit’s list of 15 Must-Read Small Press Books of Spring 2026: “Every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist’s regret . . . a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling.”
  • Decadence by Richard Kelly Kemick was reviewed in Publishers Weekly: “Kemick’s wit and curmudgeonly self-regard is offset by his palpable adoration of his partner, Litia, evoking the work of David Sedaris. It’s a weird and rewarding ride.”

In strange company

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Poems from Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens

Who Else in the Dark Headed There by Garth Martens. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Since it’s Poetry Month, and we’re standing at the threshold of the long Easter weekend, I want to write a little something in defense of literary suffering.

So much of my job involves trying to get people to read our books. And there’s always a vague external pressure to swaddle my book pitches in positive language. Readers want hope to shine through our frequently bleak books. And people are often less willing to engage with difficult texts, texts that require long hours alone flailing through another’s dimly-lit interiority. There’s an unspoken publicity agreement that despair, suffering, etc. be made palatable to a potential audience.

Yet literary portrayals of suffering seem valuable and interesting to me regardless of any transcendent qualities the mind feels compelled to impose on them. And what makes suffering interesting to read isn’t its universality: it’s the weird, inaccessible, hyper-particular reaches of a stranger’s consciousness. I want more of that. Not the performative, uplifting attempt to reach as many readers as possible, for a text to be seen as a knowable quantity. I want literature that feels alien, difficult to understand, that I have to circle again and again, banging my head against the walls of, trying to get further in. Earned moments of affinity or empathy feel so much more vital than the stuff popularized in the name of the heartwarmingly universal.

This has nothing to do with needing a little escapism, which is valid. I spend a desperate amount of time, like anyone, trying to put some distance between myself and all reminders of being a body-mind complex hurtling through time. That’s why I watch as much hockey as I do. But the Victoire clinching their playoff spot last night, and the Habs’ six-game winning streak, isn’t what keeps me going. Those are small pleasures—a little thrill for the prefrontal cortex.

What does keep me going, rather, has been consistent my entire life. It’s the unusual, painful companionship I found in Woolf when I was fourteen, or again in the poet Paul Celan when I was twenty-two, or again—just last year—when our managing editor, Vanessa, sent me Garth Martens’ poetry manuscript. It’s something about what happens when I’m alone with a voice that keens its own indescribable aloneness. The ease with which understanding comes—between reader and text, author and world—has so little to do with the kind of affinity that feels miraculous and life-altering.

With that, I’ll leave you with a handful of Garth Martens poems from his forthcoming collection Who Else in the Dark Headed There (April 14). I hope they reach you with the force of their individual darkness, and keep you in strange company over the long weekend.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

Excerpts from Who Else in the Dark Headed There

Interior table of contents for Who Else in the Dark Headed There.

Late Winter

Gloved, I undercut
the snowcrust, its changeable
emergencies,
until the shelves fell.

Worlds that mirror this one
swung like white revolving doors.
Deciduous rods,
snow: it lifted higher: higher.

What rough potato
overrode the limit of the pail?
From what
precarity is it chored up?

Ice-strip on the move,
on high
or on my tongue,
not here, but here.

A tug of breath from a tap.
A snort through dense hedges.
Transfusion
of allusive, useless ideas.

Snow leapt and plunged.
I waited for the rendezvous.
I waited for the switch.

Dilemmas

Nobody asks for them.
They come
unpermitted. The sickroom

sweats on every hard bud
and somnolent,
those cut loose by those departed.

With a spade, the boy turns up
a tidy
padlock of steam.

A sole strand
air-slips
as through a keyway.

His whole life mist
rinses
and perspires: rock, barrel, bough. Alters

his world: a nook, a bridge,
an apple tree
whose full bearings

are shadowless, odd trespasser.

Distaff Side

She left behind a vanity mirror.
The boy held it face-up
at his chest. Walked without seeing his feet

as if upside down, as if blank, into
blurred
big blades, chunks of wall. Nauseous.

It bears saying he didn’t need
to do it to feel—a rush, out of place
or in danger in this house.

This was the closest he got
to putting on make-up,
erased from the waist down.

In deprived air, he detected
heated dust in the drapes, a pang
of flight. Wasp-like focus or glare.

From the bay window he beamed drivers.
Not to hurt them. To see
in their flinch a second face.

Afterwinter

Blowing gas through a wand,
I see a fruitfly drift into the seal.
I remember canola’s upstart gold flow. It went
as far as justified, our one
paved road in six directions.
Past this, there is of one
element not enough
and of another too much. Swans
in the flooded field.
Investors sprinting
pints of treacle
among tired farmers. Gossip
like crushed egg. That too,
for hold-outs who refuse their glass of milk.
And me? In a near playground
a pink, hooded jacket foisted on a bollard
like one doubled over
in despair. There is inside me a Pillarist
who infinitely extends
this moment of the gut punch. It’s far
from overrated, far from fair.
So full of my own blood
I am nauseous as anyone
who sells too well their steal.

In good publicity news:

  • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio has been named a finalist for two 2026 Alberta Literary Awards: the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and the Wilfrid Eggleston Award for Nonfiction. Huge congrats to Marcello!
  • Cherry Beach by Don Gillmor was listed in Toronto Life, and was reviewed in The Seaboard Review: “A largely captivating novel, the sentences by turns clipped and spare or expansive and stunning. And befitting of an author who’s spent so much time in journalism, Gillmor doesn’t pull any punches. The world he gives is an ugly one, much like our own.”
  • Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko (trans. Mima Simic) was reviewed in roughghosts: “The relentless nature of the narrative style heightens the emotional intensity of this novel, allowing for an in depth portrait of one man’s past and present to emerge in a relatively limited space.”