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The Bibliophile: The Scorpion and the Frog

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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.

Coming soon: Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers (Sep 30), Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (Oct 7), Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Oct 14), and The Sorrow of Angels (Nov 4).

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?”

In good publicity news:

  • Scout Magazine featured several Biblioasis titles in their Scout Book Club: Revolution issue:
    • 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 Genocide by 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!”
  • The 2025 Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories were featured in Guelph Today.
  • 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.

The Bibliophile: “Arnhem”

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

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.

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Like working a piece of clay

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

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.

Three poems featured in the collection were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry!

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.

In good publicity news:

  • 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.”
  • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide was reviewed in several outlets recently, including:
    • 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.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was mentioned in the Guardian’s and the Globe and Mail’s articles on Alberta book bans.
  • Elise Levine, author of Big of You, was interviewed about her short story collection in The Ex-Puritan.
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was featured in Publishers Weekly’s article on Big Indie Books of Fall 2025.

The Bibliophile: An introduction from our new Sales Coordinator

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Hello, Bibliophile readers! It’s a pleasure to introduce myself as the new Sales Coordinator here at Biblioasis. This is the last day of my first week of full-time work, most of which I got to spend in the office in Windsor. Toronto is my beloved home base, but I’ve had a great time exploring the city and its environs—including one of the best Turkish bakeries I’ve yet come across in Ontario.

It’s hard to put into words just how exciting it is to have joined the (brilliant) Biblioasis team. Before starting at the press, I was working as a bookseller at the beautiful Flying Books on Queen Street in Toronto, which connected me to a vibrant literary community. I had spent the years between 2019 and 2024 teaching full time at The University of King’s College in Halifax, an experience I found incredibly meaningful, but publishing was my first love. Since as long as I can remember, I’ve had more books than space to accommodate them. Books have accompanied me throughout my life. They have given me a sense of place and rootedness in the midst of many types of transitions.

Sitting in the Biblioasis office with shelves of wonderful titles behind me has been a genuine thrill. There is a lot to learn, but after teaching for so many years, I’m enjoying feeling like a student again, making one discovery after another. Everyone I’ve met so far has been patient, supportive, and welcoming. I’m passionate about our books and I’m looking forward to championing them.

As a bonus, here are some of my favourite Biblioasis titles. Incidentally, they are all works of fiction written from the perspective of mothers: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (if you haven’t tackled the tome yet, take this as your sign—it’s more relevant than ever), Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (one of the most lyrical genre-bending works I’ve come across), and Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance (an unflinching modern take on the mother-daughter relationship that I think Simone de Beauvoir would have loved).

Hilary Ilkay
Sales Coordinator

In other news, Lazer Lederhendler is the fiction winner of the French-American Foundation Prize for his translation of The Hollow Beast! The foundation conducted a short interview with Lazer about his experiences working with Christophe Bernard’s “beast of a novel.” We’re delighted to present it here, ahead of the awards ceremony in New York next week.

Q: What did you enjoy most about translating The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard?

Lazer: Problem solving is one of the things I love most about translating good fiction, and I was well served in that department by Christophe’s fabulous beast of a novel. I did a good amount of research on English dialects of Eastern Canada that are comparable to the French spoken on the Gaspé Peninsula, where most of the action is located. This proved to be not the most fruitful avenue, as the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the book are mainly due to Christophe’s unique and highly evocative visual style. In fact, it occurred to me that The Hollow Beast has all the makings of a wonderful graphic novel. So rather than focusing primarily on language equivalencies or approximations, I would picture the characters and scenes in detail and render those images into English (and afterwards, of course, make sure I hadn’t strayed from the original). On the other hand, however, there was the challenge of depicting the evolving speech patterns of the story’s hero, Monty, who starts out quasi-illiterate but through self-education (he carries around a copy of Homer’s Odyssey) progressively acquires a more sophisticated level of French.

Q: You specialize in translating contemporary Quebecois literature. What are some differences you’ve noticed between contemporary French literature in Canada and French literature in France?

Lazer: That’s a huge question, perhaps best left to academics. But one clear difference that does immediately come to mind is this: today, more than ever before, Québécois literature and Québécois culture and language in general are very much creatures of North America, whose references and influences point increasingly south and west rather than to Europe. This is true, at any rate, for most of the writers I’ve translated since the early 2000s — Nicolas Dickner, Catherine Leroux, Perrine Leblanc, et al — who are assuredly representative of contemporary Québécois fiction. Another basic difference worth mentioning is that the literature of France by and large takes the language for granted — ça va de soi. The same can’t be said of Quebec, where the French language has always been a battle field that, as a friend of mine put it, is foregrounded as a constituent part of the landscape.

Q: The French-American Foundation Translation Prize seeks to honor translators and their craft, and recognize the important work they do bringing works of French literature to Anglophone audiences. What does being named a winner for this prize mean to you, and, in your own words, why does a Prize like this matter?

Lazer: Translators are among the unsung artisans of literature endeavouring to carry the words and artistry of writers across the barriers of language and culture. We for the most part labour in the shadows in order to extend the reach and longevity of an author’s works. So it’s always encouraging and gratifying to have one’s efforts as a translator acknowledged and celebrated. What’s more, awards like the FrenchAmerican Foundation’s Translation Prize, spotlight books and writers that otherwise might not get the attention and readership they deserve.

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: To live through a single day

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Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under follows a large cast of characters—made up of students and teachers at an English secondary school in the 1980s—in the aftermath of a beloved teacher’s sudden death. The premise reminded me of Phillippe Falardeau’s devastating film Monsieur Lazhar, yet Dark Like Under, despite the grief and uncertainty that propel the narrative, feels radically life-giving.

This 336 page novel takes place over the course of a single day, which allows for a heightened attentiveness to the nuances of setting and character. Chadwick really does justice to her characters. I think Pamela Hensley (The Miramichi Reader) gets it right in her recent review:

“Every character is so richly depicted, so expertly drawn with emotional depth and intelligence that we understand not only the individual, but the way each person influences the others and how the town—and the country—has evolved.”

Dark Like Under is the kind of deep, soul-defining book that counters the train chug of reels and the trashiness of beach reads. It allows for immersion in a way that reminds me of summers reading Hardy as a young teenager (before I was expected to work).

Chadwick’s craft is care. This is a beautiful debut novel. It’s also a lovely physical object, with a cover designed by Kate Sinclair, and pages that smell of glue and early summer mornings.

I had the privilege of asking Alice Chadwick a few questions over email, and I’m delighted to share her thoughtful responses here.

Dominique Béchard
Publicist

Photo: Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

A Biblioasis Interview with Alice Chadwick

DB: Dark Like Under takes place over the course of a single day. What inspired this decision? Did you encounter any pitfalls (or surprising benefits) to the circadian form? Are there any other circadian books that inspired you?

AC: My novel is set in a school, and I’m fascinated by the ritualistic nature of the school day. The routines are familiar to us all but, from the distance of adulthood, can appear quite strange. Despite their repetitive quality, there are some school days that stand alone, that remain with us throughout life. I wanted to write about one of those days.

The idea of writing a novel based on a school day slotted into the circadian form in a way that felt entirely natural, even irresistible. The single day as a metaphor for the span of a human life has a rich history (I’m thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73—“In me thou see’st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west . . .”). In my novel, the teenage characters are still in the morning of their lives, moving towards the high, bright point; their teachers and parents feel the light dimming as the decades accumulate. I wanted to explore those distinct stages of life and, as we move through the day of the book, the structure itself carries some of that meaning.

Working with the circadian form was tremendously helpful in structuring the novel—I had a beginning and an end, as well as a natural high point. The one-day structure keeps the narrative fresh, the characters in the present moment and the whole thing moving forwards. There is, quite literally, a ticking clock at the heart of the book. Having those things in place allowed me to write very freely. In that sense, I found it unexpectedly liberating and didn’t feel any disadvantages—perhaps those are for readers to point out!

Before I started working on Dark Like Under, I hadn’t realised that a lot of the literature I love best takes a circadian form. Despite the constraints, it’s hugely flexible and seems to inspire innovation. At one end of the scale there is Katherine Mansfield’s short story sequence Prelude, a masterclass in brevity and restraint; at the other, there’s Joyce’s exuberant and encyclopedic Ulysses. My own favourite is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; a hundred years after it was written, it still has urgent things to say about female experience in middle age, motherhood and marriage, and about trauma. The spectre of death haunts all these works. Reading them, our appreciation of what it means to live through a single day and through a single life is heightened. They return us to our own daily existence with a sharpened perception of life’s beauty, strangeness and fragile value.

Photo: Alice Chadwick, author of Dark Like Under. Credit: Beth Boswell-Knight.

Even though the novel is focused on a single day, this day is perceived polyphonically—through multiple characters. I’m curious to know if this was always going to be the case. Do you have a favourite character, or has that favourite changed over the course of writing the novel?

When I began to write the book, I experimented with the first-person plural perspective—the collective “we.” The whole town has suffered a loss, and I was looking for a way to voice that shared grief. Gradually I realised that individual experiences were equally important, and I shifted to a more polyphonic approach, with each chapter drawing close to one character to observe their particular response (a close third-person perspective). Nevertheless, I wanted to retain something of that initial choral feeling. There is considerable social division in the town of the novel, as in 1980s society more broadly, and it felt important to have a plurality of voices, as far as that was feasible within the school.

Initially, I was writing only from the perspectives of the teenage girls and women. At a certain point, I saw that I needed to open it out further and include those of the boys and men. When I had this thought, I stood up from my desk and walked out of the house—I felt extremely ill-equipped to enter the minds of teenage boys! But it was one of the turning points of the book. A character like Kelly, who had initially functioned as a sort of irritant in the classroom, became quite different when given his own chapters. That took me by surprise—he is now one of my favourite people in the book.

I feel a great deal of tenderness for all my characters, but some were easier to write than others. Nicolas, for example—who is at sea in all the teenage drama and would just like to get on with his homework—flowed out of my pen. He could have taken over the novel! I also love Robin. Her life is far from easy but there is not a speck of self-pity in her. The art teacher, Sue Sharpe, is another character close to my heart. She is not conventionally heroic, or even particularly sympathetic, but she has endured. She attempts to communicate something of genuine value to the kids in her classroom and, despite the disappointments and compromises of her career, still carries the flame of her artistic life.

The 1980s serve as a backdrop for the novel. How much do you think the time period factors into the story? Do you think it would have made for a very different novel if it had been set, say, in the 2000s, or today?

I do think it would be different. The premise—that a teacher could die, and no real explanation be given, no support for staff or children be put in place—is, I hope, unthinkable today. The silence around “difficult” subjects such as death and mental health, gender and sexuality, felt almost total in the 1980s; there was a lack of vocabulary and openness about many things that we discuss more freely and fluently now. That said, some events are inexplicable. People, even those closest to us, can remain mysterious and unknowable. The book, in one sense, is an exploration of that.

The novel is underpinned by the tension between communal experience and social division in a small town. For that reason, the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, a period of growing inequality and social destabilisation, felt like the right backdrop for the book, even the necessary one. However, the debates of the 1980s remain pressing: how do we look after the most vulnerable in our communities? How do we share the resources of land, money and education?

I also really wanted to capture an “analog” way of being alive that has almost entirely disappeared now. The texture of life was so different in the 80s—the way we passed little handwritten notes around and did all our learning from books; how, if we wanted to phone someone, we had to stand in the hall and use the landline, where the whole family could hear. Photographs were rare; we didn’t walk around with cameras and films were expensive to process. It was a different way of being an individual and of experiencing time; as a teenager you might be alone or bored, isolated or idle, to an extent that is almost impossible now. That said, teenagers are teenagers. The excitement, defiance and uncertainty of those years belong to us all, whichever decade we grew up in.

Dark Like Under is so richly detailed and elaborate. It seems to go against the distracted, content-driven culture we live in. The level of your attentiveness is impressive. What are your writing habits like?

Thank you! One of the things I love in books—and not just books, in painting, photography, cinema too—is the noticing, the observation of small details that are everyday but at the same time surprising and telling. There are many ways of paying attention, but I love an immersive book, one that takes you wholeheartedly into a place, into the lives of its characters, and lets you have a long look around. It’s a slowing down, yes, and in that respect requires a level of close attention, but that, to me, feels generous and nourishing.

But to answer your question: my writing habits are very regular, very workaday. Every morning I get up, make coffee and go outside, often before London has fully woken up. I like to write in the garden, surrounded by my neighbour’s houses, by trees and birds. It’s a small patch of urban Eden! I work in cheap exercise books, which are often covered in soil and smudged by rain, but the work I can do by hand, early in the morning, seems freer and more unexpected than anything I can do on a screen. Later, I do go inside and work at my desk—I like to type things up and edit on my computer. In the late afternoon, I might go for a walk to clear my head, and sometimes I do other (paid) work. Evenings are for reading, and reading is very much part of writing, a crucial part.

I write every day and most days I struggle, but I’ve learnt that these dull, difficult days are necessary. They often herald a breakthrough, a dreamlike period when words finally flow and stray ideas come together.

I’m interested in the title, Dark Like Under. I love the cryptic imagery it inspires. Could you tell us about how you came to it?

The title came to me slowly, I had to wait for it. I’ve had this experience with poetry; it can take a long time for the right words to surface and find an order. I always knew that there would be “dark” in the title, however. In the western tradition, in the Bible or Dante, say, knowledge and goodness are often associated with light and illumination, but some of the most important lessons we need to learn, not to mention things of great mystery, nuance and beauty, come from places of darkness. It’s where ghosts, and Time itself, accumulate—sometimes in a literal sense, in the buried, archeological layers under our feet. The art teacher in the school tries to teach something of this to the kids: to draw a pebble, to describe a human face, requires a sensitivity to the shadows as well as the highlights. There is only so much that light can teach us. But it is, of course, a question of balance, of not being pulled under by the dark.

Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?

I am halfway through Rose Tremain’s 1992 novel, Sacred Country. Told in multiple voices, it’s a portrait of a sleepy, slightly eccentric village and the story of a young girl who discovers, aged six, that she is Martin, not Mary. It’s funny and deeply touching, and I feel as though I’ve left behind friends every time I put it down.

I’ve also just finished James Agee’s A Death in the Family, a novel (as mine is) about a sudden death and how people live through those first hours and days. I now know that it’s a classic of American literature, but I hadn’t heard of it until a bookseller pressed a copy into my hands. I’m grateful that he did.

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Taking chances

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Photo: A stack of freshly-packaged envelopes awaits mailing to booksellers. Next to it, a stack of recent and forthcoming Biblioasis books.

A quick Google search tells me that approximately 2.2 million books are published every year. I don’t know how accurate that number actually is, but it’s something I find myself thinking about a lot more these days. How can anyone ever keep up? How do you decide what book is worth your time and attention?

I started working at Biblioasis last November. It’s my first job in publishing. I’ve never really known what I wanted to do career-wise, but I’ve always liked being surrounded by books and hoped that whatever job I had would include large stacks of books on either side of me. I found the idea comforting as someone whose primary thoughts are about what books I’m currently reading and, more often, have yet to read. When I saw the job posting online, I sent in my application with a feeling that I probably wasn’t going to get it. But, to my surprise, they took a chance and hired me anyway. What I’ve come to admire most about independent presses is their willingness to take chances.

It’s been funny to see how it all works after having been just a reader for so long, who never thought about what goes into publishing a book. It involves a lot of hard work to lay the foundation so that a book has the best shot of finding its readers—and then a startling amount of, what seems to me, just luck that it eventually does. You can’t really predict the success of a book. I can’t yet anyway.

Now as a publicist my goal is to make you aware of our books. It’s a process that involves a lot of reading and rereading our upcoming titles to try and come up with the most interesting way to talk about them. That is the fun part. After that it’s a lot of emailing and sending copies out to reviewers, interviewers, booksellers, influencers, and hoping something resonates with them enough that they take a chance to—out of the millions of books being put out into the world and sent to them—read and recommend this one. This can be less fun because a lot of the time I don’t hear back, and that’s alright, no one can read them all. But it’s surprisingly exhilarating when I do get a response. I felt a genuine rush of excitement the first time seeing our efforts result in a prominent review, or from hearing booksellers enthusiastically champion one of our books. I’m generally not a very expressive person, so this did not show on my face or in my voice at all, but in my head I was doing cartwheels and fireworks were going off.

It can feel endless: the new manuscripts coming in, the reading, the pitching, the following up, the waiting. And it hasn’t even been a full year for me yet. What I’ve really learned these last few months is that every book published is its own miracle and that getting the right books to the right readers, by talking about what our books have meant to me in a way that might convince you to give them a chance, is a high that I’d like to keep chasing.

Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist

In good publicity news:

  • Lazer Lederhendler, translator of The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, was announced the winner of the 2025 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Fiction.
  • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney was reviewed in a number of outlets this week:
    • Irish Times: “An ambitious, thoughtful, nicely layered book.”
    • Irish Farmers Journal: “Rich in history and drama, Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way reveals the legacies of violence and redemption as the secrets of the past unfold.”
    • Irish Mail on Sunday: “Feeney’s astute lyricism makes for a marvellously engaging story of a woman on the verge.”
    • Irish Independent: “In presenting both a political and personal history, Feeney delivers a moving meditation on enforced female roles in Irish society both past and present, the heavy pall of grief and the unceasing encroachment of the past into the present.”
  • On Book Banning by Ira Wells received a starred review in Publishers Weekly: “Wells delivers a potent behind-the-scenes look at book banning in this standout account . . . a decisive and fascinating take on a hot-button issue.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in Scout Magazine: “Nuanced, as well as touching, tense, and cringe-y at different turns, [Near Distance] contains all the stuff of a fraught mother-daughter relationship, impressively depicting its subtle, complicated dynamic.”

The Bibliophile: A Conversation with Ira Wells

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From the Biblioasis launch of On Book Banning

In March, Ira Wells joined us for the Windsor launch of On Book Banning. We recorded Ira’s discussion with our publisher, Dan Wells (no relation), and we’re delighted to bring it to you here as we look forward to its publication in the US this Tuesday, June 3.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

Our bookshop chalkboard welcomes guests to the launch of On Book Banning.

DAN WELLS: Your book, Ira, opens with a very personal story: that of a parent, you, sitting in a child’s library chair, your knees up around your ears in their school library, one of the occasions that certainly instigated the writing of the book. Would you mind starting the evening by telling us a little bit about this experience, and what the result was?

IRA WELLS: It did, yeah, not all great stories begin with an email from a school principal, but this one does. I received an email in 2022 from the principal of my kids’ elementary school indicating that they were initiating something called a “library audit.” And there was something about that phrase that struck me as interesting. By this point, we’d already been hearing a lot about the book banning that had been taking place in Florida and other places in the southern United States, and I wondered if “library audit” wasn’t just an innocuous, boring-sounding description, and if it came to Toronto, if that is what they would call it—a “library audit.” It turned out to be a little more complicated than that.

So, I joined a parent committee to see what was going on and we were given something called a TDSB—Toronto District School Board—Equity Toolkit, which we were going to use to evaluate books. Then we were asked to pick five books off the shelves more or less at random. And a couple of things jumped out at me immediately in this exercise. One is that if you were to actually use this toolkit, to go through and apply it to every book in the library, there is not enough time in your life to do it. And so at a certain point the principal became somewhat exasperated and said, “I just wish we could get rid of all the old books.” And I thought she was maybe kidding. At least, I hope that she was.

But the following fall, in the Peel Region (which is in the Mississauga area), in some school libraries, up to 50 percent of the books had been removed from the shelves. They really had gone through and got rid of all the old books, which was somewhat horrifying. But that’s the genesis of On Book Banning. I was working on something else, but the moment where I realized I needed to pay more attention to this was when all those books were liquidated from the shelves of Peel Region, because I realized I didn’t really have the vocabulary or the arguments to respond. I’m an English professor, but I didn’t have at the tip of my tongue the words to articulate why books matter, why banning them is wrong, and why we need to pay attention when this is happening in our society. Because it’s not just an American problem: it’s also happening here. That’s why I wanted to dive deeper into it.

DW: So, when you were sitting there in the library before the Peel cull, one of the things they did, if I remember correctly, is basically decide that any book that had been published more than fifteen years prior was too old to be on the shelves. They considered it “dangerous,” right?

IW: The situation in Peel was this: there was a student named Reina Takata, who was a Grade 10 student at Erindale Secondary School in Mississauga. She was the kind of girl who went to the library, ate her lunches in the library, was very familiar with the library. She came back after summer vacation in Grade 10 and realized that, in her estimation, half of the books were gone.

The CBC picked this story up and reported on it. We don’t actually know—there are 259 schools in Peel Region—we don’t know and will never know how many books were removed during this process. But we do know two things. One, as Dan said, they had settled upon this fifteen-year lifespan, so anything that had been published more than fifteen years beforehand was ripe for removal. And the second thing we know is, because these books were deemed “harmful,” they could not be donated to families in need, they could not be given to jurisdictions that could have used them. They were boxed up more or less like toxic waste and disposed of.

DW: We’ll get back to this idea of harm later on because I think it’s kind of central to how both the right and the left have talked about what they’re doing. Both the examples that we’ve started with are, I guess one could argue, examples of the left banning books or removing books from libraries. You also talk about things that have happened in Florida and elsewhere in the us. Do you want to give a bit of background about that side as well?

IW: Absolutely, and I think in some ways this may be the more familiar version of the book banning story. At least it was to me until I started paying more attention. There are a number of parents’ rights organizations, like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and there are Canadian counterparts. They’re sometimes described as anti-government organizations. And they got very interested in the content of school libraries during covid. They’re particularly concerned with books they call LGBTQ indoctrination. This could be anything that has a queer character, even, so something like Drama by Raina Telgemeier—a graphic novel that is very popular with the kids—or, not to mention, anything that has a sort of sex-ed dimension to it. But anything with a queer character. They’re also very interested in race, so anything that sort of smacks of what they would call critical race theory, or anything that casts slavery in a negative light. Including Toni Morrison. They go after these books, and they do it in a very specific way. They have game plans: they meet up in the parking lot beforehand, they have matching T-shirts, they divvy up their questions, and it’s almost like tailgating, and there’s this culture around it. They converge on school council meetings and they use their allotted five minutes, and they drag these meetings out—sometimes they’re seven hours long—and they’ve been pretty successful at getting books off the shelves.

Ira Wells.
Field Notes design by Ingrid Paulson.

So, this is the right-wing version, the evangelical version, the populist version. They do delightful things, like they’ve started to harass teachers directly by providing a list of books to a teacher and saying, “If you teach any one of these books, we’re going to sue you or bring some sort of legal action against you.” I’ve heard of lawsuits, the threat of lawsuits, against people who have the Little Free Libraries you may have seen around. If you have something they deem obscenity in those Little Free Libraries, they’ll threaten a lawsuit. And they will often threaten librarians with legal action or just make their lives a living hell. The free speech organization pen America has been very attentive to this and has been tracking the number of challenges. In 2023 or 2024, they put the number at ten thousand challenged titles. But there is also some research that shows between 83 and 97 percent of book challenges are never reported. So it’s almost certainly much, much higher than what we know.

What I found very interesting about the Canadian progressive version and the evangelical version is that they both seem to construe books as a source of contagion, as a source of harm, and they both advocate the same solution, which is to censor them, to get them off the shelves. I was very struck by the fact that you’ve got these two groups: progressive educators in Ontario and Southern evangelicals who appear to be political opposites in every possible way. Yet they think about books in a very similar way, and they have the same problem, which is they think books are causing harm to children, and they have the same solution, which is to ban them.

DW: I’m sure the principal in your children’s school would be horrified if you pointed out to her she was using arguments that a DeSantis conservative would use in Florida, and yet they were basically identical. Just for different purposes. But there’s something else that I think unites both the DeSantis conservative evangelical movement and maybe the more liberal one: they both deny that what they are doing is book banning—we should probably define book banning. And how does it relate to what you call in this book the “new censorship consensus”?

IW: That’s a good point, Dan. No one considers themself a censor, no one identifies as a book banner, which is why I think it’s really important to go back to the definition. The American Library Association defines book banning as the removal of a title from the shelves because someone deems it harmful. And what strikes me about that definition is how precisely it is describing the rationale of well-intentioned people on the political right and on the political left who believe that they are removing sources of harm from libraries.

I should say that the action the Peel Region took they described in their own words as an “equity-based book weeding process.” And that’s another term that we should unpack. Because weeding is actually something that librarians do. Weeding is a legitimate part of developing a library collection, and it refers to things like, if a book is falling apart, you weed it, if a book is out of date you weed it. It is a legitimate process, but again, to go back to the definition: the American Library Association says that while weeding is an essential part of the development collection process, it is never a deselection tool for controversial material. They want to have a very sharp line between censorship, which is not legitimate, and weeding, which is. And so, when the Peel Region says “oh we’re just doing this weeding process and getting rid of all the books we don’t find equitable,” that’s in fact an abuse of the weeding process and they are book banning.

Photo: Ira Wells’s interview with CBC Edmonton AM on book bannings.

DW: I want to also step back a bit and talk a little bit about this idea of harm. I have a sensitivity and appreciation for some of the arguments that are made about the idea of harm. You know, the idea that some books, some words, some language, can be triggering. What’s your response to that? What’s your response to the idea that what they’re really trying to do is not just ensure that everybody is represented in the library, but they’re trying to protect people from harm?

IW: It’s a good question, and it’s an unavoidable one. I would just preface my answer by stating that I don’t want to be misconstrued as saying that we should only have old books in the libraries or that we should only have what we would think back on as the kinds of books that we remember from our childhoods. I’m not advocating that at all. I think we should have diverse libraries, I think that the children who go to our schools need to be able to go to the libraries and find books that tell stories that they relate to, which includes having very diverse collections. I fully believe that children should see their own stories reflected in those pages. It’s not at all hard to find stories of LGBTQ-identifying people who say that they read a story or they engaged with a narrative about a queer character and that it changed their life, it validated their life, and that it saved their life. It’s not at all hard to find stories of people saying, “That book saved my life.” I think we should listen to them, and we need to be damn sure that those books aren’t banned and taken off the shelves.

Now, to the point about harm and what we do in the inverse case where someone says this book is causing harm—there are policies and procedures in place which are being abused in places like Pensacola, Florida, which is a place I look at in the book, where parents will use the book-challenging process to say “This book is not an appropriate book because it’s actually child pornography.” Or it’s LGBTQ indoctrination. The mechanisms that we have in place to take harmful books off the shelves are often weaponized against the material that we should be saving. So, that’s the first thing I would say.

The second thing I would say, and I’m just leaning into the policies of the school boards and of the libraries themselves, is that harm is not something that can be experienced subjectively by the person who is making the complaint. What I mean by that is, if I’m a parent and I’m outraged about something that I’m seeing in a book and it offends me, my offense, my personal offense, is not a legitimation, is not a rationale, for removing a book from the library or from the school. Because we cannot give every single parent veto power to remove books from the libraries or every single citizen veto power to remove books from the libraries. We live in a very large, very diverse, pluralistic society, and if we give that kind of veto power to one group, we have to give it to all groups, and this is not a paradox that we can work our way out of. We either defend freedom of information, which may include material that is found offensive, or we don’t, but I don’t think we want to live in a world in which everyone gets a veto power over what you get to read.

Standing room only for Ira’s Windsor launch.

DW: You tell some great stories about writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who read Macbeth and found it gave him insight into Baltimore, life on the streets in Baltimore. One of the unintended consequences even of the Peel cull and picking the fifteen-year window is that there were many books that all of us would acknowledge need to be on every library’s shelves, like The Diary of Anne Frank or Obasan, or works of Canadian history that were cut. That were removed merely by being published before that date. And it seems to me that this approach is based on a lack of awareness of how publishing works. There seems to be this idea that we can remove old books because the new ones will fill all the gaps, but quite often, especially in Canada, because of the constraints on publishing, that isn’t possible either. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that.

IW: Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, the category of “classic” was one that the progressive educators in Peel were particularly hostile to. I know this because they had a little manual that they distributed internally that was then leaked, which is in the footnotes of the book. They instruct people who are doing this equity-based weeding process to cast particular skepticism towards what they call classics. Which they say are inherently Eurocentric and heteronormative and bad in other ways. I would just say a couple of things about that. One is that they are using the word classic as it was used about a hundred years ago, and I’m not kidding about that. Like when people talked about “great books” programs in 1925, that I think is what they have in mind. But certainly since the 1960s, the Western canon has been diversified and challenged, and certainly as far as University of Toronto students are concerned in 2025, the category of classic includes Toni Morrison, includes James Baldwin, includes Ralph Ellison, includes so many of the people who would be banned for being outdated in this new rubric.

By coming up with this arbitrary date, by saying “Okay, our libraries, our school libraries, will include everything published in the last fifteen years,” I think the rationale is that they are thinking the books need to reflect the life experiences of the students. And so if the students are fifteen, the books should be published within the last fifteen years. Obviously that leads to a presentism that is kind of horrifying for many of us, in the idea that children would never read the same books as their parents, that you wouldn’t be learning about Japanese internment, you wouldn’t be reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Or, if you were, you would only be reading about it through a very presentist sort of perspective. But to your point, Dan, the Canadian publishing industry could not replenish a library every fifteen years, especially a children’s library. It would leave us much more dependent on American content, and we will lose so much. It’s kind of mind-boggling in its naivete to assume we can simply replenish libraries every fifteen years.

DW: At one point in the book you explain that censorship confronts us with literature’s opposite, and I wondered if you might say a little bit about what you meant by that.

IW: Well, Dan challenged me to actually describe what I like about literature, which is hard for someone who has tried to make that the centre of his life. But one way that I came to think of it: literature asks us, it leaves us, with questions, it prompts more dialogue. If you read a really great book, you want to talk about it. You want to talk about it in a book club. When you close the book, you want to Google it. You want to find out what other people have been saying about it. You want to go on Goodreads. My students would go on BookTok, on TikTok or whatever, but the point is that it opens conversations, it spurs more dialogue.

When you really think about the best books, they’re never reducible to a single message. They’re always full of voices, especially novels. Novels are full of voices, they’re never reducible to a single political point, and this I think is censorship’s opposite. Censorship wants to limit something to a single propagandistic message that we can either be for or against. Censorship confronts us with answers, it has all the answers. It closes conversations rather than opening them. So I think that censorship, and the way that it pretends to have all the answers, and the way that it tries to shut people up, is essentially the opposite of what I love about literature and what I think draws us to literature itself.

DW: Is there a difference between freedom of expression and freedom, or the right, to read? I mean, is there any tension there? This is just a question I was thinking about this evening; we didn’t really talk about that too much while editing the essay, but do they entail different rights or different responsibilities?

IW: I think they are two versions of the same right, and I’ll explain what I mean by that. What I found hard to articulate to that school principal is why I find book banning so offensive. Why do I find it so personally offensive? And undemocratic, in fact. And also illiberal, which is maybe something else. If freedom means anything in our society, it means the freedom to cultivate our own minds, to think what we want to think, to determine the course of our thoughts and our education, and all that is tied in with what we read. And book banning and censorship are not only about deciding what you’re allowed to read, but about deciding what you’re allowed to think, and what kind of a mind you’re allowed to cultivate for yourself. Which is such a profoundly illiberal idea, that someone would interfere with the process in which you are cultivating your own mind.

I think that is a profoundly problematic idea and is what book banners and censors are trying to do. But I think it relates to your point, Dan, about freedom of expression. Because why do we have freedom of expression in our society? It’s not only because you have the right to think and speak what is on your mind. It’s about my right to hear it. And that, I think, makes it complementary to your point about the right to read.

DW: We are all gathered here in a bookstore—let’s assume we all value books. I, as a publisher, as a bookseller, as a reader, have made a very large commitment to literature and books as part of my life. And yet, I’ve been struggling with a contradiction of sorts that I’m hoping you can help me with. I still wonder why it is that at a time that books—for some people, present company excluded—have never seemed less central to the average person’s life, when people have so much access to so much else via the internet, when information has never seemed more free . . . whatever that means. Why, at this moment in time, has the effort to ban books become so increasingly common?

IW: I have to push back on one point, because I don’t think the internet is particularly free. Maybe we can talk more about that in a second, but here’s the statistic that sent chills up my spine and we’ll see if it has the same effect on you. There’s something called the American Time Use Survey that is done by the Department of Labor. Essentially they look at how many minutes per day Americans—it’s an American survey—spend on any given thing. It turns out, and they break this down by every demographic and age and so on, for students, so people between the ages of fifteen and nineteen, the average American spends 9 minutes a day reading and about 4 to 4.5 hours on their smartphones. So, to your point, why is it at this moment where students, high school students, are spending about 9 minutes a day reading for pleasure, are we that worked up about what it is they’re reading? When for a third of their waking lives they are on TikTok or they are on social media and we have no control over—well, most of us—have no control over what our children are doing on those things?

Display courtesy of our crafty and creative booksellers, who excel at unexpected shelftalkers and papercraft. (No books were harmed.)

I think there’s something compensatory going on. In a sense that it’s precisely because we have no control. It’s so ephemeral, what kids are experiencing online. You see something that may offend or bother you: it’s there one minute and it’s gone the next. Where do you go if you’re upset by something that you see, where do you protest? Well, people think they’ve found an answer in books because there’s somewhere, there’s a library, there’s a physical place that they can go. They feel like they can exert some kind of control, right? If you’re the sort of person that thinks that LGBTQ literature is going to indoctrinate your child, there’s very little you can do about the online world. But you can go to your children’s school and make a stink about it and pull a book or two from the shelves.

Even if this might seem absurd on its face, as if it could actually work, we need to think about how censorship is working. It’s working in a couple of different ways. It might not work in the sense that it might not be preventing your children from actually accessing that material, which, yes, they will find online. But it might work by keeping it out of their hands at an impressionable life stage. Or, it might work as a way of bringing a political community together to say “We don’t stand for this sort of thing.” In other words it allows for a community to congeal against a scapegoat. That’s another kind of work that censorship is doing. I think that regardless of where you are on the political spectrum, be it left or right, there is a bad habit of thinking about libraries as microcosms of society and books as levers. Where if we want to make society a little more of this or a little less that, the way we’ll go about this is by pulling this book, pulling that book, and that’s going to exert some sort of change on society.

As John Milton recognized over four hundred years ago, bad ideas can spread perfectly easily without books. And they do.

DW: There is an element of symbolic violence in how a lot of people approach book banning. But you brought up Milton, which leads right into my next questions. One of the most interesting and best parts of this book is a survey of at least two thousand years of censorship, from the Romans through Milton and right up to the great twentieth-century censorship trials of Joyce and Lady Chatterley’s Lover and others. I love Milton’s argument that if you put truth and falsehood out there in the world, truth will win out. I am less certain, at this moment in time, still, that that may be true. Milton was saying that relatively shortly after the printing press and the rise of literacy and books as a new technology. We’re now in a new era faced by a new technology that is changing our relationship to truth. And I’m less and less certain as I look at the world, especially at this particular moment, that truth will win out against falsehood. So I guess I’m looking for assurance more than anything at all? That maybe the classic Miltonian arguments still have relevance? Help me.

IW: Well I’m going to be the really pedantic and annoying English professor and say we should turn back to the text. Because what Milton actually says is “Whoever knew, in a free and open encounter, truth to be submerged by falsehood.” But the key part of the phrase is in a free and open encounter, whoever knew truth to be beat by a falsehood. So, Milton is saying if you just let truth and falsehood fight it out, truth will rise to the top. It’s an inspiring idea, and Dan doesn’t believe in it.

DW: I’m just concerned!

IW: But to me the key part of that phrase in the context of social media is “a free and open encounter.” Because I don’t believe that our social media algorithms constitute a free and open encounter. I think that those algorithms are driving certain kinds of content to the top and that what constitutes truth on the internet is certainly not what John Milton would consider truth, and maybe you too.

But, okay, one more thought to leave you with on this is that in the heat of the covid misinformation fever, someone—and I think it was someone in the Biden administration—decided that the lab leak theory was racist and nonsense and was misinformation and it shouldn’t be on Twitter. And I’m not particularly educated on any of this but I do know that the working theory the FBI now has is something along the lines of the lab leak theory. And so, the idea is that if we censor this, we get it wrong. And this is part of what makes censorship so insidious. We get it wrong, and we get it wrong so often that I would err on letting truth and falsehood battle it out even if it’s not a free and open encounter.

DW: I’ll just ask one more question. Given what we’re facing, how can we future-proof our freedom to read and our freedom of expression?

IW: Funding libraries, funding librarians, giving them our full support. Defending our librarians so that they can defend our intellectual freedom, ensuring that there are librarians in schools, ensuring that the schools are properly funded. So many schools these days don’t have a proper school librarian, they’re just not funded. The school libraries aren’t getting the funding that they need, the public libraries aren’t getting the funding that they need, and if you don’t have someone there who knows the collection, who can safeguard it, who knows why books were selected in the first place, you lose the advocate for the library. I think that would be one big thing.

But I think that also we need to get over our trepidation around defending expressive freedom. I consider myself a person of the left, and people of my political orientation have largely given up on free expression, and especially on free speech. Because that has become such a toxic phrase for so many people because of right-wing demagogues who have taken it up. Or you will hear the argument that free speech has never applied to some groups, which is true. That if you look at the history, which I do in this book, that there has been persecution of gay and lesbian and queer bookstores and queer writers and queer presses all throughout history and well into the 1990s. In Canada! So people will say, well there’s never been free speech, there’s never been freedom of expression, this is a hypocritical idea! And my point is that just because there has not been a golden age of free expression does not mean that we can give up on the ideal of free expression, because once we do that we are in serious trouble. And maybe that’s where I would leave that.

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: On the Road

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***

Road trip narratives are often associated with freedom, independence, a desire to find something, or perhaps change something. They are filled with people hitting the open road, carefree, escaping their everyday lives in search of something greater.

One of my favourite aspects of Vijay Khurana’s The Passenger Seat is how it turns the cliched road trip story on its head. The novel follows two teenagers who want to get away from their small town for the summer. They are free from responsibilities and obligations, but soon realize they are trapped with each other in an enclosed space for miles. We feel their claustrophobia and the tension it brings. The games they play with each other as the road stretches endlessly in front of them become much darker as all that freedom and open space allows for their dissatisfaction with the world to grow.

Photo: The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana. Cover designed by Zoe Norvell.

The Passenger Seat is a road novel for the atomized generation, the ones who’ve grown up in a world where, since everything can be a game, nothing needs to matter, including other’s lives.

John Warner, in his review for the Chicago Tribune last week, I think put it best when he said the novel feels “not so much written as conjured, as though the author has absorbed something from the larger ambient culture and distilled it into the characters and narrative. The result is like being put under a spell, an invitation to join some other mind in a shared dream.”

Vijay himself speaks about the paradoxes of the road trip and the novel much better than I ever could, and you can hear him do so in a recent radio interview with WPR’s BETA and on the podcasts Across the Pond and Beyond the Zero. Or if you’re like me and prefer print interviews, you can read this one from the Berliner.

But now as we head into the May long weekend, the unofficial kick-off to the summer, the time of year most of us start to think of getting back on the road, we thought we’d share with you an excerpt from The Passenger Seat.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

An Excerpt from The Passenger Seat

The road though! Endless becoming, a colour palette always and somehow never changing, grey to green to brown to blue to other, occasionally red, very occasionally yellow, whoosh, repeat, repeat, something comes the other way with headlights on, the beauty of headlights in daylight, fence, field, these lane markings like perforations maybe, as if the road or the whole world could unzip any moment now, if there were such a thing as a moment when you’re driving, which Teddy realizes there isn’t. It’s just one long stretch. The road and its contradictions: boredom and excitement, you sit still but you’re moving, there’s a good kind of silence even with the engine noise and the German metal Adam has them listening to. Teddy’s mom used to call this sitting and thinking time. But all Teddy wants to think about is how the world keeps rushing toward them then dropping harmlessly into their wake. Adam is a good driver. He speeds often, especially to pass the empty logging trucks that must be on their way back to tree farms farther north. Adam tells Teddy the German metal is political, but it’s in fucking German so how can Adam know? The singer’s definitely angry, though. Teddy can’t decide if Adam’s tastes are more adult or more childish than his own. Is what Teddy likes, let’s say Arkells, more grown-up or just more boring? Funny that people call things middle of the road. That’s where they are now, as Adam passes another rig and swings back in before the line of oncoming traffic can snag them. Somebody beeps, and Teddy lets out a hum to match. Wasn’t that a bit close, he thinks but doesn’t say. He thinks about rhythm and speed, about the fact that they don’t know where they’re going.

At a gas station they buy energy drinks and for an hour they talk eagerly over the music, looking for ways to express how free they feel. Then comes the crash, spiralling silences in which the music speaks for them and Teddy nearly falls asleep. Towns go by, billboards, fruit trees, fences. The images don’t stop when he closes his eyes, and when he opens them again he sees something amazing. Two horses are standing nose to nose in a field, perfectly still, like somebody glued them together. They look like statues or oversized toys. One of them is wearing a halter around its head, the other isn’t. Somehow this makes Teddy think of the French they had done at school, how pointless it was because no one could remember anything by the time the next class came around. The recap would take more than half the time, the teacher getting more and more frustrated. But what did she expect? To Adam he says, over the music, Do you remember when you asked that French teacher if the word for cat also meant pussy? Adam laughs, then says, Wait, are you sure that was me? I don’t remember that. It was absolutely you, Teddy says. They hadn’t been proper friends back then, but he remembers it, his green pencil case, how the boys all laughed and the girls groaned and the teacher just went on as though Adam hadn’t said anything. She was telling them about two words that sounded almost the same, and you had to be careful or you’d end up telling somebody about your horses. She was showing off, trying to make the class laugh, but Adam stole her thunder with the pussy comment. Thinking about it now, years later, Teddy decides that Adam’s comment was actually pretty smart. It was really about how pointless the whole situation was, how they were all wasting their time, the teacher included.

They’re going too fast to have the windows open and the truck’s AC is broken. You only need it two weeks of the year anyway, Adam jokes. But surely these will be those weeks. It’s late afternoon and the sun is still well above the trees. On a long, mild hill the truck seems to struggle until Adam drops a gear. Teddy feels sweat on his neck and in his little pocket of chest hair. Away to the right are miles of quiet forest, places where nobody ever goes, probably full of bugs and bears. He hates himself for not being able to drive.

Stopping is glorious, a chance to move and to fart and to breathe. They both balance on shin-high posts beside a trash can, performing a laughing parody of martial art, for no reason other than the joy of controlling their bodies, of coordinating, synchronizing. Slowly the game becomes a competition, who can jump one-legged from post to post without falling. Knowing their phones will eventually fail them, they buy a map and unfurl it on the truck’s hood, captain and first mate. They can go anywhere they want. Teddy plants a finger at the tiny pink words HOT SPRINGS, feeling the engine’s heat through the waxy paper. Adam steers them north and east, away from the coast where they spent their boyhoods. Inward, toward what comes next. As the sun finally hits the treetops, Teddy tears open a softened chocolate block and passes it to Adam by the row. It leaves sweet muck on their hands, and later, as he stares out the window into the dusk, Teddy realizes he is sucking his thumb. The more the light goes, the more it is his own face he sees in the glass, lit by the blue stereo glow, already a ghost.

Each town they pass through is smaller than the last, recognizable brands slowing to a trickle. They stop for the night on the outskirts of one place, at a bend in the river that looks deserted enough. Adam says they’re far enough from the town that no one will bother them but close enough that they can walk back to that bar they passed. They’d probably get served in a town that small. He parks beside a low track that runs into a sea of pebbles and what looks like a ford through the black water. Teddy can imagine it flooding. Even with the driving done he remains a passenger, watching as Adam unfolds the tarpaulin and ties its ends to the truck’s raised trunk. There’s only one good tree, so Adam squats by the river and lets the water fill one of his new canisters. Then he lugs it back to use as an anchor. Teddy is impressed, and determined to make his own contributions. He doesn’t want to end up with the domestic jobs while Adam does the fun stuff, but with no other options he gets the camp stove out of its mesh sack and tries to remember how the pieces slot together. The burner hisses when he finally lights it, a memory of childhood, of hunger and the happiness of being somewhere other than home. This, he thinks, will be the summer his mother finally leaves his father and goes off with Ron; maybe he will arrive back to find everything dealt with, like how he avoids the kitchen until he knows the dishes are done. He hears the click of a bourbon bottle opening for the first time. Adam has scored three from his cousin, Teddy doesn’t know on what terms. Fuck, Teddy says. We don’t have a can opener. Yeah we do, Adam says, handing him his utility knife. Teddy repeatedly pushes its hook through the metal lid, making notch after notch until he has torn a jagged mouth. Probably he did it wrong, but Adam doesn’t say anything.

They sit with scalding cans between their knees, two mouths making plenty of noise. In brief moments of quiet Teddy hears other things, birds crying in the dark and the persistent river. They pass the bourbon back and forth, and Teddy is happy. He is part of a team. You think we can make it to the Arctic? asks Adam. You mean the ocean? Yeah, Adam says. Jesus, Teddy says, how far is that? Adam’s voice is defensive. It doesn’t take that long, maybe a week. A week there and a week back, Teddy says doubtfully. He doesn’t mention how much it would cost in gas because then Adam would try to buy half the rifle off him again, which would defeat the purpose of having it. Plus he wonders what happens if they get bored, have a fight, or just get sick of each other. He leans back and looks at the stars beyond the tarp, telling himself to relax and enjoy the ride. It’s a lot of driving to do on your own, he says eventually. Maybe, Adam says, not taking the bait. Adam suggests again that they walk to the bar, but this time it sounds more hypothetical. Both of them have taken root in their camping chairs, staring like old men at the darkness that must be the river. By the time the bourbon is a quarter gone, they’re both half-asleep. They lay their mats and sleeping bags side by side in what Adam calls the camper, a rigid bubble bolted to the rear part of the truck. When Teddy closes his eyes he sees the blue flame from the camp stove, then the blue light from the car stereo, then the horses. How weird they looked, how fake, but they were definitely real.

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed in The Tyee. On Oil was also reviewed in the Miramichi Reader: “Well-researched . . . [and] warns us that should we keep worshipping at the Oil & Gas altar, our story won’t have a happy ending.”
  • Catherine Khordoc, translator of Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron, and Me, was featured in an article on translation on the Carleton website.
  • A Way to Be Happy by Caroline Adderson was listed as one of CBC Books’ “14 Canadian short story collections to read for Short Story Month.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in On the Seawall: “Stoltenberg’s dual control of and surrender to the psyche of her novel most impressed me.”
  • A Case of Matricide by Graeme Macrae Burnet was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “It’s depressing, intriguing and quite engrossing.”

The Bibliophile: Two Nice People

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It’s Short Story Month, and we’re celebrating with one of the excellent stories from the recent linked collection Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. For those who missed it, our managing editor Vanessa wrote an unbeatable introduction to the book in an earlier post, which accompanies an interview between Maggie and publicist Ahmed well worth checking out, so I shall simply say we hope you enjoy this slice of Old Romantics’ arresting charm.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

*

Two Nice People

I was burying my little boy in sand when the policeman came right up to us. He cut out the sea and sky and I thought, what have I done now?

‘Hello there,’ he said, bending to our level. He was a shiny, compact kind of man, got up in hi-vis, shell tracksuit bottoms, sporty trainers; his summer uniform, I guessed. He didn’t wear the hat, but I knew from the badges on his arms and chest.

‘How are things here now don’t worry—because these days with everything people might see a policeman and think, Oh, I’m in trouble or something.’

‘Heh—no.’ I sat up straight and folded up my legs in such a way that he would not see any pubic hair. My swimming togs were very old and didn’t fit me properly. How many of them were here this time? I looked around but it was just this one policeman. ‘I’m Sergeant Pat Hourican,’ he was saying. Or Houlihan? O’Halloran? I didn’t really want to know his name.

‘I’m on duty up at the station on the main drag. And—hello there? This is your little fella?’

We both looked at the boy, buried to the waist. He was patting, imperiously, the sand around his body. Sand had got in everywhere, into his hair, his ears, eyebrows, nostrils. Once he noticed we were watching him he broke away and walked up to the dune to pick up stones and things. His only piece of clothing was a UV tank top with clouds and rainbows on it, and his little ass was coated in wet sand.

‘We’re obviously contented anyway, ha,’ the policeman said. He looked at me again. ‘Now, it’s a hot day, and very crowded out here.’ His eyes were bright like candle flames; his nose and cheeks were sunburned, as if all he did was patrol beaches.

‘Are ye visitors to the area, or . . . ?’

‘Yes. I come here all the time, I grew up here. We’re not just on holidays.’ I wanted to convey my separateness out here, and the policeman nodded; he understood.

‘I hear you, not exactly blow-ins.’ He edged closer on a taut calf muscle. ‘So. I just had a call there at the station, and I came to check if you were alright.’

‘Oh!’ Somebody came, I thought.

‘A call from a gentleman you may have met on the beach today.’

A gentleman. I couldn’t think of any gentleman.

‘A man who was a little bit concerned.’

‘Oh dear.’

The policeman nodded regretfully. ‘About the two of ye here, yes.’

‘Oh.’

The policeman looked inside me now, and I felt very peculiar, very bad, like I was being poisoned by my own friends. The boy was busy, collecting shells, seaweed, bits of rope and other debris. I saw the sleepy crowds, the tide, white horses, shimmering sea. Our patch of things. Mangled towels, opened suncream, sand-coated flask. Lunchbox, no lid; chocolate-smeared Wagon Wheel wrappers, one filled with a sand pie. In the game, you had to eat the sand pie and be sick. But I hadn’t played the game this time. Why had I not played the game this time? My book, a classic love story I was keen to finish and have read, was discarded, face down on its pages.

‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you, but I’m just responding to the call,’ the policeman went on. ‘So I hope it’s OK if I have a word with you here, ask a few questions. Just to find out what the story is.’

He took a pad of paper from a pocket in his jacket and he gave me a gallant little nod.

It was a half-truth, that I grew up here. We used to come here on our holidays, to a farm along an avenue where sheepdogs leapt, blackberries clustered in the briars, and bright-green cow-dotted fields, hiding flat white mushrooms, led right down to the rocky shore, and to the sea; and on hazy afternoons straw bales were tossed by the farmer onto trailers and the air was thick with pollen and wild perfumes.

The previous winter, I’d ended up very suddenly alone with my small son. Now it was time for freedom, time to be seen—maybe to be given some reward for tough endurance. Always I felt owed some happy time, some crock of gold, had no doubt but that it awaited us. The Airbnb, a bedroom and kitchenette, was clean and tasteful, and the farm just up the road looked much the same as I’d remembered it. They let us pick eggs and give a carrot to the horse. The weather was incredible, in fact it was a dangerous heatwave, with red warnings on the news. Every day we dragged ourselves into the car, and to the beach to cool off in the sea.

Today was the hottest day. In France, that week, four people died, and two in Spain. Here, people went around in a daze.

Up on the cliffs, the cars were sprawling from the car park onto the road and grass and golf links. The bins were overflowing, and long drooping queues of colourfully dressed families trailed from the Mr Whippy and chip vans. CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES, the sign read. We parked in a ditch and, holding hands, climbed the steep path down the cliffside to the beach. A sign said: DANGER, SUDDEN DROP BELOW.

On trips alone with my small son, to a beach or park, on planes or train journeys, I used to go up close to other families or friendly looking people. I had a beady eye for friendship on these traipses, for that gleam of openness and understanding that just might lead to company. At this beach, I pulled the boy around, checking faces under hats until we found a spot. It was a whole extended family. Mums, dads, aunts, uncles and kids, passing around crisp packets and soft drinks. The women stretched out on towels, the dads having conversations looking straight ahead of them, out to sea, the boys throwing a ball or digging a moat. They had castle moulds, pirate ships, sticky rackets, balls, snorkels—and we hadn’t thought of bringing any beach toys. I placed our bags in their periphery.

DANGER, COLLAPSING SAND DUNES. CAUTION, INCOMING TIDES. I unrolled our towels, shook the sand away. I set out the boy’s lunchbox: a peanut-butter sandwich sliced in triangles; four apple quarters turning brown; two Wagon Wheels, both already melted in their packets. And his turquoise water flask, decorated with pink octopi. The flask was stainless steel and the lunchbox bamboo, so—doing everything the right way here.

We had absolutely everything we needed. I looked around for something missing, something to stoke my anxiety, nothing came to mind. I got hold of him, coated him with Factor 50, put his cap on, stretched his limbs into his swimming trunks and rainbow top. He took his swimming trunks back off again, and sat down to play. He took his cap off, threw it away. Sun lit up his golden hair, and the shadows of his long eyelashes swept his face in lavish streaks.

I took out my paperback and looked for my page. I had forgotten water. His flask was full, but none for me. I looked up at the cliff, and the distance made my mouth feel dry. I lay back under the burning sun. You can’t have everything. I reached for his flask, but he got to it first.

Carefully, the boy unscrewed the flask, looked inside it, then tipped it upside down into the sand. He shook it hard to empty out the last few drops, then buried all the water, squatting right into his ankles. I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth and pulled myself to standing.

‘Come on.’ I took his hand. The tide was so far out it took forever, pebbles pushing at our heels, before we reached the water. We waded out and farther out. The sea was shallow, murky, strewn with seaweed and dead crabs. We went a little deeper, then with his arms around my neck and his legs around my body we plunged in. The waves surged and tossed him up and down and he broke away, gasping, flapping his arms and kicking his legs until he was completely separate from me, gulping and spitting seawater, laughing, showing every tooth inside his gums. I’ve never had the strength to test it, but it seems there is no limit to the fun this boy is capable of having. He snips up cables, opens teddies with a joyfulness he shouldn’t be deprived of. Sometimes he bursts out laughing in his sleep.

There is not much to report about the day now that I’ve sat down to try. The sun shone, birds called; I worried about the sun, about sunburn, I worried that I didn’t worry half as much as someone should. I worried about all the wrong things. The group beside us, they knew how to live—their bored and diligently playing children, a woman drinking Diet Coke, reading from her phone, on her back a tattoo of a bat with its wings spread.

He was running up and down, playing in the water of a little stream that trickled from the cliffs into the sea. It occurred to me that I should put his cap back on, and his swimming trunks. The sun shone down, and I turned from right to left to let it cook me on both sides. I felt its hot rays cutting through the parting on my scalp. Fizzy drink, I thought. Iced lemonade. Cold beer. Ice cubes. Cold glass of water.

The men, arms draped around knees, had their conversations. Talked of these extremes in temperature. Of boats at sea—or county councils. Planning applications, objections to the plans. They talked about the schools, they talked about the coaching—the hoops you had to go through. Most likely all of that. One had dark hair. I moved along the towel to get a closer look. He had a beard. He had a beard and yet—the face. Easy-going—small, hooked nose, cheeks stretched now, dark impressive beard—eyes that seemed sad, or just afraid. He was heavier now, but distinguished, by the beard, kind of—time had passed, but he’d remember me as well. I’d already pulled myself to sitting and was clambering forwards on the sand.

‘Excuse me? Hi?’

They turned to look at me.

‘Hi. Did you study Arts in UCD? Ten years ago—no, fifteen.’

The bearded man leaned back. His friend or brother glanced from me to him, the bearded man pointed at himself but I knew already. His face, up close, distorted into someone else’s.

‘Sorry,’ he said, looking at his friend or brother. ‘We’re from—!’ The name of a town. I hadn’t heard of it. His friendly Northern accent forgave everything. They laughed it away. I laughed back, and they turned back to face the sea. The boy at his marsh of sand, pouring in the seawater, mixing up his elements. Running to and fro in an ecstatic hurry.

I held up the book to block the sun, checking on him with one eye. My novel was insufferably long and heavy in my hand. I’d been reading this one for about four years, even though it was a classic and a bestseller. The book jacket, its technicolour drawing of a frightened woman running from a burning house, had come apart from being

carried around. I’d seen the Netflix adaptation, so the story held no mystery anymore, I knew who murdered who and why they did it, knew there was a shipwreck coming, two shipwrecks, that in the end a human skeleton would be fished out of the bottom of the sea.

I read a paragraph from start to finish, and the effort could have killed me. Half the words were cast in shadow, and the tiny print felt harmful to my eyes. The boy was lining up some rocks along the stream now, rushing, in great hurry.

DANGER, GOLF BALLS FLYING. I thought to take a little break from looking, so that I could be right here, just sink into this time. One eye was still open; now it drooped and rested closed and everything was calm. This way I could employ my hearing at its most acute. I could appreciate the heat, and air, the sound of waves, for what they were. DANGER, OR CAUTION, BEWARE OF BEING CUT OFF BY INCOMING TIDES. You can really open all your senses, absorb the moment, take time, when you’re allowed to close your eyes. I stretched an arm, found the book, and placed the pages on my face.

‘DO YOU HAVE A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND??? A SMALL BOY, THREE, BLOND???’

Loud like torchlight or a speeding car. I sat up.

He was on his hunkers, talking in a phone.

‘SHE’S HERE, I’VE FOUND HER.’

Pink man, yellow thinning hair. Short, doughy build. He had a job at hand. He didn’t have a whistle round his neck but it seemed that in some other situation he would have had a whistle, and a first-aid pack, and ID.

‘HE’S WITH US, HE’S OVER BY THE WATER!’

The beach had emptied. I reached around for things, then threw myself to standing. My legs were stilts. My legs weren’t working properly. Half-words fell out—not what I’d have said if I’d had time to collect all my thoughts. But I understood the urgency, and I would not begrudge these people their distress. One foot found the sand, and then another, and I ran, with difficulty, on stilts.

My little boy was standing, seeming very little and confused, at the shore, beside a woman in a sarong. She was talking in a high-pitched voice about the water, eyes wide in mine, with her hair neatly brushed and her hand on the shoulder of my little boy. I pulled him in and picked him up.

*

The policeman wasn’t particularly enjoying any of this either, I was to understand.

‘And do ye mind me asking, are ye alone together on your holidays?’

‘Oh yes. But lots of help around. Lots of family.’

‘Oh yes surely, good to hear, it takes a village doesn’t it.’ He made some scribbles in his notepad.

‘A village.’

‘Well to rear a child, doesn’t it.’

‘Oh, sorry, yes. You’re telling me!’

‘And how did ye get down here, was it in the car today?’

‘We parked illegally, Garda.’

‘Well I think now you wouldn’t be the first, heh heh.’

‘No, heh.’

‘The car park is choc-a-bloc, alright.’ He seemed to look inside me, with a tilt, and the most inveigling compassion.

‘Are you alright?’ He looked in my pupils and gave a quick high-pitched laugh.

‘Garda,’ I said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Right. Well, this afternoon I received a phone call. What happened was you, ehm, your child, came to the attention of a gentleman on the beach here, and a lady, two nice people. They said to me that you were there with a book, that you had your face inside the book. Physically, inside the book. Not just looking at the book, but unconscious, underneath the book.’

‘I was reading, Garda.’

‘OK, listen, when you got up off the ground, you seemed disoriented. They said you weren’t making any sense, they said—look. OK—I’ll tell you. They said you looked a bit dishevelled.’

‘Dishevelled.’ We both looked down at my appearance, which was of course dishevelled, a worry almost. All our stuff. Scattered everywhere. I shut my knees together and hugged them to my chest.

‘But look sure, you seem very well. And he’s a great lad.’

‘I am very well. I’m—I’ve just been burying my kid in sand here.’

I reached out for my beach bag, and opened it, and found my sunglasses. Tears burst out behind the frames while he told me about his kids.

‘They are a handful, boys. I’ve two myself at home, I have your sympathy, I’m sure.’

‘They’d send you to an early grave,’ I wept, laughing. Tears burst from my face. He wasn’t to know.

‘Oh, you’re preaching to the converted you are.’ He shut his notepad.

Before he left, I asked him where the two nice people were. I would like to thank them one more time for coming to our rescue. He pointed at the cliffs, where the rocks were clustered in a jagged ring, where the man and woman had been watching. I shook out our towels.

On the way home, we stopped and bought the last remaining can of 7up and two Cornettos from the petrol station. The moment we arrived back in the Airbnb, it filled with sand. I stood at the shower, rinsing down the boy, who twirled and laughed under the warm spray. I scrubbed him clean, washed the sand into the plughole, dried him off, then unwrapped his ice cream while he hopped from foot to foot with his arms outstretched.

That night he watched YouTube Kids while I finished all the bottle in the fridge. Then I uncorked something special, organic and spumante I’d saved specially for the holiday. The evening darkened, the boy fell asleep. I picked up the phone.

‘No, this time I’m going to ask you some questions!’ I was on the grainy bedspread, in déshabillé, dishevelled if you like, white flesh exposed to nobody, hair tangled in saltwater, a cone of melted ice cream tipped over on the bedside table. ‘I’m going to want phone numbers,’ I said. ‘Names and phone numbers!’ The boy slept on like a little angel. I drank the wine down to its last few vinegary droplets and flopped back, laughing, and waves crashed on my skull.

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in the Adroit Journal: “One emerges from the agile linguistic theatrics of this book [UNMET] feeling requited, met, seen, and inspired—a sensation that moves from writer to reader.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was excerpted in The Walrus.

The Bibliophile: The ghost in the machine

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Want to get new excerpts, musings, and more from The Bibliophile right away? Sign up for our weekly online newsletter here!

***

It surprised me that the most riveting book I’ve read this year is on a topic I knew nothing about and didn’t think I would care to know much about anyway. But Don Gillmor hooked me. That won’t surprise anyone who has read him before. In On Oil, Gillmor, a journalist and former roughneck, takes us through the rise and fall of the oil industry. He had a front row seat to Alberta’s oil boom in the ’70s while working on the oil rigs and he uses that perspective to show how it transformed the province and the wide-ranging influence oil has had across the world. It has given some countries immense wealth and power. It has also corrupted governments, started wars, and worsened our environment.

Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

Please enjoy this short excerpt from On Oil, which will be released on April 22.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

***

Babylon

In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023 it imported 8.51 million barrels per day (bpd) from dozens of countries, and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost-effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between US$5 and 15 billion. With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool.

Photo: We’re hiring a new sales coordinator! See our website for more details.

Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline.

It binds us all. Oil has a pulse, it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. It powered our lives: We are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine.

***

After graduating from university, I worked on an oil rig for a hundred straight days, with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late sixties, one in his seventies, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and western song. Pete, the wobbly seventy-two-year-old derrickman, came home to find his wife gone, along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains. There was a note on the floor: “Your dinner’s in the oven.” There was no oven. The driller was a ropy-muscled troll who had worked on the killing floor of a meat-packing plant but quit finally, saying it took too much of you, all that death. My fellow roughneck was a farmer whose modest crop had been lost to drought. He was in his late sixties, with a deeply lined face, a face that could hold a spring rain, as my grandmother might have said. Between connections he would roll a cigarette and walk to the edge of the lease and smoke and stare at the horizon.

Photo: Check out Don Gillmor’s new feature in Maclean’s.

I went up in the derrick when Pete was drunk or too hungover to climb the thirty metres onto his perch. We were south of Calgary and I was ten storeys off the ground, a view of the Rockies to the west and limitless prairie to the east, farms and ranches laid out like a Mondrian painting, a glorious solitude.

With my first paycheque I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete and here was the residue. Only two months earlier, the Amoco Cadiz had split apart off the Brittany coast in France, spilling 230,000 tonnes of oil, at that point the largest spill in history. Twenty thousand birds were killed and millions of sea creatures. Two months after the spill, six thousand French soldiers were still cleaning up the coastline.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil tanker spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. It was peak spill, with an alarming 788 of them (by contrast, the 2010s saw 63 spills). Millions of tonnes spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil.

***

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda, and wrote the article “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil” for Maclean’s.
  • Ripper was mentioned in The Hill Times: “A bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.” Mark Bourrie was also featured in Vancouver CityNews’s Bookshelf.
  • Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books: “A master of words . . . [Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road.”
  • A few of our titles appear in the Literary Review of Canada’s May 2025 issue:
    • Review of On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “Persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.’”
    • Review of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc): “Demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”
    • Review of UNMET by stephanie roberts: “With a resolute inward stare, Roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”