Literary Spring

Now that I’m not sick or injured (my ribs are still sore but no longer in a life-limiting way) and we’re not experiencing any blizzards or polar vortexes, it is a great time to embrace literary spring in Canada. I’m excited! I’m also pretty excited to go to the drug store these days (see above) but this stuff is really quite good. This is of course but a small sampling of things that have come my way, but nevertheless: really good.

Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, an anthology of speculative fiction about a food-insecure future, will be available on Tuesday—grab your copy! It has a story by resident weirdo Mark Sampson and assorted weird friends like Terri Favro, Lisa de Nikolits, and many more. If you are going to be in Toronto and available to party on April 2, please come celebrate the book and hear some readings at Teddy Beer—I believe there are other launches in other cities to come!

I’m happy to share that I’ve recently joined the Board of Directors at INKSpire, an organization that supports young writers and helps them to gain experience and publishing credits, find mentorship and connection and build a writing portfolio. As my first act as an official board member, I have been promoting the opportunity to become an INKSpire fellow. Check it out at this link or below, and please share with anyone you think could benefit:

INKspire's Writer Fellowship Program is a free, year-long program for women ages 18-24 to build a professional writing portfolio, gain hands-on publishing experience, and engage with Toronto's literary community through workshops, mentorship and collaborative projects.

Benefits include:
Being part of a supportive writing community.
Receiving personalized feedback from editors.
Publishing five pieces on INKspire and being featured in our printed anthology.
Gaining industry insight through workshops, networking, and mentorship.
Participating in a capstone project with literary grassroots organizations.
Receiving guidance and mentorship from our Writer-in-Residence.
More information is available on our website.

Submit your applications here

Applications are due March 31, but don't wait until the last minute to apply! And if you know anyone who would be interested, please share this information with them.

I blurbed a couple books this spring and one is The Northern by Jacob McArthur Mooney from ECW. One of the awkward things about blurbing books is you have to venture an opinion on record about a book that has no other opinions on record yet, and the author will generally very respectfully refuse to tell you what they would like or expect you to say. I say this not because I ever blurb disingenuously—I really only write something for works I truly admire—just as someone who occasionally misinterprets rather badly even work I like a lot and that would be an embarrassing thing to do when I was trying to give a compliment. (although Daniel Lavery did write a substack partly about how we blurbers might CALM DOWN a bit and take ourselves less seriously—”blurb casually” were his words. As a person who has rarely even eaten a sandwich casually, I have not been able to do this, but I take the words to heart nonetheless).

Anyway, i have now read the OTHER blurbs about The Northern, and I think that my interpretation is not outside the realm of reasonable interpretations—that it’s about how growing up is partly about seeing grownups for what they really are, fallible creatures, and how baseball, the most cerebral, mathematical, and somehow knowable of games, is still not without its mysteries, and very human failings. The thing (a thing, among others) that I like about JMM’s poetry is the rich and complex world the poems spin up, and in a novel, a novel set in 1952 in Southern Ontario, there’s a lot of scope for this type of world-building. The detail feels breathable without that research-y self-insistence you sometimes get with historical books.

Can you tell I have lost my actual blurb and it’s not on the website? Anyway, I forget what I wrote but I remember how I felt reading the book—immersed, fully present, amused and sad and hopeful—and I hope you read it too. It’s great. Also, in case the ECW marketing folks don’t pick up on this, I feel it is my duty to point out that this book is destined to be given as a gift to a lot of people who “aren’t big readers” but love baseball. And I think those people will end up loving it, it’s an interesting slice of history and such a good story, well-told.

The other book I blurbed for spring 2025 is Caitlin Galway’s A Song for Wildcats. This one I can actually find my blurb for and it’s this: “A haunting collection of stories that span the world, the twentieth century, and the human heart. A truly huge achievement, but it's the small details of Galway's characters that will stay with readers long after the book is back on the shelf.” There’s only five stories in this collection, and they are long, and all very disparate and very complicated—a young man exiled to a small town in France after a queer affair at boarding school, falling in love and realizing that past affair might not have been what he hoped it was, all against the backdrop of the Paris uprising. That encapsulation is basically what happened but doesn’t even touch what it feels like to read the story—Galway is all about tone, atmosphere, and she is very very good at it. The best story is the last one (per the rules of collection building I was taught, correctly) “The Lyrebird’s Bell” about two young girls in the Australian wilderness just after WWII more or less unsupervised, trying to take care of each other. Writing that, it sounds very strange, and not at all what I would want to read and yet I was enthralled and really thought it was brilliant. Which just goes to show, a good enough writer can make anything good.

And finally, I published a short professional development article at my job today, called How Does Government Advocacy Work at Magazines Canada? It is paywalled so you can only read it if you are a member at MagsCan or work for a member publisher, but I know a few readers here fit that bill. And if you aren’t, or don’t care about the content, you can just nod and feel happy for me, since I haven’t published anything in a while and this feels like a little win, even if not at all on the level of what’s above.

<3

RR