Ritual, Interrupted by David Ly (Palimpsest Press)
Vancouver, BC
All Lit Up: What’s a favourite spot to visit in your hometown/where you live?
David Ly: One of my favourite spots is anywhere along the seawall where I can walk and focus on the water sloshing nearby. I love being there as the day draws on, and the tidal rhythm changes. I feel very lucky to live in an area so close to the water–I don’t think I could survive anywhere else!
Click here to learn more about Ritual, Interrupted + purchasing options.
Cantaloupe! by M. Jay Smith (Freehand Books)
Edmonton, AB
All Lit Up: Do you have a favourite spot to visit in your hometown/where you live?
M. Jay Smith: This is going to sound a bit unhinged, but one of my favourite landmarks in my hometown, Edmonton, is the Talus Dome. It’s a piece of public art that has been incredibly controversial since it was first installed in 2011. Do you hate public art? Well, it cost $600,000 and it’s just a bunch of giant ball bearings in a heap by a highway. Ugly! Also, the artists aren’t even local—Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues, who created the piece, live in Los Angeles. And let’s not get started on geology. According to the artists, the shiny balls are meant to represent talus—bits of rock that accumulate at the bottom of cliffs or mountains. But Edmonton isn’t close to the mountains. And our soil is clay. And… talus aren’t round?
But what a landmark it has become! Sure, it’s beside an urban highway, but it’s also smack in the middle of the river valley, at the nexus of four active transit routes. It’s rare to pass by and not see someone engaging with the Dome. The reflectiveness of the spheres just invites interaction. Running and cycling groups stop for selfies. My kids, when they were small, loved to climb inside the sculpture and peer out. (A few years ago, someone larger tried this party trick, but couldn’t squeeze out again. Firefighters had to cut open the structure to rescue him, but Ball—is that even his real name?—and Nogues had anticipated such a mishap—there is an emergency exit that no one involved knew about. Next time!)
When I run in the river valley, which is something I love to do, the Talus Balls (that’s what we locals call them) are a reminder of the complicated and wonderful ways that art infiltrates our lives. A big pile of silver balls is perhaps easy to hate in the abstract. But it’s much harder to dislike when you see how much joy and curiosity it continually sparks. To me, it’s a symbol of the silly and nonsensical ways that art invites, quite literally, reflection. I hope that I’ve captured some of that spirit in Cantaloupe!
Click here to learn more about Cantaloupe! + purchasing options.
No Shelter for the Wicked by Raye Anderson (Signature Editions)
Winnipeg Beach, Manitoba
All Lit Up: Does your community feature in your book in some way? How?
Raye Anderson: Here I am standing at the beach from which Winnipeg Beach gets its name, with its iconic water tower in the background.
This is where I live in the Manitoba Interlake, a resort town, less than an hour’s drive north of Winnipeg, on the shore of Lake Winnipeg. On hot summer weekends the beach is full of visitors and the cottage owners are often in residence. The population quadruples. Once there was a fairground with a giant rollercoaster and a dance hall, and people arrived by the trainload. Now people drive here and are content to swim and relax, stroll along the boardwalk, eat ice cream and listen to the music at the bandstand on a Saturday night.
In the winter, when the lake freezes over, the lake is a favourite place to ice fish and drive on skidoos.
I write crime fiction and this landscape provides me with all kinds of settings where dead bodies might turn up. So far, in the Roxanne Calloway series, one has been found dangling over the water from the end of a pier, another lying under six feet of ice in the middle of winter, and a third, out in the water of that beautiful bay, wrapped in a fishing net.
This is where I come to walk when I am in need of a new idea, at the beginning or end of a day, when it is quiet.
This is a great place to visit, but also to live in and write.
Click here to learn more about No Shelter for the Wicked + purchasing options.
Madness Belongs to the People by Jody Chan (Brick Books)
Toronto, ON
All Lit Up: What’s one thing happening in your local arts and culture scene that you’re excited about right now?
Jody Chan: It feels like there’s a real renaissance of DIY spaces in the city—from long-time scene staples like the Tranzac (and its resident Toronto Zine Library); to Bootsy’s, a basement-apartment-cum-venue in Kensington Market hosting community breakfasts, experimental music nights, and tenant organizing art builds; to the No Arms In The Arts campaign’s annual-ish festival of workshops, screenings, panels, and counter-programming. Despite weathering decades of austerity, arts workers find ways to organize collectively and make beautiful/weird things happen, without relying on stagnant government granting systems or companies that also fund bombs and drones!
Click here to learn more about Madness Belongs to the People + purchasing options.
Catch, Drive, Release, Recover by Olivia Pillai Quinney
(Cormorant Books)
Belleville, ON
All Lit Up: Do you have a favourite spot to visit in your hometown/where you live?
Olivia Pillai Quinney: My community lives in the pages of my book, woven through every mention of rowing. I arrived in Belleville in the strange, hushed months of the pandemic, and it was the Quinte Rowing Club I turned to first. Nervous at first, they quickly made me feel like part of their crew and friend circle.
Click here to learn more about Catch, Drive, Release, Recover + purchasing options.
Tall, Grass, Girl by Tanis MacDonald (Book*hug Press)
Waterloo, ON
All Lit Up: Do you have a favourite spot to visit in your hometown/where you live?
Tanis MacDonald: The idea of a hometown is doubled for me. I have now lived almost as long in Ontario as I have in southern Manitoba, and I am still sometimes called a prairie writer despite my more eastern residence. (The writer Ariel Gordon calls me “the once and future Winnipegger.”) Writing Tall, Grass, Girl required that perform a little hometown sleight of hand: access the pull of a used-to-be-local environment while living elsewhere. So while I took trips to the prairies to soak up the long light and the sound of cottonwood leaves in the wind, sensual elements that are important tot the book, I had to come home to Waterloo sometime, and I had to find a way to write about there while being here: a hometown-transplant strategy.
For this, the trails of the Laurel Creek Conservation Area were (and still are) my saving grace. I walk them several times a month in all seasons, and this helped to weave together two environments imaginatively. A walk in the woods in Waterloo acts as a catalyst for writing about Manitoba, though it’s more of an infinity ratio than a one-to-one substitution. In a way, it works not because the environments are alike, but because they are different, and in the slippage of that difference, walking here means remembering there.
Click here to learn more about Tall, Girl, Grass + purchasing options.
Aether and Ego by Joanne Merriam (Inanna Publications)
Halifax, NS
All Lit Up: Is there any literary lore in your hometown/where you live?
Joanne Merriam: Halifax has a number of literary giants in its past. L.M. Montgomery and Philippe-Ignace-François Aubert de Gaspé Jr. were both journalists here for a time. Anna Leonowens lived here for two decades. Thomas Raddall went to school here and lived through the Halifax Explosion. Given my book’s connection to Jane Austen, I was delighted to learn from Sarah Emsley’s novel The Austens that two of Austen’s brothers were stationed here. And of course, many contemporary writers live here now.
Charles R. Saunders was one of those. An American, he moved to Ottawa to escape the draft, and some years later settled in Halifax. He was a well-known journalist for the Halifax Daily News and wrote a number of books about African Nova Scotian history. That’s how I knew him, slightly, in the ‘90s when I worked at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia, of which he was a member. I didn’t know it then, but he was spending his spare time inventing the fantasy genre of Sword & Soul, a sword and sorcery sub-genre set in a fictional prehistoric Africa. His Imaro books were partially written in his apartment above the long-standing and legendary Trident Booksellers & Cafe, where I go to write weekly with a group of speculative fiction writers (this group also runs the annual TriCon, a conference for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and horror). I wish I had known about his fantasy writing when I had occasion to meet him briefly in the ‘90s!
Click here to learn more about Aether and Ego + purchasing options.
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