Author: ALU Editor
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Poetry in Motion: Sadie McCarney + Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking
The bold, Lisa Frank-esque cover of Sadie McCarney’s sophomore poetry collection Your Therapist Says It’s Magical Thinking (ECW Press) encases an introspective look into living with mental illness and her queer identity, specifically asexuality. She reads two poems from the collection for today’s Poetry in Motion.
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Reflections from the Contributors of Where They Stood
A collaborative anthology by young Black writers and the Black Community Resource Centre,Where They Stood (Linda Leith Publishing) showcases the evolution of the Black Anglo community in Montreal. The collection features essays by nine writers exploring the rich histories of immigrants, labourers, and activists who built the cultural, social and political community that exists to…
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Adventurize Your Summer: An Interview with Chris Pannell
Today we chat with award-winning poet Chris Pannell about his latest work, Adventurize Your Summer! (Wolsak and Wynn)—a collection of poems that contemplates travel, art, and humanity—and how his love/hate relationship with cruise vessels inspired the poem “The Captain’s Voice.” Read our short interview with Chris and a poem from his collection, below.
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Character Study: Lost Dogs
The darkly funny, character-driven debut novel Lost Dogs (Cormorant Books) would totally work as a feature film – and we’re glad its author, Lucie Pagé, agrees! Lucie donned our casting director’s cap to choose actors for characters Becca, Caroline, Katherine, and others, plus a director who could definitely bring their various stories home.
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ALU Summer Book Club: Yaga Staff Discussion
This week ALU book club broke out the snacks and met to discuss Kat Sandler’s Yaga (Playwrights Canada Press), our August book club pick. We shared thoughts on the whip-smart dialogue (seriously consider a play for your next book club for the dialogue alone!), representations of women, the Twin Peaks-ish vibe of the story, and more. Read…
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Under the Cover: A community of development workers in We Meant Well
As a Sustainable Development Consultant for various UN agencies, Erum Shazia Hasan was inspired to write her debut novel We Meant Well (ECW Press) after working in Haiti, and noticing a community of fellow development workers that was seldom mentioned in fiction. She discusses her experiences and how they tie back to the protagonist of We Meant Well, below.
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Read This, Then That: Debut Poetry
Grief, displacement, and survival are central themes in the works of these two debut poetry collections: Mirabel’s The Vanishing Act (& the Miracle After) (Guernica Editions) and Laila Malik’s archipelago (Book*hug Press) wade through loss and longing with completely unique expression.
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Quoted: Homebodies
Writer and poet Amy LeBlanc heads up her first collection of short stories, Homebodies (Great Plains Press) with an epigraph from none other than Emily Dickinson. Amy walks us through the quotation and why its evocation of hauntings-sans-houses is so fitting for her slightly uncanny, deeply human set of stories.
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ALU Summer Book Club: Interview with Kat Sandler
This week of ALU Summer Book Club we chat with author Kat Sandler of the irresistibly readable play Yaga (Playwrights Canada Press) about her take on the infamous Baba Yaga as “a villain and a protagonist,” how she loves creating complex female characters—especially older ones who are often invisible—and her approach to writing comedy.
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Read an Excerpt from The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles
The highly anticipated follow-up to Forgotten Work, Jason Guriel’s The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles (Biblioasis) is an imaginative verse novel set in the nearish future. Told in rhyming couplets, the story is an off-the-charts adventure ride with werewolf whalers and cult YA authors that the Toronto Star describes as “a dreamy mystery […] that’s going to…
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Where in Canada: Places Like These
Lauren Carter takes us on a tour of the places she’s lived – from the turbulent north shore of Lake Huron, to the American Southwest, to remote Manitoba, and then just outside Winnipeg – and shares how they’ve inspired her writing, most recently her deeply human collection of short stories, Places Like These (Book*hug Press).
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ALU Summer Book Club: Intro to Yaga
This summer’s book club theme is of the supernatural crime thriller variety: last month we read the Indigenous crime thriller Humane by Anna Marie Sewell (Stonehouse Publishing); this month we’re sleuthing the genre-bending comedic fairy tale meets thrilling whodunit Yaga by Kat Sandler. Today we chat with Playwrights Canada Press Publisher Annie Gibson about the book: “I love that the answer…
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Character Study: Sunsetter
Curtis LeBlanc’s new novel Sunsetter (ECW Press) asks who are the “good guys”, and who are the villains, when corruption is rife and opportunities are few? Incredible characters coupled with its bleak, former-industrial prairie town setting, we think it has everything it needs to be a great movie. Curtis dons our casting director’s cap to pick…
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Top 10: Literary Friendships
With the International Day of Friendship taking place this weekend (July 30), why not grab a bestie and buckle up for these top 10 friendships in literature?
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Poetry in Motion: Jade Wallace + Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There
In their debut collection Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There (Guernica Editions), Jade Wallace gifts us a series of vignette-like poems that reflect on home and our relationships to each other and to the places we inhabit.Below, Jade reads “Blood Shift,” from their collection and tells us how the poem recalls the works of…