In Review: The Week of November 2nd

On the Blog

~ For Adoption Awareness Month, Jane Byers, author of the new memoir Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family (Caitlin Press) recounts her first days of being a parent to adopted twins: “They say newly adopted kids will be shopping for parents with anyone they see, so we did everything for them.”~ When poet Jessica Moore began writing The Whole Singing Ocean (Nightwood Editions)—the true story of a boat builder who saw the eye of a whale—she thought the story was complete: “It dislocated his memory of what he had believed, until then, to be the most extraordinary adventure of his life.”~ Pedlar Press and book designer Emma Allain discuss her work on Su Croll’s Seeing Martin—from finding the right mix of typefaces, to choosing the right cover image, and her previous work on designing books within the Pedlar portfolio: Seeing Martin~ In the #IndieReadingRoom this week playwright and emcee Donna-Michelle St. Bernard talks about how Sound of the Beast~ Journalist and author Susan Perly talks about the healing power of visual art: “If you’re lucky in an art exhibit room, you’re a mess, unslept, hairy and scabby and lost, and your rib cage cracks, your bones part to allow you to reach in, and pull your heart out, beating in your hand.”

Around the Web

~ The virtual 2020 Giller Light Bash happens on Monday, November 9 and is free to register.~ The Toronto Book Awards shortlist was announced, which included a past Indie Reading Room author Jean Marc Ah-Sen (In the Beggarly Style of Imitation, Nightwood Editions) ~ Toni Morrison’s personal library is up for sale and includes some surprising and not-so-surprising finds. 

ICYMI (last week) 

Mirror’s Edge 

Alex Passey on good speculative fiction and the politics behind his novel Mirror’s Edge (At Bay Press):”Even if we see one world much closer in relation to ourselves than the other, if we dig deep enough, we might find that the grand narratives which drive these communities, separated by dimensional boundaries of reality, are not that different.”