Louise Erdrich and Barbara Kingsolver, Amy Tan and Elizabeth Strout: these are some of the writers whose stories about parenting, and being parented, stand out in my mind. Claudia Dey’s fiction could be included here, too, although her stories spiral around alienation and abandonment—the ways in which those who
Poetry is a place into which we can disappear from pain. In these collections, there are many other themes explored, but these passages intertwined like threads through my reading. In “A Toothless Crackhead Was the Mascot” from Reginald Dwayne Betts’ Bastards of the Reagan Era (2015): “This begins the concept
A couple of weeks ago, I attended Wordstock, a literary festival in Northern Ontario (they presented all their events in-person and online), and one of my favourite discussions was between three northern Indigenous authors, which reminded me that I had intended to share some other recent Indigenous reads. The Wordstock
Picking up yesterday's thread, the balance in Seçkin’s novel sways toward the personal, whereas the political scene in Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths (2021) is more prominent, despite all the attention paid to characterization—a network that grows increasingly complex as readers turn the pages. (And there’s at
Last week, I wrote about learning that Margaret Atwood has been a long-time supporter and admirer of Thomas King’s writing, a writer I’ve enjoyed reading for a couple of decades. And I teased that this week I’d be writing about someone whose books likely wouldn’t have landed in my
