Columnists

Reading Books While Desperately Avoiding Loneliness

There was a tree surrounded by countless of its kind, but also all alone, as the only one alive. Its nearby kin debarked and digested, steamed into slop, robbed of their resin and lignin, cleaned, screened, ...

An Interview with R. Kolewe

“There’s no doubt that there’s a politics of nostalgia.” - R. KoleweAfter reading R. Kolewe’s Inspecting Nostalgia, discovering that his previous life involved working in software made sense. ...

Dear UBC Accountable

Dear UBC Accountable,It’s been one year since you released your open letter to UBC, and Canada, and the world. I don’t want to wish you a happy birthday, because it’s not happy. Not for me, and ...

Publishers and Awards

Though fall isn’t quite as busy a time for children’s literature awards as it is for the adult side of CanLit, the two most prominent prizes, the Governor General’s Literary Awards for text and ...

Books of the Year

The end of the year is predictably a time for reviewing, taking stock, and of course, lots and lots of best of lists. In the world of books, there are some pretty obvious picks—award winners, best sellers, ...

Talking to Picture Book Creators - Part Two

Welcome back! I hope you enjoy part 2 of my Q and A with the creators of four super picture books—Nicola Winstanley, author of A Bedtime Yarn, Shauntay Grant, author of The Walking Bathroom, Scot ...

So You Want to Write About Race

Somehow I have become on expert on writing race.This was not something I planned for. When I started publishing, I was writing fiction about Chinese Canadian characters, about families who had been invisible ...

An Interview with Canisia Lubrin

“I think memory, or more specifically, history, plays a role in how we understand ourselves." - Canisia Lubrin. The encyclopedic poetry of Canisia Lubrin simultaneously works on intellectual and cerebral ...

Talking to Picture Book Creators - Part One

Admit it: Don’t you just wish you were me sometimes?Because when I recently came across four super picture books—A Bedtime Yarn by Nicola Winstanley, The Walking Bathroom by Shauntay Grant, Federica ...

On Being an Ill Writer

Every day for a few years now, I’ve had to navigate my fatigue. Sometimes it’s only subtle, tugging at my consciousness as a toddler might. Sometimes it’s pervasive and insistent: clouding my thoughts, ...