Why I Wrote This Book: Issue #28

Featuring Michelle McLean, Michael Trussler, Courtner Bates-Hardy, and Ben Berman Ghan

Why do your favourite Canadian authors write the books they write? Let’s find out in this exclusive feature here at The Miramichi Reader.


Michelle McLean, author of Tesserae (Chapel Street Editions, April 2024)

Life can be so messy, painful and sharp, but somehow still beautiful. That’s what I’ve learned and continue to learn. We can sometimes be utterly shattered by the things that happen to us.  We also have the power and artistry to rebuild and make something new. My poetry collection, Tesserae, traces the journey of trauma, grief, addiction and recovery. I’ve described it as “equal parts scream and lullaby”. Poetry has always been both a compulsion and healing force in my life. It’s how I process my emotions and make sense of my experiences.

While writing these poems has been a personal journey, it is also my sincere hope that sharing them will play some small part in breaking down the stigma that folks with addictions and mental health issues continue to face.  We’ve come a long way when it comes to stigma, but we have a long, long way to go — particularly for those suffering from substance use disorder. Stigma kills. There’s simply no other way to say it.  Stigma is one of the biggest barriers to treatment and recovery for substance use disorders according to the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (and my own anecdotal experience). We need to fight stigma. It’s a matter of life and death for too many people. Stigma has devastating impacts for individuals, families and communities. It keeps people isolated and alone when they need support the most. We are all on a continuum of wellness and illness and finding ourselves at different points on that spectrum throughout our lives. There is no “us” and “them”.  There is only “us”. 

Michelle McLean is a grateful mother, clinical social worker and addictions counsellor, educator, animal and nature-lover, dreamer, and seeker of treasure in all forms. Her poetry has appeared in a number of publications, including Quillselm & ampersandAscent AspirationsPeacock JournalUnderstoreyOther VoicesSulfur, and JONAH. Her collection of children’s poetry, When Pigs Fly and Other Poems, was published in 2020 by Chapel Street Editions. Her eldest daughter, Sophie Arseneau, is the illustrator and her youngest daughter, Lily Arseneau, is a contributing illustrator. Michelle and her family live in Carlow, New Brunswick.


Courtney Bates-Hardy, author of Anatomical Venus (Radiant Press, April 2024)


When I started writing poems for my second collection of poetry, I found myself fascinated with the figure of the Anatomical Venus while reading Joanna Ebenstein’s book, The Anatomical Venus: God, Death, Wax, and the Ecstatic. An Anatomical Venus is an 18 th century wax figure of a woman who is fully dissectible. These figures were created to make death and suffering look beautiful, even erotic, and therefore, easier to study for doctors at the time.

I didn’t know why these figures fascinated me so much at the time. It took me a long time to realize that I was writing about the Anatomical Venus because she embodied my experience, and many women’s experiences. She is a visual representation of the contradiction of suffering while remaining beautiful and desirable in the eyes of those who would either deny or fetishize our pain. Like the Anatomical Venus, we are required to perform our femininity in ways that can either engender sympathy or mean we are not taken seriously.

Most people don’t know that I experience chronic nerve pain. Some people might notice that I rub my left shoulder or neck frequently, that I stretch often, change positions a lot, prefer not to sit on hard chairs for long. Most people do notice that I dress well, style my hair, and wear makeup every day. The nature of pain, especially chronic pain, is that it is invisible. I spent a long time hoping that I would eventually heal. I had to learn that chronic pain is a cyclical experience. That I will have days with pain and days without, days when I am more productive and days when I must rest, and that I must manage my pain as well as I can.

I hope that the people who need to read Anatomical Venus do. I hope that it makes you feel less alone. Writing it helped me to learn more about myself and find others with similar experiences. I included a quote from Amanda Leduc at the beginning of the book that asks, “What sort of happy ending can be found in constant struggle?” The final poem in the book is my answer to that question. I’d like to add that I find that happy ending in those I’ve met who have similar struggles. I find it in our conversations, our empathy for each other, and our deep understanding of the pain we carry from day to day.

Courtney Bates-Hardy is the author of House of Mystery (ChiZine Publications, 2016) and a chapbook, Sea Foam (JackPine Press, 2013). Her poems have been published in Grain, Vallum, PRISM, and CAROUSEL, among others. She has been featured in Best Canadian Poetry 2021 (Biblioasis) and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is queer, neurodivergent, and disabled, and one-third of a writing group called The Pain Poets. She lives in Regina, Saskatchewan.


Michael Trussler, author of Realia (Radiant Press, April 2024)

Realia was composed during a period of upheaval, both personal and social-environmental. Part of the book was written in response to my ongoing mental health problems, specifically my OCD, which seems to be worsening. Much of the book is concerned with the ongoing environmental collapse that all life forms are facing. I wanted to write poetry and mini-essays that respond to the problems intrinsic to being alive today and to do so in a way that is honest, entirely unpredictable, and sane. Or perhaps not. A good poem, to me, is one that is utterly opaque and entirely clear.

A mini-essay called “There’s Been a Murmur” explicitly engages with what it’s like to be neuro-atypical (I have a learning disability); a negative repercussion of this condition is chronic depression and anxiety; I suspect, though, that a good thing about being neuro-atypical is that it seems to make me very sensitive to colour and very appreciative of the natural world. This essay, a kind of extended prose poem, attempts to grasp why colour is so vivifying as well as embody how a mind with OCD attempts to function.

The book, as a collection of poetry, embraces and anguishes over what it means to write poetry, particularly lyric poetry in our contemporary moment. A strategy the book employs is to abandon the singular, often unified voice traditionally associated with the lyric and attempt to listen in on the multiverse that is our now; and then channel the voices implicit to cargo ships, mitochondria, true crime documentaries, space trash and the light shows octopuses make alone in their dens. Each poem is thereby a new experiment, a probe into the unknown, both in terms of subject matter and how words might combine to give shape to these explorations. Put differently, the collection seeks to grasp how, in order to write poetry these days, one must nearly forget what a poem actually is. A Symbolist robocall spoken by Marcel Duchamp. If many of the poems are elegiac, they are also celebratory: an homage to Katherine Mansfield reflects on her resilience, her exuberant and hard won insights alongside the recent implosion of a million liter aquarium in Berlin, flooding a street that once saw Nazi parades.

All along, Realia converses with images (from those created by Caspar David Friedrich to Kevin Carter and several movies), ethical philosophy and contemporary cultural theory.

Seneca and Philippa Foot look toward Lauren Berlant and Jane Bennett using Arnold Schwarzenegger as an intermediary. As many have noted, it’s a weird time. More than anything, I wrote this book to try to (fleetingly) capture this weirdness.

Michael Trussler lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. He writes poetry and creative non-fiction. His work has appeared in Canadian and American journals and has been included in domestic and international anthologies. A photographer, he has a keen interest in the visual arts and is neurodivergent. He teaches English at the University of Regina.


Ben Berman Ghan, author of The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn, May 2024)

Imagine you’re standing on a balcony in London, staring up at the moon. Tomorrow, you’ll fly home again to Toronto with the creeping and uncertain feeling that your home will not always be yours. Inside you, the story begins taking root. You write a short story about a ghost, a holographic man who comes to life, hiding in the city, as refugees of a lunar colony crash back to Earth. You think for a while, that’s that. You move on.

Imagine, then, you are standing on a beach eight, maybe nine months later. The entire world has shut down. It’s so quiet. You’re trying not to think about the master’s thesis you’ve left waiting unfinished in your little basement apartment. You wiggle your feet against the water at Cherry Beach, and when you look up, the moon hangs in the afternoon sky. In one of the little pocket notebooks you’ve been carrying around since the start of your bachelor’s, you take out your paper and your pen, and you scribble while still looking up:

Imagine something like an angel kneeling on the moon, planting seeds.

I mean, it was something like that. This book went through a lot of editing, both on my own and later as my editors at Buckrider Books helped me make sense of myself and what I’d done. But for the sake of story structure, please accept it. I wrote The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits for probably too many reasons to put down here. It has a hefty list of both critical and creative inspirations. But those are dry and dusty things to discuss. The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits starts in the middle, because it is a novel that eschews beginnings. It starts with that first ghost I wrote, already neck deep in a chaotic and unfair world. And it starts with Daisy, a cyborg agent of the state with no memory of her past, who is fired at the moon like a bullet. It’s a book that I wrote like a riddle or a puzzle, throwing myself at the pieces again and again until the last piece of everything went click.

It is a novel about dying, and finding yourself in newly formulated identites — as both I and so many of the people in my life were finding themselves. It is a novel about preparing to say goodbye to a person, or a city, or a world. It is a novel about melting the divide between natural/unnatural, and giving up on the idea of a pristine natural world, as well as the idea of a pristine natural human. I wrote this novel for love, and delight (and even delight at horror). Most of all, I wrote this novel for You, Not a specific you, but a You to delight and frighten, and a You that is me, too.

Ben Berman Ghan (he/him) is the author of the novel The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits (Wolsak & Wynn 2024), as well as the collection What We See in the Smoke (Crowsnest books 2019), and the novella Visitation Seeds (845 Press 2020). His prose and poetry and essays have previously been published in Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, The Blasted Tree Publishing Co., The Temz Review and others. He lives and writes in Calgary, Alberta, where he is a Ph.D. student in English literature at The University of Calgary. You can find him at www.inkstainedwreck.ca.