Why I Wrote This Book: Issue # 32

Featuring Joelle Barron, Patrick Connors, Marianne Miller, and Jade Wallace.

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


Joelle Barron, author of Excerpts from a Burned Letter (Harbour Publishing, April 2024)

I wrote this book for the same reason I ever write anything at all — to hopefully be better understood than I am in person, or even through other forms of writing. There’s something so much easier for me about communicating in images and metaphors and all of poetry’s many devices. When I sit down and try to explain why I wrote what I wrote, I feel stuck. I did it because I just did. I had to. 

Many of the poems in this book were probably inspired by oppositional defiance. If a historian can say a figure or character definitely wasn’t queer or trans, then I can say they definitely were. If the argument is, “We understand queerness and trans-ness too differently now,” then I can layer my own experiences and modern understandings of identity over these historical identities, hopefully demonstrating that time really is a flat circle. We’re told that to assume queerness causes harm. I hope these poems celebrate and encourage those assumptions, in a way that is mostly silly and not too serious. 

Where I’m from is also an important part of my identity, and I enjoyed taking historical figures and pulling them into this very particular corner of the world, imagining them reincarnated here. I hope the book honours small town queers everywhere, and gives them a well-deserved place in history. 

Joelle Barron (they/them) is a writer and editor who lives and relies on the Traditional Territory of the Anishinaabeg of Treaty 3 and the Métis people. Their first poetry collection, Ritual Lights (icehouse press, 2018), was nominated for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. In 2019, Barron was a finalist for the Dayne Ogilvie Prize for Emerging LGBTQ Writers. Their second book, Excerpts From a Burned Letter, is out now with Nightwood Editions.


Patrick Connors, author of The Long Defeat (Mosaic Press, May 2024)

The Other Life, my first collection of poetry, was published in 2020. I was 51 years old. I had been writing for most of my life, but not really able to call myself an author until then. I didn’t want to wait 10-15 years to have another full-length book. But where to find the time for artistic production, followed by necessary editing?

The pandemic came along, and with it a 10-week layoff from my day job. I was on lockdown, and had a lot of things I needed to work out. Along with my specifically personal concerns, there were the deaths of many loved ones, the environment nearing catastrophe, disconnect between members of society, and marginalization of people from society.

It was important for me to become part of a greater conversation, both from my identity as an artist, as well as in being a citizen of the world, and all the points where these perspectives meet. And it became urgent that the writing be better and clearer than anything I had ever done previously.The Long Defeat is my response to the trauma this world has endured, both since 2020, and for some time before. It is my statement of solidarity with anyone who is like-minded, and an attempt at conciliation with those who are not. Through the struggles every single one of us have faced, and how insurmountable they seem, the long defeat precedes great victory.

Patrick Connors first chapbook, Scarborough Songs, was released by Lyricalmyrical Press in 2013, and charted on the Toronto Poetry Map. His second chapbook with Lyricalmyrical, Part Time Contemplative, was published in 2016. He had 18 poems in Bottom of the Wine Jar, published in 2017 by SandCrab Press. Other publication credits include: The Toronto QuarterlySpadina Literary ReviewTamaracks; and Tending the Fire, released in spring 2020 by the League of Canadian Poets. He has recently had work accepted by Beret Days Press, WordCity MonthlyThe Poet Magazine Faith issue, VerseAfireLitterateurLiterature for the PeopleIn Silence We WaitCP QuarterlyBeliveau ReviewHarbinger AsylumBrave World MagazineEnvoyPeople’s Voice, and New York Parrot. His first full collection, The Other Life, is newly released by Mosaic Press.


Marianne Miller, author of We Were the Bullfighters (Dundurn Press, May 2024)

I never thought I’d write a book about Ernest Hemingway. I read The Sun Also Rises in university and I went to Spain the summer after but that was about it. I hadn’t thought about Ernest for years until my writing group had a poetry challenge. To my surprise, I wrote a poem about Ernest Hemingway. I started reading about his life.

I went to school in Kingston, Ontario. People will tell you Hemingway was there to cover a prison break. But it wasn’t until I started researching that I discovered he was 24 when he did that. It wasn’t the old guy with the beard. It was the young guy, the fledgling writer dying to get published. (Although I’m not 24, I kind of related). He’d just unhappily given up his life in Paris with the literati for a “stable” job as a staff reporter at The Toronto Daily Star because his wife got pregnant. It was a job he dreaded from the beginning. Reading all this, it hit me as ironic that, Ernest, feeling somewhat trapped by circumstances, was sent to cover a group of men who risked everything for freedom on his first day on the job at The Star. That’s how it started. The novel follows both Ernest and the convicts on the run.

My website is below if you need it. And thanks for reading. (And by the way — the book has nothing to do with actual bullfighting.)

Marianne K. Miller is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Toronto. As an independent scholar and member of The Hemingway Society, she presented a paper, Hemingway in Toronto, at the 18th International Hemingway Conference in Paris, France. She lives in Toronto.

mariannemiller.ca


Jade Wallace, author of Anomia (Palimpsest Press, June 2024)

Anomia is a novel without sex or gender. The people in its fictional world have collectively forgotten that such categories exist. They go about their lives — having relationships, having children, doing work — without ever taxonomizing each other in one of the fundamental ways we are accustomed to. As a writer, this was an interesting undertaking for me on the level of craft. How would you write a book in third person without using gendered pronouns of any kind? And how would your characters behave without gendered reference points through which to conceptualize themselves or one another? And what would your fictional society look like if it were not structured around sexual binaries? 

Of course, I did not write Anomia as an exercise in craft. I wrote it out of a desire that is probably by some standards morbid or perverse or just silly — I wanted to see a world that doesn’t exist, that might never exist, even though it is in almost all ways so much like our own. The fictional town of Euphoria, in which Anomia is set, is reminiscent of any of a number of small, quiet, but occasionally Gothic, municipalities that dot the landscape of southwestern Ontario. In fact, I based Euphoria on towns I grew up in, complete with a throwback video rental store. But Anomia is really a novel built on a fault line. There is great tension in the narrative between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the actual and the improbable, and between characters who want to find and be found and characters who want to disappear. 

I looked for a novel like Anomia for more than a decade, and in the process I read a few that came close. The closest was Anne Garréta’s Sphinx, which grants its two main characters respite from gender identity. I read several more books with their own distinct approaches to gender non conformity as well: Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed, Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji, Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and Monique Wittig’s The Opoponax, to name a few. I also encountered several science fiction books that conjured all manner of gender-defying aliens. Each was fascinating, but none matched my vision. So I wrote the book myself. The absence of gender centres the novel, but Anomia is far more than just a void. It’s also a missing-persons novel that upends true crime genre expectations; a love story about the misty space between romance and years-long friendship; and sometimes it reads more like poetry than prose. You might not like it— but I hope you think it’s sufficiently weird.  


Jade Wallace (they/them) is a queer writer, editor, and critic. Their debut poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There, was published in 2023, and their second poetry collection, The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, is forthcoming in 2026, both with Guernica Editions. Wallace is also the cofounder of MA|DE, a collaborative writing entity whose debut poetry collection ZZOO is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press in 2025.