Featuring Michelle Berry, Harman Burns. Anna Dowdall, Robert G. Penner, and Stephanie Cesca
So many great books hit shelves this month!! Here’s another Why I Wrote This Book ~ extended edition ~ to give you but a mere spattering of some of the great books you should pick up.
Michelle Berry, author of Satellite Image (Wolsak & Wynn, October 2024)


In mid-2021 I started to work on what would eventually become Satellite Image. I had this image in my head of a body seen from the sky lying in the backyard of a typical suburban home. How many murders or crimes, I thought, have been unknowingly caught on satellite images? I went to my computer and began to creep. My fingers flew around searching for things. I caught still pictures of a group of construction men on the front steps of my house taking a break, I caught a dog peeing as it went for a walk, I caught a man and a woman kissing beside a hotel. I read articles about bloody drag marks on a dock where the police assume a body was dumped. I read about people being caught naked, suntanning on their roofs.


At this time more people were starting to move to the country, they were leaving large cities and escaping the crowds. People seemed to want space, distance, fresh air, and privacy. My husband and I, and our two small children, had also packed up from the city many years before and settled in a smaller town in a cottage area. So the idea of Ginny and Matt starting to fear the city and moving to the country to begin life in what they assumed was a quiet, calm area, wasn’t a far stretch for my imagination.
But what if they saw a satellite image of a body in their new backyard just before they moved in? How could I resist? Maybe small towns are just as threatening as big cities? Maybe you can’t make your life better or easier just by moving? The novel grew and morphed. At one point there were hundreds of pages I had written about Miranda and Charles’ previous life — he was a kidnapper in one version, and then he had dementia in another, and then he evolved into who he is here, a man trying to take control of his life but then taking it to the extreme. At some point Ginny was hearing and seeing ghostlike apparitions but that quickly evolved to her imagining a warped reality instead. The neighbours were an overly suspicious bunch at first, but then became the family Ginny and Matt actually needed. The book took all different twists and turns. From thriller to literary and back to thriller and now, literary thriller, I skipped around genres with the goal of keeping my readers interested and compelled.
What began with a satellite image transformed into a novel about a house in a small town, I think, a novel that looks at how we interpret what is going on around us, for the better or for the worse. The grass is always greener and we imagine that just over that hill life is better, when maybe it’s really not, or maybe we think something will be horrible when it’s really fantastic. I wrote this novel in order to make my readers disappear into it for an hour or two. To be scared, to laugh, to worry, to jump, Satellite Image is hopefully something that will, above everything else, make you think about what you think you understand about life – or make you think about what you might just misunderstand.
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Michelle Berry is the author of seven novels and three books of short stories. Her books have been shortlisted, longlisted and won awards. Her writing has been optioned for film several times and she has been published in the UK. Berry was a reviewer for the Globe and Mail for many years. She teaches at the University of Toronto in the Continuing Education department and has also taught at Toronto Metropolitan University, Humber College and Trent University. She has been on the board of PEN Canada and the Writers’ Union of Canada and on the Authors’ Advisory Group of the Writers’ Trust of Canada. For five years Berry owned and operated her own independent bookstore in Peterborough, Ontario, called Hunter Street Books.
Harman Burns, author of Yellow Barks Spider (Radiant Press, October 2024)


I have no idea how to write a book. You might think I would have learned in the course of writing one, but I didn’t. I didn’t know how to start this book, and I don’t know how I finished it.
I don’t think this is a bad thing.


“Beginner’s mind” is a nice way of describing a kind of fruitful stumbling that can happen when we are clear of expectations and open to discovery. For this novella, the first sections I wrote came to me while I was working at an office job. I kept a folded sheet of paper under my keyboard, and I’d slide it out a bit to scribble a quick sentence or two when no one was looking. That was five years ago, and since then the book has mutated, transformed, expanded, burned down, and collapsed over dozens (hundreds?) of sprawling, scribbled drafts — some bordering on Gertrude Stein-inspired nonsense, others a kind of genre-morphic pastiche à la William Burroughs.
What I didn’t set out to write was a coming-of-age story. It seemed done to death. What did I really have to contribute to the already crowded coming-of-age canon? Well, as all writer’s know, stories tend to have minds of their own, and mine had no interest whatsoever in my dumb, human misgivings. Once I surrendered to it, everything started falling into place. The story is really about the protagonist, Kid, growing up. It’s about trauma, and how it collapses time, how it swallows memory, how it bends us. It’s about stripping back the layers of self and discovering who we are.
What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t plan to write this book. There was no chip on my shoulder, no themes I set out to explore, no overarching agenda. I certainly didn’t write it expecting to get published. I wrote it because it asked me to, and it seemed rude to turn it down. Which is a way of saying: when the ideas started coming, I just tried to do them justice, and explore them to the furthest extent of my abilities— for better or for worse.
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Harman Burns is a Saskatchewan-born trans woman, filmmaker, sound artist and writer. Her practice is informed by folklore, nature, the occult and bodily transfiguration. Yellow Barks Spider is her debut novella. She currently resides on the unceded ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples (Vancouver).
Anna Dowdall, author of The Suspension Bridge (Radiant Press, October 2024)


When I was in graduate school in the US, I spent my time cycling hither and yon along unfrequented backroads and writing gothic parodies of my plight. They featured disguised versions of my hated yet loved professors in situations as dream-like as they were plotless, except for various hallucinatory quests, journeys and lurid falls into the void which never got fully explained. Prior to heading south, I’d had a series of intense dreams like my protagonist Sister Harriet’s, of trying to cross a bridge, vertiginous and narcotically beautiful like something from Les triplettes de Belleville. But why these source materials ended up decades later in my new book is hard to say.


The Suspension Bridge is a mystery story set in 1962, intended to be historically unreliable, poignant and darkly playful. A moody fable about spiritual quests, within the comédie humaine. Parts of The Suspension Bridge read like ecological satire. I milk the low-key feminism of the 20th century school story, for its ability to portray a community of girls and women getting on with things in a patriarchal world. The familiar contrivances of mystery, like plot derailment and violent death, do a lot of my speaking.
My characters, haunted by their pasts and a bit feral under a veneer of civilization, aren’t really intended to be relatable. Still, I’ve observed that readers connect with them as they plunge into the entertaining byways of human misstep. I immerse myself in multi-dimensional setting and detailed world-building as I write, and hope that readers will join me there, luring them with promises of realism and then cutting them off from solid land with gothic exaggeration and hints of the supernatural. Between moral instruction and creative escapism, I’m probably more the latter kind of writer. Readers will identify subtle social messages in the narrative, but I’m increasingly pulled towards the mythic and legendary in my writing. The Suspension Bridge mainly offers readers the therapeutic pleasures, whatever those might be, of imaginative itinerance.
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Anna Dowdall was born in Montreal and, like her protagonist in The Suspension Bridge, moved back to the city of her birth twice. Again like the peripatetic Sister Harriet, she’s lived all over, currently making the Junction neighbourhood of Toronto her home. Occupationally just as restless, she’s been a reporter, a nurse’s aide, a graphic artist, a college lecturer, a planner, a union thug, a translator, a baker, a book conservator, a pilot and a horticultural advisor, as well as other things best forgotten. Raised on fairy tales, she began by writing two young adult fantasy novels. These manuscripts made the long lists for the American Katherine Paterson Prize and the Crime Writers of Canada’s unpublished novel award. After being told by an agent her words were too “big,” she shifted to adult fiction. Her three genre-bending literary mysteries, April on Paris Street (Guernica 2021), The Au Pair (2018) and After the Winter (2017), feature evocative settings and a preoccupation with the lives of women. A lover of prose, she once wrote a poem, which ended up on an electricity pole on Montreal’s rue de la Poésie.
Robert G Penner, author of The Dark King Swallows the World (Radiant Press, October 2024)


I started writing this book just after the birth of my daughter, in the endless wee hours of the mornings, with a child in one arm, and the other hand free to type. In a sense it was just something to do while sitting in the dark trying not to wake a sleeping infant, but I was also trying to process a huge amount of emotional turmoil. I thought frequently of that Yeats’ poem back then, the one about the child and the faery walking away hand-in-hand from a world more full of weeping than we can understand, because one of the unexpected aspects of parenthood, at least for me, was anticipatory grief. We know our children will suffer, often terribly, no matter what we do to try and prevent it, and so we suffer too, from the knowing of it. It is one of the dark truths of being a parent overwhelmed by love, again, at least for me, that our fearful imaginations murder our children in countless ways. All the terrible things that can happen to them prey constantly on one’s mind. It is exhausting. And writing a fantasy about death and grief and parent-child relationships while you hush an infant with lullabies in the middle of the night is one way to cope, one way to keep the wolves at bay.


The other reason I wrote the book was that at the same time my daughter was born I was working on a PhD dissertation on the history of the 18th and 19th century British Empire and my research had taken me to Cornwall where I had become fascinated by the degree to which the artifacts of the pre-Christian past, the Middle Ages, the Industrial Revolution, and centuries of British Imperialism, were all crammed provocatively into the same charming countryside. So if the emotional drive to write the novel was a product of my experiences as a first-time parent, the ideas and concepts in which those emotions were sublimated were the result of an attempt to make sense of how the wistful medievalist fantasies of England I had grown up with in C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and George MacDonald, were so very different than the England I was discovering first in the postindustrial and postcolonial landscape of Cornwall, and then in the archives of Truro and Penzance; archives full of transatlantic methodists and hustling artists and capitalist country vicars investing in mines and a cosmopolitan sense of rural England not as a bucolic paradise but as a bustling crossroads of global possibilities. The story I wrote as a result of this experience is one in which I hope the more speculative aspects are read not as regret for the loss of imagined certainties, or the passing of a golden age, or any of that nostalgic business which is so frequently the project of fantasy, but simply as a playful re-arrangement of a few of the many things that might actually have happened in the past. And at least as many that might not have. And a few that might yet come to be.
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Robert G. Penner lives and works in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Science Fiction Books of 2020. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms. He was also the founding editor of the online science fiction zine Big Echo.
Stephanie Cesca, author of Dotted Lines (Guernica Editions, October 2024)


When my third child was born in 2017, I took a year-long maternity leave. It was the first time I’d had such a long absence from work. My two sons were born overseas, and for various reasons I stayed home with them for only a short time.
My hands were more than full during those twelve months. But for the first time in my life, I felt like I could finally parent without distraction. I spent a great deal of time not only with my newborn daughter, but also with my boys – doing all the things I never previously had time to do.


It was during that year that I thought a lot about things: how I was raised, how important our childhoods are, how I’d parented my two boys, how all three of my children were so different. More than anything, I thought about all the ways parenting is an often difficult and sometimes terrible job. Really, is there anything harder? The experience can throw so much at you. Even if you have practice doing it, it doesn’t make it any easier the second or third time around. Every child is different and every experience of raising one is unique.
I’m not a parenting expert by any means, but I am a lover of books and storytelling. And so with all of these things swirling in my mind, I came up with the idea of writing a novel about a very special family with a very unusual dynamic.
In this story, the protagonist of Melanie is a young girl who’s suddenly abandoned by her highly flawed and severely overwhelmed mother. Melanie is left with Dave, her mom’s former boyfriend, and Jesse, her half-sister. While the two girls grow up to have a difficult relationship, Melanie and Dave’s bond becomes as strong as it gets. It’s that bond that helps Melanie as she grows up to face the heaviest of life’s blows.
Anyone who reads this story will see that Dave is a special guy. Not only is he a single dad, but he’s a single stepdad. That’s a pretty unusual role. On top of that, one of his daughters thrives on disorder and chaos. It can be a nutty household. Despite these challenges, Dave does a spectacular job of managing everything. Through his constant love and support, he teaches Melanie what it really means to be family.
Some readers may call the relationships in this novel dysfunctional. In some ways, that’s true. But there’s a lot of goodness and beauty there, too. After all, aren’t many families like that? Messy but still full of love.
I know most families don’t look anything like Melanie’s. But while all families are different, no family is perfect. And, so, I wrote this story with the hope that people will connect with Melanie’s journey. Through her story and her relationships – whether they’re loving or tumultuous or even completely crazy – I believe that readers will see parts of themselves along the way.
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Stephanie Cesca was born and raised in Toronto, where she lives with her husband and three children. A former newspaper editor in both Canada and Europe, she holds an English degree from Western University, a journalism degree from Toronto Metropolitan University and a Certificate of Creative Writing from the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies. Her work has been shortlisted for the Penguin Random House Canada Student Award for Fiction and The Marina Nemat Award for Creative Writing. Dotted Lines is her first novel.