Featuring Ben Ladouceur, Linda Trinh, Luke Francis Beirne, and Kevin Craig

Ben Ladouceur, author of I Remember Lights (Book*hug Press, April 2025)

I think an author’s answer to the question “Why did I write this book?” often changes — while they write it, and long after they’re done writing too. At the time when I began my first book, about a decade ago, my answer would have been: “To share my amazing insights on the human condition with the world!” Now when I read that collection — written by an alternately overconfident and insecure Starbucks barista, who introduced himself as a poet at parties and did most of his writing after midnight — I have a different, possibly more accurate answer. He was trying to work things out, he was making room for himself. The poems are, at times, downright disdainful of gay male culture. I only remember the strength of that disdain because I can read the poems today. I worked hard, I wrote pretty well. But I didn’t know the real “why” and the book benefited from that particular ignorance.

When I first began writing this novel, I would have said: “I’m writing this book because I need to prove that I can write a novel.” I was completing a three-month residency at the Al Purdy A-Frame. On the application I had said I’d write my first novel there. I was hoping it would take three months, tops. Instead I wrote a failed novel, and then, emboldened, spent a few years writing more failed ones. Between projects, I went to the movies. A documentary about architecture reminded me of an old fascination of mine – Expo ’67, a summer-long party that I studied in school and tried to write an essay about (another failure). By now I knew a lot about writing novels (though nothing about finishing them) and I knew that whatever you’re writing about, you’d better enjoy spending time with that topic, because it’s not going to be done in three months. I could think of nothing more exciting than spending months, even years in the world of Expo.

My answer to the “Why” question shifted over and over. That’s another element of the process — you have to keep finding reasons to work, work, work. To let the research process intoxicate you. To have fun. To have an excuse to visit Montreal and do a guided tour of Habitat ’67. To feel emotions you can only feel when you’re building a relationship between two people you made up. To craft an entertaining vessel for thoughts on queer friendships, Dionne Warwick, infrastructure, lonely childhoods, dancefloor politics, parlour games, and how to mix the perfect negroni. Now the book is done. I guess, at this moment, my answer would be: I wrote the book to revel in the joys of its existence – this thing that didn’t exist at all, until I made it myself, the whole thing.

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BEN LADOUCEUR is the author of Otter, winner of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Prize, finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, and selected as a National Post best book of the year, and Mad Long Emotion, winner of the Archibald Lampman Award. He is a recipient of the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the National Magazine Award for Poetry. His short fiction has been featured in the Journey Prize Stories anthology and awarded the Thomas Morton Prize. He lives in Ottawa.

Linda Trinh, author of Seeking Spirit: A Vietnamese (Non)Buddhist Memoir (Guernica Editions, April 2025)

Is this it?

That’s how my memoir opens, with that question. I’m a wife, mother, and career woman. I had everything that my immigrant mother wished for me. Yet I still had my own questions about the purpose of my life, and questions about my mortal existence. I wrote this memoir to help me explore and make sense of the questions I was asking, and the spiritual framework that was relevant to me was Buddhism and world mythology.

I started writing pieces that would form chapters in the book when my daughter was 14 months old (she’s 13 years old now) wanting to explore motherhood. Then during the next few years, juggling life with a toddler, being back at work after maternity leave, trying to have another baby, there were many challenges. Feeling disappointment. Feeling anxiety. Feeling grief and not wanting to get out of bed to face the day. So I wrote. To document. To try to understand. To heal.

I was also thinking about the structure of how to collect my thoughts – how my experiences could be parallel to other journeys and how my beloved childhood myths helped my search for something more. In listening to the universe, in exploring Buddhist fundamentals, I could weave together my own personal spiritual journey.

And I thought, could my story be relevant to others who are living their own unique lives, and experiencing highest highs and lowest lows? In reading my story, could others relate, to laugh, to cry, and to find some connection? This is my offering.

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Linda Trinh is an award-winning Vietnamese Canadian author of fiction and nonfiction for children and adults. She is the author of The Nguyen Kids series. Her work has appeared in various anthologies and literary magazines, and has been nominated for numerous awards. The Secret of the Jade Bangle co-won the Manitoba Book Award for best first book. Linda immigrated to Canada with her family from Vietnam when she was three years old. She and her older sister were raised by a single mother, surrounded by extended family in the West End of Winnipeg, after her father passed away when she was seven. Growing up, she did not see herself represented in books and that absence influences her exploration of identity, cultural background, and spirituality. She lives with her husband and two kids in Winnipeg, on ancestral lands, Treaty 1 territory, traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota, and Dene Peoples, and on the National Homeland of the Red River Métis.

Luke Francis Beirne, author of Saints Rest (Baraka Books, 2025)

Saints Rest is a neo-noir novella set in a stylized version of Saint John, NB. It overemphasizes the gritty and shadowy side of the city as it attempts to delve into the kind of worlds that authors like Dashiell Hammett or James M. Cain typically created. This book emerged as I walked uptown streets, which have so many narrow alleyways slithering between old brick buildings that you can get lost without even moving six blocks. Saint John has a big city feel and a plethora of history behind it, from Partridge Island to The Great Fire.

Saints Rest is my third book and the one I am proudest of. I suffered a life-threatening brain injury in 2022. At the time, I had just a rough draft of this book written. I spent five weeks in a coma and had to relearn to move my fingers and walk. In the early stages of my recovery, my girlfriend (now wife!) would encourage me to write and put pencils in my hand and a notebook in front of me. My dad also helped me throughout my recovery, doing video calls to discuss writing and sending pieces back and forth. Most of the work on this book was done after my injury, while I was recovering.  

Saints Rest follows Frank Cain, a private investigator, as he looks for a missing woman, digging through her past and prowling the streets. As he navigates the streets, working the case, he encounters a lot of uptown characters. He learns more about the person who hired him for the case than the woman he’s looking for and begins to grow wary. He also begins to spot a police officer, Detective Boucher, around the city and suspects that he is being followed. As the case unfolds, Frank Cain unravels.

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Luke Francis Beirne was born in Donegal, Ireland, and lives on the Wolastoqey land of Saint John, New Brunswick. His first novel, Foxhunt (Baraka Books, 2022), was a finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES award and selected as one of The Miramichi Reader’s Very Best novels of 2022. His second novel, Blacklion (Baraka Books, 2023), was selected by CBC as one of the novels to read in 2023 and shortlisted by the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick for the 2023 Best Novel Award. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Counterpunch, NB Media Co-op, Hamilton Arts & Letters, and CrimeReads. Beirne’s work has been stylistically compared to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carre. Saints Rest is his third novel.

Kevin Craig, author of I Will Tell the Night (independently Published)

I wrote this book because I know there are a lot of LGBTQ+ community members of a certain age who are (or were) estranged from their families because of bigotry. They’ve had to choose separation from family for their own mental health. And I also know that times have changed and a lot of people have become more accepting, and that stubborn pride is a strong barrier against reconciliation. The majority of LGBTQ+ community members in the age range of my main character have faced bigotry of one form or another. In the family unit, this could range from mere lack of acceptance to outright banishment. I wanted to write a story that begins with an LGBTQ+ character being thirty years into their exile from family and see where it went from there once they were told the matriarch of the family was dying. Death is a time of coming together. Could that be a thing when someone is so fully excised from their family that they no longer truly know what their parents even look like?

I didn’t know the outcome of the story when I began it. I take part in a yearly 72hr novel writing marathon (Muskoka Novel Marathon) where forty writers get together in one room in Huntsville, Ontario, over a long weekend in July. They each try to write a complete novel that they then submit to a panel of judges for feedback at the end of the weekend. In 2016, the novel I wrote during this weekend was I WILL TELL THE NIGHT. It went on to win the Best Novel Award for that year. When I began to write it, though, I was fresh off the memory of being an almost 50 year old queer person living in Toronto who had just lost their mother to cancer after an estrangement. I began the novel using bits and pieces from my own memories of driving to New Brunswick to say goodbye to my mother. From there, though, I had no idea where the story would go. This novel is absolutely NOT my story. But it is one of thousands and thousands of stories of people from my generation trying to navigate their sexuality in a world where we were neither accepted nor tolerated. I felt in my heart that maybe some of those iced-over bridges connecting us to family had maybe thawed. Was re-connection to family possible for us, if only someone on one side of the rift would lay down their stubborn pride and attempt to reach out…before it was too late? I guess that’s what I went into the story thinking, that it was never too late for us to have family. So I wrote the rest of the novel to find out if it could happen…

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KEVIN CRAIG mostly writes young adult fiction. Their young adult titles are; SUMMER ON FIRE, BURN BABY BURN BABY, HALF DEAD & FULLY BROKEN, PRIDE MUST BE A PLACE, THE CAMINO CLUB and BOOK OF DREAMS. THE CAMINO CLUB, was the 2021 Silver Winner in the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Benjamin Franklin Awards. Both The Camino Club and Book of Dreams are from Duet Books, the LGBTQ+ YA imprint of CHICAGO REVIEW PRESS. Kevin has had twelve plays produced for the stage. They have also recorded memoir for CBC Radio One. Kevin’s memoir has also appeared in the Globe & Mail. Their latest book, the LGBTQ+ family saga literary novel I WILL TELL THE NIGHT, is available on all Amazon platforms. Kevin is an avid traveller and has walked the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route across Spain a few times. They wrote The Camino Club after completing their first Camino in 2014. Kevin will walk the Camino again in 2025, with thoughts of a future novel to keep them company.