Featuring Bruce Hunter, Sean Minogue, Ivanka Fear, and Callista Markotich
Bruce Hunter, author of In the Bear’s House (Frontenac House, May 2025)
After reading more than a dozen biographies, memoirs and self-help books about deafness, I searched for a novel about deafness by a deaf person. This was 1998. The web was in its infancy, and I found no such novels. So, I wrote one: In the Bear’s House. It’s a fictional memoir that blends historical fact with imagination told in parallel plots. It is told intimately in first person by a young mother, Clare who is raising a young, deafened child nick-named Tout for his family’s love of the wilderness. His story is told in third person omniscient. It’s an epic in the vein of Wallace Stegner’s Big Rock Candy Mountain and an intergenerational tale that reaches back into history to the 1880s, through the 1950s to the early 1960s.
The title is a backcountry analogy for the wilderness. When you’re in the bear’s house, you mind your manners. And I suppose, everyone in the book could be seen as a bear.
Set in post-war Calgary and the high Rocky Mountain grasslands of Kootenay Plains, it’s rooted in the ethos and sociology of the times which were not always kind to those who were judged as other. Along the way, I learned that the wildness where I once lived was flooded without any consultation to make way for Alberta’s biggest man-made lake and hydro dam. The First Nations who lived there and who befriended me as a child lost so much. It too is a story symptomatic of the times. My dreams were filled with icy water rising to my ankles, often waking me at night. I learned that what my young deaf character witnesses was a classic example of colonialism and land theft from First Nations. Despite the many challenges my characters face, In the Bear’s House is ultimately a novel of love and redemption through resilience and imagination. A love song to the people and places I describe.
Read an excerpt of In the Bear’s House, and learn about how it came to be re-issued after more than a decade, on our Patreon here
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Bruce Hunter has authored twelve books. The latest, a new edition of the award winning novel, In the Bear’s House, is now available (spring, 2025). Nella casa dell’orso (2024; the translation of In the Bear’s House) follows Galestro (2023), and A Life in Poetry (2022), all from iQdB edizioni in Italy.
Sean Miogue, author of Terminal Solstice (Turnstone Press, June 2025)
I wasn’t great in high school math. My mind would wander during lessons on algorithms and matrices. One of the ideas that returned to me often in these moments was what it might be like if time just stopped and everyone suddenly froze in place.
I would imagine myself free from my teenage anxiety and able to go wherever I wanted in total silence. The fantasy was incredibly appealing for the type of kid I used to be.
About fifteen years later, I was worn out from trying to make my way in writing for film, TV, and theatre on the West Coast. I had moved back to Ontario and wanted to write something totally different — something that had no production constraints or script revisions or worries about raising a budget. I just wanted to write for myself.
That’s when the idea of frozen time came back to me. It felt like the kind of concept that would expand my mental canvas and allow me to stretch my skills. I let it run free on the page and didn’t worry if what I was writing amounted to a book. I was happy to let the story reveal itself on its own terms.
One year led to another, and then another, and soon I had built an entire world from that long-ago fantasy. I never expected my daydream would lead me on this journey, but I’m glad I decided to chase it.
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Sean Minogue has written for film, television, and theatre. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in Lithub, ARC Poetry Magazine, Maudlin House, Full Stop, THIS Magazine, The Globe and Mail, and elsewhere. Sean’s acclaimed play, Prodigals, will be published by Latitude 46 in August 2025. Terminal Solstice is his debut novel.
Ivanka Fear, author of Cold Query: A Blue Water Mystery (Level Best Books, February 2025)
They say you should write what you know. My ideas come from everyday life experiences. And so, I wrote a novel about a group of writers aspiring to get a literary agent and find a traditional publisher. Cold Query refers to the process of reaching out to agents without a prior connection to them. Having had plenty of experience with cold querying, it occurred to me that I could use this in my next book.
Like many writers, I’m accustomed to rejection. But with rejection comes the potential for success. After several hundred rejections from literary magazines and a respectable amount of acceptances for my poetry and short stories, I was ready to write my first novel and have it published. Four books into the series and a hundred or so query letters to agents later, I realized it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. Since my main character was also an aspiring author, I incorporated my own writing and querying experience into the plot of book five in my series. This is the book that landed me a literary agent and a five-book publishing deal.
In Cold Query, my main character, Ivy Rose — who has been querying agents for her mystery series without success — is envious of her best friend who secures an agent for her first novel with just one query. I knew that would resonate with other writers (who are usually avid readers). This is the reality of the publishing world: some writers struggle for a long time to find representation, while others get ‘lucky’ and find the perfect agent quickly. Overall, the odds of getting an agent are slim.
Because I’m a mystery/thriller author, the writers in my book struggle not only with surviving rejection, but also must fight for their lives when a serial killer appears to be targeting the literary community.
And being Canadian, I set my story in an idyllic fictional Ontario town inspired by the communities along Lake Huron, namely Goderich, which I love to visit. Write what you know, add your wild imagination, and set it in a place you know and love.
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Ivanka Fear is the author of the Blue Water Mysteries series and the Jake and Mallory Thriller series, published by Level Best Books. She earned her B.A. and B.Ed in English and French from Western University. Ivanka resides in Wellington County.
Callista Markotich, author of Wrap in a Big White Towel (Frontenac House, April 2024)
I wrote this book because I’ve wanted to be an author since Grade Five, when all of us kids were avid for the afternoon bell because that’s when Mrs. Sherman read us a chapter of Trap Lines North. Sixty eyes glued to Mrs. Sherman in her ivory silk blouse, seeing rapid black water under fragile ice, yellow-fanged, frost-crusted wolves, an open-beaked crow — who wouldn’t want to write a book! Yet, these many decades later, I wrote instead a poem, and another and another, each a nomad, sent out singly with (I hoped) the supple staff of poetic device and diction into the literary world.
My appetite for writing poetry was new, and I was hungry enough to grab any rhythmic phrase or satisfying juxtaposition that flapped into my mind, or delve into any idea that could be mined for emotional resonance. I was the newish poet pumping up the bell curve with the energy of a learner who has fully succumbed to the broad possibilities of the exquisite form. But, the impetus to make a book took hold. I was reading collections by contemporary poets that moved me, inspired and taught me and re-invigorated that timeless aspiration, and I began to wonder if there was a way to collect my poems in a book.
I started writing poetry seriously after my sister died. I had a few poems about the brave resistance she mounted for as long as she could. Her loss released a little spill of love poems about my parents, long gone from this earth, which led to some about my childhood family. I had a clutch of poems about animals, anchored by a poem about Noah, slightly off-Genesis, exploring the erratic stewardship of animals by us humans. There were a couple of moon poems, ocean poems, a few social justice poems. The challenge was to find a flag under which they could all march out together. I wrote this book of collected poems when I realized that language would have to be that banner. A line from one poem presented itself as the flag-bearer: I wrap in a big white towel. I saw that language could twist like a winding cloth around profound sorrow. It could unwrap a gilded memory or adroitly half-cover a truth too hard to bear. Diction’s fluidity could swath pain and joy, humour and irony. Poetic language was the magic textile that could bind together disparate poems, be the big flag under which they all pledge allegiance, and I could meet a childhood aspiration. The book: Wrap in a Big White Towel. Mrs. Sherman would be proud.
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Callista Markotich has enjoyed a life-long career as a teacher, principal and Superintendent of Education in Eastern Ontario. Her poems appear in numerous Canadian reviews and quarterlies from The Antigonish Review through Vallum and in several American and British magazines and journals. Her poetry has received first and second place awards and a placement in the League of Canadian Poets Poem in Your Pocket campaign. It has been short-listed and Honorably Mentioned in several Canadian contests and nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the National Magazine Awards. Her suite, Edward, was a finalist in the 2023 Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Award and the 2024 Toad Hall Chapbook Contest, with The Poets Corner. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. Callista’s first collection, Wrap in a Big White Towel (2024) was published by Frontenac House. Callista lives gratefully on the banks of Lake Ontario, traditional territory of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee nation, in Kingston Ontario, with her husband Don of fifty-nine years.
