Featuring Halina St. James, Giles Blunt, John Brady McDonald, and A. Jamali Rad
Halina St. James, author of The Golden Daughter (House of Anansi Press, August 2025)
I had no intention of writing a memoir, especially one so heavily dependent on my mother’s story. But when she died, I found a bundle of her secret letters — 55 in all, written in Russian or Polish. I had them translated. I was stunned at what I discovered.
I learned mama had gone to school one day as usual when she was 17 years old in her hometown of Vinnitsa, Ukraine. That fateful day, she was snatched from her classroom by the Nazis. She was taken to Germany to work as a slave. She never saw her parents, her home, and her country, again. She never told me any of this.
Because of her letters, everything changed. I discovered I really didn’t know my mother at all. I wanted to find more because, ultimately, knowing her secrets would help me understand who I was.
I went to Germany. I saw the places where mama almost died. I saw the camps or the places where they once were.
Mama also kept all her documents from her time in Germany. Through them, I found my birth father, whom I never knew. I followed the clues about him and discovered his unmarked grave in Northern Ontario. I found his family, my family in Poland. I found we were once part of Polish nobility.
Through her letters, I discovered a slice of the truth. She was part of over 5 million slave workers the Nazis stole from their countries, and forced to work in Germany. If they survived the war (and many didn’t, because they were worked to death), most, like mama, never spoke about their time in Germany. They were ashamed they were forced to work for the enemy, or they simply wanted to forget.
I wanted to tell their stories and mama’s, and how what they went through affected everyone in their lives.
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HALINA ST. JAMES was a journalist for the CBC and CTV, covering revolutions, a war, election campaigns, and three Olympics. Later, she became a performance coach for business and government leaders. Halina lives in Tantallon, Nova Scotia.
Giles Blunt, author of Bad Juliet (Dundurn Press, August 2025)
I know why I started writing Bad Juliet. I visited Saranac Lake in upstate New York and became entranced by its history as a treatment centre for tuberculosis. The sanitarium was founded in the late 19th century and became so renowned that they had to turn away hundreds of patients a year. To care for those who didn’t get in, many locals transformed their private homes into “cure cottages” by adding glassed-in porches (often several) where patients could sit out in any weather to benefit from the curative properties of sunshine and bracing mountain air. More than a hundred of these altered houses still stand, and I loved learning about the wild variety of people who came to live—and often die—in them. Ideas for characters began coming together.
But why did I keep writing this novel? That’s the question I ask myself whenever the demons of self-doubt start lobbying me to quit a project. An unusual setting was not, in itself, enough to sustain me through the tough patches. One reason I kept going was the use of a first-person character-narrator, which was a departure for me and an interesting challenge. Another challenge was to find a way to tell a story in a medical setting without using a doctor-hero. As I wrote I began to realize the relevance of certain aspects. Tuberculosis was a pandemic that required a common, co-operative response from people of all classes (sound familiar?). And Sarah, the “bad Juliet” of the title, is a severely traumatized woman who survived the Lusitania disaster. Yet, as other aspects of her tangled past are revealed, it becomes harder and harder for anyone—especially my callow poet/novelist narrator to believe her. Sarah is torn between a deep desire to trust the man who loves her with the truth, and the fear of seeing that love turn to shock and revulsion. That felt to me—even though the novel is set a hundred years ago—about as real and contemporary as a story can get.
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Giles Blunt grew up in North Bay, Ontario, before studying English Literature at the University of Toronto. The author of twelve novels, including the award-winning John Cardinal Mystery series, Blunt has more recently turned to literary fiction with Bad Juliet. He lives in Toronto.
John Brady McDonald, author of What Shade of Brown (Radiant Press, June 2025)
I wrote What Shade of Brown as I was looking back on a life hyper-reflected by the pandemic, where I had massive amounts of time alone with my own thoughts. I began some deep and serious introspection. I looked upon my life — as exciting and adventure-filled though it has been — and I realized that I longed to be the young, thin, healthy man with potential once again. I longed for that feeling that there was still hope and still time to do … whatever.
I also wrote this book to bring light to my experiences as a light-skinned Indigenous man surrounded by the plague of Pretendians while fighting to be accepted by my own community, but never quite fully being able to do so. It is a chronicle of my navigating through what should be a safe space for me like an outcast, and traveling a Red Road too often paved by colonization and hypocrisy.
This book is a work of both catharsis and screaming into the void, and I wrote it because these words needed to be said out loud, not just squatting rent-free in my head.
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John Brady McDonald is a Nêhiyawak-Métis writer, artist, historian, musician, playwright, actor and activist born and raised in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. He is from the Muskeg Lake Cree Nation and the Mistawasis Nêhiyawak. He is the author of several books, and his written works have been published and presented around the globe. Kitotam, a poetry collection, was published by Radiant Press in 2021, and Carrying It Forward, a book of essays, was published in 2022 and won the Saskatchewan Book Award for Non-fiction and the Indigenous Peoples’ Writing Award. He is also an acclaimed public speaker, who has presented in venues across the globe, such as the Ânskohk Aboriginal Literature Festival, the Black Hills Seminars on Reclaiming Youth, the Appalachian Mountain Seminars, the Edmonton and Fort McMurray Literary Festival, the Eden Mills Writers’ Festival and the Ottawa International Writers Festival. A noted polymath, John lives in Northern Saskatchewan.
A. Jamali Rad, author of No Signal No Noise (Talonbooks, October 2024)
This book is both the end and the beginning of a process. I had an idea for a book that brought together (like a conspiracy theorist’s wall, red string and all — metaphorically, of course) a whole whack of material historical simultaneities. It was grounded in the origin story of the binary, and how the coming-into-being of the binary led to orientalism, colonialism, nationalism, the drawing of lines, the delineation between the “us” and “them,” the technologies that aid and perpetuate these delineations, and so on and so forth.
I spent a year reading and trying to find a way to write this book, until I realized it was actually a series of books. I realized that in order to understand the idea of the “binary,” I really had to understand the coming-into-being of Zero, that which really makes the binary possible. So I started on trying to write a new book, which would become the first in the series, a book dedicated to the story of Zero.
Zero’s story was complex, yet simple; mysterious, yet necessary. I wanted to find a way to show how this one little symbol contained these massive mysteries: combined the spiritual and scientific, was both visible and invisible, and in its containing of contradictions, was both the foundation of the status quo and its demise. I wanted to include both sides of Zero, so I wrote in two voices: one was more prosaic, tracing a historical trajectory, the other was more fanciful. I needed to find a way to write Zero’s story so that I would understand it better, and that hopefully, others would too. That understanding Zero and its origins would help us understand binaries that contain, define, and divide us. And that this understanding would assist in our dismantling of those systems, to break out of binaries, to find a way to write ourselves out of dichotomies.
When I started thinking about this project, it was during Trump’s first time in office, when I noticed the discourse shifting, the people around me giving in to these dichotomies, the blurring of lines between reality and fiction, and the nascent stage of technological control over every aspect of our lives. AI wasn’t really in the picture, the tech bros weren’t explicitly right wing. A lot of what I was trying to uncover is now laid bare for all to see, but that has only made the dichotomous thinking more extreme. There was a moment when I thought I didn’t have to keep writing this series, that everything was out in the open now, and that my work was redundant. But after reflecting on the question of why I wrote this book, and thinking more deeply about my reason for beginning this project, I see now that I need to continue writing more than ever.
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A Jamali Rad is a text-forward artist born in Iran and currently living on the Traditional Territory of the Attawandaron (Neutral), Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and Lūnaapéewak Peoples. They have published two full-length books of poetry: for love and autonomy (Talonbooks, 2016) and still (Talonbooks, 2021). Their most recent work is the chapbook WHAT I WANT (Model Press, 2022). Jamali Rad also co-founded the journal About a Bicycle and the small poetry publisher House House Press.
