It’s the fall! Publishing’s favourite season! Check out why some of the authors whose books are out this month wrote their books!
Featuring Shani Mootoo, Guy Elston, Nadia Ragbar, and Aamir Hussain
Shani Mootoo, author of Starry Starry Night (Book*hug Press, September 2025)
In my twenties I was a practicing visual artist before I had any intentions of being a writer. I was, however, privately chronicling events in my early life and how I felt about them. I had, from a young age, known that my early childhood was particularly traumatic, but it seemed to me that no one else recognized this, or tried to help me. Setting incidents and feelings down on paper was a way of witnessing for the unhappy child trapped in me. That chronicle was never meant to be made public. There was a well-established artist who was mentoring me at the time and seeing the ever-growing pile of paper on my kitchen table, asked if she could read what I was writing. I let her borrow the pages, imagining that getting to know me more intimately could help her to understand my art better. Unknown to me she put the pages in the hands of a publisher, who began soliciting writing from me, a short story, perhaps, or a novel. I knew I would never make that cathartic writing public, but I agreed to write “something” for the publisher, and that was how my writing life began. Throughout the past nine books, I never broached that first material with publishing it in mind, but I always pulled it out and added a word or two to it. Starry Starry Night grew out of that old story, but through an entirely new set of lenses of understanding and skills as a story-teller.
Three things conspired to allow me to finally approach that early material anew. 1) The writing of my first book, a collection of short stories titled Out on Main Street introduced me to a kind of seductive joy different than anything I knew in art-making; I was instantly hooked on writing. I saw the power of the specificity of verbal language, of grammar, sentence, arc and structure logic. And of creating stories itself, the bending of fact into fiction, situations embellished, the magic of imagining that made possible the impossible. In six books of fiction and three poetry, skills as a writer, particularly of fiction, were honed. 2) I was now recognized in ways that substituted well enough for what I had longed for from family all my life. The early incidents could not be changed, of course, but I had—not only as a writer, but as a person, become confident, happier, compassionate and understanding of my parents and reasons for all that had happened in my childhood. The combination of this, and the recent deaths of both my parents freed me to return to that ever-present early material, no longer as catharsis, or blame, but as story, memory re-tailored, no analysis that is the mark of memoir. Rather, full of the joy of writing and the play of autofiction. 3) Finally, the time was absolutely right. I not only benefit now from the experience of having come to peace with my childhood and parents, and from having developed skills as a fiction writer, but I appreciate that the child who endured such a difficult childhood by learning to observe in order to survive, had become the adult and writer because of that very childhood. The act of writing Starry Starry Night was the writer of today witnessing her self of today, looking, at the same time, back at a past and a present, and celebrating.
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SHANI MOOTOO is the author of six novels, three collections of poetry, and one short story collection. She is a four-time Giller Prize nominee, and her work has been long and shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Lambda Literary Prize, and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has been awarded the Doctor of Letters honoris causa degree from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary’s James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award, and Library and Archives Canada Scholar Award. Mootoo was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and lives in Southern Ontario, Canada.
Guy Elston, author of The Character Actor Convention (Porcupine’s Quill, September 2025)
Why would anyone write a book of poetry? Honestly, it doesn’t feel like I had too much choice in the matter. I want to write, and poems are what come out. The Character Actor Convention is the happy product of years of grinding away.
But as for why I wrote this book of poems – I used to write directly confessional stuff, trying to do the sort of disjointed, blunt, cool voice I admired. I wasn’t very good at it. Almost by accident, I wrote a poem called “Lifecycle of the Large Blue Butterfly”, a sort of natural horror story. This was something completely new for me – a persona poem, from the POV of an ant that feeds its offspring to butterflies (true story). A little later, I got sober. These two things changed everything.
Since then, the “persona” drive has guided my writing. I like to see my poetry as a form of storytelling. The Character Actor Convention is full of impossible or niche stories, encounters, voices and laments. This is not to say that my psyche doesn’t fill the book. If anything, my writing is much more me than when I wrote directly confessional stuff. Each persona helps unlock a fresh bunch of my own joys, anxieties and melodramas.
I guess the short answer is, persona poems and the like are my way of incorporating Emily Dickinson’s famous “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant” into my practice. I approach myself at a slant through these guises.
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Guy Elston‘s debut poetry collection is The Character Actor Convention (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2025). His poems have appeared in The Malahat Review, The Literary Review of Canada, The Ex-Puritan, Geist, Grain, EVENT, and elsewhere. He is a member of the Meet the Presses collective and lives in Toronto.
Nadia Ragbar, author of The Pugilist and The Sailor (Invisible Publishing, September 2025)
This began over ten years ago as my Master’s thesis. At the time I was mainly writing character-driven flash fiction, but I knew I wanted to try something longer, though I was very intimidated by the prospect. And, honestly, by “longer” I only meant “novella.” I remember being hung up on trying to find my voice, and so to get over myself I just made a long list of things I loved—things I didn’t second-guess. The list included books (Geek Love by Katherine Dunn), a documentary (Deep Water dir. Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell), hobbies (knitting, sewing, daydreaming), childhood memories, feelings.
I think my premise emerged alongside the characters. I was thinking about characters in limbo and having to make a choice to gain some kind of forward momentum. I naturally gravitated toward a heightened premise—conjoined twins who were amateur boxers. Having my twins, Bruce and Dougie, conjoined let me lean into the guilt and anticipation and anxiety that surrounds decision-making. Making them boxers just felt fun. And I knew I didn’t want to fall into a dynamic where one was the good twin and the other was evil. But rather, I wanted to make sure the characters felt grounded, and hopefully readers will find themselves rooting for each at different times, as they are at odds. What emerged as I wrote was the importance of community; the way we need each other in order to live our best lives. This stands in contrast to the idealized myth of American individualism; the idea that being strong means doing it on your own. Even as a writer, there is that persistent vision of the solitary writer cloistered away, when the truth is that writing a book is entirely collaborative, particularly in the editing phase, and the support that a writer gets from their community during every phase of pre-and-post publishing is crucial to survival.
The novel is told through an ensemble cast, and Anka Ramratan, is introduced as a romantic interest and catalyst for Bruce to step out of his comfort zone. I was really writing this novel for my teenaged / young adult self, and so Anka’s character was someone I would have loved to have seen in text at that age. She is a character experiencing grief, and for me, she exists as the heart of the narrative, though this isn’t explicitly her story.
So, I had started with that list of things I loved and put it all into my imagination’s blender. The result was that I couldn’t help but then love the characters, and all their nebulous, tricky emotions which emerged in the writing.
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Nadia Ragbar lives in Toronto with her partner and son. Her short fiction has appeared in Broken Pencil and This Magazine, among other outlets. Her flash fiction appeared in The Unpublished City, an anthology curated by Dionne Brand, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Toronto Book Award. The Pugilist and the Sailor is her first novel.
Aamir Hussain, author of Under the Full and Crescent Moon (Dundurn Press, September 2025)
I wrote Under the Full and Crescent Moon because a lot of different thoughts collided in my mind and refused to leave me alone. Thoughts on my family, the places I grew up, and my faith all coalescing into the story of a young woman growing up in and then defending a society both matriarchal and Muslim; a story that then demanded to be told.
The reason all of these thoughts were swirling in my head was because of the rise of Islamophobia in the wake of 9/11. For a while the attacks came from all directions, from Christians calling the Quran a work of Satan, to high minded intellectuals opining on “clashes of civilizations” with Muslims cast as barbarians somehow “incompatible” with Western culture. Common to all these was a conviction of Islam as being inherently misogynistic, and the casting of concepts with Arabic terms such as “Sharia” and “fatwa” as being irredeemably regressive and dangerous. Through these attacks, I could feel my community being turned from human beings into object of fear and suspicion. Our richness and diversity was morphed into a stereotypical monolith fit to be hated and to be the subject of righteous violence. That sensation of dread I felt turned out to be a harbinger of the millions of innocents that would be killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now the millions being starved to death after enduring months of genocide in Gaza.
Nevertheless I took these attacks seriously and I read the Quran that was being vilified, and delved into the rules, mechanics, and history of a “Sharia law” that billions of dollars were mobilized to destroy with shock and awe levels of military force. I came away with an appreciation for the principles of my faith and the conviction they could be applied in many different ways, even something as seemingly contradictory as a Sharia compliant matriarchy.
Then there was a real delight in crafting the outline of the novel as my mind kept on raising possible problems with the story and, almost as quickly, finding solutions that turned into plot points and characters and world details. After this came the grind of writing, putting in far too many details about the mechanics of the historical society I was inventing (which were then surgically removed by the excellent editors I have been fortunate to have). I have been blessed to have been able to escape the harsh realities of this world for a while by writing another one into existence in Under The Full and Crescent Moon. I hope there are readers out there that will find similar relief in its pages. And I pray that the novel will do its tiny bit to create a future marked not by suspicion of our diversity, but appreciation instead.
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AAMIR HUSSAIN was born into a family of strong women in Pakistan, grew up in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Canada when he was fifteen years old. He works in the tech sector in Toronto. Under the Full and Crescent Moon is his debut novel. He lives in Milton, Ontario.
