Featuring Katie Welch, Ann Cavlovic, Meg Todd, and Conor Mc Donnell
Katie Welch, author of Ladder to Heaven (Wolsak and Wynn, October 2025)
Ladder to Heaven arose from the intersection of a midlife crisis and inspiration. I had recently gotten sober and divorced. Embarking on life beyond alcohol and marriage was hopeful but scary, and my biggest fear was that I had permanently alienated my daughters, then 14 and 16. At around the same time, I came across Kathryn Schulz’s 2015 Pulitzer-prizewinning piece in the New Yorker, The Really Big One, about the inevitable and imminent subduction zone earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. What would happen, I wondered, if a character’s life shake-up coincided with an actual earthquake? Nothing would ever be the same again; there could be no return to the way things were before. Chaos, and then everything changes.
Schulz’s essay brings the earthquake threat into sharp focus. It seems that we in the Pacific Northwest are spectacularly ill-prepared for this predictable disaster. Indigenous people from Alaska to California told stories and made art about a major earthquake three centuries ago; there is substantial anecdotal evidence, Schulz explains, as well as solid geological proof, that a subduction zone earthquake happened in 1700 and happens in this part of the world every three or four hundred years. I am a seasoned environmental activist and an advocate for nature, and it bothers me that we pride ourselves on our intelligence yet again and again, the natural world surprises us with the unintended consequences of our actions. Even when we see it coming, we don’t mitigate disaster if it means sacrificing ease and comfort. I read The Really Big One and was reminded, uncomfortably, of realizing I had a problem with alcohol and yet continuing to drink.
I began by writing a short story. It was oddly reassuring to imagine a character in a similar but worse predicament than my own. Del’s exterior and interior worlds are devastated; highways are broken, cities have crumbled and she has abandoned her home and family. On the bright side, nature is rebounding; when humans and their machines recede, the rest of the planet can breathe. After a natural disaster, we want to get back to ‘normal’. My story needed a fundamental change that would make a return to the status quo impossible. I decided an unexpected consequence of the earthquake was that humans and animals could communicate telepathically.
If they could speak, what would animals say? Writing their voices wasn’t as farfetched as I had imagined, and I had a wonderful time choosing how various animals might express themselves. Intelligence comes in many forms, and science is constantly revising the intelligence of other species upward. Honeybees dance, and they navigate using quantum physics. Octopuses use tools. Orca grandmothers are essential members of orca communities. Videos of animals behaving ‘like humans’ often go viral; we love discovering connections with the planet’s other denizens. After all, we are animals too, and bound by the same needs: a healthy atmosphere, water and food.
The TEMZ Review published Hukka and the Cougar, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Del, its narrator and protagonist, and the story became Ladder to Heaven. I wrote this book to imagine a very different future, both for an addict like myself and for the planet.
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Katie Welch lives in Kamloops and on Cortes Island, BC. Her debut novel, Mad Honey, was nominated for the 2023 OLA Evergreen Prize. She is a two-time alumnus of the Banff Centre and was a finalist for the 2023 CBC Short Story Prize. Find her online at http://writerkatiewelch.com.
Ann Cavlovic, author of Count on Me (Guernica Editions, October 2025)
I’ve known for over 25 years that I wanted to write something about love and money.
In grad school, my friends made fun of me. “Ann wants to write an economic theory of love,” they teased. But that wasn’t quite it. Although I didn’t know it consciously then, I was studying economics in part to understand what love isn’t. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with market transactions, but I was trying to rule out lookalikes in order to gain clarity on what love actually is.
I began tinkering with writing while in grad school, but soon realized I wasn’t mature enough as a writer or a human to take on this topic. So I started with smaller stories. About ten years later, with a few publications under my belt, my parents landed in a nursing home — a place where heated family dramas often unfold in sour-smelling hallways for all to see.
I realized that this was it. Love and money collide in many ways, but it is so common for them to wreak havoc in a family when a parent is declining and wounds from the past suddenly get ripped open again. Yet we so rarely talk about this (or any of the realities of aging) in our culture, whether in art or daily life. It can range from siblings having different senses of what’s “fair,” legal fights over inheritance, to full-on financial or emotional abuse of elders. Our pop culture, when it talks about this at all, tends to blame nurses or other support workers, but they are usually the heroes in real life.
Soon after starting to write Count on Me, I had to wrestle with how to not end up writing an instruction manual for elder abuse. Based on a lot of research, I could have shown exactly how a character could slowly insinuate themselves into the life of a vulnerable senior, earn their trust, and then start to steal their wealth. That might make an interesting story, but ethically odious. Instead, I wrote the novel so that most of that emotional manipulation happens “offstage,” although you sure see the consequences. Some people have critiqued this choice, saying they wanted to get more into the minds of the people causing harm, that they’re too much of a mystery. I’ll live with that critique.
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Ann Cavlovic’s debut novel Count on Me will be released in October 2025 with Guernica Editions. Her fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Canadian literary magazines and news media such as Event, The Fiddlehead, Grain, The Globe and Mail, and PRISM international. Her writing often weaves in reflections on the climate crisis, the use of spin in personal and political discourse, and tensions between love and money. She lives in Western Quebec.
Meg Todd, Author of Most Grievous Fault (Nightwood Editions, October 2025)
We all have stories, and we are all in some way caught between what was and what will be. Trapped, for better or for worse and to a greater or lesser degree, in patterns that are difficult to change even if we’re trying. In the character of Crystal, because her situation is so glaringly dysfunctional, we see just how hard making a change is. She doesn’t have the tools many people have, she doesn’t have the support of family, and she is afraid of external support because of her role in the perpetuation of this dysfunction. I don’t think this is an unusual situation and I think that working to understand these complexities is helpful in our efforts to become a healthier society. Judgement is not unnatural, but it thwarts healing.
Most Grievous Fault didn’t start with Crystal. The first draft was Becky’s diary and it came out of news stories, terrible stories, the kind that are hard to hear and harder to comprehend: how can this happen? But what we hear and see in the news is of course nothing more than a glimpse. Becky, Crystal’s daughter, grew out of a glimpse. The story started with her, but she was an innocent. More interesting was Crystal, the person harmed by her own mother and now harming her daughter in turn, the person who was trapped by circumstance. Is it possible for someone like Crystal to change the trajectory of her life?
Parenting is never easy and the mother-daughter bond can be particularly fraught. I don’t think the contrast of Crystal’s resentment and anger on the one hand, and her intense love for Becky on the other, is uncommon in the mother-daughter relationship. It may not always present as dramatically and destructively as it does in Crystal’s case, but there can be a particular kind of push-pull intensity in this relationship. Some things seem incomprehensible—the way traumatized children protect those who injure them, especially if it’s their parent, the way we hurt what we love and love what we hurt. We’d like to think it’s only other people who harm those they love, but I think, in some ways, sometimes, we all do this. We seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Perhaps this is what it is to be human.
Most Grievous Fault was not an easy novel to write and I put it aside for many years. But Crystal stayed with me and perhaps her voice in my head is why I wrote it, or at least why I went back to it. I felt I owed it to her. This person who has no hidden strengths, no superpower, no latent gifts or skills, who is just Crystal, unlikeable, trapped and desperate. Or perhaps I saw in her the possibility of a poignant picture of love and neglect and care and callousness and survival all wrapped up together.
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Meg Todd (megtodd.com) grew up in the Alberta prairies. She is a two-time finalist for the CBC Short Story Prize, and her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Fire, PRISM international and elsewhere. Her debut short story collection, Exit Strategies, was a finalist for both the ReLit Award and the Danuta Gleed Literary Award. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia and a BA in Religious Studies from the University of Calgary. She lives on Vancouver Island.
Conor Mc Donnell, author of What We Know So Far Is… (Wolsak and Wynn, October 2025
I Wrote This Book so you would read it…
I realized I was beginning to write What We Know So Far Is… sometime in 2023. I typically start my days very early with BBC News and during a particular concentration of distressing news stories I noticed the phrase, “What We Know So Far Is…”, repeatedly brandished as almost an excuse for alarming people during still unfolding events while simultaneously not providing any palpable sense of safety, i.e., “is this still happening right now?” “That’s a body in the street, does the family know it’s their loved one?” I personally experienced such a tragedy unfold in December 2007 and have since found the sensationalism of online reporting triggering and traumatizing. I started to collect little vignettes and write short poems all of which began with the line “What We Know So Far Is...”
After the first draft of this book I was advised that I might make these pieces work better as a long poem and should think further about unifying the themes I was exploring. I realized I was ultimately writing about language and how it can be both balm and barrier. The story of Babel soon came into play, and language as a dormant virus mutating our DNA across various epochs in order to keep communities separated – the latest iteration of this being memes and their viral nature. This brought science and medicine into play and how the phrase “What We Know So Far Is” can often mean, “we don’t really know what’s happening, all we can manage right now is damage control.” In some passages this poem is a gentle What’s Going On? Elsewhere, it rages against the machine. I hope, I really hope, that everyone who reads this book comes to a moment where they feel that if they turned on the T.V. I’d be there onscreen with a “this just in”, but they wouldn’t want to change the channel…
During the process of revising & editing What We Know So Far Is, I realized I was living out a little literary fantasy I’ve held for years. One of my favourite films is Henry Fool by Hal Hartley, wherein a garbage-man (Simon Grimm) sits down and starts writing one morning, simply because he HAS TO. He crafts a long poem across multiple notebooks and when people read it they experience significant visceral reactions but cannot put it down: a mute woman screams, a teenager punches him, people stop what they are doing and sit in the street reading poetry! The viewer never gets to see or hear a word of the poem, we can only experience it through reactions of characters onscreen. I have always wanted to write that poem but never thought I would, or could. What We Know So Far Is… is probably as close as I’ll ever come, which brings me neatly back to the beginning…
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Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at The Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is Associate Professor at the University of Toronto and Editor in Chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative Based Medicine Lab publication which seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current Vice-President of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesiology Society. Conor works weekends at Sellers & Newel rare/used bookstore in Little Italy, Toronto, where they have words for people like him…
