Featuring Nicholas Ruddock, M.S. Berry, Lucy Black, and Melanie Schnell
Nicholas Ruddock, author of Planet Earth (House of Anansi Press, November 2025)
Because, when I was young, I read Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro in The New Yorker, turning the pages, hoping not to see the filled-in black dot signifying The End, so good were the stories. George Saunders. William Trevor. I wanted to write like that, with a light hand, clarity, a kick, a surprise. And the surprise could be for me, for I cannot plan. I write the first sentence with no idea of the second, and so on, until something happens.
Planet Earth: reading somewhere that Mario Vargas Llosa had sucker-punched Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the lobby of a cinema in Mexico City, I knew I would have to write the story. Who were the bystanders? I borrowed from him⎯Llosa ⎯one of his tropes, the sudden introduction of violence after routine passages of everyday life. Socialism, politics. The story moved to Toronto on its own. Also in Planet Earth, I could hardly pass up the polio epidemic of 1954, the paralyzed children now disregarded by antivaxxers, or the fact that William Butler Yeats credited the actress Margot Ruddock, half his age, for the recovery of his potency, or that when Prince the musician died in his mirrored elevator, from a fentanyl overdose, his cleaning staff was summarily dismissed, or that two Romanian girls were held up by passport control at the French-Italian border, or that my wife and I lived across the street from a Dobermann Pinscher, iron-collared and bristling, or that my wife and I were almost-astronauts and met Ralph Fiennes, that we worked in an asbestos mine in the Yukon, that the unhoused in Canada sleep on winter cardboard, that personal love is what we seem to have now, what we need to fight for, on the hot coals of this burning planet.
I couldn’t pass stories like these by, and that’s why I wrote the book.
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NICHOLAS RUDDOCK is a writer and physician whose novels, short stories, and poetry for adults have won multiple prizes in Canada, the UK, and Ireland. His novel The Parabolist was shortlisted for the Toronto Book Award in 2011. Most recently, in 2023, he has won the Nona Heaslip Prize from Exile Quarterly and been shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Award. He lives in Guelph, Ontario.
M.S. Berry, author of The Tenant (Turnstone Press, November 2025)
In 1997 my husband, my infant daughter and I went on a vacation to Freiburg, Germany. We were loaned a house at the base of the Black Forest and my parents also joined us. When we arrived we were astonished to find there was someone living on the third floor. A young student from Italy. Our landlord had given her a part of the apartment for her time in Freiburg. No one told us she would be there. It turns out she was lovely, my parents enjoyed her company and it was a wonderful trip.
But the idea of that student secretly occupying the third floor has always stuck with me. What would have happened if she weren’t someone trustworthy and kind, if she had come with her own emotional baggage?
The Tenant is the first book I am publishing under M.S. Berry instead of Michelle Berry. In here I can play with pacing and things that make you shiver. I used to skirt this genre with my literary writing and now I will try to pull readers in, make them a little wary and unsure, alter a reader’s balance. The covers will be similar in style too and be a way my readers can recognize what they are in for.
It’s interesting that one small trip to a German city caused my imagination to go into overdrive.
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M.S. Berry is Michelle Berry, an award-winning author of seven novels and three collections of short fiction. Her work has been optioned for film and published internationally in the United Kingdom.
Lucy E.M. Black, author of A Quilting of Scars (Now or Never Publishing, October 2025)
This novel began in an antique store when I fell in love with a reproduction poster from May 1874. I was charmed by the poster but also intrigued. Gradually Larkin’s story revealed itself and the novel unspooled.
I was an educator for nearly thirty years and during that time, I interacted with many young people who were frightened of revealing their sexual identities to parents and family members. Sadly, many students I knew were asked to leave their family home as a result of such disclosures and spent weeks, if not months, couch-surfing while attempting to find a more sustainable living arrangement. It broke my heart to see young people turned away by the very individuals who should have embraced them and celebrated their life choices. As I reflected on this, I realized that the church had a role to play in perpetuating the kind of judgement that so damaged these beautiful young people.
And so, as the novel took shape and I came to know Larkin and his best friend Paul, it became important to me to tell their story – which is a love story of sorts and a celebration of male friendship. The setting is placed at the end of the 19th century when small-town Ontario was still very much under the influence of Victorian ideology. This is a period of tremendous growth and potential with huge advances in science and technology and yet the social mores, if you will, were much slower to change.
What has become so clear to me is how desperately we all need acceptance and unconditional love.
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Lucy E.M. Black (she/her/hers) is the author of The Marzipan Fruit Basket, Eleanor Courtown, Stella’s Carpet, The Brickworks, Class Lessons: Stories of Vulnerable Youth and A Quilting of Scars. Her award-winning short stories have been published in Britain, Ireland, USA and Canada in literary journals and magazines including Cyphers Magazine, the Hawai’i Review, The Antigonish Review, the Queen’s Quarterly and others. She co-ordinates Heart of the Story, an author reading series in Port Perry, writes book reviews for The Miramichi Reader, serves as literary chair for Scugog Arts, is a dynamic workshop presenter, experienced interviewer and freelance writer. She lives with her partner in the small lakeside town of Port Perry, Ontario, the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of Scugog Island, First Nations.
Melanie Schnell, author of The Chorus Beneath our Feet (Radiant Press, October 2025)
Fifteen years ago, when my son was a year old, I joined several other writers for a weekend writer’s retreat at an ancient farmhouse in the country in the middle of a cold prairie winter. It was just the five of us women, no wifi, our burgeoning stories, and my baby. I was working on my first novel, which was in its final stages, but during this weekend it was interrupted by a vivid image of two women standing barefoot and hands-free on a tree branch, impossibly, in the midst of a violent storm. I sketched the image in my notebook and promised to return to it later. This image became my second novel, The Chorus Beneath our Feet.
There was an aggressive tension between the two women on the branch that made me return to my sketch and begin writing it into a story. There was a fierce competition (who would fall and possibly die first?) but there was also an implicit connection, undesired, but necessary. The story evolved over the years, as these things do (though the two women are showing up now in my third novel) but what stayed was the tree, which became a central character, and a holograph of one of the women also remained. The intense connection and implicit tension remained as well, but it manifested between my two main characters, Jes and Mary.
That tree that grew into a central figure and what I became immediately interested in was what lay beneath her: roots, soil, fungi, long-lost treasures, scattered bones of skeletons, and all the memories representing lives that lived over millions of years before us. The question the tree was asking me as I wrote was, What is our connection to what came before us? How are we impacted by these previous lives? The answers slowly unfurled into my literary mystery, The Chorus Beneath Our Feet, which follows Jes, a soldier returned home from Afghanistan after eight years away. Jes learns soon upon arriving back home that his sister, Mary, is missing and wanted for questioning by the police in the murder of an infant in the city’s central park. During Jes’s labyrinthine search for his sister, the mystery of the park’s infamous Harron tree and its connection to his family, their community, and the history of the British Home Children, orphans from England who came over to work on prairie farms in the late 1800s, are slowly revealed. The Chorus Beneath Our Feet explores buried secrets, and the human desire for healing and connection.
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Melanie Schnell is an award-winning author and Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. She has written for television, and has published poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. The Chorus Beneath Our Feet is her second novel.
