Featuring Ben Zalkind, Chris Klassen, Irina Moga, and Bretton Loney
Ben Zalkind, author of Honeydew (Radiant Press, October 2025)
My novel, Honeydew, is a sort of convergence point for my preoccupations: tech oligarchy, surveillance capitalism, the clarifying power of humour, and why, to paraphrase the great cultural critic, Thomas Frank, Johnny still can’t dissent. The spark for the story itself was a wonderful Evan Calder Williams essay in The New Inquiry that traces the history of sabotage and highlights the early-20th-Century Industrial Workers of the World organizer and badass feminist radical, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. She coined the phrase “fine thread of deviation” to distinguish capitalist subterfuge (e.g., planned obsolescence) from worker sabotage. The former is “good for business” and the latter is a crime. This led to my perusing the recently declassified OSS (now CIA) Simple Sabotage Field Manual, which is an astonishing cultural artifact and a surprisingly amusing read. I dug into the tragic story of the heroic and unfairly maligned Luddites, who were among the earliest resisters of automation. A story started to percolate.
To my surprise, the narrative that sprang from this research was not a rousing tale of successful dissidence, but a farce, equal parts A Confederacy of Dunces and The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a quartet of feckless wannabe saboteurs who have the right idea but can’t quite follow through. Vanquishing famed tech bro and future-mover Moses Honeydew is a bit of a tall order in a world in which surveillance is nearly total. This tension suffuses my story. My protagonists are keenly aware of the problems that are swallowing up their world, but they’re no match for momentum and inertia.
I know there will be a temptation to see clear topical references in my characters, especially Moses Honeydew himself, who, I’ll admit, does bear some resemblance to a few of our less impressive overlords. But my intention was never to reflect the reader’s world back to them. Honeydew shares some of our reality, but it also exists in its own milieu, maybe a bit like Boots Riley’s Sorry to Bother You, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series, Roald Dahl’s novels, and even, I think, P.G. Wodehouse’s Edwardian Britain that never was. I permitted myself the freedom to make my characters eccentric and the setting surreal. There is something unsettling beneath Honeydew’s humour. Though many of us face the welter of social, climate, and economic injustice with courage and wisdom, Honeydew’s freedom fighters resort to harebrained schemes. This is not a commentary so much as a prism through which I filtered my own bewilderment.
Have I answered the question? If not, there’s a line in Honeydew that seems appropriate as a closer. When Mo Honeydew is asked why he plans to pilot a submersible drill ship to Earth’s mantle, he replies that “we shouldn’t ask why when a because will do.”
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Ben Zalkind lives and works in Calgary, Alberta. A Salt Lake City native and naturalized Western Canadian, Ben is happiest outdoors, where he can cycle, drink coffee, and adventure with his wife and fellow traveller. Honeydew is his debut novel.
Chris Klassen, author of Harold Koenig (DarkWinter Press, Dec 2025)
Before there was Harold Koenig, the novel, there was “Harold”, the story. I wrote it in 2022 and saw it released officially in a literary and cultural online journal called Across The Margin. At the time, fairly early in my writing exploits, my focus was solely on short stories, and this was where, as far as I was concerned, my efforts would continue. And this was where, I felt certain, Harold was going to remain, a strange little philosophical man existing eternally within a few brief pages.
Unexpectedly, however, I received a few flattering and encouraging comments from people who read “Harold”. They suggested that he had potential to be something more, that his life needed further exploration, that he deserved to be in a novel. So despite my doubts, I decided to give long fiction a try. After almost a year, with many moments of blankness combined fortunately with moments that felt appropriately creative and sensical, Harold Koenig was complete, submitted, rejected often, and then, with many more months passed, ultimately accepted.
Always in the background, as support, were the literary masters that I have read throughout my life. Harold Koenig would not exist without Kafka, Camus, Sartre. Their talents and the books they wrote, the ones I’ve read multiple times, that deal with questions of reality and meaning and absurdity, are my influence. They are part of the reason that Harold Koenig may or may not make sense. But they are also part of the reason that Harold Koenig exists at all.
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Chris Klassen lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. After graduating from the University of Toronto and living for a year in France and England, he returned home and worked the majority of his career in print media. He is now writing exclusively. To date, thirty-six of his short stories have been published in numerous journals including Literally Stories, Vagabond City, Dark Winter, Ghost City Review, Unlikely Stories, The Raven Review, The Coachella Review, Sortes Magazine, Amethyst Magazine, Toasted Cheese, and Mobius, among others. His two novels – An Individual and Harold Koenig – are available through Dark Winter Press.
Irina Moga, author of Quantum (DarkWinter Press, June 2025)
Reading poetry means crossing into a space of mindfulness that lends itself to introspection. Some call this “being in the zone”—a state of meditation and detachment that nurtures focus and clarity of purpose.
A question comes to mind: What if poetry is a field of creative energy whose quanta surround us, and in which we can immerse ourselves through the mediating power of daydreaming?
Hence Quantum, a collection of poems that attempts to serve as a conduit to lightheartedness and serenity.
Poetry, as we know it, is the deconstruction of reality and its recompilation into an alternate paradigm, guided by intuition, aesthetics, and imagination. This is why in Quantum I experiment with a variety of techniques—punctuation, mathematical concepts, and series of mini poems aggregated under a single theme.
More than anything, the poems in Quantum make use of sensory cues to create a reading experience that blends deep silence with the reverie of the natural world—a realm where raw feelings can subside and where healing can begin, awash in an understanding of who we are.
A tremendous empowerment comes to us through the beauty that words encapsulate—meaning, rhythm, sound, signs.
Why not make use of it? Read Quantum and see if I have the right of it.
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Irina Moga is a trilingual poet writing in English, French, and Romanian, and a member of The Writers’ Union of Canada. The author of six poetry collections, she brings a distinctive voice to contemporary literature, one that interlaces linguistic precision with lyrical depth. Her collection Variations sans palais (Éditions L’Harmattan, Paris) received the 2022 Dina Sahyouni International Literary Prize in France. Her poems have appeared widely in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in publications such as Canadian Literature, carte blanche, New York Quarterly, and California Quarterly. Her work has been nominated for the SFPA Rhysling Award and Best of the Net. Moga’s poetry has been translated into German, Spanish, Korean and Farsi, further extending its reach across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Bretton Loney, author of Unsettling Time (Self-published, September 2025)
In 2013 I was reading Jon Tattrie’s great non-fiction book, Cornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax, when one particular passage described how current downtown Halifax was dense, virgin forest when the English colonists arrived in 1749.
That passage fired my imagination. It was the seed from which the idea for my new book, Unsettling Time, sprouted. In the novel I wanted to explore pioneer life in colonial Halifax from perspectives not usually considered — those of women, poor English settlers, Acadians who worked in the colony, German and Swiss Protestant settlers, African enslaved people, and free people of African descent.
To enable this I created a time travel murder mystery which allowed the reader to look around in the fledgling colony through the eyes of an unwitting time traveler from modern Halifax.
The modern character was able to provide historical context that characters of that era would have no knowledge of in order to give readers a broader perspective. The murder mystery in Unsettling Time helped propel the story along and introduce some actual historical residents of colonial Halifax.
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Bretton Loney is a fiction, short story and non-fiction writer who has published two books that were nominated for Whistler Independent Book Awards: a biography, Rebel With A Cause: The Doc Nikaido Story in 2015 and in 2018 for his first novel, The Last Hockey Player.
In 2022 he published his second novel, Joe Howe’s Ghost. His short stories have appeared in various Canadian short story anthologies including The Group of Seven Reimagined, a collection of stories inspired by the artists’ paintings.
Loney lives in Halifax with his wife, Karen Shewbridge. For more information, please see www.brettonloney.com
