Featuring Kasia Van Schaik, Mallory Tater, David Martin, and Barbara Emodi
Content Warning for this issue: Suicide
Kasia Van Schaik, author of Women Among Monuments (Dundurn Press, February 2026)
I first conceived of the title, Women Among Monuments, in 2022, midwinter. I’d just read an article about a debate in Padua concerning a statue of Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia: the first woman in the world to earn a Ph.D. City councillors Margherita Colonnello and Simone Pillitteri had proposed to place a statue of Piscopia in the town square — a notable historical woman to join the effigies of notable historical men. Their suggestion sparked a major misogynist backlash across the country. Critics believed that to include a female statue within the pantheon of all-male statues would be an act of “cancel culture.” But the city councillors were determined. “The important thing,” said Colonnello, “is that we have raised the debate about the underrepresentation of women among monuments and it is now very clear to all politicians that we need a very good statue of a woman in a very good place.”
I loved this quote. The phrase “women among monuments” rang in my mind and offered me a frame for my own questions about gender and artmaking: What is a creative life? What does such a life look like for women?
I’d written about some of these questions before in essays published in Electric Literature, Jacket2, and Maisonneuve Magazine, and so I knew that I wanted to explore these questions more comprehensively, though I wasn’t yet certain of my entry point into such a huge subject. Women Among Monuments started off as a book of lyrical cultural criticism. For models, I read and reread many of my favourite critics and life writers. How to be as uncompromisingly honest as Chris Kraus, as ruminative as Amina Cain, as sharply observant as Jamaica Kincaid or Rachel Cusk, as formally original as Bhanu Kapil…?
At some point, though, I realized that the fiction writer in me needed a story to contain the lyricism, research, and analysis. I needed a narrative to propel the reader forward. And so, as I excavated stories from my own life — my experiences of imposter syndrome, frustrated ambition, and dead-end jobs, as well as lightbulb moments (most often felt when engaging with another artist’s work) — the manuscript shifted into a pleasurable, bold, hybrid form.
The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington once observed that for the writer “the task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope.” With one eye pressed to the telescope and the other to the microscope, I trace my own journey alongside those of the writers and artists in this book, in an effort to understand what it means to sustain a creative life — and in the hope that this book might serve as a companion to others endeavouring to do the same.
…
Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the linked story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth, which was longlisted for the Giller Prize and shortlisted for the Concordia First Book Prize and the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her nonfiction books include the forthcoming Women Among Monuments, a book of memoir and cultural criticism, and the co-edited essay collection Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge. Kasia edits fiction for The Fiddlehead and is Assistant Professor of English and Co-director of Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick.
Mallory Tater, author of Lockers are for Bearcats Only (Palimpsest Press, February 2026)
Following a death in my life, I rediscovered that I found peace while swimming. Lane swimming transformed into a mix of exercise, therapy, and retreat. Poems emerged swiftly from this practice. Specters of childhood and grief emerged with each lap. The poems in this book are sorrow and water and hopefully read as gentle, open inquiries into loss, existence, and the forces that propel us onward, even when we are forced to say goodbye to the people we love.
More formally, Lockers is divided into three sections. The first section is the titular long poem about a speaker watching athletes on a swim team warm up as “I”/speaker considers their own relationship to youth and jock culture. This section explores themes of athletic expectations and trauma experienced in spaces that claim to be community pillars of support and safety. The second section features poems about girlhood, mental health and losing a best friend who dies of suicide. I was writing these poems originally alongside my friend about her hospital experiences and she was going to add paintings to go with them (This was a plan we dreamt up back in 2017). Two years later, she died. I miss her so much. I miss her art too. The book is a love poem to who she was and who I was and am trying to be, with and without her.
While revisiting my adolescence for the poems that honour this friend, the third section of the book unfolded. It explores pop culture moments like Twilight and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. It’s school masses and Cheetos and TNA sweaters. It kind of becomes a time capsule that the practice of swimming helped me drift toward and unearth. My favourite collections of Canadian poetry from the past few years are The Program by Megan Fennya Jones, Exhibitionist by Molly Cross-Blanchard and Midway by Kayla Czaga. They are books that are unafraid to be intimate, funny and really, really sad. I tucked them carefully in my pocket while I worked on Lockers. In short, I wrote this book because I was sad. I wrote it because I was nostalgic. I wrote it because I was, to quote a line from the titular poem, “bored and breathing.”
…
Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. This is her second poetry collection.
David Martin, author of nightstead (Palimpsest Press, February 2026)
I had been writing a good portion of nightstead without being fully aware of what I was really doing. It wasn’t until a fellow writer and editor, Colin Martin (no relation), commented that my latest batch of poems seemed to be circling around childhood and the excavation of memory that I realized I was inching towards a subject I had avoided for many years.
As he said those words, I instantly knew that I was writing a collection about my younger brother and his death from suicide. I still find it strange that someone else can be aware of what I’m writing about before I am.
Once I was consciously assembling the poems, I thought carefully about how I navigated this subject. I decided that I wanted a balance of experimental and lyrical techniques involved to allow for a variety of emotional and intellectual registers. This process included discovering hidden meanings within words by wrenching them apart, exploring the physical range of the page, and spreading text across both recto and verso to create multiple possibilities for reading. Just as importantly, however, there is a direct lyrical approach to the poems that brings the reader into the harrowing moments that surround such a tragic event.
Lastly, I wanted nightstead to approach suicide and grief in ways that are open to poetry but less so to other literary genres. There is not as much focus on narrative and explication and a greater emphasis on image, metaphor, sonic texture and linguistic experiment. The fragmented story that does emerge from beneath these poems is neither simple nor linear, and there is no cathartic resolution at the end of the book. Nevertheless, I hope readers will engage deeply with what I’ve written and that the collection will stay with them.
…
David Martin has published three previous collections of poetry: Tar Swan (NeWest Press, 2018), Kink Bands (NeWest Press, 2023), and Limited Verse (University of Calgary Press, 2024). He lives in Calgary.
Barbara Emodi, author of Crafting a Cold Case (C&T Publishing, October 2025)
I write cozy mysteries set in Nova Scotia. I try hard to make the characters and setting real and representative. The best compliment any local reader can give me is “Oh your book made me laugh. So true.”
The funny thing though is that most of my readers live outside the country. Europe, the U.S., even Japan and South America. For some reason, my Gasper’s Cove Crafters books have even found readers in Australia and New Zealand. My publisher says the rest of the world thinks Nova Scotia is “exotic.” That appears to be true. This past year, I even heard from Southern Hemisphere readers who wanted more snow.
This got me thinking. The Canadian winter is part of my life story, as it is my characters’. As a result Crafting a Cold Case is about aspects of the season that are normal for us, but unusual for those who don’t live here.
Pipes that freeze. Snowplows. The bread bags my mother put in our boots to keep our feet dry. The girl in high school who had her nylon stockings freeze right into her skin. How we plan trips around the weather report. Anti-freeze in the car. Letting it warm up before we leave the driveway. I had so much material for this book, and I love the idea that some reader in Queensland, Australia, will write to tell me what exciting lives we live here.
And we do. Which is why of all the books in this continuing series, Crafting a Cold Case might just be my favourite.
…
Barbara Emodi has written sewing how-to books and now writes a Substack: How to be an Older Woman for Beginners and cozy mysteries set in Nova Scotia, Canada. Gasper’s Cove doesn’t really exist but it will seem awfully familiar to anyone who lives where she does. The community is based all she believes matters in life – extended family, companion animals, good food, and more sewing, crafting, quilting, and knitting projects than any reasonable person would take on.
