Featuring Liz Johnston, Jane Park, and Jaclyn Desforges
Liz Johnston, author of The Fall-Down Effect (Book*hug Press, April 2026)
The Fall-Down Effect came out of a mixture of nostalgia and climate grief. On a trip to B.C. in 2017, the hazy skies—smoke drifting from hundreds of kilometres away—were the worst I’d ever seen. I’d never witnessed smoke like that growing up in the interior, but megafires had begun to happen every summer. Visiting some friends in Osoyoos, we had to sweep the ash off our car as if it were snow. We didn’t go to my hometown, Revelstoke, that trip; I hadn’t been in years. But my siblings were there, and I felt gutted, that summer or the next, when my brother sent me a picture from Mount Revelstoke with smoke totally obscuring the view of the other mountains. It reminded me of an earlier grief, the way I’d feel on car trips in high school or en route to college passing large swathes of forest destroyed by pine beetles. I didn’t know then that the proliferation of pine beetles was in large part thanks to climate change too.
I’d been writing short stories and losing faith and interest in a different novel, which I’ve since relegated to the drawer. I’d never written something set in my hometown (although I suppose my short story “Scoring,” about a woman who billets a hockey player, could have been), and maybe because of that smoke and grief or maybe because it was just time, I suddenly felt compelled to. The Fall-Down Effect is not set explicitly in Revelstoke, but the unnamed town my characters grow up in is a version of that place. The family my novel centres on is nothing like my own, but perhaps because it was my siblings reporting on the smoke—on all the changes in our small town—I decided to write about relationships between siblings too.
In Revelstoke, many of my friends, or friends’ family members, worked either in logging or at one of the lumber mills, and as I started writing, I got thinking about the impact of logging deforestation on our climate and ecosystems and about that classic push and pull between the environment and the economy, ecosystems and jobs. I’d like to think those don’t always need to be in opposition, but in a system where companies succeed by extracting more and more as cheaply as possible, it’s hard to see it another way. What’s clear is that the future of life on this planet depends on us doing things differently.
While I was writing, a lot was going on to fuel my thinking about protest and activism as well: the Extinction Rebellion movement, then the Wetʼsuwetʼen pipeline protests and the Fairy Creek protests, among others. There was even a blockade of a logging site near my hometown, much more organized than the one my character Lynn tries to mount with her children. Following those activists on Instagram wasn’t so much like seeing my fictional characters leap out of my computer and into the world as it was a confirmation that those characters weren’t alone, that there will always be people who fight for our forests.
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LIZ JOHNSTON grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Cardiff Review. Johnston is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.
Jane Park, author of Inheritance (House of Anansi Press, April 2026)
It was 2006. I was living in New York and dissatisfied with my life. Sometimes at my job—as a way to rebel or let off steam—I would sit in front of my monitor, my face concentrated, my fingers furiously typing, pretending to be engrossed in work when, in fact, I was writing flash fiction. It was during one of these exercises that the voice of an unhappy Korean Canadian tax lawyer descended upon me. Her father had just passed, her brother was in rehab, and her mother didn’t seem very reliable. I wasn’t sure if she was either. But I pursued her voice, which eventually became the beginning scenes of my novel.
But I wasn’t consistent. I got distracted and abandoned this story for months, then years. I returned to it, but stopped again. I got married, moved countries, got pregnant, had a kid, then another kid, then stopped writing altogether. For various reasons, I hit a rock-bottom low and lost any semblance to my former self. Yet, in the chaos of motherhood, where my time should be spent cooking, cleaning, organizing, and scheduling (all the while, presenting as pleasant), the only thing I wanted to do was write. So after many years, I returned to my computer and opened the neglected word document. My characters miraculously returned, like loyal friends who weren’t resentful despite all the passing years.
I had a newfound tenderness for my characters. On one occasion, I could not stop a character from ruining their life, and I sat at my desk, sobbing as if grieving a death, feeling helpless I could not give them a happier ending.
This book is a culmination of all my own observations about Korean/East Asian immigrant kids: of trying to fulfill Confucian duties yet also pursuing the Western beliefs of finding individual aspirations and passions. I also indulged in scenes that gave me pure joy: from dancing ajummas (elderly Korean women) gyrating to PSY’s Gangnam Style to describing the beauty of a prairie thunderstorm. Now, twenty years later, I look at my novel as I would a 20-year-old adult child, stunned at what grew from such a tiny seed, now unable to imagine my life without it.
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JANE PARK is a second-generation Korean Canadian writer. She is a MacDowell Fellow, and was a participant in the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio, and Diaspora Dialogues. She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, lived in New York City for over a decade, and now lives in Calgary, Alberta. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Inheritance is her debut novel.
Jaclyn Desforges, author of Weird Babies (The Porcupine’s Quill, April 2026)
I wrote Weird Babies because I was a poet who wanted to learn how to write fiction. I wrote Weird Babies because I already knew how to write fiction, but my fiction felt and sounded different from other fictions. I wrote Weird Babies because I was lonely and autistic and afraid and a new mother. I wrote Weird Babies because I was figuring out what it had meant to be a daughter.
Inside Weird Babies there are thirteen stories and each story is about me: there is a story about a woman with an unexplained gaggle of mysterious infants and an eating disorder and a college-age daughter. There is a story about a lovesick, unwittingly murderous ghost and her frenemy, a talking hamster. There is a story about a miraculous set of re-incarnated quadruplets on an ostrich farm with a catatonic mother. This book is about the most vulnerable part of me, the most shameful part, the part I was hiding from all the years I spent writing these stories: hilariously, I thought I was making it all up. I thought these characters had nothing to do with my insides.
Of course, they were me all along. And maybe they’re you, too. I suspect there is a weird baby in each of us, wriggling and wailing, longing for love. This book originally had another title, something more traditional. But over wine with my friend and mentor Miranda Hill, I kept saying weird babies, weird babies, and she said, “You know that’s your title, right?” And she was right, of course. It was.
I wrote this book because I wanted to write fiction. I ended up writing the truest truth I could, the kind that can only be told slant. I was a wreck, writing this book. I was growing up the whole time – starving myself, avoiding myself, escaping the truth of my life. I’m a different person, now, and also exactly the same. It’s strange to hold this book in my hands – like holding a part of myself.
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Jaclyn Desforges is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower, winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry, and Why Are You So Quiet?, a picture book selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. Her forthcoming works include the short story collection Weird Babies(The Porcupine’s Quill, 2026) and her first novel, Eyelash Person, both generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
