Featuring Maria Giesbrecht, Jane Doucet, Adriana Oniță, and JoAnn McCaig.
Maria Giesbrecht, author of A Little Feral (Write Bloody Publishing, May 2026)
I wrote this book out of the aftermath of a ruptured belief. After leaving a strict Mennonite fundamentalist church when I turned seventeen, I wasn’t interested in replacing one doctrine with another. But something was still lingering, and so I started wrestling with a desire for reverence, something holy. These poems come from that unsettled place, where faith hasn’t disappeared so much as loosened its grip on me.
While writing A Little Feral, I found myself drawn to the idea of attention rather than certainty. The poems live in moments of heightened awareness that, if you look closely enough, resemble devotion. I am trying to track how sacredness shows up in a life. Poetry gave me a way to stay inside that instability instead of rushing to resolve it. (Trying to figure everything out before writing never seems to work out for me anyway!)
I also wrote this book because I needed new practices. Without the inherited rituals of my past, writing became a daily act of orientation, a way to mark time, to slow down, to notice what still mattered. Many of these poems were written in stolen moments, late at night, half-formed and urgent, shaped by instinct more than discipline. In that sense, the book is a record of how to live attentively in the absence of belief. What I missed most from church was the way an entire gospel choir could fill your chest and make you feel like you were floating. Or the gentle whisper of a psalm. A poem, really. Since then, I’ve discovered there are many ways we can access sacredness. It’s more important that we do, than how we do.
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Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose work explores her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her writing has appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, Grain, ONLY POEMS, San Pedro River Review, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2025 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, a Best of Net nominee, and the founder of Gather, an international writing community that connects poets worldwide. Born in Durango, Mexico, she now lives in Toronto, Canada with her fiancé e.
Jane Doucet, author of Blood Typed (Vagrant Press, May 2026)
I had no plans whatsoever to write a murder mystery. Zero plans. A big fat goose egg of plans. In 2023, I had three published novels, all humorous contemporary fiction (none of which I had planned to write, either, but that’s another story). The only deaths in those books—and there aren’t many—are from natural causes or accidental.
However, I had been reading murder mysteries since I was young, starting with Enid Blyton’s mysteries and Nancy Drew. In high school, I read my mother’s Agatha Christie and Elizabeth Peters novels. I watched Murder She Wrote with my maternal grandmother. I’ve read all of Louise Penny’s Three Pines novels, and I am hooked on Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series. On home turf in Nova Scotia, Tom Ryan, C.S. Porter, Pam Callow and B.R. Myers rank among my favourite mystery authors.
So, in 2023, when I saw a CBC story announcing that several Canadian authors had been shortlisted for the $150,000 Dublin Literary Award, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny if one by one, they started dying? And not from natural causes?”
I didn’t think, “Wouldn’t it be tragic if they died? Wouldn’t their families be sad? Wouldn’t it be a monumental loss to Canadian literature?” No, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny.”
And because I thought it was funny, and I couldn’t get the idea to leave me alone, I started writing a funny murder mystery based on that premise. And that murder mystery is Blood Typed.
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Jane Doucet is a seasoned journalist who self-published her debut novel, The Pregnant Pause, in 2017. The following year, it was shortlisted for a national Whistler Independent Book Award. Vagrant Press, the fiction imprint of Nimbus Publishing, has released her subsequent novels: Fishnets & Fantasies, Lost & Found in Lunenburg, and Blood Typed: A Val Jenkins Mystery. Jane lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with her husband and their two senior rescue dogs. She is working on Death at the Petting Zoo, the second book in her Val Jenkins mystery series, which is scheduled for publication in 2028.
Adriana Oniță, author of Descântec For My Split Tongue (Palimpsest Press, May 2026)
I wrote Descântec For My Split Tongue as an incantation to reclaim my mother tongue, Romanian. Today I speak and teach in five languages, but regaining fluency in limba română—the only language I spoke in the first decade of my life—has been the greatest challenge.
For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by how languages are learned, lost, silenced, reclaimed, revitalized. In Canada, language shift is often described as individuals “abandoning” one language and “adopting” another. But did I abandon Romanian as a child? To abandon and to adopt imply choice. Did I sweat it away in the labour of learning other languages? Did I discard my mother tongue and call that forgetting? Did it disappear inside corpul meu, hiding out of fear, shame, assimilatory pressures—waiting for momentul potrivit to resurface?
Between 2016 and 2022, everything in my life converged around this inquiry: the art and language pedagogy courses I taught, the research I conducted with youth, the conferences I organized, the talks I delivered, the poems I wrote. I was very lucky that my PhD supervisor, Dr. Olenka Bilash, and my committee embraced creative arts–based inquiry; several poems in this book began as a poetic autoethnography tracing how I arrived at my research questions. Poetry was the most fertile ground for me to explore questions about language loss in sensuous, symbolic, spontaneous, and hybrid ways.
I hope this book speaks not only to poetry lovers, but to anyone interested in how we might better honour, value, and sustain languages through creative practice.
I wrote this book to reclaim Romanian, and the descântec worked. In these poems, I resist Anglocentrism and code-switch a lot between English and Romanian in an Anzaldúan attempt to “keep my tongue wild.” But by the end of the manuscript, I found myself writing more and more poems entirely in Romanian. The year after finishing the book, I wrote only in my mother tongue—not a single poem in English. Today, I am teaching Romanian as a first language to my son. I would say the spell held. I hope this book speaks not only to poetry lovers, but to anyone interested in how we might better honour, value, and sustain languages through creative practice.
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Adriana Oniță is a poet, artist, educator, editor, translator, and researcher with a PhD in arts-based language education. She writes and teaches in English, Romanian, Spanish, French, and Italian. Her debut poetry collection, Descântec For My Split Tongue, is published by Palimpsest Press / Anstruther Books. Her multilingual poems also appear in CBC Books, The Globe and Mail, The Ex-Puritan, Canthius, Tint Journal, and in her chapbooks: Misremembered Proverbs (above/ground press, 2023) and Conjugated Light (Glass Buffalo, 2019). As founder of The Polyglot, she is proud to have published more than 250 writers, translators, and artists working in over 60 languages. She is the editorial director at the Griffin Poetry Prize and lives between Edmonton and Italy. Discover her work at adrianaonita.com.
JoAnn McCaig, author of Beneficiary (University of Calgary Press, May 2026)
I wrote Beneficiary because these stories refused to go away and leave me alone. They pestered me for decades!
The first two sections were drafted in a fiction writing class with Aritha Van Herk when I was in grad school in the 90s, a class I actually had to drop out of because I was pregnant and single and pretty overwhelmed. I can’t tell you how many times I rewrote The Vigo Reaction, how many times I sent it to the Malahat novella contest — just about the only venue available for a piece too long to be a story and too short to be a novel.
Family Fugue was originally titled Pax Ramona (a play on the antidepressant Paxil, 200 years of peace in ancient Rome, and a character named Ramona. Don’t ask). Thank goodness I decided to put that one in a drawer but I always kept pulling it back out, editing, pruning, retitling, refocussing. One scene I just loved but finally had to delete saw Seren taking her young son Justin to a physiotherapy clinic to be trained to skate more smoothly on a bizarre contraption that’s almost impossible to describe. My writer’s group finally convinced me that the scene didn’t belong. (But I’ve got it tucked it away, so don’t be surprised if it pops up somewhere in the future!)
The original conclusion of the novel was called Ideal Donut, and it was a love story set entirely in a donut shop (!). When I finally realized that it didn’t work, I was stumped about what came next and ended up setting the entire novel aside for quite a few years. Then, while I was riding out the pandemic in the mountains of southeastern BC, the final half of the novel — Catastrophe, Beneficiary, and Distancing — all bubbled up. They were a chaotic patchwork of bits and pieces of old and new material, and organizing everything involved multiple sheets of newsprint taped to the walls, and two dozen felt markers in a variety of colours, with arrows, strikeouts, and post-its galore. Putting it all together felt like planning the invasion of Normandy!
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JoAnn McCaig is the author of the new novel Beneficiary. Her other books include An Honest Woman. She taught for 20 years at the University of Calgary, and she owns the independent bookstore Shelf Life Books in Calgary, Alberta.
