Featuring Alex Boyd, Brent van Staalduinen, André Narbonne, and donalee Moulton
Alex Boyd, author of Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life (Palimpsest Press, June 2026)
I published my first essay in The Globe and Mail in 1999, concerning a warehouse job that was something of a rude, helpful awakening after being an English lit major. The feedback was quite good, and I thought “That was fun, but I’ll just write another essay when I think I have a good idea for one.”
Here we are. It took this long, but a book of 18 essays came together slowly over the years, concerning itself with faith, jobs, getting older, landlords and life as an introvert, among other subjects. The essays include some of my favourite quotes in over thirty years of reading, and books and references to writers are pretty much a constant in the essays. I’ve always admired the essays of George Orwell as I think they’re model essays for clarity and purpose. In an essay called “Boys’ Weeklies,” he talks about magazines that were around when he was a kid (certainly a part of history, even by the time he wrote about them) but manages to make it interesting. His essay “Bookshop Memories,” about life working in a bookshop, inspired my essay “Paper Problems,” certainly at least partly because life working in a bookshop hasn’t changed all that much.
Aside from 18 essays, the book has 16 of the best book reviews I’ve written over a period of about twenty-five years, and I think they’re books that were largely overlooked: When I Was Young & In My Prime, a novel by Alayna Munce, or How to Swallow a Pig, prose poems by Robert Priest.
I wrote this book because I was clarifying thoughts and searching for answers, and wherever possible it made sense to include some of the most articulate comments I’ve found in other books. It’s my contribution to thoughts on these relatable subjects. Revising the essays with Jim Johnstone of Palimpsest Press, I realized I’d used a quote twice, but in finding a replacement quote about a particular subject I didn’t have to turn to Google, I turned to my essay collections, highlighted and underlined over the years. I’m immensely grateful the book is being published, and it’s good to see all my best thoughts from such a long period of time gathered in one place.
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Alex Boyd helped establish Best Canadian Essays, co-editing the first two collections. His books of poems are Making Bones Walk (2007) and The Least Important Man (2012). In 2018 his first novel was published: Army of the Brave and Accidental, a retelling of The Odyssey reviewed as “timely, original and profound.”
Brent van Staalduinen, author of The Peace Thieves (Thistledown Press, June 2026)
The Peace Thieves is an incomplete answer to a lingering question.
For a couple of years in the early 90s, I served as a reserve army medic—we called them Medical Assistants, or Med-As—in the Canadian Armed Forces. I enrolled almost as an accident, tagging along to the recruiting office as moral support for a friend who was excited to join up. Looked interesting, I thought, and signed on the line. And it was.
As a soldier, I got to fulfill fantasies I’d held since childhood, running around in camouflage, riding armoured vehicles, shooting automatic weapons, making things go boom with hand grenades and rocket launchers. I named my C7 rifle Zoe, short for Zoriana. As a Med-A, though, I got to assuage my pacifist, religious upbringing by training to help others through advanced first aid, basic trauma life support, air medevac, ward nursing skills. Human, painful things, too. I learned how fragile the human body is against explosive and projectile. I learned why one never tells a dying soldier the truth.
I learned all these things part time, in safety. But then, as now, there were bad things happening in the world between bad actors, and Canada was putting its soldiers between them. Many of my comrades-in-arms were deploying on peacekeeping missions overseas. A grand adventure, it seemed like, so I put my name on lists, hoping. I never deployed. School and life came first. When an overzealous officer gave me an ultimatum—I was all for Queen and country or for nothing at all—I chose to resign. I had a life that wasn’t painted olive drab.
I don’t regret or look back, but I do wonder. What would my life have looked like if I’d stayed in, gone to places where red crosses made attractive targets? In some ways, I don’t have to wonder. Brothers and sisters who served longer and farther than I did have entrusted me with enough sacred knowledge that I can see through a glass, darkly. Lives changed by deployments to Croatia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, elsewhere. The high calling of aid, the stress of combat, the struggle of physical injury and PTSD. The cost of the highest calling.
The Peace Thieves is my imperfect attempt to imagine how someone like me might have journeyed through overseas deployment and the life thereafter. It also tries to memorialize a fraction of the stories I’ve learned, an incomplete composite of flawed, warrior angels who put themselves in harm’s way. As fiction, of course, it’s about obstacles and struggles, characters with hopes and dreams and foibles, and is hopefully, in the end, simply a good yarn. Maybe, if I’m lucky—if we’re all lucky—a few more people will think more deeply about sacrifice, ask themselves how much they’d be willing to carry.
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Brent van Staalduinen is the award-winning and bestselling author of the novels Unthinkable, Nothing But Life, Boy, and Saints, Unexpected, and the story collection Cut Road. His stories have won numerous literary prizes and have appeared in journals and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. A former army medic and recovering high school English teacher, he now lives in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada with his wife and two daughters, and when not writing or teaching writing to aspiring undergrads, he often finds himself looking for excuses to use his power tools or wandering city streets looking for stories. Find out more at www.brentvans.com.
André Narbonne, author of Those Are Pearls (Palimpsest Press, June 2026)
Those Are Pearls began as a series of emails. My mother was living in Flume Ridge—a speck on the map near St. Stephen. She lived alone in a large house on a logging road and was unwell. In the past, either I or one of my siblings would fly or drive to her, but this time no one was available. I was at school in London, Ontario, had a one-year-old daughter, and my commitments held me in place. I began asking questions about our family, her childhood and her grandparents, thinking that engaging her in storytelling might help. I knew next to nothing about the family. I had heard that my grandfather, who’d died when she was young, had run off with the maid and drowned when he fell off the Victoria ferry, but I could not imagine his life.
As it happened, she’d been making similar inquiries. Early in our correspondence, she forwarded an email from my great-uncle Harry Short Jr, who’d passed not long after writing. I include some of his email below. The words are his; the material in square parentheses is mine and is included for the sake of clarity.
My mother [my great-grandmother Margaret Roll] fell down the stairs while she was at boarding school [in Cape Town, South Africa]. Fearing repercussion from her father, the head mistress kept it from her father [a prosperous doctor] until it was too late to set her back in place. She was fitted with a very uncomfortable girdle but the curvature could not be corrected and she was left with a permanent hump in her back. She was not able to get rid of the girdle until she married and at that time she vowed never to wear it again. Her husband [Harry Short Sr] fell at work and hurt his head and had to move to a cold climate. Mom said he had a tropical disease and at first they tried to medicate it with hot spices but soon told him he would have to move to a colder climate and at the time the coldest English settlement was in Winnipeg. Margaret's parents didn't want her to move. Her husband was too proud to ask for help. They sailed for Canada in 1910.
When I read the email, I was hooked.
The novel I found myself writing follows four principals: Harry Sr (my great-great-grandfather, who fell off a boiler), Frank Good (my grandfather, who fell off a ferry), Nan Good (my great-aunt, whose gravestone reads, “Old Socialists Never Die, They Organize the Angels”), and Margaret Good, my mother. In the Margaret section, I am the writer, she is the text. While fiction, the novel is true to the events the principals lived through: Jameson’s Raid, which was the precipitating action of the Boer War; the First World War; the Winnipeg general strike; the influenza pandemic, the Great Depression; the Second World War; the Winnipeg flood. For a family that kept falling down, they were up for a lot of history.
My mother and I had agreed that the novel, while fiction, would try to get the orientation—the time and place—as close to palpably real as possible. But how to write about a time when a doctor might in good conscience prescribe Winnipeg? When I was writing about my mother’s life during the Great Depression, I asked what the city smelled like. Here is the opening of the second chapter of the novel: “Winnipeg is the Honeysuckle Bakery on the north side of Notre Dame. It’s the last years of the Depression and the smell of baked bread and doughnuts fills my childhood. There must be other scents, but they don’t exist for me, only the joy of being bidden to fetch a twenty-five-cent bag of day-old bread buns and being accompanied home by that crusty, sweet smell.” When describing the arrival of the family to their new home, I consulted the Winnipeg Railroad Museum and asked where they would arrive in 1910 and what would have been visible from the train. While true to its history, which is specific, the book I wanted to write, the one that engaged my interest, is a meditation on love in its many routes and manifestations. While my family kept falling down, they also kept falling in love. In its truest sense, that is what my novel is about.
André Narbonne is a scholar, writer, and the publisher of Conspiracy Press, based in Windsor, Ontario. His short fiction has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories, won the FreeFall Literary Contest, the David Adams Richards Prize, and the Atlantic Writing Contest. A first collection, Twelve Miles to Midnight, was shortlisted for the 2017 Danuta Gleed Literary Award. His first novel, Lucien & Olivia, was longlisted for the 2022 Scotiabank Giller Prize.
donalee Moulton, author of Cardinal: Nova Scotia (BWL Publishing, February 2026)
Cardinal was a gift. My publisher, BWL Publishing, launched a national series of paranormal mysteries — one for each province and territory across Canada. I was invited to write the story for Nova Scotia.
I knew two things: this book would be a mystery, and it would feature a paranormal aspect. I was comfortable with the first of these; I knew little about the second. My initial concern was that paranormal meant alien, a world well beyond my writing universe. I quickly discovered “paranormal” included anything outside the fringes of “normal,” and a wonderful world of ghosts opened up.
I grew up in Nova Scotia. I heard about the ghosts that haunt Peggy’s Cove, Citadel Hill, and a seafood restaurant in the heart of downtown Halifax. These were not ghosts for my book, however. I was looking for someone, or something, with particular characteristics. I don’t write horror, so I didn’t want the Headless Horseman. Something closer to Casper. Maybe a relative of the Ghost of Christmas Future.
I also needed an apparition that could weave itself into a mystery. This book was not intended to be a ghost story. It was from the outset a whodunnit, a crime that needed to be solved by people inhabiting this world. And perhaps other worlds.
As I poked about the past, lurked in cemeteries, and floated through haunted houses, I met Catherine McIntosh, a little girl from Pictou County who died in 1889, one month short of her eleventh birthday.
From what I have read, there is nothing sinister about Catherine’s death. What makes the little girl so special is her reluctance to leave her home. Today people bring gifts to her gravesite, pay their respects, and, if they are lucky, get a giggle or a handprint on their car in return. Take a gift, however, and you might hear an unearthly growl. As you just might in the pages of Cardinal.
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donalee is a professional writer and freelance journalist from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her byline has appeared in over 100 publications across North America, including Canadian Business, Chatelaine, Equinox, Ford Times, Maclean’s, and The Globe and Mail.
