The title of Jaclyn Desforges’s new book of short fiction, Weird Babies, is absolutely appropriate. These stories are about childhood and motherhood, and they are strange. Strange and delightful, that is: the characters and their experiences are situated to one side of what we might consider normal, ranging from speculative fiction to something close to magical realism. Desforges is an award-winning poet and the author of a children’s book. She also has a daughter, and as I read these stories, I wondered how much they reflect her experience of motherhood, particularly as a queer and neurodiverse woman. It must be strange for anyone to have a human grow inside one’s body and then, after its painful entry into the world, to feed it with fluid produced by that same body. As one character in “Mothworld,” the book’s final and perhaps most unusual story, says, “That shit freaks me out.” I know that fiction doesn’t necessarily reflect an author’s lived experience, but perhaps in this case there’s some connection.
She also has a daughter, and as I read these stories, I wondered how much they reflect her experience of motherhood, particularly as a queer and neurodiverse woman.
Or perhaps there isn’t, and these stories are just playing with narrative conventions, pushing them in new directions, overlaying typical urban or suburban life with something less typical. “Wet,” for instance, explores the relationship between a mother (the narrator) and her daughter, Julie, who is away at university. (Please note this discussion includes spoilers.) But the narrator addresses her stepmother, telling her not only about Julie but also her own adolescence (specifically, an incident at a cottage that seems to have been an underwater sexual assault that led to Julie’s conception) as well as the five babies she breastfeeds as a kind of wet nurse, something she’s done since Julie’s infancy. “The gushing of milk was the gushing of my own power, my own attention,” she explains. “There was an emptiness at the centre of each hour, and my milk was its perfect opposite.” Whether those babies have a tangible reality isn’t clear—why wouldn’t Julie mention their presence while visiting her mother?—but that detail is less important than the way the narrator’s maternal definition of herself. In part, that self-definition is the result of her belief that “[w]hen you are a mother, aloneness disappears.” That disappearance is important for the narrator, who (like many characters in this book) lives a solitary life (except for the babies she cares for). As she feeds them, she shrinks, becoming “stronger and harder” before turning into a glass object that’s small enough for Julie to carry away in her pocket.
The mysteries and unanswered questions in this story fascinate me. They obviously have symbolic resonances, suggesting something about the all-consuming nature of being a mother, of the way that the responsibility of caring for a child can become overwhelming, of the way birth and breastfeeding align women with other mammals—indeed, other creatures. The other stories in this collection reflect on similar themes of motherhood and unfulfilling (to say the least) relationships with men, and they are suffused with shame, guilt, failure, even violence. They’re pretty strange, too. “The Gall” juxtaposes a lactating woman’s musings about figs and wasps (a more-than-human form of reproduction) against a folktale she heard in childhood about a traveler who is drugged or poisoned by a Baba Yaga-like figure after eating a fig containing a wasp. In “Grief,” a woman begins a relationship with a man who is the size of a pigeon and a baby is born from a trout’s stomach. In “Second Coming” a woman gives birth to the Son of God. These events are related in disarmingly simple prose, as in this example from “Second Coming”:
Sometimes I wonder why I was chosen for this. I wasn’t a virgin. I wasn’t religious. I wasn’t even good.
Sometimes in the night, when he’s sleeping and I could be sleeping, all I can feel is my own badness. All I can feel is every mistake I’ve ever made.
Who among us hasn’t felt that way? The story’s strangeness is grounded in our shared frailty, something that’s true of the rest of this book, too.
Some of the stories in Weird Babies have already won awards. The book itself deserves to earn similar recognition.
Jaclyn Desforges (she/her) is the queer and neurodivergent author of Danger Flower (Palimpsest Press/Anstruther Books), winner of the 2022 Hamilton Literary Award for Poetry and one of CBC’s picks for the best Canadian poetry of 2021. She’s also the author of Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020), a picture book which was shortlisted for a Chocolate Lily Award and selected for the 2023 TD Summer Reading Club. In 2023, Jaclyn served as the youngest-ever Mabel Pugh Taylor Writer In Residence at McMaster University and Hamilton Public Library. Her writing has been nominated for Best American Short Stories, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, the Best of the Net Anthology, and the Pushcart Prize. Jaclyn was a finalist for the 2024 CRAFT Novelette Print Prize, the 2024 Room Magazine Fiction contest, the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize and the 2023 CRAFT Short Fiction Prize. She’s the winner of the 2018 RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award and two Short Works Prizes. Jaclyn’s writing has been featured in literary magazines across North America. She is an alumna of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Jaclyn teaches creative writing at Wilfrid Laurier University and lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter. palettes. He’s fine. But you should probably bring him a bagel.
Publisher: The Porcupine’s Quill (April 1, 2026)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 192 pages
ISBN: 9781774221976
Ken Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Regina. His first book is Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road; his second, Walking Well, will appear in 2026.
