Essay collections are special animals. They can go awry if an author introduces too many disparate tales or the ideas aren’t quite ready to be pulled from the oven. The essays need to be cohesive, not in terms of content or time periods, but in terms of story spirit. Of the emotional and imaginative harmony that zips them together as a singular creation. In All the Waking Hours, a possible nod to Michael Cunningham’s enduringly beautiful novel The Hours, Erin Wunker delivers nine exquisite essays that are ripe to perfection.
I began with the piece about Agnes Martin, an artist whose paintings and approach to life I’ve long loved. On large grids of muted colour, this quiet woman etched cosmic introspective visions while her schizophrenia paced like a persistent old tiger in a zoo. With art Agnes could tame her mind, and I think the same may be true for Wunker, who doesn’t shy away from talking about her own struggles. Not just with mental health, but also with the sorrow and frustration at the thick rope bound to the neck of most women living in a world where systems created by men prevail.
All the Waking Hours thrums with masterful, almost gothic nostalgia that is as clear-eyed and symbolically evocative as Melissa Febos’s award-winning essay collection Girlhood. There is a repeated sense of reckoning with a past she didn’t always consent to and a curious compassion for the girl she was. The one who got married young in those fabulous but ill-fitting shoes, who learned to tell the weather, who endured strange lessons at church camp.
There is a repeated sense of reckoning with a past she didn’t always consent to and a curious compassion for the girl she was. The one who got married young in those fabulous but ill-fitting shoes, who learned to tell the weather, who endured strange lessons at church camp.
The one who booked it through rural North Carolina in a 1989 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. There is nothing quite like the joyful sovereignty of a woman driving her car and that chapter, called ‘On Style and Survival’, is one of my favourites. I can hear Janis Joplin blaring and see the tendrils of Wunker’s imagination flexing on the cool power of Billie Holiday and Nina Simone while cruising an Antebellum highway at night.
The author’s intimate histories dialogue in compelling ways with broader historical events and figures like Freud, Hannah Arendt, and blessed Sylvia Plath with her early morning “blue hours” of solitary creation. Threading what she’s gleaned from these figures across the essays enlivens their seminal contributions and feels like a poetic education. Whether standing on the edge of a cliff on the cusp of a momentous decision, wading through the forced cloister of Covid-19, or scrolling through the information of daily life with a loose thumb, All The Waking Hours reminds us that what humans do is rarely mundane.
Wunker shows us the small magic that’s tucked up inside most of this thing called life. If we look closely and if we care. This is especially true in ‘On Swimming’, which floats somewhere deep inside my skull like a favourite pool toy at the end of summer. It features childhood, water, adopted racoons, and fish, but is mainly a peeling back of the silver flesh that surrounds mother as woman, symbol, and identity. This chilling and exhilarating essay slices through the page and pulls us close to a darkness few of us understand, those “swift and strange” people in our watery midst who started it all.
Wunker shows us the small magic that’s tucked up inside most of this thing called life. If we look closely and if we care.
Erin Wunker teaches, researches, and writes in Mi’kma’ki where she is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Dalhousie University. She is the author of Notes from a Feminist Killjoy: Essays on Everyday Life (Book*hug, 2016) and The Routledge Introduction to 20th and 21st Century Canadian Poetry(Routledge, 2022). She is also the co-editor of Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader (Coach House, 2020), with Sina Queyras and Geneviève Robichaud; Public Poetics: Critical Issues in Contemporary Canadian Poetry and Poetics (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015), with Bart Vautour, Travis Mason, and Christl Verduyn; and Refuse: CanLit in Ruins (Book*hug, 2018), with Hannah McGregor and Julie Rak.
Publisher: Assembly Press (September 15, 2026)
Paperback: 6″ x 9″ | 144 pages
ISBN: 9781998336333
Dr. Treena Orchard is an award-winning professor and author based in London, Ontario. Her work on sexuality, gender, and health sheds new and illuminating light on human behaviour in the 21st century. She has written for Maclean’s, Psychology Today, and The Conversation,and in 2025 was awarded the YWCA Woman of Excellence Award (Social Justice). Treena's memoir Sticky Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture & The Darker Side of Dating Apps (AEVO/University of Toronto Press) was nominated for Book of the Year & People’s Choice by Mindvalley. Her next book project Vulnerbro: Men, Masculinity & Vulnerability explores how men cultivate their sense of identity and belonging.
- Treena Orchardhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/treena-orchard/
