Featuring David Ly, Conyer Clayton, Sanna Wani, and Jade Wallace

David Ly, author of Ritual, Interrupted (Palimpsest Press, September 2026)

I feel like I have a curiosity to be close to something scary — see how close I can get before the warning lights flash in my mind to run. And, for me, there’s nothing more unsettling to me than my relationship with my mental health. How my depressive episodes and anxiety attacks can make me feel inhuman, drifting further away from myself until I can barely feel the tether. And, at odd times, how being untethered feels…euphoric? That there’s a satisfactory removal of myself from myself.

I think that contradiction is where Ritual, Interrupted began. I wanted to get close to those feelings without pretending I could make sense of them, and without having them devour me whole. I wanted to indulge my imagination; the strange places my mind can take me to — to the creatures and imagined worlds that sometimes feel more truthful than reality. Dark fantasy became a way of approaching what frightened me. If I couldn’t name it directly, maybe I could give it horns, teeth, feathers, and talons. Maybe I could turn it into a spell, a creature, a landscape, and see what happened if I stayed with it for a while. Talked to it. Or just sat with it in silence.

But rituals that I built for myself could be interrupted. Depression disturbs. Anxiety annoyingly petrifies. There are days when things that usually help me, just can’t. Writing. Imagining. Reaching outward. Trying to make meaning. They all become inaccessible. Locked behind a seal I cannot enchant open. But I’m curious about this “failure” to cope: What happens when a ritual doesn’t work? What happens when a person cannot summon the words, the magic, or recognize themselves in the mirror? Instead of rushing to recovery and understanding, Ritual, Interrupted holds poems that sit inside these interruptions.

I think the act of imagination is its own kind of powerful resistance. To make a creature out of fear is to give the fear shape. To invent a land or spell is my insistence that the world can be different. I did not want Ritual, Interrupted to be an escape from darkness, but to give belief in the possibility of movement: summoning, severing, resurrecting. I wrote this book because I wanted to see how close I could get to the frightening parts of myself without disappearing into them. And, somewhere in that fear, I kept finding strange and beautiful reasons to return. Especially when sharp feathers and talons invited me.

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David Ly is the author of Mythical Man (Anstruther Books, 2020) and Dream of Me as Water (Anstruther Books, 2022), both shortlisted for ReLit Poetry Awards, and the fantasy novel Not All Dragons (Poplar Press, 2026). He is co-editor, with Daniel Zomparelli, of Queer Little Nightmares (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022). David is Poetry Editor at This Magazine and serves on the editorial board of Poplar Press, the speculative fiction imprint of Wolsak & Wynn.

Conyer Clayton, author of the lake shaped-excuse (Wolsak & Wynn, October 2026)

Because my mom is still here and also not here. Because I am still here and part of me, also not. Because 16 years after her sudden death, my grief still changes all the time. Because we were so much the same, so very different. Because love is immense. Because I had and have so many questions I cannot ask her now, and so I turned to poetry.

It took me a very long time to write the lake-shaped excuse. Five years? Seven years? Ten? I guess it depends on if you count every dead and discarded version of this book as still this book. When I finally figured out what I needed to do, it was this: not just write through grief, but understand fully how our experiences, voices, and silences conjoined and separated from one another, in life and after death.

For years, I struggled to allow myself anger within my grief, and I think early iterations of the book wanted from this. Finally, in late 2021-early 2022, I wrote Kneeling in Our Name, the first section (one long poem) in this book; it is full, messy recognition of the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship, my own anger included. Kneeling in Our Name is erased, repeated, mirrored, and deconstructed later in the book in Floating in Our Name and Standing in Our Name.

I wrote the lake-shaped excuse so I could tell the world about my continuing grief, my deep love, my incredible, generous mother, Sharon Conyer, who gave me her name, who died too soon at 54, who made amazing pot pie, who sang silly songs, who gave me her laugh, whose body merged with Kentucky lake, where I imagine myself often, whose complicated life reflects my own, who I am so much alike, who I am so much alike, who I am so much alike, who is remembered.

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Conyer Clayton is a queer writer, editor and bookseller from Louisville, Kentucky, living in Ottawa. They are the author of But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves (Winner of the Archibald Lampman Award), We Shed Our Skin Like Dynamite (Winner of the Ottawa Book Award) and many chapbooks. Conyer’s fiction has been supported by a MacDowell Fellowship and a McCormack Writing Center Scholarship. the lake-shaped excuse is their third book.

Sanna Wani, author of Lantern (House of Anansi, September 2026)

It was 2021. I had just ended a strange and overly-extended situationship, where I thought it was the person I was going to marry. I realized character was more important than common interests. Values were the foundation of trust. I had failed at making a life in Kashmir post-pandemic, and it was time to return to Canada.

A spirit possessed: I must find love. And in finding love, find myself. Everyone always says you have to love yourself before you love anyone else, but loving other people healed my ability to love myself. This book is an archive of that. What does it mean to love poetry, love the world, love my family, love my community? It all came back to that little love inside me, two-pronged and hard as steel. Romantic love is not the foundation itself but it was a catalyst. I could change how I lived. I had to.

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Sanna Wani is a Kashmiri writer, editor, and translator based in Toronto. Her debut collection, My Grief, the Sun, won the 2023 Trillium Award for Poetry. Her writing has been widely published, including in Best Canadian Poetry, Brick, Hazlitt, and Poem-A-Day. She is the creator and host of the podcast, Poet Talk; poetry editor at The Ex-Puritan; and Publicity Manager at Between the Lines. Learn more at sannawani.com.

Jade Wallace, author of The Work Is Done When We Are Dead (Guernica, October 2026)

The Work Is Done When We Are Dead, my sophomore poetry collection, labours over, and plays with, an unwieldy problem: when everything in life feels like work—day jobs, relationships, even sleep—what do we live for? This book began back in 2018. I was in my late twenties and employed as a community legal worker, a job I truly loved. I spent my days representing clients, advising people about their rights, giving public legal education workshops, advocating for changes to legislation and policy, and strategizing with grassroots coalitions. We all knew that employment and housing were increasingly precarious and income inequality was rising, making the work harder and more necessary. Most of the people we saw every day were either in, or on the edge of, crisis. 

It was the first time in my life that I felt what I was doing was useful to other people; I also knew, after half a decade, that it was not sustainable long-term. My chronic illnesses were catching up with me, getting worse over time rather than better despite my best efforts at mitigation. I was exhausted all the time but couldn’t sleep through the night. I was also coming to terms with my queer identity, navigating various interpersonal dramas, and living alone with my cat in an overpriced Toronto apartment. Everything was hard; everything felt laborious. Even relaxation was not a respite, just one more thing that seemed unnecessarily difficult.

It is no surprise that I became interested in work as a concept. First, I got curious about obscure jobs, unfamiliar livelihoods. What has worked looked like across ages and cultures? But my view quickly branched out: I thought about self-care as work; family relationships as work; making art, paid or not, as work; reorienting ourselves to the environment in the wake of climate crisis as work. Fundamentally, I wanted to understand how the diffuse responsibilities we have to ourselves and to one another might be interpreted as kinds of work, and to ask whether that is a useful framing. As you might expect, seeing everything as work is a quick route to feeling that life has little to offer except tedium and ennui; it’s an emotional and intellectual dead end. The Work Is Done When We Are Dead is about the struggle to come back, to get free. That struggle, I think, is one we all go through, especially now as precarity and income inequality are still on the rise, and for many of us, the ways we are called to work are ever more urgent, unjust, and out of sync with where we find real meaning in our lives.

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Jade Wallace is a queer and chronically ill poet, novelist, and literary critic whose work has appeared in publications internationally, including Canadian Literature, CV2, Geist, Hermine, PRISM, and The Malahat Review. Their previous books include the poetry collection, Love Is A Place But You Cannot Live There (Guernica Editions, 2023), longlisted for the Nelson Ball Prize; a genderless novel, ANOMIA (Palimpsest Press, 2024); and, a collaborative poetry collection, ZZOO (Palimpsest Press, 2025), written with Mark Laliberte under the moniker MA|DE, as a follow-up to their bpNichol award-shortlisted chapbook A Trip to the ZZOO (Collusion Books, 2020). Keep in touch: jadewallace.ca + ma-de.ca