Featuring Judy Wearing, Mark Anthony Jarman, Elizabeth Ball, Frances Boyle, and Maria Cichosz

Judy Wearing, author of Anxious and Hairy (House of Anansi Press, October 2026)

“What’s pubic hair for?” I asked a group of scientists over my cup of tea. I was a graduate student at Oxford at the time, studying animal mating behaviour. While learning about the bright feathers of a peacock’s tail and the dances of the jumping spider,  I started wondering about our own anatomy. The location of pubic hair alone suggests it might have something to do with mating. And since humans are the most interesting species alive, someone must have thought about it, I reasoned. So I dove into the research literature and came up with almost nothing, although other hairy mysteries presented themselves. Such as: What are mustaches for? Armpit hair? Even eyebrows. Curiosity bubbled. But when I asked my colleagues their thoughts about pubic hair over tea, I realized that most of them hadn’t seriously thought about it before. How odd.

Over the years, my questions blossomed, along with a fascination about why people are so weird about their hair. Throughout time and across geographies, human beings have plucked and waxed and rubbed it off with pumice stones. Taking a broad view, this is pretty strange—why is hair so offensive? And yet, when people go thin on top, and the majority of males do, many are psychologically disturbed by it no matter how tough they are. Even Julius Caesar wore a combover. 

Anxious and Hairy is my attempt to address both the evolutionary questions about our patches of hair and our discomfort about it. I had a hunch the latter relates to a broader disquiet with being animal, and my interdisciplinary research convinced me of it. I also wanted to explore how evolution impacts everyday behaviour of individuals and societies. Hair did not disappoint. I believe that understanding how biology and culture intersect is crucial for understanding human beings. If we have any hope of being kinder to each other and the planet, we need to consider biology and culture; both influence (not dictate) the decisions we make.

There’s a more personal reason I wrote this book too: while I have not suffered much on account of my hair, I have had difficulty accepting some of the less fun aspects of being an animal interacting with other animals. I hoped that facing the facts about bodies, and the human behaviour surrounding them, would ease my discomfort. It worked for me and I hope it does for others. 

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Judy Wearing is an award-winning educator and author with a PhD in evolutionary biology from the University of Oxford and a second PhD in education from Queen’s University. Her previous book, Edison’s Concrete Piano, has been translated into multiple languages.

Mark Anthony Jarman, author of Wild West (Flying Books, October 2026)

Decades ago I published a story about the Custer Massacre in my book 19 Knives. My editor  Martha Sharpe thought there was a novel there. I love the short story form and wasn’t enthused; the short story is the best natural form and my favourite writers published short stories. To echo Barry Hannah, my brain is calibrated to the short burst.  

I realized, however, that my character could easily witness the first Riel Rebellion (Fort Garry, 1869-70), Custer’s massacre (Little Big Horn, 1876) and the last Riel Rebellion (Battle of Batoche, 1885).  

Gabriel Dumont, who led the fight at Batoche, was a favourite of mine, an early proponent of guerilla warfare, hit and run and harass. But Riel had a vision of staying put to make a stand at Batoche. Bad idea; led to his hanging. Most texts say, “found guilty and hanged in Nov 1885”  and that’s it. If I did try a novel, I wanted to reveal more disturbing details of the execution.  

Over the decades other Wild West stories popped up in my various collections. Martha kept after me, asked me to send the pieces and see if she had any ideas. She did.  

In the stories I use “The Territory” and like that vagueness, that freedom, especially as the border was fluid in those days. Martha asked me to be more specific: are these bars in the same town or worlds apart? US or Canada? So, we worked on place names and countries and chronology.  

In Fredericton I live by the river and many of my Wild West scenes are by rivers, so I plucked details about floods, eagles, or moose in my dooryard. A young girl was killed by lightning here; I put that in Wild West. I cite a Loyalist graveyard, a nod to graveyard scenes in John Ford’s westerns. My narrator is a gravedigger, but also cuts ice in the winter. At UNB I taught Creative Writing for decades in The Icehouse. It all adds up in a good way.  

I’m from the west and walked the fields at Batoche, but New Brunswick helped inspire Wild  West.

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Mark Anthony Jarman is the author of nine books, including Smash & Grab, Burn Man, 19 Knives, and Ireland’s Eye. His work has been praised by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, and many more. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Yaddo fellow, Jarman has taught at the University of Victoria, the Banff Centre for the Arts, and the University of New Brunswick. He is co-editor of the literary journal CAMEL and editor of Best Canadian Stories 2023. Mark lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

Elizabeth Ball, author of Missy Whynaught (Baraka Books, October 2026)

I don’t really know why I wrote this book. I would love to say it’s because I’ve always dreamed of it, or that I had a unique and urgent message to share with the world. But neither is true. I’m just a white gal with daddy issues who, while pregnant with my third, decided to resume the bad poetry I dabbled in high school by imitating The Owl and The Pussy Cat. I based it on a visit to my dad in Cuba when I was nineteen and befriended the teenage prostitute he knocked up. “This is a short story,” my poetry teacher said. “Keep going. But you might want to keep an eye on the way you make light of the themes you’re exploring. It’s making some students uncomfortable.”

I took her advice and wrote more stories about life with my father. He’d recently died, so I didn’t have to explain why I aired our dirty laundry or added a ton of nonsense à la Edward Lear. I blame Missy. Sure, it makes light. Child prostitution and intimate violence are no joke. As a mother and social worker, I’m with ya. Still, as I introduced Missy to other characters I’d met, heard about, or imagined, the stories kept rolling. And I am sorry I have yet to address the discomfort part.

Missy Whynaught wasn’t intended to be a book. It is what it is, and again, I blame Missy. In a way, it morphed into a sort of relationship catalogue. Different dress; same person. “Oh, look, there’s Missy confusing love and attention again.” “Oh, look, Missy ignores the danger signs.” Maybe  it’s a not-so-unique but urgent message in solidarity with those who find themselves in toxic relationships while onlookers scream (nod to my editors): “Come on, where’s your agency? You’re smarter than that! This isn’t a joke!” But who am I kidding? I still really don’t know why I wrote this book. But I am incredibly grateful for the interest.

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Elizabeth Ball is a writer, social worker and mother of three boys. Her stories have been published in The Dalhousie Review, Qwerty, Prism International, The Missouri Review and elsewhere. She was shortlisted for the CBC Short Story Prize in 2026, short listed for the Commonwealth Fiction Prize in 2022, shortlisted for Room Magazine’s 2019 Fiction Contest, and nominated for the 2019 Journey Prize. Her writing has been financially supported by Le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council of the Arts. Missy is her first novel and she is currently at work on her second. She lives in Montreal.

Frances Boyle, author of Skin Hunger (Guernica Editions, October 2026)

Skin Hunger tells two stories in counterpoint: the story of Rowan, a young activist who crusades for animal liberation to compensate for a dearth of emotional comfort and physical connection, and that of Evie, Rowan’s mother, whose struggles with mental illness and substance abuse have long kept the family apart.

Rowan Shea has spent her life looking for warmth and comfort. Separated for years from her mentally ill mother, she seeks fulfilment in caring for sick and injured animals, and connection through a string of casual hook-ups. After losing her job as a vet tech, Rowan finds a renewed sense of belonging and direction when she falls in with a group of animal rights activists and moves into their ramshackle farm on the outskirts of Vancouver. Soon, impatient with their inaction and petty disputes, Rowan forges new friendships and creates her own opportunities for protest, until she learns that the activists are targeting a university lab performing experiments on rhesus monkeys—and considering more extreme action.

 In another time and another place, Rowan’s mother, Evie, struggles with the conviction that her very essence will harm her delicate baby. After numerous stays in a psychiatric hospital, Evie becomes convinced that her daughter is better off without her cursed touch. Lonely yet wary of forging deep connections, Evie undertakes the challenge of building a new life on her own terms.

Skin Hunger tells the story of a mother and daughter, starved for nurturing and compassion, as they struggle to find a home in the world, one that, despite decades apart, might bring them back together.

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Frances Boyle is the author of Seeking Shade, short stories, Tower, a Rapunzel-channelling novella, and three well-received poetry collections. Her volunteering includes Arc Poetry Magazine, The League of Canadian Poets, and Ottawa’s VERSeFest poetry festival. Raised in Saskatchewan, Frances has long lived in Ottawa. Skin Hunger is her first novel.

Maria Cichosz, author of Middlemen (NoN Publishing, October 2026)

I never intended to write a sequel. When I finished my first novel, Cam & Beau, I was elated and emptied, happy with how the book ended and where I had left the characters. I felt I had done them justice. I was ready to move on to—where? The next thing, I guess.

Back then I was living abroad in London and working a day job I had taken to escape the mass unemployment of the Great Recession hitting my generation like a truck. I spent my days on a pier on the River Thames, watching the water flowing glacially by, listening to my coworkers talk shit about each other and jostle for a word of managerial praise, an extra chocolate from the “staff appreciation” pile, a stab at a promotion. Back home my friends were going about their lives without me, changing into beautiful strangers I recognized but no longer knew. Here I was stagnant, poised on a ledge between a place and time I missed and an uncertain future where adulthood, financial instability, and displacement loomed large. I could go neither forward nor back. I lingered.

And I started thinking about these characters I loved. I saw, with preternatural clarity, Beau Larky waking up in the soggy park among dregs of stubborn spring snow, not knowing how he’d ended up there. I saw him smoking with his temple pressed to the cool window, rivulets of rain running down the pane, ashing his cigarette into a dirty mug much as I liked to while sitting on the low mattress pushed up against the window of our makeshift east London bedroom. Lost in the ennui of crowds and tourists, I found myself inhabiting the only piece of home I had brought with me to this strange and unwelcoming land. 

That summer, I got my wish to go back. I found Toronto sad and changed, looking much as I remembered yet somehow no less foreign than the mean, wet country I’d longed to escape. The people I loved were the same, but different. Nothing felt right. I spent the summer crawling between provisional spaces, staying up too late, doing too many drugs. In the fall I loaded my meagre worldly possessions into a U-Haul and long-hauled it across the continent to California, a golden promised land I’d always felt a pull toward that would ultimately teach me more about distance, displacement, and longing than I’d ever wanted to know. And I kept writing about these characters who didn’t exist but felt as real as my hand on the wheel on the Interstate in the middle of the night, experiencing this flux alongside me through a glass darkly.

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Maria Cichosz is a writer, critical drug studies scholar, and professor of literature and creative writing at Victoria College in the University of Toronto. Their work has appeared in Critique, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Literary Review of Canada, American Literature, and on the CBC Literary Awards shortlist, among other places. She is the author of two novels, Cam & Beau (2020) and Middlemen (2026), as well as On Drugs, a forthcoming entry in Biblioasis’s Field Notes series.