With a MFA from the University of King College, being a multi-award winning Black Canadian writer and poet, she uses her remarkable skills in lyricism and thoughtful analysis to understand what it means to be in this constant state of movement.
Hi Niko! Thank you so much for your time. I must be a fangirl first and let you know I’ve been following your work for some time and I am thrilled to be talking to you today. There are so many exciting themes in “Dad Rock” that I want to ask you about! Though, I’m going to begin with a bit of a bummer question because lately I am so often thinking about grief and mental wellness amongst my peers. When you discuss Jason Molina’s Farewell Transmission in your essay We’re all Supposed to Try, you capture your own memories with the song and you also present bits of Molina’s story. But I was moved by how careful you were to discuss his life and work without overly romanticizing his struggles, while still acknowledging the reality that he lived with alcoholism and ultimately died quite young.
A Steady Brightness of Being is a moving collection of letters by celebrated Indigenous Voices from across Turtle Island (North America) with titles like “Dear Relative,” “Letter to Clouds,” and “Dreaming, Listening, Belonging.”
Go-Between Girl, by Andrea Gunraj, is a memoir told across a collection of essays that examines what it means to be the descendent of the racialized indentured class.
Beaulieu asks, why are we writing?
What I wasn’t expecting about In the Field was just how much I love it. It is a remarkable book: thoughtful, nuanced, beautifully written, and thoroughly researched.
You may know Dennis Lee by the lyrically nonsensical poem and book, Alligator Pie, which came out in 1974.
The personas writers invent (often subconsciously) for their non-fiction usually attempt or pretend to show more or less of the private self. In Because Somebody Asked Me To, bemedaled and oft-rewarded Guy Vanderhaeghe favours a straight speaking tone, whether reviewing Richard Ford or talking to historians.
Her estate has recently emptied the cupboards with a release of Shields’s previously unpublished and/or uncollected stories and essays.
Hosted at York University, the free, public events gather writers, artists, and thinkers from various disciplines and geographies to discuss the most pressing issues of our time. The insights shared at the live and streamed events are later transcribed and expanded in artful books published by Alchemy, a Knopf Canada publishing program, in collaboration with York University.
Do you ever wish poets would include essays to situate their poems? Some frank prose that ponders what their own poetry comes out of or means to do? We can’t follow every crumb trailer life, and not every aesthetic reaches universally. Consequently this book of essays, Bait & Switch: Essays, Reviews, Conversations, and views on …
Stephen Osborne is a long-time British Columbia-based literary raconteur and starter of bookish projects. In 1971,
Consider the infamous Martian. What would they surmise about Canadians circa today, if they were to read the latest selection of Best Canadian Essays?
I admire Purdham’s willingness to give voice to the ugly thoughts a lot of us have had about disability or other perceived differences — because we do have them.
Excerpted with permission from Dundurn Press
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