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What is Amber Fenik Reading?

I just finished Ducks by Kate Beaton. I retreated to my bed – my perpetual happy place especially throughout the neverending pandemic quarantine and lockdowns – reading it from cover to cover all in one go. It was one of those fingertip-gripping, page turning, blurry-eyed, I-don’t-think-this-is-good-for-my-back, all nighters. I loved the author’s long running online comic strip Hark! A Vagrant as well as her previous two book collections of equally light-hearted fare: Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant Collection. A comedic yet heartwarming reimagining of people and events in history and literature, they are a welcome escape from the all too harsh realities of the modern world.

Ducks marks Beaton’s venture into a more serious topic, covering the period of time in her life following university when she had to leave her community of Cape Breton to find work in Alberta’s oil sands in the hopes of paying off her student loans.

What I enjoyed most about this graphic novel is that it can’t be categorized. It takes place in such a specific time and location, but covers a myriad of important issues that are still prevalent today: the persistence of poverty in certain parts of the country, mental health and the lack of access to adequate healthcare, workers’ rights and dangerous working conditions, climate change and environmental impacts of certain industries, drug abuse and addiction, sexual harassment and sexual assault, and the lack of job opportunities and the struggle to maintain quality of life in an increasingly unaffordable society – especially for younger generations.

This graphic novel presents us with the question, “Can we find community outside of our home towns surrounded by strangers?” Most painfully, it wonders why in Canada, entire communities have to travel halfway across the country in order to make a livable wage, often in very unsafe conditions.

You would think that this would be a heavy read but the collection of stories recounting this period of Beaton’s life is interwoven with humour and contains many heartfelt moments. Beaton’s ability to convey emotions through her illustrations is masterful. You can tell exactly what each of the characters are thinking, see the nuances in their expressions and body language. That’s pretty impactful for black and white lines.

Through a painfully honest, vulnerable, and detailed account of her personal life and experiences, Beaton creates a vivid picture of humanity and connects the reader to unfamiliar people and places. But what shines through most of all is the deep
attachment and longing for home inherent within all of us as well as the feelings of peace and joy that our loved ones bring us – no matter where we may be.

I’m not a crier, but I cried a lot. I ugly-cried my way from cover to cover.

P.S. There is a shimmery duck embossed on the front of the hardcover copy of this book that looks like an oil spill. If that can’t convince you to read it, I don’t know what will.

Amber Fenik Picture

Amber Fenik was born and raised in Perth, Ontario where she heard many local ghost stories. She has thwarted death on several occasions and enjoys spending time alone with her cat. Contrary to popular belief, she is not afraid of the dark.

 Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Sarah Totton

“To Break the Liquid Moon” was inspired by a true story told by Kate Bottley on the BBC Radio 4 program “Three Vicars Talking, Death” (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007qb0). This was a very consciously structured story. I made a rough outline, and I knew what the last line would be before I started writing. This isn’t my normal process, but I wanted to try something different with this story. I’d just finished a several-months-long stretch of writing rambling stories that were unplanned and unplotted and that ultimately didn’t go anywhere and had to be abandoned. I was determined that I was actually going to finish something for a change. I think it’s a good idea to explore different methods of storytelling, to see which ones work (or don’t) and how well they work (or don’t). 

I write a lot of stories in the fantasy genre and this particular story seemed to lend itself to a fantastical premise. I drew on the myth of Charon, flipped his gender, and set the character in the modern day. I wanted to explore how someone who played this role in a modern community would live and how she would be treated by the community. I imagined that people would respect her but that she would also be ostracized because of what she represents. I like to use settings from real life, especially when I’m writing fantasy. It helps me ground the stories and make them feel real. This story is set at an actual cottage in Wales that belonged to a distant family member who I visited as a child, so I know the place well. 

While I wrote this, I was listening to “Bright Eyes” written by Mike Batt (performed by Art Garfunkel) to set the mood, although in retrospect, I’m not sure it really helped. I was taking mood-cues from the music rather than from what I was writing. 

The story took me sixteen days to write, from first conception to final draft. 

Currently, I’ve moved back to a less conscious method of creating stories, but I’m now more mindful of choosing ideas that will move a story forward as opposed to spinning in circles, so I’ve spent less time writing drafts that ramble endlessly and end up abandoned.

Sarah Totton‘s work has appeared in The Walrus, Room Magazine, EVENT, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Nature, and The Conversation. Her humor has appeared in McSweeney’s and The Rumpus. She was named the Regional Winner (for Canada & the Caribbean) in the 2007 Commonwealth Short Story Competition.

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What is Ferrukh Faruqui Reading?

I recently culled my bookshelves. It wasn’t a one-off event, more a drawn-out process like someone crouching on wet ground, half-heartedly scooping a toy net into an overflowing bucket of water, half-hoping the canny fish, their scales flashing silver in the sun would continue to elude the snare. 

There’s something about owning a book, the physical heft of it, its strong sturdy spine, its white pages inscribed decisively in black, fluttering in the backyard breeze, something fragile but strong, the font authoritative, something like scripture, a secular guide to living.

Eventually I admitted that I was just never going to reread some of my books, but I still winced when discarding these volumes in grocery store boxes that previously held heads of lettuce or yellow bunches of Costa Rican bananas. I tried to be ruthless, to not get waylaid by the beauty of random phrases or descriptions of strange landscapes, or by characters with teacup ears.

After a year of languishing inside their splitting cardboard vaults in a corner of the garage my husband hired someone to spirit them away. I turned my head as they disappeared. 

Some books are so beloved I’ll never stop reading them. I hug them to my chest with pleasureful dread, knowing the steep price I’ll pay. Coinage not only in hours, but in tears, fat and salty. I’ll inhale deep lungfuls, down to the physiological dead space where oxygenated air rarely penetrates, to swim with the sharp-edged feelings the author rips from me. Long past midnight I’ll switch off my bedside lamp, my spent body sliding down my mattress like a wrung-out thing, to lie open-eyed, staring into bedroom darkness with thoughts ricocheting off each other like whizzing protons in quantum fields, dazed by revolutionary ideas. Sometimes we nestle into stories which are the literary equivalent of tea and toast, like Elizabeth Gaskell’s criminally underrated novel Wives and Daughters. Other tales slam into us like sledgehammers. Lanky, lonely Ruthie narrates Robinson’s Housekeeping, speaking truths we keep forgetting, leaving us as limp as convalescents. This is the book I read when I need to cry but can’t.

My first decent part time job paid enough for a modest book budget. I don’t remember when I first read Rosemary Edmonds’ translation of Anna Karenina, but I do know the Penguin paperback cost me only $5.95. As an earnest virgin I sympathized with poor naïve Dolly’s heartbreak, but try as I might, I couldn’t dislike her philandering husband Stiva. So many Tolstoian scenes ring with the messiness and malice – and kindness too – of real life. Anna alighting from the train in Moscow, pleasantly conscious of performing a good deed, Anna frantic for Vronsky while her punctilious husband shields her from the crowd at the steeplechase. The bloodless Karenin dissolves into tenderness as Anna delivers her lover’s child under his roof. All three actors in this unhappy triangle are doomed. Passion animates imperfect, perhaps immoral characters drawn in heartbreakingly human dimensions. The social strictures of 19th century Russia imprison both Dolly and Anna. Seriozha’s snuffed out joy in his mother’s clandestine visit plunk us into her tortured mind and forbid us from judging her too harshly. The final drawn-out scene tightens the screw with each beat of a ticking shell. We live in her head as she’s cornered, torn into pieces, driven to visit the pitying Dolly, firing off threatening notes to her lover yet panting for his return. The tension ratchets up till her pain explodes leaving her body crushed and broken on the train tracks.

 I need to hear the stories that Tolstoy wants to tell. I want to tell stories that engage, enrage, delight. Whether Anna was bad, mad, or simply a woman trapped in a world not of her making, her story scorches me because she is flawed, she is real.  Drawn back again and again I become Anna: desperate, furious, abandoned; seeking absolution, seeking release. 

Ferrukh Faruqui was born in Karachi, the city by the sea. Raised on the edge of the Manitoba prairie, she’s content either streaking through water or tramping across snowy fields. 

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Basma Kavanagh’s Writing Space

When the best seat in the house isn’t in the house: in praise of makeshift spaces

It’s a long story, but the big drafty room with plastic covering its large, unfinished windows is sometimes a difficult place to write. Perhaps it’s too dense with possibility—my messy piles of textiles, paper, and art projects. Books overflow the shelf. I get lost before I start.

I choose a room with only two walls, no desk, no lamp. For more than six months, I sit every day in an old wicker chair in my porch. My elderly laptop won’t work there—I don’t like the humidity, dear—and despite its name, it doesn’t really like being in my lap. I sit with my notebook and pencil, interrupted by insects and breezes, writing and reflecting. I make surprising progress on a collection of essays from the creaky chair.

Once a week, my friend and I go to a nearby café to write. Alert and restless in the not-quite comfortable chair, I squint in river-light glaring through the windows, endure the emotional rollercoaster that is pop music, the general hubbub. These slight discomforts activate a strange, dreamy state of focus—I write twice as much as I would in an afternoon at home.

When my partner goes away for work I unleash an avalanche of papers and books, the wild detritus of work-in-progress blanketing the dining table, couch, floor. I fill the bed with a person-sized drift of books. Titles that don’t usually touch find themselves in proximity, whispering to one another. The whispering filters into dreams; odd and elegant notions emerge from this haphazard séance, the confusion of books and body.

I’m mostly a creature of habit; many of us are. Routines can be helpful, but to paraphrase Ellen Glasgow, the difference between a rut and a grave is depth. I spend many hours in the bright, drafty room at the too-small desk in my desperately uncomfortable chair, and writing ensues, but whenever I can shape a new little nest somewhere fresh, I do, and it is good.

Basma Kavanagh is a poet, visual artist, and letterpress printer who lives and works in Nova Scotia, in Mi’kma’ki. She has published two collections of poetry, Distillō (Gaspereau, 2012) and Niche (Frontenac, 2015), and a book-length poem, Ruba’iyat for the Time of Apricots (Frontenac 2018). 

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Finding the Form with Anne Hopkinson

“Testimony, March 3 2011”

I attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Vancouver. It was overwhelming; the survivors, the stories, the crowd of indigenous people, the tears. At home I wrote pages and pages, all raw writing, a flood of sentences. I wrote by hand in a semi-legible scribble, drew arrows to connect ideas, doodled, crossed out words, and kept going until I was toast.

I read it over and remembered what Alex Leslie, Vancouver poet, had said years before in a writing workshop. She said, “Shrink your stories into poems.” Cut five pages of wild prose into three, then two, then one. The shrinking process makes you select the strongest words, clearest images, and most compelling ideas. At one page the writer decides either to write it as a poem or prose piece. I chose poetry. Which form brings out the theme, sound, and rhythm best, without dominating the meaning? I experimented with a few traditional forms first: pantoum, ghazal, sonnet. Betsy Warland says in Breathing the Page that to find the intrinsic form of your poem you must find a word or phrase that encapsulates the poem. Becoming an ally was my phrase. The skating theme was clear, and I chose which details of testimony I would use. Free verse felt right, content uppermost in the poem. Finding form includes finding voice. Because it was a personal day of reckoning, a day of remorse and shame, I had to write in first person. I had to face the truth myself in lines of poetry.

 

“Mother’s Day, Kigeme Refugee Camp”

This poem came from a diary I wrote while volunteering in Rwanda in 2014. I filled three notebooks in three weeks, some of it teaching material, some shopping lists, letters, Kinyarwanda vocabulary, and my observations of peoples’ lives in Rwanda after the genocide. I remembered what Ray Hsu, Vancouver poet, said about generating poetry. He said, “repurpose your work.” Take text you have already written and distill it into poetry. This worked well as I had already examined those feelings, sensations, and ideas in prose. My prose piece on the same material won the Non-Fiction prize for the Victoria Writing Society contest in 2019. I repurposed the text into poetry by focusing on one mother and her child. The time I spent in Kigeme refugee camp provided a bank of sensory information from which to draw. I chose free verse because of the gravity of the story. Denise Levertov calls it “fidelity to experience” when form and content integrate. The serious circumstances of women and children in that part of the world can’t be lightened by rhyme or compressed into a sonnet. There was too much to say for 14 lines. Free verse allowed me to make simple statements of the tasks she must do to survive – no clever wording or extended metaphor, no literary devices or tangents to dilute the meaning. 

Anne Hopkinson writes poetry in Victoria, and is President of Planet Earth Poetry, a reading series of 26 years. She is a nature lover, book addict, and water rat. 

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Finding the Form with Traci Skuce

I’m always teetering on the edge of fiction and non-fiction. Trolling my own life for stories and then spinning them into fiction. Sometimes this means combing through images or events that happened long ago, but other times it means opening to a story that presents itself in real time. “A Chorus of Injuries” is one such story.

Let me backtrack.

About a decade ago, I found this writing prompt from Dorothea Brande. Write what happened to you yesterday—in the third person. It’s an awesome prompt for many reasons—it teaches you about voice, story consciousness, interiority—and it means there’s always something to write about.

Fast forward to a May long weekend a half-dozen years ago. I did trip and fall outside the grocery when my little town was bustling in celebration—just like my protagonist Anna.

It should be said that, at the time, I was enthralled with all things Virginia Woolf. (She still enthrals me.) I love Woolf for all the reasons people love Woolf but am particularly in awe of the way her characters tumble through time. How the linear movement of the story (going to buy herself flowers) simply serves what’s excavated in deep time (Bourton and Peter Walsh and the cabbages).

So, when I sat down to write ‘what happened yesterday’, the day after I fell, I’d decided to adopt the close-close third point of view à la Virginia Woolf. This brought me to a place where my character not only experienced the shame of falling “over nothing” but the fall shook all her old injuries—both physical and emotional—from the depths of her body.

I’m always curious about the overlays and filters characters experience in a present moment. And what’s held in the body. In this story, I wanted to stir my character’s wounds, wake them up, show how deep they are, how they separate her from the aliveness of the world. 

Traci Skuce lives on Vancouver Island–on the traditional and unceded territories of the K’omoks First Nation. Her work has appeared in several literary journals throughout North America. In April 2020, her short story collection, Hunger Moon, was released by NeWest Press and was a finalist for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. 

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Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

Fugio – I flee. I flee two thousand years back in time to Saint Stephen, first Christian martyr, and in distance, a good league hence, in the footprints of Good King Wenceslas. I run away. As if compelled, I circle back again to the realities: Boxing Day, the quiet nurse, the room in ICU, and to the choir, my sister’s choir and to her, herself, lying in the room. I loop again and again back to the far entities, Stephen and Wenceslas, and to the near ones, there in the room. I am fleeing.

Looking back, of course I am in flight. I didn’t accept my sister’s death.  For a long time, I hosted a triumvirate of numbing agents: denial, avoidance, magical thinking.  I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t face it. When we slipped out of ICU, slid silently down the KGH elevators, exited the near-empty parking lot, and drove through the street-lit city, I was in a kind of shock. What about those next promising therapies? What had happened?

When we spoke to our brother, who lives in Labrador and is a musician, like Joll, he noted that she died on the Feast of Stephen. Boxing Day. The day that Good King Wenceslas looked out. He asked, rhetorically, how many times had she sung that Christmas Carol. Many times; there was no arguing that, and as days went on, the concreteness of this assertion grabbed hold and dragged me towards the starkness of it. I began to think about a poem.

 In a musical fugue, the first melody is repeated, “chased” by variations in second and subsequent voices, sometimes randomly, unpredictably, repetitively. In “Fugue”, a poem written in the recognized poetic form called a fugue, Saint Stephen marches through it all, chased by Wenceslas and all the rest.  Yet it was I who fled. 

Poems desire to be compelling; thoughts, memories, experiences crying for expression, are finally gathered into chosen lines and language. Joll’s death, though, did not present itself like other thought, memory or experience, or imagination or dream. It was a knot of torpor in the middle of me.  It took the facts about Stephen, 2000-year-old canonized saint, whose feast is Boxing Day, to set me on a path winding around and through the events of December 26th, the night of my sister’s death, on the Feast of Stephen. 

A fugue, as a form described, with exemplars, in the excellent Canadian resource, In Fine Form by Kate Braid and Sandy Shreve, was the outcome of a personal and painful flight, put into a poem, Fugue.

And by the time Fugue was finished, I had wept and I had grieved – not that grief is a finite thing, for it is not. But I was able to accept that Joll was not going to be reached by text or phone. We weren’t going to be able to chat in person about her choir, her cat, her new red coat.

Poetry by Callista Markotich is published in TAR, Arc, Grain, The Nashwaak Review, TNQ, Prairie Fire, Riddle Fence, and Room, and has received First and Second Awards and Honourable Mentions. Callista is a retired Superintendent Education, living gratefully on the traditional homelands of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and the Huron-Wendat in Kingston, Ontario. She is a contributing editor for Arc Poetry. 

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Finding the Form with Hollay Ghadery

My poem, “Rebellion Box”, is a sestina and the title piece of my debut poetry collection, which is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023. I first learned about rebellion boxes while attending a lecture by historian Allan McGillivray at the Uxbridge Museum. These boxes were carved out of stove wood by men who’d been imprisoned at Fort Henry as a result of their involvement in the 1837 Rebellion. The boxes often included personal inscriptions. 

To be honest, I’m surprised I remember anything about what was said in the lecture. Not because it wasn’t interesting—it was, obviously—but because I had my eight-month-old daughter with me who was interested in everything except sitting quietly on my lap. I remember sweating with embarrassment while other attendees either gave me the stink-eye or sympathetically pursed-lipped looks. 

But the story of rebellion boxes did manage to stick with me. Not because I have any great knack for historic details, but because of the love story behind one particular box: the one Joseph Gould—a founding member of Uxbridge, Ontario—crafted for the woman he loved, Mary. Priopriety at the time made it so Joseph couldn’t communicate directly with Mary, so he instead wrote to Mary’s mother, sending her the box and obliquely inquiring after his love interest. 

The story of Joseph and Mary floated around my mind for a year or so. I suspect my fascination with it extended beyond enjoying a good romance and was rooted more firmly in my interest in examining the mores and values that bind us—an interest that can likely be traced back to my own identity as a biracial and bicultural woman. I’ve often felt, especially as a young adult, almost unbearable tension between what I want and what I am allowed to do. Who I am allowed to be.  

So when I had time, I did more research on the 1837 Rebellion and Joseph and Mary. I knew I wanted to write a poem because so much prose had been written about Joseph Gould and I didn’t see how I could add to it in any interesting way. 

Also, prose would require a level of sustained historical research I was not prepared to undertake. 

Also, love and poetry are a no-brainer combination. One of the most influential love poets I’ve ever encountered is Petrarch. He wrote many poems to Laura—the object of his unrequited affection. While thinking about “Rebellion Box”, I imagined Joseph wondered if his love was returned since—while Joseph would eventually end up with Mary—he was in prison. Who knew if Mary would wait for him? Who knew for certain the extent of her affection and if it would remain consistent? 

I started to think about how awful it must have felt, to be so young and in love and impotent. To be limited in your ability to even express how you feel because of familial and societal expectations.

In the end, the confining image of the box and the rigid sestina form made sense, though I would not have been able to articulate this sense at the time. I wouldn’t have been able to say I picked the sestina because Petrarch also used this form to write of his frustrations in love. These things aligned unconsciously. It was only later I could pick them out. 

What I knew at the time I wrote the poem was that I couldn’t get my thoughts straight and I have always gravitated to form to force my thoughts into order. When my mind is unruly, form poetry helps me plot a course to coherent expression. So I’m pleased that the form of “Rebellion Box” works on multiple levels, but I have to admit: I can’t help but feel as if this synchronicity has little to do with intention.

Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in rural Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her work has appeared in various literary journals and magazines. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental illness, was published by Guernica Editions’ MiroLand imprint in 2021. Her debut collection of poetry, Rebellion Box, is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023 and her short-fiction collection, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in 2024. 

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What is Kelly Pedro Reading?

Black Dove by Colin McAdam

What is an airplane if not a story about people who wanted to fly?

As a writer (and I’m sure I’m not alone) I spend a lot of time living in my head, building alternate realities, processing my emotions on the page. And so, when I picked up Black Dove by Colin McAdam, a story structured in the form of a fairy tale about a father trying to write a different world for his son, it didn’t take long to get hooked. If you love a book that blends genres, this is the book for you.

I had read McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth and he also led a summer writing workshop group I was in where he helped me think more deeply about my characters and what makes them who they are. He’s done that beautifully here.

In Black Dove, 12-year-old Oliver lives in Toronto with his father, who’s a writer. His mother was a drunk who left the two and by the time we meet Oliver, his mother is dead and he’s being bullied by a group of boys at school. At some point, the story slides into a fairy tale, where Oliver has the power to overcome his past and change his future through gene editing. Like all good fairy tales there are kernels of wisdom woven throughout the story. At one point, Oliver’s father writes, “Maybe most people make up stories about who their loved ones are, and we never really know each other.”

For me, the book grapples with some central human questions: Can we fundamentally change who we are? Can we break free from our past? All fairy tales have a moral undertone and reading McAdam’s book, I wondered: If we try to change too much of ourselves, do we risk losing ourselves all together?

I’m a sucker for when form amplifies content and McAdam does that so well. Black Dove is broken into three parts that mirror the structure of a fairy tale — there is magic, there is good versus evil, and the beginning and end come together. The last book I read where form amplified content so well was Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries.

McAdam’s writing is exquisite. As I write that it seems so vague. I’ve tried to pick out just one sentence to demonstrate its beauty but every sentence is hooked into the other like a carefully crocheted blanket. Unloop one piece and the rest unravel. It’s a testament to McAdam’s writing that every word has its place, every decision is intentional, and I’m reminded of my responsibility as a writer to have the same expectation for my own work. No filler words, no crutches. Just writing that transports the reader into a time and place, clutching them there until, as a writer, I’m ready to let them go.

Kelly Pedro’s fiction has appeared in PRISM and The New Quarterly. She was a finalist for the Phyllis Grant Zellmer Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. Her work has also been selected as part of the Emerging Writers Reading Series. She’s currently revising a collection of linked short stories and lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada, located on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbek, and Haudenosaunee peoples. You can find her on Twitter at @KellyPatLarge.

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Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Writing Space

There are not a lot of doors in my house. It took me until the pandemic to really notice this, but with two kids at home, I quickly learned the value of doors. In March 2020, I started writing in my bedroom, but all those sleep experts are onto something when they say that working where you sleep can mess up your sleep. Not to mention that my kids were constantly running in and flopping on the bed next to me.

But a few weeks into the pandemic, I had an epiphany—we had an uninsulated sunroom that was bike and stroller and shoe storage. I decided one Saturday morning that it would be my office. I moved the bikes out to the garage, got a small patio couch, a lamp from my youngest’s room, and moved in a small side table from the basement and just like that, I had place to work! With a door!!

Since then, I’ve upgraded my couch to one from the basement and filled the sunroom with my favourite things—art and postcards created by friends are lined up on the windowsill; I’ve got my kids art that’s faded in the sun taped to the wall, and a jar of doily flowers my youngest made in kindergarten; a stack of poetry books next to my space heater; a print of swimmers floating in the water, a gift from my sister, to remind me of the glory of being in the water; a framed poster by Sebastian Curi from a trip to Buenos Aires, and gorgeous bunting I also picked up in Argentina; and a beautiful painting my dear friend Laura Wills did of twelve rings my Papa Doug made for my Nana. (I will also add that my sunroom office is also filled with shoes and umbrellas and leaves my youngest has collected over the years and scooters and bike helmets and baseball gloves and sidewalk chalk and tote bags, because in addition to my office, it’s also a mudroom).

It is my favourite place to write in the early mornings—moonlight creeping in the fall, and when it’s warm enough, open the windows that let the spring air through. I did much of my Letters to Amelia editing on this couch, and all the edits for my forthcoming picture book, Dear Street. 

It’s not perfect by any stretch—it’s not insulated, so even with a space heater (and a scarf, toque and sleeping bag), I can usually only use it from April to early November. And then I’m back to writing in my bedroom and messing up my sleep, or at my desk in the basement where there are no outlets and not enough light, listening to my children thundering above me, counting down the days until my sunroom office is warm enough again.

Lindsay Zier-Vogel is a Toronto-based author, grant writer, educator, and the founder of the internationally-acclaimed Love Lettering Project. She is the author of the acclaimed debut novel Letters to Amelia in the permanent collection at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library in Toronto, and she leads creative writing workshops in schools and community settings. Her first picture book, Dear Street, is out with Kids Can Press in Spring 2023.

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Photos courtesy of Lindsay Zier-Vogel.

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