What is your escapist read? What do you keep re-reading, perhaps in secret, because you are embarrassed to admit to loving a certain book to friends with a sophisticated literary taste? Every novel is escapist in some way, so I prefer to call them comfort books. We turn to them when we are anxious, depressed, or experiencing a loss. I’d like to share mine, with the hope they will console and restore you before you need to re-engage with brutal reality. I can categorize my comfort books into three groups: 1 – literary novels, which are completely absorbing and intellectually engaging, 2 ..read more

Lisa Alward’s first book, Cocktail, was published by Biblioasis last fall. Alward’s stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories as well as The Journey Prize Stories. She grew up in Halifax and worked for several years in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, where she lives with her husband, John. Q: First, let’s talk about the very positive critical reception that Cocktail has received since it was rele ..read more

38 years ago when my husband and I bought this house in the middle of the woods we added on two rooms: a bedroom in the attic, and my writing space. It’s a large and airy room, filled with light, and has now become a sort of greenhouse for which I am especially grateful in the winter. The desk on the far eastern side of the room once belonged to my mother and is a treasured piece. The view from where I sit looks deep into the woods and in Spring a very marshy area popular with ducks and deer. Once I saw two wolves running through the trees. Last year I saw a river otter hopping past. On the ..read more

I do love to write at the library, but I can only do that if the high school kids aren’t hanging out in the study section. Otherwise, I hear the sound of a considerate teenager next to me, trying to eat chips quietly, torturing my nervous system in the process. When I’m home, I sit in a place that says to me, “You can and will do this.” It was once a little room in the basement, no longer in use, hosting a bed, a dusty treadmill, a lot of dark paint, and a hideous carpet. Until one day, mid-pandemic, I was struck with a “You can and will do this” determination. I decided the space could be r ..read more

“You, On Your Thirty-Fifth Birthday” is both deeply personal and yet not about me. To be honest, it also makes me uncomfortable to read again, and to write about, because while I vividly recall the singular moment that eventually inspired the piece, it now feels like it happened to someone else.  But first: the ending. Don’t they say you should always start with your ending? Years ago, my mother told me about the first time she ever left little baby me with my dad, who was (and still is) a wonderfully doting and loving father. She was enjoying a brief coffee outside ..read more

A BOOK I READ recently was The Mystery of the Emeralds, Trixie Belden Mystery #14, credited to Kathryn Kenny. Such pulpy offerings—series for young readers like The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Cherry Ames Student Nurse—were everywhere when I was a kid. You’d see them haphazard in a bookshelf, crammed between Auto Trader and National Geographic magazines, or at the bottom of the Lost & Found bin at school, sharing the floor with a nylon tuque, a green plast ..read more

Virginia Woolf famously hoped for a future where all women writers (and, likely, women in general) had “A Room of One’s Own” to create and be themselves, away from the noise and busyness of life. Nearly a century after the publication of her iconic essay, I am a woman sharing a condo in Vancouver, BC, Canada with four boys: my husband, two young sons, and our elderly cat. Though privileged to have stable housing in this city/world, I do not have a room of my own. I did apply to put a shed on our patio to turn into my writing space, but strata, unsurprisingly, said no ..read more

I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle to make sense of the complications. In particular, it is her relationships with her mother, with “friends”, and with her one true friend that Klara struggles to understand. Partly what makes this story so compelling is Klara’s observational clarity. In so many ways, the indifferent logic ..read more

For a long time, I had a quotation on my wall that read “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” I knew a writer named Ursula K. Le Guin wrote it, but I didn’t know anything about her, and had never read any of her books. I just really liked the quote because I am a romantic. I am now remedying my ignorance and have begun “Conversations on Writing”. It feels as though I’ve inherited a long lost, very wise, California grandmother. Also, for the first time in my life, I have multiple books on the go at once. I attribute this to ..read more

I started writing The Condolence Visit not exactly planning for the interactions between the two major characters in the story to unfold in a single location. However, in retrospect, I think I might have subconsciously known this. After all, when the idea for the story first came to me in the first year of my MFA program, it was simply an image of two women who were simply next-door neighbours, not friends, in a house. This is not to say that the story, which is set against a backdrop of grief and reminiscing, does not venture beyond the confines of the house. In fact, it is through the ..read more