None of my ex’s had a dog. I can’t watch
television alone. I am sloppy
with the weekend

For our second attempt at pepperpot, my husband and I purchased a roast, hoping it would tenderize well in the Instant Pot.

As we had done the first time, we bought a loaf of challah bread to soak up the sauce. We dutifully acquired more Scotch bonnet peppers and cinnamon sticks.

How my heart fell when I unscrewed the lid and realized we didn’t have enough cassareep to coat a second batch of pepperpot. As my husband sautéed the beef over the stove, I pinched an eighth-inch teaspoon between my fingers to scrape as much of the dregs of the cassareep as I could into a measuring cup. By the time my knuckles were sticky with syrup and I could salvage no more, I had collected less than half a cup.

The decision was not intentional. When I was initially thinking about the novel, I intended to have multiple perspectives, but at some point, due to a combination of reading Adele Wiseman’s Old Woman at Play (which is about her mother’s profilic doll making and creativity), and doing many crafts with my four children, a sock puppet wandered into my head. I became fascinated with the puppet’s voice, which was silly and sweet and whismically wise. I found myself disinterested in listening to any other character. So I didn’t. I let the puppet tell the story of Minoo—an Iranian immigrant to Canada struggling with shame, sexuality, and being there for herself and the people she loves.

It’s not every day a sock puppet visits a maternity ward.

Minoo and I fly down the hall, the anticipated squeak of hospital vinyl absent from under our feet. We are weightless, shoes barely touching the ground. A reflection of Minoo’s form glides beneath us. Wraith-like, we are darkly mirrored in the freshly-waxed floor. 

And Minoo—she stares ahead, unseeing. Not seeing me, I mean. As conspicuous as I am to everyone else, my existence is as natural to her as the weight of her tongue in her mouth, or the air filling the lungs in her chest. She doesn’t see the nurse who jumps out of our way either, flattening her body to the wall, blue eyes large with shock.

Being the subject/object of unwanted gazes, overt attention and other creepy male incursions, is so ubiquitous in most women’s lives that few even seem to address its rupturing dominance. Even when we consider ourselves to be outspoken feminists, writing about this pervasive reality isn’t simple. And perhaps it’s even more complex when the obsessive is an artist, or wealthy, someone we should supposedly feel honoured to have snagged the eye of so that, even if we don’t yield to their advances, we should at least shut up regarding our own resistance (despite the powerful examples of the #metoo movement).

How does the old adage go? Despite the sage wisdom of not judging a book by its cover, the cover of a book is a key first impression that informs a potential reader of what it’s about, inviting them to flip open to the first page and want to find out more. The decisions that go into a cover’s artwork, font choice, and other design elements are all important in creating an impression that makes a book stand out. And when it comes to books by Canadian small presses, there’s a wonderful opportunity for unique, beautiful, and more personalized covers that you might not always find with books published by larger houses or the Big Five. This is not to take anything away from books released by these publishers, which often have great covers of their own, but sometimes, especially in certain genres and trends, one cover to the next can seem a little formulaic. Not so with small press books, and the artists who spend lots of time and care in creating them, ensuring that no two covers are exactly alike. 

In a conversation with Brian Vines for a Twenty Summers podcast in 2021, Fran Lebowitz was asked about “the strange balance and continuum” between AIDS and the current COVID crisis. She stopped him and said, “Not at all. People ask me, ‘This is like AIDS, right? It’s nothing like AIDS.’”

I often encounter those who assume the AIDS crisis was like the COVID pandemic. It’s understandable, particularly for younger generations, but it’s misguided to view both pandemics in the same light.

When I moved to Edmonton, Canada from Jilava, Romania in elementary school, I felt so much pressure to assimilate that within a few years, I almost completely lost the capacity to express myself in my mother tongue. Since then, I’ve felt this desperate dor, or longing, for limba română.

My mother tries to translate it on the phone:

Harnică means you’re vrednică.
You’re pricepută, îndemânatică, dibace.
You work with spor.
Muncești cu râvnă.
Lucrezi cu zel.

For me, a poem is "finished" when it flows so smoothly that lines will randomly pop into my consciousness like catchy song lyrics. I know it's time to step away from the page when everytime I make a change, no matter how minor, I revert back to the original.

Between the day in June when Mrs. Harrison booked her death 

and the day in July when the doctor came, 

she grew heavy in the hospital 

on twelve last suppers.

Love felled her like a tree
a robin’s egg in a windstorm
a pretty blue thing
a gift of spring.

The whole of The Blue Gate weaves threads of love and loss. But in the long central section, where I’m thrust into grief, reality ravels and unravels. Death destabilizes, throws one into a space and time that is unknowable. I move physically into an unknown country but emotionally hold close to what is lost. In this time of transformation, I walk in two simultaneous realities. 

T’oyaxsut’nuun, I really appreciate the question and I would like to answer it but I have to be honest, I, luckily, have not been touched by the loss of a loved one on the highway of tears. I wish everyday for the safety of my family that lives along the highway, my friends, my loved ones. I really wish for the safety of all Indigenous people along the highway of tears.

According to Dreamers Creative Writing Magazine, a periodical currently soliciting online reviews of Canadian books: “it's not really worth your time to write a negative review. What’s the point? It’ll be more enjoyable for you and for us to write a kind and positive review and it may even facilitate a dialogue with the author you’re reviewing.”

Such rhetoric is prevalent in the reviewing realms and shall I say, brutally simplifies the reason why reviews are written, while indubitably patronizing authors who are deemed to be so ultra-sensitive that they cannot handle a real critique of their work, one balanced between grounded praise and articulate and respectful attention to what might need reassessment.

Writing this novel, and thinking about it in the ramp up to its publication date, has done all of these things. Researching forest fires especially, I sometimes felt like River does watching clips and news stories about the fire that puts his mom on evacuation alert, sadness “like a log across his chest,” and I’d struggle with what can seem like an inevitability, that “from now on things [will] just get worse and worse.” There is a lot of climate grief in The Fall-Down Effect. Characters reflect on the increasing frequency and severity of forest fires; activist and government-worker characters alike feel, at times, defeated when they think of the environmental and climate costs of the logging industry; parents worry about the world their children will inherit. And yet, at the same time, each of the characters also tend to and preserve their hope for and connection to the natural world. None of them are going to quit caring for and about the planet. None of them will give up the fight and there’s nothing they can do.

Although a collection of minimalist poems (or one long poem composed of minimalist fragments), Wound Archive has a lengthy origin story. In 2016-2017, I was a Fellow at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. I was researching instances of Holocaust survivors reading poems as part of their testimonies and was deeply invested in exploring the place poetry held in survivor testimony.

The sea wept with Rhys, each wave breaking like a breath he couldn’t catch. Clouds aglow in pink and orange stretched above the western coast of Lanilia. Dawn over the Wilnayan Sea always echoed the blush of succulent fruit to him. Memories bloomed on his tongue, of the sharp, citrusy bursts of sunpearls and the lingering, spiced warmth of mourningberries. Rhys stood, motionless, clutching the flower bud in his hand, rubbing its soft petals. He wondered if he would soon forget the taste of his favourite fruits as well.

It was like laying beams in the dark, trying to trust that something will hold even though I could not see or understand the entire structure yet. There was a tenacious fear that I was imagining incorrectly, that I was misunderstanding my own creation, and mistaking whim for truth.

2026 is well underway with spring fast approaching, and there have already been lots of great books by small presses released to start off the year. But there are plenty more coming out soon and it’s never too late to add to your reading challenge, whether you’ve set an official one on Goodreads, joining many other avid readers, or something more casual, such as a list of titles you’ve been meaning to get to before the year is out. However you like to enjoy your reading, without further ado, here are 10 books published by Canadian small presses that you should consider adding to your 2026 reading challenge, and why they deserve to be there.