Excerpt from The Haunting of Modesto O'Brien by Brit Griffin

Excerpt from The Haunting of Modesto O'Brien by Brit Griffin

Lily released the arm of Mr. Johnstone and turned to look at Coffin. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m Theodora Bow, here with the travelling show. Colleen Bawn? Perhaps you’ve seen it?”

Coffin, grinning now, said, “You can certainly act. But you can’t lie about those violet eyes of yours, can you?”

Lily rested her hand on Johnstone’s arm to bring him along with her as she took a few steps towards Coffin. She sighed and said, “Sir, you really are confused,” and then smiling patiently turned to Mr. Johnstone and said, “Mr. Johnstone, what colour are my eyes?”

Power Q & A with Brit Griffin

Power Q & A with Brit Griffin

It is maybe odd to only write about where I live — all four of my novels are set in and around Cobalt, and most of my musings & reflections are also generated from this landscape. Odd maybe, but I feel a sense of the imperative to pay attention to the land I inhabit. Scrappy and used up as it is, and still showing the scars of short-lived but hyper-industrial activity, it is a place worth seeing, as in discovering the minutiae, the magic, the vulnerabilities, and the joy, in and of and around this place that I inhabit. It seems to me now obvious, though I wish I had seen it sooner in my life, that any hope we have of being better, of finding a way of being in the world that is non-destructive, lies in seeking atonement from the land we inhabit, its creatures and beings, wherever that happens to find us. 

Power Q & A with Melanie Schnell

Power Q & A with Melanie Schnell

Several years ago the idea of what exists beneath the ground, beneath our feet, began to worry itself away in my brain. It all began with learning about the scores of indigenous children who died at the Residential Schools. Then I read more stories of mass graves being unearthed, such as hundreds of infant remains at a former home for unwed mothers in Ireland, and a mass grave recently discovered in Syria from Assad’s crackdown on protestors.

Power Q & A with Ben Zalkind

Power Q & A with Ben Zalkind

Satire is tricky. In a free society, it can be a form of entertainment, which confirms for its audience the idiocy and silliness of “that thing we enlightened people are against.”  In dicier milieus, such as Putin’s Russia, satire cannot be reckless, lest it disappear. It has to be clever, damning, and opaque enough to cloak its true purpose, which is as a tool of resistance. Making fun of our overlords is serious, political business.  

Power Q & A with Stephanie Bolster

Power Q & A with Stephanie Bolster

The timing of the book’s release was coincidental, though it’s a fortunate coincidence in that Katrina and the subsequent levee breaches that wreaked such devastation in New Orleans are back in the public consciousness and may make readers more interested in the perspective the book offers. Sadly, the inequalities the disaster highlighted are even more acute now than they were then, and the climate change that contributed to the storm has only worsened.

Addiction, Family, and the Story Behind Lorne Daniel's What is Broken Binds Us

Addiction, Family, and the Story Behind Lorne Daniel's What is Broken Binds Us

“I initially wrote the story of our family’s journey purely to record what was happening as it happened,” says poet and retired communications consultant Lorne Daniel about his poetry collection What is Broken Binds Us. “The addictive behaviours, the anger, the borderline housing challenges disrupted and changed week by week, month by month, over years and stretched into decades,” he says of one son’s journey. “While we tried to support him, it was often a real challenge to track what was happening, even to track where he was.”

Excerpt from Votive by Annick MacAskill

Excerpt from Votive by Annick MacAskill

Votive considers various forms of devotion and our often fraught attempts to respond to “our confusion, our curiosity.” These are poems concerned with the way we use stories, old and new, to connect our experiences, and the way we persist in our quest for love, hope, and meaning when language falters —“What we couldn’t say we found in the skies.” MacAskill’s great gift resides in her facility for coaxing things evasive and intuitive into crisp form and language, in voicing what “so quickly I /knew and knew and knew.”

Excerpt from Long Exposure

Excerpt from Long Exposure

After Hurricane Katrina, the photographer Robert Polidori flew to New Orleans to document the devastation. In the wreckage he witnessed, and in her questions about what she saw in what he saw, Stephanie Bolster found the beginnings of a long poem. Those questions led to unexpected places; meanwhile, life kept pouring in. The ensuing book, Long Exposure, is Bolster’s fifth, a roaming, associative exploration of disasters and their ongoing aftermaths, sufferings large and small, and the vulnerability and value of our own lives. Incremental, unsettling, Long Exposure rushes to and through us.

Power Q & A with Sean Minogue

Power Q & A with Sean Minogue

I know I’m hardly the first writer to use my hometown as a setting for a fictional story. I came upon this totally by accident, though. When I set out to “become” a writer in my early twenties, I was trying to latch onto anything except where I grew up. And that’s not because I had negative feelings about Sault Ste. Marie – I just hadn’t processed anything about my experiences there. 

River Street Reviews: Mariam Pirbhai reviews In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns

River Street Reviews: Mariam Pirbhai reviews In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times by James Cairns

Tell me, who would you want by your side at a time of crisis, personal or other?

I imagine it might be someone to help navigate us through this haze of unpredictable futures and tempestuous presents with collective wisdom culled from an informative range of sources: political, historical, philosophical, economic, sociological, classical, contemporary, local, global. Someone perspicacious enough to ably distil this gathered knowledge but introspective enough not to look for easy answers, pat solutions. Someone who can anticipate your various and sundry interrogations and objections—all those what ifs, why-nots and buts—with openness and latitude.

Excerpt from A Quilting of Scars by Lucy E.M. Black

Excerpt from A Quilting of Scars by Lucy E.M. Black

Larkin was fifty-one now, almost the same age as his father was when he’d died a quarter century before. And in the last while Larkin had been thinking about his own mortality. About how the past could feel more present the further away you got from it.

Larkin turned and stood motionless, looking at the dark that hid the open fields and beyond them the dense bush surrounding the farm. He was remembering. 

Power Q & A with Guy Elston

Power Q & A with Guy Elston

To put it simply, because I’m not that interested in myself. Which isn’t true, of course – what poet isn’t obsessed with themselves – but perhaps I'm not that interested in the front-facing, autobiographical concept of ‘Guy Elston’. Memory, identity, the cause and effect of life and its happenings – it’s all a sheer mountain face, senseless. I need an angle, a longer way round.

Power Q & A with Christy Climenhage

Power Q & A with Christy Climenhage

I hope that readers will take away the idea that just because we are capable of doing a thing, doesn’t mean we should do the thing. We need to use our own critical thinking and ethical judgement to determine our way forward and make decisions in a complex world. We live in an era of marvels where so much is possible. But just because something is possible doesn’t mean that it serves any kind of public good. We shouldn’t do it just because we can. This applies to genAI, it applies to resurrecting dire wolves (which were not resurrected at all, not really), and it applies to deep-sea mining. And of course, it applies to the central premise of my novel – adapting humans to live in the ocean depths. 

Power Q & A with Aamir Hussain

Power Q & A with Aamir Hussain

The core inspiration of the story does come from my lived experience of coming from a family of Muslim women who are incredibly accomplished in many different fields and my attempt to reconcile this with the image of my faith in the West of being incredibly misogynistic and oppressive towards women. An image that has been a part of Western culture for hundreds of years but came into prominence as a part of the incessant drumbeats successfully justifying wars against Muslim Majority countries for the past few decades.

Power Q & A with Kevin Andrew Heslop

Power Q & A with Kevin Andrew Heslop

The work of a good book or a good art or an et cetera is to make it harder to live, to invite the reader to stretch beyond the settled narratives and reduplicative forms to which they’ve become habituated, an injunction ever the more keen in a world so stricken with capitalist call and response, itch and scratch, that the moral obligation to look longer, allow greater complexity to be revealed, and not categorically to encapsulate one’s satisfaction by acquiring the product of an echo is the greater.

Power Q & A with Lucy E.M. Black

Power Q & A with Lucy E.M. Black

This novel began in an antique store when I fell in love with a reproduction poster from May 1874.  The splendid horse, young Netherby, was available as a proven foal-getter at $4 a single leap.  I was charmed by the poster but also intrigued by the idea of a farmer advertising his horse’s services in this way.  I began to wonder about the farmer and gradually Larkin’s story revealed itself and the novel unspooled.