The Gibraltar Point Lighthouse has stood sentinel on the southwestern edge of the Toronto Islands since 1809. It’s the oldest surviving lighthouse on the Great Lakes, and one of Toronto’s oldest buildings still standing.

But age alone is not what makes it remarkable; it has a darker story that began on a cold January night in 1815.

Ten years was far too long a time to be confined to a single room, a prisoner of my own mind just as much as the walls around. Understand this: Walls are fragile. I could have taken them apart stone by stone if I had chosen to. 

Well, I’m four months pregnant and this will be my last entry in this diary. It’s a fresh chapter in my life. No more smoking, drinking or sex with other boys for me. M will be a good dad. I’m moving to Maywood Home until the baby is born so I can work on high school classes. Also, my parents don’t really want me here. My mother said, “Do you think I should shout it from the rooftop?”

I’ve always been a walker. I’m old enough that I walked to elementary school, for instance, instead of being driven there. My family sometimes went on short hikes; I write about one of those in Walking Well. When I was a university student in Ottawa, I would usually walk to the campus instead of waiting for a bus.

I originally conceived of Sixteen Homes as a more straightforward memoir that moved in a semi-temporal trajectory through the sixteen homes I have lived in, but as I wrote it, I realized that a diversity of approaches was required to enter different aspects of the divisive subject matter.

Alvin swaying to left and right under bright fluorescent light, thinking about his ilk, how it now gone and get him into trouble in this new school, in this new country, and he not even here two month yet. Alvin have the ilk from he know himself. For most of that time, he never even know what it is. It vex him still to think that when he find out, it was not from Miss Mirrie, his guardian, now gone to her Lord, neither Mr. Hector, the best headmaster in the world, neither Old Papa Chin, from Chin’s Self-Serve, that he rescue when he fall down the hillside, nor even Young Chin that supply him with Chinese butterfly biscuit.

Every man, unless he is born decided, has his own conversion story. All men convert, because all men worship, whether they know it or not. To be blessed is to know what you worship, and to understand why. To know what holds you, and to what extent you hold it back. The salesman knows himself to be a lucky man.

I write for anyone who can read, anyone who has ever opened the cover of a book. I don’t say anyone who enjoys reading, because one big reason that I write is to seduce people who would not, as a habit, consider books as a source of entertainment, who would not say that they “like to read.”

When authors get together to gripe, they often gripe about this: people asking, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’ It’s posed at dinner parties and public readings and even in media interviews. I knew one particularly prickly writer whose standard reply was ‘I subscribe to Ideas Monthly.’ But I’ve never understood why this question would bother anyone.

I never imagined that I would have a poetry collection. In the last 5 years, I decided to pursue my passion for poetry that I have always had since I was a young girl growing up in Singapore. English classes were my favourite at school. I remember that we even had a class on poetry every week. I could not wait for Wednesdays at 2 pm. With our trusty teacher at the helm, we read poems aloud in class, memorized them, and I was lucky enough to be selected to perform some of them on stage for school celebrations. I was only 11. There was this one poem that I still remember about how even the powerful Queenof England had to stop and obey the red traffic lights. The love for poetry was planted in my soul from elementary school – the power of the arts.

Mummy sits in the corner of the room

dupatta over her head

hands in clasped obeisance

murmuring verses from the Adi Granth

I scream in unbearable agony

expelling this errant child from my womb

A few years ago I stumbled across excerpts from an interview of Canadian novelist Timothy Findlay by Graeme Gibson (Margaret Atwood’s late husband), where Gibson said that Findlay’s first novel, Last of the Crazy People, reminded him of “Southern Gothic”. Findlay replied that it was – in fact it was Southern Ontario Gothic. I had not heard the term before but I ruminated on it, especially since I was born and raised in the heart of Southwestern Ontario — London. When the image of a father and son burying a body late at night in a field came to me (as it does to one), I decided to pursue the image through this genre of Southern Ontario Gothic.

I was there when they found you. 

Innards falling from your mouth. Muscle wedged between your teeth. An eyeball in your left hand, nerve endings grazing the cracked concrete floor. 

I studied you in perfect silence, with the same devotion your forefathers studied the embalming arts. Your golden barrel curls, matted with tar.

Elizabeth Urso’s debut Gothic suspense novel, Hail Mary (Rising Action Publishing, September 22, 2026) follows Mary Foreman, who returns to her hometown to help her estranged family during a scandal-plagued election. But when the opening of a decades-old time capsule draws her into a criminal investigation tied to her family’s funeral empire, she must fight to prove her innocence. Not only of recent crimes, but past ones, too. For this is the North Shore of Lake Huron, and the past is always present where the dead don’t die.

Ribgrass by Nicole Mae is an atmospheric and haunting poetry collection. It explores the decay and resurrection of trans-queerness in the prairies. From farmland nostalgia to soft romances, Ribgrass is a vehicle for grief. The cyclical nature of mourning finds you everywhere⎯in an algae lake, in the kitchen fridge, in your hospital bed. It shows up as bugs in your bones. 

Whether it’s subconscious or intentional, people are often  thinking about money. It’s kind of a hard topic to avoid. Questions like how much we need to get by, how much others have, how to save up for that amazing vacation we’ve always wanted to go on, and so forth…these are questions we continually ask ourselves as we navigate life. And in the interconnected world of today, where corporations continue to grow, the cost of basic things continues to rise, and it’s dangerously easy to see what others have on social media and the Internet, the topic of money is sure to cause a lot of unwanted headaches. Arguably more than ever.

Waves slap the sides of the boat, sails snap energetically, Mama captains. “Look at you,” I say into the wind, my glasses sprayed with seawater, “so cool, hand on the rudder, in charge.”

She grins. “Tiller,” she says. “The rudder’s in the water. This is the tiller.”