March 6, 2026
Almost Paradise!
The last movie I saw before the world shut down in 2020 was PONYO at Paradise Theatre and movie theatres (along with EVERYTHING) were one of those parts of community and city life that I missed so much in the months and years that followed, especially listening to doomsayers who droned that we’d never get them back again.
I started writing DEFINITELY THRIVING in 2021 because I wanted to write a book that would make me happy, to find a way out of such a dark and scary time, and that we all gathered last night at Paradise Theatre, the very place I was dreaming of as I was writing, only underlines how we never knew how the story might unfold, that sometimes things work out rather beautifully in the end.
And how particularly beautiful that I got to launch this book in conversation with the NYT-bestselling Marissa Stapley whose novel LUCKY has become an AppleTV series hitting screens this summer starring ACTUAL Annette Bening and Anya Taylor-Joy. (!!)
Thank you to all the beautiful people who filled the room last night!! It was such a joyful celebration and so much fun to revisit BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY on its 25th anniversary. Thank you for booing Daniel Cleaver, as you should, and being a terrifically engaged audience.
Thank you for helping Type Books sell SO MANY BOOKS last night! Thanks to the family and friends who keep showing up for these things. Thanks to people who showed up who didn’t know me at all—what a thing!! Thank you to Emma Rhodes for her calm, reassuring and awesome presence, and all her hard work to make the night happen. Thank you to House of Anansi who’ve shown this book so much support. And thank you to universe for granting us an event that did not require me to carry a sheet cake across town—WOULD RECOMMEND.
The only disappointment was that nobody crashed through a plate glass window. And that Salman Rushdie could not be there.
DEFINITELY THRIVING is officially out March 17, but slowly creeping into bookstores already! Hope you get your copy soon. And I hope you love it.
March 4, 2026
Endling, by Maria Reva
I was going to write something about how I was a co-juror for the 2022 Kobzar Book Award, a prize for Ukrainian-Canadian literature, and vividly recall how much more viscerally I felt the Russian invasion of Ukraine that February for having been just steeped in stories of Holodomor and less abjectly genocidal elements of Soviet Ukrainian life as per Maria Reva’s first book, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, which would take the top prize. I remember how the ceremony had to be moved online due to ongoing pandemic reasons, and how shattered the award’s organizers from the Ukrainian-Canadian community were by what was happening in the country whose culture we were celebrating, how the whole thing was devastating and just so profoundly tragic and sad. (And four years later, Ukraine still fights. Having been steeped in those stories, I’m not surprised by this either, just heartbroken.)
But then what does it mean to consider experiencing a war from worlds away? Do any feelings, however visceral, matter at such a distance? What it means to have a thousands of tanks roll into a sovereign nation and interrupt your plans, if your plans happen to be an awards ceremony in Edmonton? Or a novel you’re writing in Vancouver, in case of Reva herself, or at least her proxy in the novel Endling, which is just a wild and wonderful experience and an experiment in what a novel might possibly contain.
Endling is about a snail scientist in Ukraine who funds her mobile lab by working as a potential bride for international suitors who arrive in the country on romance tours, though she has no interest in romance herself. This work brings her into a contact with a pair of sisters who are hatching a plan to kidnap a bunch of the bachelors as part of a campaign to attract attention from their long lost activist mother, and they pull it off just as the Russians are invading Ukraine, turning the country into a war zone. And here the novel veers into a wild meta-narrative of the author’s own fiction being disturbed by war in the very place she’s writing about, this narrative weaving in and out of the broader story in an unsettling and fascinating way.
What is fiction? What can fiction do? What does it mean to suppose we can control any narrative at all?
Endling unsettles in the very best way.
March 4, 2026
Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Due to a winter storm, my short trip to Pittsburgh for the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute was even shorter than scheduled, but oh, we made the most of it. My publisher House of Anansi Press set up meetings with delightful and inspiring booksellers across the US doing inspiring and life changing work everyday, standing up for the kind of world they believe in. Meeting so many booksellers at the Authors Reception was exciting and I was thrilled to be able to tell them about the fictional bookshop in my book.
I also loved exploring this gorgeous city, being awed by its beautiful rivers and so many bridges. (I got to cross the Rachel Carson Bridge TWICE last Wednesday!). Pittsburgh is even more stunning than it is during the opening scenes of FLASHDANCE, which is saying something because that was a tremendous promise.
And best of all: Pittsburgh booksellers. I got to visit Posman Books, White Whale Books, and City Books, which is pretty good coverage for a single day in town. I loved each store so much and the suitcase I brought home was SO HEAVY.
The most surprising and wonderful thing about all of it, particularly for an event that was so massive, was how intimate and human it all was. From my cab driver from the airport, an immigrant from Cote D’Ivoire, who talked to me about how much he loved Pittsburgh, the bookseller from Kentucky I had dinner with whose colleague was someone I’d been chatting with on Substack, to the friends-of-friends who I met at the Authors Reception, and the bookseller I’d met that afternoon who popped into the reception to pick up a copy of my book—it was all so magical and affirming.
Best whirlwind ever. Thank you, Pittsburgh!
March 2, 2026
Brawler, by Lauren Groff
Nearly 20 years later, I still remember what it felt like to be reading Lauren Groff for the first time, her debut novel The Monsters of Templeton, a book that could have been a one-off, clever, a gimmick. And then a year later I’d read her story collection Delicate Edible Birds and realize that Lauren Groff can do ANYTHING (and also she writes swimlit!). These were delicate, edible and sometimes absolutely brutal stories that veered off on all directions, the same way Groff has continued to do throughout her career with her novels, to the point where I’m not always interested in all of her projects (which is fine—a writer should pursue her own fascinations) and her latest release, the short story collection Brawler, only underlines her narrative power, precision and excellence.
Lauren Groff’s novels are sweeping—Arcadia and Fates and Furies!—and her short fiction manages to be just the same, every little little story an epic, some of these unfolding over years and decades. Usually long short stories are not my favourite, but I never wanted any of the stories in Brawler to end, only getting through it when they did because the endings are so exquisite and worthy of the head-exploding emoji.
Each story hinges on a moment of unfathomable consequence. “Wind,” the first, takes place in the 1950s as a woman attempts to flee her husband’s violence, the story narrated by her eldest child; in “To Sunland,” a young woman makes a choice when she become responsible for her disabled brother; in “Brawler,” a high school diver with bloody knuckles reckons with her mother’s illness; “Birdie” probes the dark edges of female friendship; “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?” is a masterpiece that takes a rich kid from the idyll of childhood to the darkest night of the soul (and the ending!! omg); “Under the Wave” explores the aftermath of a climate-change driven natural disaster; “Such Small Islands” is about a little girl not quite aware of her own power (or is she?); and “Annunication” about a young woman’s reckless choices whose consequences come for others.
If you want to be devastated over and over again (what else is reading for?), then Brawler is the book for you. One of the sharpest, and most haunting works I’ve encountered in a long time.
March 1, 2026
Definitely Thriving on Tour!
Tuesday March 3 in Stratford
Tuesday Night Book Release Party at the Bruce Hotel
- Free to attend, RSVP required
Thursday March 5 in Toronto
Bridget Jones’s Diary at the Paradise Theatre, and a conversation with Marissa Stapley
Wednesday March 18 in Etobicoke
Meet and Greet at A Novel Spot Books (Thorncrest Plaza, 1500 Islington Ave., Unit 4)
- Free event, details to come!
Sunday March 22 in Uxbridge
Book Drunkard Festival Brunch with Kerry Clare and Bianca Marais, Wooden Sticks Golf Club, 11-1pm
Thursday March 26 in Peterborough
In conversation with Megan Murphy at Take Cover Books, 59 Hunter Street East
- Free event, details to come!
Saturday March 28 in East Gwillimbury
Event with the East Gwillimbury Public Library
- Details to come!
Thursday April 16 in New York City
Humor, Self-Discovery, & Love – A Totally Booked: Live! Event at the Whitby Hotel (18 West 56th Street)
April 17/18 in Hamilton
Part of the 2026 gritLIT: Hamilton Readers and Writers Festival
- Details to Come!
Saturday April 25 in Uxbridge
Canadian Independent Bookstore Day at Book Heron Books
- Details to come!
Wednesday April 28 in Waterloo
Waterloo Public Library Event in Partnership with Words Worth Books, Eastside Branch (2001 University Avenue East), 7-8pm
Thursday April 29 in Toronto
Flying Books Author Social at 371 Queen Street West, in conversation with Julia Zarankin
- Details to come!
Saturday May 2 in Port Hope
Reading at Port Hope Public Library in partnership with Furby House Books.
- Details to come!
Sunday May 3 in Toronto
Junction Reads in-person with Liz Johnston and Alice Fitzpatrick. TYPE Books Junction, 2887 Dundas Street West. 6:30pm ET.
February 27, 2026
Why We Read, by Shannon Reed
I do not entirely regret to inform you that being obsessed with Pittsburgh has become my entire personality, and Shannon Reed’s collection Why We Read: On Bookworms, Libraries, and Just One More Page Before Lights Out was the perfect Pittsburgh souvenir to bring home from my whirlwind trip for the American Booksellers’ Association Winter Institute. And not just because there’s an essay in the collection entitled “The Five People You Meet When You Work in a Bookstore” that’s dedicated to the very bookseller who sold me the book. (Is the sixth person you meet when you work in a bookstore a Canadian author who’s hiked across the city to see your beautiful bookshop and is a little bit too excited about having walked over a bridge? It turns out that nobody in Pittsburgh gets excited about crossing bridges! Unbelievable that bridge crossing ever gets old…)
I started reading Why We Read on my flight home, and finished it this morning, about 26 hours later, and I loved the journey from start to finish, in which Reed—a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh—takes the reader through her life in books and reading. She writes about growing up in books and libraries, and the safety and comfort she found in reading as a hearing impaired person. The essays are familiar, warm, and loosely chronological, personal but also with touches that will be universal to anyone who’s ever been compelled to pick up a book about books. (It’s me!) In between the essays are humour pieces with titles like “Signs Your May Be a Female Character in a Work of Historical Fiction” (“Your name is Sarah.”) or “Signs You May Be An Adult Character in a YA Novel” (“You are dead.”).
A childhood pilgrimage to see the hole in the ground where the Ingalls family lived in On the Banks of Plum Creek, the saga of trying to get her preschool students to stop selecting a picture book version of “Old MacDonald” at story time, introducing her public school students to libraries, being assigned to teach a university course on vampires even though she’s terrified of vampires, adding George Saunders Lincoln in the Bardo to her course syllabus and only after sitting down to read and realizing she didn’t understand the novel (!). How she skimmed for the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! program and maybe missed the point (but got the personal pan pizza. She writes about how reading requires us to be vulnerable, to be okay with not always understanding or knowing, with being wrong sometimes. About pretentious English Major guys whose favourite novels are Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Moby Dick…
Wise, kind, funny, intimate, and surprising, reading these essays feels like meeting a friend.
February 24, 2026
Standing on the Edge
I’m writing this post from the airport where I’ve arrived much too early for my flight to Pittsburgh, where I’ll be attending the American Booksellers’ Association’s Winter Institute, an opportunity I’m so excited about—can you think of better company? And for me, this is the beginning of Book Promo season, a season that’s actually going to be pretty busy. We’re also taking a family trip to the UK in early April, a trip I booked around potential book events, which I felt a little embarrassed about at the time, because who was to say that such events would even come to pass? But they have, they really have, a string of occasions that I could (and no doubt will) line up in a row and call my “book tour,” as though I were R.F. Kuang or Sarah J. Maas. And I feel lucky for all these things to look forward to, for all these opportunities to meet readers and sell books. When I published my first novel almost ten years ago, I just took for granted that these were the sorts of things that just happened, but they don’t always. (And to be honest, even when they do, readers and book sales are never guaranteed. It’s a crapshoot.) I feel really lucky for the marketing and publicity push my publisher has put behind my book—the creativity, intelligence, and care has been astounding. Every author should be this fortunate.
And being able to line up events like this, a quasi book tour—of course celebrating these opportunities is important, but underlying this celebration is an uncomfortable feeling like I’m trying to prove something with them. Look at me, here’s living proof of my substance and importance, that I’m legit. Posting my “Book Tour” schedule like it’s no big thang, as though I’m the kind of person this sort of opportunity happens to (but oh, it’s such a big thang. I’m so so grateful and so so pleased, because I’ve experienced a book launch to CRICKETS and it wasn’t great.) The same way I feel compelled to line up my four published novels (my fourth novel is not officially out YET, but it’s slowly trickling its way into the world. Official pub date is March 17!) and exclaim to the world, “Look what I’ve done! Four entire novels. Maybe this author thing is not just a ridiculous fluke after all.”
As though the four books and the list of events add up to something more than what they are, as though they prove something about my worth, my worthiness—as a writer and a human both. And this is what I’m resisting, what I’ve been working on shrugging off since my last book came out three years ago and it almost wrecked me. All these things are wonderful, but they also mean nothing. This is my moment to shine, but also nobody cares, and neither point necessarily cancels the other, and being able to hold all of this at the very same time might very well be the key to not losing my mind.
February 23, 2026
Gleanings
- In a log cabin quilt, the red represents the fire at the centre of the home. This morning ours is burning warmly, wood cut and split and stacked in the woodshed by the grandfather who loves to show his grandsons how a house is built. How the beams are built up of long lengths of 2x12s spiked together, the joists crossing them.
- It seems symbolic these days, to simply make a mark, a human mark on a piece of paper.
- This wintering of life is my chance to go deeper, slow down, fan the embers of latent desires of my youth that I didn’t have time for while rushing from train to office desk to school pick-up to grocery store to kitchen.
- This is the language I grew up with, spoken by my parents to each other and to me, although I almost always answered in English. Still, most of my childhood memories come with German subtitles.
- I’d rather be “cringe” and sincere than “cool” and detached. I’d rather celebrate the fact that we are capable of feeling something for one another in a world that often feels designed to keep us apart.
- “Rules are rules: Cold but piercingly sunny days require grapefruit cake.”
- My chief take-away from that course was that, to be successful, one has to choose a location, walk into it quietly and with as little fuss and noise as possible, settle and wait.
- “Physical books have always been my best friends, and the wisdom and characters within them have guided me when human beings or humanity disappoint. I do think my reading practice serves as the perfect antidote to the noise and performance of social media.”
- This morning, I
track my day, searching
for it. A “holy moment” –
one amidst a thousand
of them to be sure.
And there you are,
a tiny moment. Maybe
three minutes in a
day filled with over
a thousand,
waking ones. - How do I turn off my thinking mind? Actually, I’m an expert — I’ve learned all kinds of strategies by necessity, because writing doesn’t thrive when thinking, if thinking is equated with panic or rumination. Thinking seems like the opposite of trusting, of going with the flow. Thinking spirals. To turn off the thinking mind, you need to get what’s inside, out — by drawing, sketching, making music. Even talking is not the same as thinking.
- There’s something quietly radical about gathering with strangers and neighbours, opening our books and simply being together. No pressure to perform. Just the shared understanding that reading, even when done alone, doesn’t have to be lonely. Sitting with other people absorbed in their own worlds somehow creates a connection that’s hard to describe but easy to feel.
February 23, 2026
Frog and Other Essays, by Anne Fadiman
The day I first met my friend Nathalie was, in some ways, the day my life began, because it was also the day I discovered Anne Fadiman, when Nathalie gave me a copy of one of her essay collections—I think it was Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader. And I very quickly became a devotee, devouring her other collection, and then the book on rereading which she’d edited, and ever since, Nathalie and I have been waiting for, craving, still more Anne Fadiman, her humour, her focus, her attention, her brilliance.
And then finally, Anne Fadiman delivered, with a new collection called Frog and Other Essays, which does not disappoint. If I designed the world, there would be stacks of copies at the entrance to every bookshop in the country and descending hoards on the verge of riot who want to buy them, but it turned out that our local Indigo had ordered in two. When I showed up at the store to purchase one, I texted Nathalie to let her know (she’d had no idea!) and before I’d even brought my copy to the till (I take a long time to browse, it’s true) Nathalie had come into the store and bought the copy remaining. (I’ve just checked their stock and there are two more on the shelf!).
What a thing to finally pick up a book that you’ve been waiting to read for more than 15 years—and Frog does not disappoint. Although the opening essay was unexpected—so many of Fadiman’s essays are the result of her close attention, and this one (about her children’s long-lived pet frog) was about a being to which she’d paid very little attention at all. (It made me laugh until I cried. “You may be wondering: What kind of frog was he? / I didn’t.”) Fadiman is so thoughtful, so intelligent, so creative, her thoughts so nimble, and so an essay about a mostly ignored frog (THAT LIVED FOR 17 YEARS!) is also a meditation on devotion (and otherwise), domestic life, care, family, and changes over time.
And then her essay on her printer. Her printer! “[A] Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II that cost $1,795” in 1987, and would live on for decades, Frankensteined together from spare parts mined on eBay. In “The Oakling and the Oak,” she writes about Coleridge’s disappointing son Hartley, and the nature of progeny, disappointing or otherwise. In “All My Pronouns,” she expounds on her evolving relationship with the rules of grammar, informed by her strict prescriptionist sensibility, but also from her relationship with her beloved students at Yale, where she is a Professor of English and teaches nonfiction writing. “Screen share” is a trip through Zoom learning in Spring 2020, what was lost, what was gained. The final line is, “At 5:20, I am reluctant to click the button that says, ‘End Meeting for All.'”
In “South Polar Times,” readers indulge Fadiman’s obsession with polar expeditions to much reward, this one about the newsletter produced by Robert Falcon Scott’s ill-fated polar expeditions. And then finally, “Yes to Everything!” about Fadiman’s student, Marina Keegan, a writer of great promise whose sudden death was shocking and whose work was published posthumously in the collection The Opposite of Loneliness.
Oh, I love the world through the eyes of Anne Fadiman. And I love Anne Fadiman, and I love Nathalie for giving me Anne Fadiman (among so many other riches). Like all the best thing, Fadiman’s work is never enough, but also it manages to be everything.
February 20, 2026
These are the Fireworks, by Vicki Grant
Oh, wow, this comedy murder mystery is one heck of a ride, full of twists and turns, moments of real poignancy, and abject absurdity. Celebrated YA and middle grade author Vicki Grant makes an assured debut for adult readers with These Are the Fireworks, a story about a family thrown into disarray after the death of its patriarch, but just not for the reasons you’d think. After the unexpected death of Nina Fforde’s father, Malcolm, her mother, Petra, begins acting bizarrely, dressing differently, hardly beset by grief at all, and possibly cavorting with a much-younger man. Nina herself decides to throw off her listless relationship, and move back home to help care for her mother—but Petra seems hardly concerned with being there for her grown daughters. Plus there’s a detective sniffing around suggesting that Malcolm’s death may not have been an accident. Come for the wacky story, but stay for the amazing family dynamics (including spectacular dialogue) between Nina and her two sisters. This one is great.
(This is one of four books featured in my latest “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf. Check the whole thing out here!)
