November 12, 2026

Still Thriving

My latest novel is no longer new, and was launched into the world last spring with all the energy and support an author dares to dream of. An unexpected delight were special gifts and keepsakes from reader friends—Susan Sanford Blades’ painting of the cover for her newsletter, Clemence’s yellow teapot IRL from Sarah Campbell of Words Worth Books, the Barbara Pym cookbook from Melanie K. in Stratford, and my best friend Britt’s mom Vicki’s rendering of the book cover in woodwork.

It’s also been lovely this fall to have friends share photos of my book in the wild, in some pretty estimable places, no less. The rainbow display behind the cash at The Well Indigo is particularly exciting, and last week I got to visit and see it for myself. (Copies are signed now!).

Plus as a BEST BET at the Toronto Library Beaches branch, and on the shelf at the Spacing Store.

I’m grateful to everyone who’s worked so hard to get Definitely Thriving into readers’ hands, and to all the readers who’ve so generously received it.

November 11, 2026

What I Wouldn’t Do for a Free Book

I don’t know what I wouldn’t do for book in the mail, which is something that occurred to me the other day as I signed on to receive a newsletter from the media outlet Be Giant in exchange for a book they’d created. And did I need that book? Probably not. Do I already have a professional life that involves books arriving in my mailbox on a regular basis, many of them unsolicited? Absolutely. And yet there I was, happily relinquishing my personal information, consenting to yet another corporate email appearing my inbox, because I’d been promised a book, and I was fine with that.

Not even 24 hours later, I’d done it again, purchasing two boxes of Mini-Wheats as part of Kellogg’s Feeding Reading campaign. With the purchase receipt for these two boxes I was eligible to receive a selection from a list of children’s books in the mail, and naturally I was all in, never mind that my children have aged out of the books on the list, and no one in our household eats cereal for breakfast under ordinary circumstances anyway. But free books in the mail are hardly ordinary circumstances, even if you’re sending away for them all the time, and when called upon our family will rise to the occasion.

I’m actually well practised at books for breakfast—we partook in Feeding Reading last winter, ate a ton of Mini Wheats, and ended up with three books for my kids. (Feeding Reading had more YA titles then.) Almost 25 years ago, when I lived in the UK, book tokens in cereal boxes earned me Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit and Wild Swans, by Jung Chang, and the fact that I could earn books by ingesting whole grains still fills me with abject delight.

Reader, this is who I’ve always been. When I was a kid, there used to be television advertisements in the daytime for an actual sequel to the Bible that you could get if you called the phone number across the bottom of the screen, and I wanted that book so bad—I went to Sunday school, but they’d never once mentioned the Bible Part Deux, so I was curious. And while I’m really sure I called that number in quest of the book, that it never arrived makes it more likely that I didn’t call at all for fear of the kind of telephone charges you might incur for calling the Psychic Network—I was ten, so who was I to discern?

And that is the story of how I never managed to get my grubby mitts on a complimentary copy of The Book of Mormon, an injustice I’ve been making up for in all the years since by trying to acquire all the other books in the universe.

November 9, 2026

Kin, by Tayari Jones

While I have more than a passing familiarity with both the female friendship novel, and the motherhood novel, I’ve never encountered any of either quite like Tayari Jones’ latest novel Kin. Beginning with the fact that there are no mothers, with Annie’s mother gone, and Niecy’s mother murdered, both girls marked by these absences in their hometown of Honeysuckle, Louisiana, as they’re growing up in the 1950s. The two of them are “cradle friends,” and while Annie’s grandmother and Niecy’s aunt manage to raise the girls with necessary provisions, an absence of anything close to nurturing and true affection imbues each girl with a longing for love that will define the very different but still parallel trajectories of the rest of their lives.

Annie skips town with a boyfriend, and ends up working for the owner of a brothel, and then tending bar at various joints in Memphis. Ever on the hunt for her missing mother, an obsession with finding her may prove her undoing. Clever Niecy enrols at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, seeking mobility and respectability through marriage to a civil rights lawyer, and the mothering she never had via the complicated affection of her mother-in-law. A secret from her past, however, threatens the stability she’s worked so hard for.

These friends are never far from each other’s minds over the years, and stay in touch via letters and eventual visits, Annie arriving back in Niecy’s world as a bridesmaid at her wedding, and then later again when she’s in trouble and Niecy is the only one who can help.

Vast and moving, the characters in Kin are so vividly imagined with nuance and edge—there are no villains, but nor is any character too good to be true, and there is only so much these characters can give each other anyway, only so much that can be risked as Black people making their lives in the American south—where the wrong choice of a bus seat can be read as a provocation, an incitement to violence. Except for Annie and Niecy, of course, both alone in the world, and therefore never truly alone for that, and there is no limit to how far they’d go for each other, no limit to the fathoms of their love.

November 5, 2026

As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories

The worlds depicted in the anthology As the Earth Dreams: Black Canadian Speculative Stories, edited by Therese Mason Pierre, are full of thresholds, trapdoors and portals (and magic carpets), entrances to other times and other places, which is also say they’re full of possibility. Although in “The Hole in the Middle of the World, ” by Chinelo Onwualu—my favourite, and what I found to be the most haunting, story in the collection—the portal is a vacuum instead of a passageway, an empty space remaining after the protagonist’s memory is harvested by a nefarious system of dehumanization, but even then something essential remains.

These are stories that insist on connection (or at least long for them), even with history intent on fracture. In Mason Pierre’s own contribution, “A Fair Assessment,” an appraiser at an antiques shop performs her work with the aid of connections to the dead, and a tarnished silver ring brings her into contact with her own ancestor. In Chimedum Ohaegbu’s “Ravenous, Called Iffy,” a woman attends her mother’s fourth funeral, and learns she has siblings she never knew about. And ravenousness recurs in the collection, especially with “Hallelujah Here and Elsewhere,” by francesca ekwuyasi, one of the contributors to the collection whom I’d encountered before (in her acclaimed novel Butter Honey Pig Bread). Another familiar name was Zalika Reid-Benta, whose “Paroxysm” is a wild story of laughter, contagion, and mysteriously multiplying bags of garbage.

These stories featuring portals are portals themselves, absolutely rich and engaging, providing wondrous literary immersion in one world after another.

November 5, 2026

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November 4, 2026

“To love this world is not a simple thing.”

“It is like democracy is a bottle someone can threaten to smash and do a bit of damage with.” —Ali Smith, Autumn, 2017

Last night many remarkable things happened, but chief among them—from my perspective—is that I went to bed entirely relaxed and not even that engaged with the results of the election in a country that I don’t live in. Not because the election wasn’t consequential, but instead because I had a pretty good feeling (based on facts) that the results of the election were going to be fine, that democracy would do the thing it was supposed to do; I didn’t have to manage it. And I can’t remember the last time I felt like that about a US election, about any election really. To think that there might have been a time that I did, but then I would have been young then, and really didn’t know anything.

It’s been an incredible season for democracy lately—not just the US, but Brazil, and Serbia. My own city decidedly reelected our progressive mayor last week in a victory that defied pollsters’ predictions. Voters in Alberta stood up for Canada the week before that. I’m still thinking about Hungary, the tremendous odds of Magyar’s victory, how hard and persistently Hungarians fought to make it happen. And what is most heartening about all of this is that it’s not about winning, us versus them, but instead an understanding that these are electoral results that are ultimately going to serve everybody—even the people who might not be celebrating them yet.

At a different time in my life, I would have wondered if these victories were indicative of a broader shift, a realignment. And in some ways, they are—we have seen what authoritarianism looks like and we do not like it. But I have also grown wary of reading too much into such patterns, of supposing a few data points can tell us anything definitive about how the future might go. Which I say not to put a damper on the joy of all this, but instead to suggest that the recent election of a far right party in a German state (for example) also might not be indicative of something sweeping to come, and the reality is more likely that there will always be this and that to contend with, that the future is gong to go all of the ways, that the tension is inherent, and while it means we cannot be complacent, it also means there might be something that all of us could stand to learn from each other. That the world might be more complex and interesting than left versus right, or just that we might require a different kind of framework by which to properly understand who we really are.

There are some days when it feels especially easy to love the world for what it is, which was what I was thinking about yesterday before I even knew how the election would turn out. The light was so incredibly golden, and it was shining through whatever autumn leaves had not yet fallen into a carpet across the street and sidewalks, and the sky was so blue, and the beauty of it all was just absolutely breathtaking. And I was thinking of how it’s easy to love the world, even when it breaks my heart, the fragility of life itself only underlining how precious and miraculous it is to be here at all, to be able to hold what we hold. And to hold it all so close, while we can, as the seasons and cycles swirl around us, nothing ever finished, nothing ever still.

“To love this world is not a simple thing. But no matter what you do, life happens. That’s the funny, forgivable thing about the earth, It is not only loss that is imminent: it’s creation.” —Alessandra Naccarato, Imminent Domains, 2023

November 2, 2026

Relationships and Reconcilation

I read two newspaper articles yesterday that spoke to me beautifully about relationships and reconciliation. The first was from John Lorinc in The Toronto Star, who was brave enough to say what a lot of other people should have said awhile ago, which is that municipal leaders in Toronto need to finally begin to work together to turn down the heat from a local conflict that ostensibly began with the war in Gaza, but has since become its own thing entirely, and is setting a terrible precedent for how Torontonians get along with neighbours we might disagree with. (It does not help when candidates use such conflicts for political leverage.)

He writes: As they move beyond a divisive election, our political leaders, on both sides, have to find ways to communicate the critical work of de-escalating and re-establishing mutual trust. I don’t mean everyone has to agree on everything. But the city’s elected officials should be going out of their way to brainstorm ideas for repairing severed community relationships. As those who’ve gone through tough negotiations know, you don’t get to an agreement by fixating first on the most complex elements, drawing red lines, or lobbing accusations. Rather, you look for small wins at the margins and leverage those to build momentum.

The second was an opinion piece in The New York Times from United Methodist Minister Lydia Sohn who mourns that as we’re losing our religion, the real loss might be the language of religion, which provides so much wisdom as to how we can relate to one another, and try to understand each other across divides. The specific example she uses is the idea of “grace.”

She writes: What has replaced religious language for moral guidance? Professors Grenoble and Whaley observed that smaller languages tend to become displaced by those with greater political, economic and social power. The language of law and public justice — accountability, rights, reparation — has become the dominant framework through which many of us structure our relationships. What is fair? What am I owed? What are others responsible for?

The rise of neoliberalism in the late 20th century, and with it a growing familiarity with the logic of the marketplace, has also shaped how we relate to others. Scholars have described this as the “economization” of the social. The language of investment and return, cost and benefit, what one gives and what one is owed threatens to overtake private domains like our marriages, friendships and the schoolyard. It is little wonder, then, that “grace” has fallen out of our everyday vocabulary.

Grace, by definition, interrupts the logic of exchange. It is a gift freely given rather than earned or traded. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the language of the law and the marketplace, it is insufficient to the task of capturing how we seek to treat and be treated by others.

I hope you’ll read both pieces. (They’re both gift-linked, so you should be able to.) I found both to so be generous, and generative.

October 30, 2026

Minnow, by Willie Poll and Emily Graceanna Pearson

Last spring, we published a gallery of images from the graphic novel Minnow on 49thShelf, and that taste of the book made me seek it out to read it in its entirety. While the cover copy describes the book as magical realist, I’d argue that Minnow is more “realist magic” (is that a thing?), grounded in a recognizable reality in which extraordinary things are possible. Which means that my in-house Raina Talgemeier-enthusiast middle-grade graphic novel readers found the book appealing. And I was amused that while this is a story in which a person becomes and orca, and another can transform into a mermaid, what my 13 year old found most unbelievable about it was that protagonist Minnow could so immediately and uncomplicatedly become friends with Celia, whom she encounters one day at the local aquarium. But I reminded her that this is a novel in which all kinds of amazing things can happen, including the triumph of an Indigenous protest to stop a pipeline. And who’s to say which parts of the story are magic and which parts might be real.

Minnow is the story of a young Indigenous girl in the midst of a lonely summer in Vancouver who’s noticing strange behaviour from the sea creatures around her—an orca appears to be following her up and down the beach. When the visits the aquarium, the animals there appear to be doing just the same. With the help of a new friend, Celia, who might be more than a friend, the two girls begin to investigate Minnow’s connection to the sea life, how this connects to Minnow’s missing grandmother, the way that a spirit of the Great Lakes might be underlining Minnow’s connection to the water, and to her future as a water protector, pushing back against the oil industry to keep the waters healthy and clear for creatures of all kinds.

October 29, 2026

Taking Stock

Making: plans to partake in a new knitting project, inspired by Cody Cook-Parrott’s The Practise of Attention.
Getting: closer to finishing my read-through of my shitty first draft, and is actually less shitty than I thought it was.
Cooking: Will shortly be cooking some kind of butternut squash soup for dinner, much to the chagrin of my squash averse daughter. She doesn’t know yet…
Sipping: Water! Fresh from the tap. Albeit not direct from the tap.

Reading: A Glacier’s Guide to Dying, by Michelle Porter
Waiting: For my youngest child to get home from school
Looking: Out the window at my garden done to seed, and marvelling at the abundance of seeds. What a world!
Listening: Not right this second, but my current big listen is my friend Caroline Marie Brooks’ new album Light and Matter
Wishing: For democracy to triumph next Tuesday.
Enjoying: The glow of an election in my city this week that went my way, and will be good for all of us.
Appreciating: October goodness, golden light, and that it was warm enough to ride my bike today.

Eating: Pumpkin seed apricot cookies from the Snacking Bakes book.
Liking: The goodness of apples in apple season. Six months, such fresh produce will seem like a dream.
Loving: Reflecting on Alessandra Naccarato’s essay collection Imminent Domains, which I finished reading last night, and which I can’t stop thinking about.
Buying: Cranberry sourdough loaf at Cobb’s Bread. It is truly the best thing, and even better with turkey soup.
Managing: I mean, just barely? (JK. Actually holding it together pretty well this week! Hooray for good sleeping…)
Watching: Planning on watching Rosemary’s Baby on Halloween. I love that movie, and always have, even back when I was 12, and watched it with my best friend, entirely unaware of how her Baptist parents might not be thrilled with our cinematic fare.
Hoping: For good weather for Trick or Treaters.
Wearing: A cardigan. It was warm today so I turned the heat off. Might be time to turn it back on.
Following: Fashion for weird baggy jeans, even if I’m not sure anyone looks that good in such garments.
Noticing: Jean fashion is always preposterous. (Remember acid washed?)

Coveting: A copy of the new Anita Brookner biography, which costs SIXTY DOLLARS, which is ridiculous, but also I will probably buy it. I am like the people who drive everywhere no matter what gas costs, except with books.
Feeling: GOOD. After an anxious time, I’ve found some space and peace.
Hearing: A car driving by. The whir of the fan.
Anticipating: I don’t know? Kind of living in the moment.

Thank you, Pip, for the template!

October 27, 2026

Joy, by Maira Kalman

It’s a perfect morning to be celebrating the release of Maira Kalman’s new book, Joy. A book whose first lines are, “Joy? Do you think I am an idiot? Don’t I know that you know that suffering and sorrow envelop our planet and our little lives/ That perils lurk and shadow our every move. That injustice destroys the soul.” AND YET.

JOY. In spite of. “What solace might you find if you turned your gaze to a thing of beauty?” Picnics in dappled light, a Sunday afternoon in Paris. A stately sofa on the sidewalk, women who don’t give a fig, so many things to be curious about. Books and libraries, without which “wouldn’t we wander around with no idea of what is going on.”

“And didn’t the night fall/ ever so quietly. / And didn’t everyone wake/ the next day in the morning light/ and get out of bed/ And aren’t we all/ supremely courageous/ for doing just that every day.”