It's 1998 and Antony Williams is about to meet his match. A native of Windsor, Ontario, Antony is the child of a demanding single mother and an absconding Vietnam War resister who got too used to leaving home, country, and family. With a keen eye on the hybrid Windsor-Detroit landscape, backhanded affection for his hometown, and a growing understanding of his own family's place in its bootleg history, Antony makes his living as a house painter by day before catapulting loads of Canadian we...

Teaching Creative Writing in Canada maps the landscape of Creative Writing programmes across Canada. Canada’s position, both culturally and physically, as a midpoint between the two major Anglophone influences on Creative Writing pedagogy—the UK and the USA—makes it a unique and relevant vantage for the study of contemporary Creative Writing pedagogy.Showcasing writer-professors from Canada’s major Creative Writing programmes, the collection considers the climate-crisis, c...

This book examines the dynamic landscape of creative educations in Asia, exploring the intersection of post-coloniality, translation, and creative educations in one of the world’s most relevant testing grounds for STEM versus STEAM educational debates.Several essays attend to one of today’s most pressing issues in Creative Writing education, and education generally: the convergence of the former educational revolution of Creative Writing in the anglophone world with a defining aspe...

There is no history of poetry without love poetry, and there is no history of media without pornography. After his first collection of poems received a starred review from Quill & Quire, Darryl Whetter turned his attention from evolution in the natural world to the co-evolution of love, sex and media. Urging readers to “fill the tiny / unmade bed of the search box,” these alluring poems build on radically changing communication technologies to explore a new sexuality that does (and does no...

Andrew Day embarks on a bicycle trip from Halifax to Kingston, his childhood home. As he goes, the dual narratives of Andrew's life emerge: the slow, painful death of his father and the disappearance of Betty, who may be lost to him forever. He contemplates, too, the nature of desire. En route, Andrew sloughs off his fears, material goods, and attachments. In episodes of intensifying violence, he leaves the highway and rides the back roads under the cover of night. By the time he arrives h...

Ellen is blindsided by her husband's request for a divorce and the news that everything she thought they jointly owned is in his name.Depressed and defeated, her life spirals out of control, until she impulsively decides to buy a bike and attempt the journey of a lifetime. Nervous and tenuous at first, she eventually gains strength and confidence and sets her sights on riding to California.Just as she determines this is something she is really going to do, tragedy strikes. ...

The adage about “what happens in Vegas” is funny precisely because we know it’s wishful thinking. A Glittering Chaos is about what happens when “what happens in Vegas” comes home to haunt you. Melusine is a German librarian whose ho-hum world wobbles after she tags along when her husband Hans attends a Las Vegas optometry conference. A newly empty nester who speaks no English, Melusine’s voyage of self-discovery is punctuated by the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann, nude photos in the desert, a...

Through mesmerizing forays into characterization, voicing, and narrative technique, and with a clean economy of style rare even in short fiction, Astrid Blodgett conjures the moral and existential freight of her fully fledged characters in the throes of realistic moments. From the fascinatingly unhinged hero of "Getting the Cat," to the dreamy survey of prairie landscape and childhood experience of "New Summer Dresses," to the fatal irony of "Ice Break," readers will be hooked from first s...

St. John’s archivist Michael Lowe’s life is turned on its head when a Dutch colleague, Anton Aalders, arrives on his doorstep in 1995. Anton is searching for a father he never met, ostensibly a Newfoundland soldier part of the Allied force that liberated the Netherlands at the end of World War II. Anton’s visit stretches from a few days to a few weeks, keen as he is to learn as much as he can about Newfoundland, its history, and its people. Rabble rouser and ardent Newfoundland nationalist...

Betsy Trumpener’s raw fiction hits quickly, cuts deeply and lingers on in the imagination. Her urgent, unique voice pushes fiction north of what’s real. The Butcher of Penetang carves up rare slices of savory stories that are both tough and delicious. A child missing in a dangerous part of town; a draft dodger with bloody hands; a robber armed with a hairbrush; a refugee who rescues poetry from his prison cell; moose hunters chasing snow flakes. The people in these edgy stories cu...

Three women, three countries, three stories—the destinies of a Thai in prison for murdering her husband, a Cambodian longing for a child, and a Laotian Hmong refugee are threaded together by the tears leftover from the Vietnam War. Each of the women have been marked in some way by the atrocities of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Secret War in Laos, and the effects of these wars, as well as the Vietnam War on Thailand, where many displaced people from Laos and Cambodia found refuge, and where Amer...

Bernice Archer lives in a low-income downtown neighborhood where she has raised her blind twin daughters, Eva and Ava, in relative isolation. Every night she tells them regurgitated bedtime stories, sometimes magical and often cautionary, about the dangers of the world outside their small apartment. Eva and Ava, now middle-aged, still wait for their mother?s stories with both excitement and suspicion, knowing that there is much they haven?t been told. When Bernice notices two new neighbors...