The Bibliophile: Welcome to work but not to remain

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An introduction to Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio

In Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers, which publishes next Tuesday, Marcello Di Cintio travels across Canada (from the Okanagan, to Leamington, to Goose Bay, Newfoundland) to document the experiences of migrant workers, destabilizing the popular notion of Canada as a safe, welcoming space where migrants can escape the hardships of their home countries.

Contrarily, Di Cintio highlights a recent UN report that describes the Temporary Foreign Worker Program as a “breeding ground for contemporary forms of slavery.”

Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

There was so much I didn’t know about migrant policy and programs, about the prevalent unsafe housing, constant harassment, and unstable pay experienced by the workers every day. Or I knew about some of it, but only vaguely, at the back of my mind, the way I imagine millions of Canadians “know” about these issues. Precarious is filled with many of the harrowing, chaotic stories of precarity that make up the modern migrant experience in Canada. In a time of heightened, near-propagandistic Canadian patriotism, Precarious feels like such an important book to recalibrate our sense of identity, and our sense of what can be done to improve, rather than abolish, migrant labour in Canada.

I recommend taking the time to read Di Cintio’s beautifully angry op-ed in today’s Globe and Mail, which he writes in response to Poilievre’s call to scrap the TFWP and deny visas to new migrants:

“I wonder . . . how many see the irony of being lectured about the ills of foreign labour by a recently unemployed man from 2,600 kilometres away—about as far from the riding as Chihuahua, Mexico—who showed up to take the job of a local resident.”

And I hope you’ll find the time to read the following excerpt from Precarious—taken from the introduction—which lays the groundwork for the book by pulling from Di Cintio’s familial experiences of migrant labour, and how these differ drastically from more recent experiences uncovered in later chapters.

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

An excerpt from Precarious

Introduction

My grandfather was a migrant worker before such a thing existed.

Amedeo Sorrentino was born in 1923 and hardly a man when Mussolini forced him into the Italian infantry. In my favourite photo of him, he is wearing his army uniform and holding a cigarette between his fingers. My grandfather never smoked, but the photographer told him the cigarette would make him look older. After the photo was taken, the army shipped Amedeo across the sea to North Africa, handed him a rifle, and sent him out into the desert. British soldiers quickly decimated his regiment, and Amedeo was taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a London POW camp.

After the war, Amedeo returned to his hometown of Lanciano and learned that his mother had died. Shrapnel from a grenade struck her in the back and killed her instantly as she sat in the village square with Amedeo’s youngest brother on her lap. My grandfather never hesitated to retell his war stories, and they were harrowing, but he didn’t like talking about what his family endured during those years. “The real war was back home,” he’d say before growing quiet.

My grandfather met my grandmother, Giulia, a few years later. Amedeo was not the first suitor to come calling. There were “lots of boys to choose from,” she once told me. One was a police officer, but policemen were not allowed to marry until they were thirty, and Giulia didn’t want to marry an “old man.” She chose Amedeo because he was the only one to make her laugh. Their courtship involved walking back from church together with family chaperones following a few paces behind them.

An interview with Marcello Di Cintio in the Calgary Herald.

Because they were both poor, Giulia and Amedeo waited until after Easter to announce their engagement so they wouldn’t have to give holiday gifts to each other’s families. Giulia’s mother, Guiseppina, did not approve of the engagement. “Why do you want to marry someone poorer than you are?” she asked her eldest daughter. They married on a rainy day in 1948 after their borrowed car got stuck in the mud and had to be pulled free by an ox. The family ate the wedding dinner in Giulia’s parents’ bedroom, the largest room in the house. Afterwards one of Amedeo’s friends set off firecrackers he made from unexploded artillery shells he’d found in the fields.

Amedeo vowed never to leave home again. He’d found happiness with Giulia and wanted to raise a family with her in the country that he loved. Their first daughter, my mother, was born later that year, then two more girls in the years that followed. Amedeo toiled as a tenant tobacco farmer to support them. The landowner allowed Amedeo to keep and sell only half of the harvest. With no sons, Amedeo did most of the labour himself. He found extra work at his uncle Nicola’s olive oil press. Though Amedeo had little education—he’d reached only the fifth grade before leaving school—he was good with numbers and did his uncle’s accounting.

For all his love of Italy and his promise to never leave it, Amedeo knew he could never properly provide for his family by working on someone else’s farm. Men were leaving Italy every day to find work abroad, and Giulia persuaded Amedeo to follow his sister and brother-in-law to Canada, at least for a couple of years. Amedeo obliged and set off in 1956. He sent back a photo of himself waving from the deck of the Canada-bound ship. A note on the back written in black ink read: “As soon as I lifted my hand, my first thought was of returning soon to my family, and to my beautiful Italy.”

Before World War II and the Great Depression preceding it, most immigrant workers to Canada came to develop the agricultural economy of the Prairies. After the war, though, Canada’s booming industrial economy needed urban workers: people to build things, not just grow things. Many Italians ended up on construction sites in cities like Toronto, Montreal, and in my grandfather’s case, Calgary. Amedeo poured concrete during the day and tended to greenhouses at night. Years later, my grandfather would look out at the Calgary skyline and point to the buildings he helped build, including Foothills Hospital where I was born.

With the money Amedeo sent back to Italy, Giulia was able to buy a bicycle for her daughters and a record player for herself. One day, a vinyl record appeared in the mail from Canada: a recording of his cousins singing songs in a small Calgary studio. Amedeo was on the album, too. He had recorded a message for his wife and daughters, telling them that he loved and missed them. There were no telephones in Lanciano at that time, and this was the first Giulia had heard her husband’s voice in over a year. The arrival of the record was both a blessing and a tragedy. For all the marvellous joy it brought to hear Amedeo’s voice, the record reminded everyone that he was far away.

My grandfather didn’t want to stay in Canada. He wanted to save enough money to build a better life for his wife and daughters back home. Maybe buy some land and a bigger house. He wanted to be temporary. After two years, though, he and Giulia decided that it would be better for the family to live in Canada than to reunite back in Italy. Nonno resisted, but Nonna was stubborn. With the money Amedeo had sent them, Giulia and their daughters boarded the RMS Saxonia for the long, seasick journey west. The girls insisted on bringing their new bicycle with them. It lasted for decades, and I used to ride it around my grandparents’ neighbourhood when I was a child. Nonna left the behind the album that brought so much happiness for the family with Amedeo’s sister, Ersiglia. When Amedeo and Giulia returned to visit Italy years later and inquired about the album, Ersiglia claimed the mice ate it.

I doubt Amedeo and Giulia knew the role their whiteness played in their journey to Canada. The entry of non-white immigrants was restricted until 1962 when the federal government expunged overt racial discrimination from our immigration policy. Even afterwards, though, bigotry proved a tough habit to break. Anyone from anywhere was now permitted into the country as long as they demonstrated they could succeed here, but preference was given to people from Europe. And only Canadians from the United States and certain European and Middle Eastern nations could sponsor the immigration of their siblings. In the early sixties, my grandfather sponsored his sister and two brothers to come to Canada, a privilege he wouldn’t have enjoyed had he been Black or Asian.

My nonno died in July 2020 during the first fraught COVID summer. He’d been living in an extended-care facility since a stroke felled him a couple of years earlier. Nonno received initial treatment at the Foothills Hospital, and during a particularly painful injection quipped to my mother, “I never should’ve helped build this place.”

Due to the pandemic restrictions, fewer than fifty invited family members, masked and distanced, attended his funeral mass. When I stood at the front of the church to give his eulogy and looked out at the sparse attendees, I knew that the church would have overflowed with mourners had Nonno passed even a few months earlier. My grandfather was one of the first links in an immigration chain that brought dozens of families to Calgary. No doubt hundreds of the city’s Italians can trace their history back to my grandfather’s reluctant passage across the Atlantic.

Circumstances have changed for workers from abroad since then. Even though my grandfather came to work and never intended to stay, Canada granted him landed immigrant status upon his arrival. He had a choice to immigrate or not. Had my grandfather made the same journey even a decade later, he’d likely be considered a “temporary foreign worker”: welcome to work but not to remain. A labourer, yes. Not a link.

Marcello’s recent op-ed in the Globe and Mail.

Nonno’s passing made me think of his contemporary counterparts. My grandfather only wanted the best for his daughters, and he was willing to sacrifice years away from them for the opportunities Canada would eventually provide. No doubt today’s migrant workers make the same bargain. But what does it mean to voyage far from family to a nation that wants you to work but doesn’t want you to stay? Bring your arms and backs, Canada pleads, but leave the rest on the other side of the border. We need your sweat. We don’t need your stories.

But I did. After my grandfather died, I set out to hear the stories of migrant workers in Canada. I knew nothing about these newcomers. I wondered about their days in our country, the lives and loved ones they left behind, and what compelled them to first make their long journeys here. I wondered, too, if they believed their time in Canada made up for their sacrifices and absences. Was our country worth it?

I spent the following three years travelling the country to meet workers and their advocates, pausing my wanderings for intermittent pandemic shutdowns and travel restrictions. I quickly learned that my image of a migrant worker was sorely limited. I thought I’d be spending all my time speaking to Latino farmhands and Filipina “nannies.” But I found that migrant labour exists within all aspects of Canadian society. Temporary workers are everywhere. They build our homes, drive our trucks, clean our offices, and pour our coffee. Many of Canada’s post-secondary institutions are propped up with the foreign tuition paid by international students who, most of the time, are also migrant workers. The complexity overwhelmed me at times. The more people I spoke to, the more threads emerged. I wish I could have followed them all, but the diverse workers I did manage to speak to expanded my perspective of what migrant labour encompassed.

For the most part, I heard the kinds of stories I expected to hear. I learned about how calamities back home—a sick child, a dying wife, a hurricane—compelled people from around the world to seek financial opportunities here. I heard stories of redemption, reinvention, and romance. I learned about workers sending their overseas families gifts of maple syrup and Toronto Maple Leafs caps to stand in for the physical embraces their long separation denies them. I smiled at the baby photos on their cellphones. I cheered workers on soccer fields and watched the dance videos they recorded in their greenhouses. I heard about lovers the workers had left back home, and the lovers they found here.

What I didn’t expect, though, was how often Canada itself was the source of the migrants’ trauma. Despite the sufferings many workers escaped, a sea of troubles awaited them here. Nearly every worker I spoke to had been done wrong. Cheated. Threatened. Beaten. The abuse nearly always came at the hands of my fellow citizens. I realized I wasn’t just looking into the lives of workers who’d long been invisible to me; I was seeing a Canada I didn’t recognize. The more I learned the migrants’ stories, the more I learned our own. And the portrait of Canada I started to see wasn’t flattering.

In awards news:

In good publicity news:

  • Marcello Di Cintio, author of Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers was featured in several outlets this week:
    • Interview in the Calgary Herald: “What started off being a book about other people, about these workers, really also became at the same time a book about us, a book about how Canada has treated these people . . . I feel I’ve written an unpatriotic book in a very patriotic time.”
    • Op-ed in the Globe and Mail: “For a half century, TFWs have recounted stories of filthy and crowded bunkhouses, unsafe working conditions, wage theft, humiliation, physical and sexual assault, and all manner of cruelty. I heard many of these stories first-hand. Penalties for these crimes are too soft and too rare. Victims have little recourse.”
  • Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in Heavy Feather Review: “Brilliantly oscillates between a focus on the inner world of a flawed woman’s personal journey through the land of modern romance and a spitting commentary on what it even means to be a wife, mother, and woman in the 21st century.”
  • Best Canadian Poetry 2026 edited by Mary Dalton was reviewed in the Washington Review of Books: “Reading Dalton, one really gets the sense that there was a poetic process enacting the selection process . . . I thank [Molly] Peacock for bringing the series to life, and [Anita] Lahey and Biblioasis for keeping it alive.”
  • Self Care by Russell Smith was reviewed in That Shakespearean Review: “You can always count on Russell Smith for a straightforward technique that hits you in the solar plexus.”
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Tribune: “This collection grapples with contemporary life in a way that is both stylized and vulnerable . . . Sarah’s ability to tie scenes of everyday life to highly abstract concepts and ideas results in compelling poems.”

CROSSES IN THE SKY shortlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on September 25, 2025, the shortlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full shortlist and announcement on their website here.

The winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be announced on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

A huge congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

The Bibliophile: In Memoriam: Elaine Dewar (1948–2025)

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On the Death of a Happy Warrior for the Public Good

I was walking into work the last week of August when Elaine Dewar called. She had just got back from holidays at a cottage with her daughters and grandchildren. I was waiting on the last round of edits for her new book, Growing Up Oblivious. But she was calling with much more dire news. She’d developed a pain on vacation, thought it might be gallstones or appendicitis, so went to emergency to get it checked out. They’d done a scan and it was cancer. There was no word on the origin or the extent of it yet, but she’d asked to see the ultrasound and had spent far too much time over her life as a science researcher looking at medical records not to know that it was almost certainly terminal. She hoped she’d have six months. She wanted to talk about the book. I demurred, said we didn’t need to now, that she had other things to worry about. But Elaine wasn’t having any of it. “Of course I’m going to worry about it, honey,” she told me gently. “It’s my last book, and it’s with you. So what are we going to do about this?” And with that, we got to work.

Elaine Dewar. Credit: Danielle Dewar.

When Sam Hiyate wrote to me in early December 2015 with a proposal for Elaine Dewar’s book The Handover, about the sale of Canadian publisher McClelland and Stewart to Random House in contravention of Canada’s cultural protection laws, I knew little about Elaine’s work or reputation. Nor was this book, a work of deeply-researched nonfiction, our usual fare at the time; Biblioasis was much more strictly a literary enterprise in those years, borne forward by the ignorant hubris necessary to lay claim to such a designation. How else to continue in a world, even a small, purportedly literary enclave of the same, which cares so little about what we do? Our list in 2015—it strikes me now, at a time that one year pushes into another with almost no distinction, that 2015 was our break-out as a publisher, with three Giller nominations, a Writers’ Trust shortlisting, and a GG win, among other accolades: perhaps we wouldn’t have been sent Elaine’s proposal if that hadn’t been the case—was almost exclusively fiction, poetry, and works in translation; our only experience with nonfiction was literary criticism, with a sideline of regional history and more commercial titles to try and pay the bills. Reading Elaine’s proposal, I was worried that we didn’t have the publishing chops to pull it off. I knew that we didn’t have the money to properly fund its writing: I don’t think we’d ever paid an advance of more than a couple thousand dollars at that point. But we thought Elaine’s was an important story, so I pushed my envelope and offered $4000, which seemed a big risk for a press consistently skirting insolvency, and was able to swing her an additional $3500 in Writer’s Reserve funding. And for that Elaine produced what Jack Stoddart justifiably claimed to be “the single most important book about Canadian publishing . . . published in fifty years.” It garnered her a Governor General’s Award nomination and reams of press coverage, and resulted in a range of important conversations among anyone who cared about publishing or culture in Canada. It’s probably no surprise to those who knew her that it garnered Biblioasis’s first serious threat of a lawsuit, by a former Minister of Culture who had signed off on the sale of M&S, though when they learned that Elaine had dug up government documents that showed exactly what Elaine had claimed, this person (& their lawyer) thankfully never again darkened my inbox.

Elaine’s office and desk, with the research for Growing Up Oblivious lined up chapter by chapter.

Because that was the thing about Elaine: she always had the receipts. There were times earlier in our working history that I doubted her claims, but I quickly learned that she always had the proof somewhere in a manila file folder on one of the multiple desks in her sprawling basement office; there was always a footnote. She taught me to read those footnotes with care as I read her manuscripts. She was a meticulous researcher, with a tenacity I’ve yet to see in another. Though she described herself, earlier this week, as being as “spiritual as an old sock,” she nevertheless believed her role as a journalist involved a sacred trust: to follow the facts as far as they would take her; to pursue the truth at all costs; to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. She did all three with regularity until the end.

Elaine, during our numerous editorial exchanges, offered me a first-rate education in how to edit and publish researched nonfiction, perhaps to the chagrin of those authors who’ve followed her. The key was to “never to be afraid to look stupid”; to clarify and keep pushing when you’re not clear on something; to keep asking questions until you’re satisfied. To fight over every word, every footnote, as the need arises. And we did, it seemed, fight over everything. Those initial Handover editorial rounds were bruising, unlike anything I’d experienced before as a publisher and editor. But as hard as it was, she never took it personally, as she trusted that we had her own, and her book’s, best interest in sight. She trusted in the process.

Poster for the Fourth Annual National Magazine Awards.

And in the process, she helped to reshape the direction of the press. Having been through the fire with Elaine, we knew better how to do these kinds of books, and knew, from her research, that one of the primary consequences of the sale of Canadian publishing to foreign interests was the decline in researched nonfiction. There was a gap in the market that needed to be filled, but more importantly a gap of intellectual responsibility. She fervently believed, despite her noted concerns about Canadian nationalism, that Canadians should be in charge of which Canadian stories were told. And that it would take Canadian writers and publishers to hold the powerful within Canadian society accountable. Elaine felt an intense sense of duty to tell the truth, and hated, as she called them, lying liars who lied. She used her formidable intelligence and research skills to untangle those lies, and we’re all better for it, and as another journalist wrote to me this week, now far lesser for her loss.

Elaine’s writing desk, with more chapters of Growing Up Oblivious.

What drove her was her indomitable curiosity about just about everything. She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn’t make sense. This curiosity led her to begin digging into the origins of COVID when we were all in lockdown, reading the scientific papers, and discovering right away that there were things that didn’t add up; it led her to uncover connections between Winnipeg’s National Microbiology Laboratory and the labs at the centre of the COVID outbreak in Wuhan, and gather evidence of the Chinese government’s infiltration of this lab that would have national political ramifications thereafter. What amazes me about the research that became her On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years is that, though it was perhaps the first serious book-length enquiry into the origins of COVID in the English language (quite a feat, I must say, for a provincial publisher!), it has stood up remarkably well, with the consensus opinion moving closer and closer to Elaine’s own over the ensuing years. She followed the facts where they took her, and as usual, she ended up pretty close to the mark.

The Handover and On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years by Elaine Dewar.

Her last book started with a January 1st, 2022 email from psychologist and Native Studies professor Roland Chrisjohn asking her to investigate “‘the cover-up’ of the Canadian government’s ‘genocide’ of Indigenous people.” But in her research, she became pre-occupied by questions of what was known when, by whom; and how she, growing up in the prairies, hadn’t known about the plight of Indigenous people in the surrounding communities. She turned her sharp journalistic eye on herself, and in the process wrote a kind of journalist’s autobiography and an investigation into the mechanics of what she calls obliviousness. The book is also an investigation of Indigenous health, segregated hospitals, and how the government used the lure of health care to conduct unethical experiments on wide swaths of the Indigenous population. There are some very disturbing revelations that Elaine uncovered by doing what she did best: following the trails of footnotes to uncover what had up to now largely escaped notice. Growing Up Oblivious will be published at some point in early 2026; it may well be her most important book.

Poster from the Eleventh Annual National Magazine Awards.

When it became obvious that we didn’t have months but weeks, and then, really, days, I went up to Toronto to spend Monday and Tuesday with her in the Palliative Care Unit at Bridgepoint to work on the final edits and the conclusion. She was surrounded by family and friends who’d flown in from around the world to be with her. Though her body had completely failed by this time, and she was self-administering her pain medication as we spoke, she remained as sharp, funny, and caring as ever. We worked on a round of final edits and questions until she needed a rest; then did a second round; she did a long, wide-ranging audio interview with Marci McDonald about the book and what she uncovered, and was brilliant at it despite everything; then she shifted gears again, devoted to the attentions of her daughters and friends who were waiting for her. The next day she did another long interview with a national radio program and then we worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world. She never, she told me, liked the word decency: it was a weasel word, could mean whatever you wanted it to mean. We needed something more specific to the issue at hand. We went back and forth for a while, and then it hit me. Dignity? “Yup. That’s it. Now let’s cut the rest of the fat and get it done.” And so we did.

There was so much love in that room, so much laughter, so much dignity, that it dispelled death’s shadow. It was a pleasure and honour to be there among her loved ones, if only for a little while. She seemed able to keep everything in those final days in perfect balance, the professional alongside the personal. Though perhaps, for her, that distinction wasn’t as sharp as it was for others. It didn’t seem possible that, when I took my leave, she’d be gone in less than 48 hours. And though I spent this morning watching her funeral, I still can’t quite believe she’s gone.

Family photos of a young Elaine Dewar.

Elaine once described herself as aspiring “to be a happy warrior for the public good.” She was that. She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person, matriarch to what I’ve learned is an incredible family, and a very good friend. She was, always, inspiring, and never more than in the last days; she approached her fate with resolve. I still haven’t entirely processed these last, intense few weeks, those days alongside her and her family and friends at Bridgeport, but I’m grateful once more for the gift of her time, intelligence, care, and compassion, and we will all at Biblioasis try to live up to the example she set.

Dan Wells,
Publisher

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: The Scorpion and the Frog

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Next week is the Canadian publication of Russell Smith’s novel Self Care, his first book in a decade and first novel in fifteen years. Most of you may know Russell Smith as one of Canada’s sharpest satirists who first came on the scene with the Governor General’s Award–nominated novel How Insensitive (1994) and who followed it up with several more novels often poking fun at our contemporary culture. But my own introduction to Russell’s work was his last book, Confidence (2015), a collection of short stories about people in Toronto and their conflicting desires, loneliness, and disappointments. When I read it, I got hooked by his dialogue and his humour. I felt that each story had just the right balance of being both wickedly funny and rather sad, which, I think, is a lovely combination for a story to be.

Self Care by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

Self Care is the long-awaited return of Russell Smith, and it is also somewhat of a departure from his earlier work. Here we still have that satirical edge and that perfect pitch dialogue, but it’s also a rather dark book focusing on the particular dissatisfaction affecting people today and the online communities and culture that enable it.

A provocative modern fable about sex and self-loathing, Self Care follows a young woman who, despite her better judgement, starts a relationship with an incel. It’s a dark twist on a love story (a “Romeo-and-Juliet tale for our cultural moment,” as Mark Kingwell put it), and a righteously funny and tragic novel about our desire to care and be cared for in return.

I got the chance to speak with Russell about his new book. Read on for that conversation.

Thanks for reading,

Ahmed Abdalla
Publicist

An Interview with Russell Smith

Could you start by telling me how Self Care came about?

This is my tenth book and it’s a departure for me in that it’s not about my life at all. It is from the point of view of a young woman and it’s about a world of people much younger than I am. I taught creative writing for several years and I was inspired by talking to lots of young people. I stayed in touch with my students after I stopped teaching in that MFA program, mostly through social media. I became fascinated by certain problems that they had that I didn’t have when I was their age. In many ways I wanted to write about what it’s like being young today in North America. The main pressures that I wanted to describe were financial ones that these young people with degrees in the humanities just have no idea how to make a living. There are very few options available to them.

Also, one of the things I noticed women talked about a lot online were frustrations with men and particularly with “cool” boyfriends who wouldn’t commit to relationships. But another thing that really struck me was a couple of women in private conversations with me started talking about incels and incel culture. A couple of women admitted to having a fantasy of taking one of these guys and showing them what a true relationship could be like and changing him. And I think that’s a fantasy that all of us have. The idea that I can change him. I thought that was maybe not such an uncommon fantasy, so I thought I would invent a story around it.

You said Self Care is a departure for you because it’s not really about yourself anymore. Is part of that why you chose to write from a woman’s perspective? Most of your previous work up to this point has been from a man’s perspective.

I just really wanted to write about what I was seeing among the young women who were in my own circle who struck me as quite sad. I wanted to describe a particularly contemporary kind of sadness. I also think people are less and less interested in men. I’ve written a lot about men and their sex drives. I’ve really played that out. I’ve done enough of that lustful man character.

And there are satirical elements, but it’s not a full-on satire. Just like my last book, Confidence, a collection of short stories, this is a more serious book than my early works.

Confidence by Russell Smith. Cover designed by Gordon Robertson.

How satirical did you intend this book to be? Because it makes fun of a lot of different people, but also gets quite serious as the story goes on.

It’s a dark book, but there’s humour in it. There are various contemporary milieux or situations that I just find ridiculous. Primarily my own milieu. Satire is always written by insiders. I’m writing about me and my friends often in everything I write. The targets of satire here are the kinds of people who work for online health journals and the reason that they have to write nonsense is that they’re not paid enough to do any actual research. They just repeat faddish ideas and trends.

Another thing that I’m making fun of is the obsession with mental health that young people in university environments have at the moment that seems to be encouraged by social media. What I mean by that is that everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as mentally ill. You’ve heard the word neurodivergent suddenly rise in popularity over the last five years, when ten years ago we never heard that word at all, and now every single sensitive person claims to be neurodivergent. I think it’s more salutary to realize that if everybody is neurodivergent, then nobody is. If you’ve ever suffered from depression or anxiety, and who hasn’t, you’re neurodivergent. But that just means you’re normal. Also, there’s a million quizzes you could do online to prove you have ADHD. Anyone can come up with these quizzes. If you take one of these quizzes the answer will always be that you have ADHD. People are desperate to identify as disabled in this way. I’m amazed by how thrilled people are with this diagnosis.

Suicide is also a big part of this book, and suicides of artists in particular. Why is that?

There was a weird period in my life a couple of years ago where there were a couple of suicides close to me, in a cluster, and that was just a coincidence. But that gave me the idea of an imagined epidemic of suicide of people in the arts.

There is a strange fixation with suicide in the culture right now. The more that people say you have to be sensitive and cautious about the idea of suicide and you have to put trigger warnings on top of anything that mentions it, the more the idea is brought up and discussed and you are creating one giant trigger. This is one of these paradoxes. It’s like the Streisand Effect. The more you say “Don’t mention the war” the more you mention the war.

Gloria lives in a world in which there are literal, physical signs everywhere about suicide. Some of those really exist. The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in the past did have big posters all over the city with the slogan “Not suicide. Not today.” I’ve quoted that in the book. So you’re trying to get people to be aware of the dangers of suicide and you’re putting up posters reminding people of the possibility of suicide all over the city. That struck me as paradoxical.

The idea that we should all be proud of being fragile and vulnerable, that we need to identify primarily with our limitations, that we need to label ourselves with them and notify everybody of them—this is a new pressure and I don’t think it’s healthy. The book is not an essay. I’m not lecturing anybody about anything. It’s a love story about two people that fails, but if we’re talking about the satirical aspects, I couldn’t help having fun with this.

Can you talk about how sex and intimacy has changed because of the internet? It seems as though all these characters are dissatisfied with their sex lives and they turn to the internet for something. Daryn with the incels and Gloria with her social media and wellness blog. But even they seem to get dissatisfied with that as the story goes on.

Daryn and Gloria’s dissatisfaction are very similar and they have similar complaints about the world, although their solutions are wildly different. Daryn is upset about income inequality, that he can’t get ahead. He works in a Best Buy and doesn’t come from a privileged class, so he has no advantages in the world. Gloria is preoccupied with the same things, just as her leftist friends are, but it’s just that Daryn’s solutions are different.

Daryn is dissatisfied and unhappy and so he turns to a community of unhappy men online for companionship, while Gloria is talking to women all the time who are disappointed in men because they’re on dating apps. The apps give everybody so many options that nobody’s willing to commit. Even the cool, sensitive, educated men that Gloria and her friends want to date, they know the right language, they know how to speak feminist language and they know the sensitive things to say, but they’re extremely insensitive about women. They like to have a bunch of women on the go at any time, and that makes all those women unhappy.

Although it should be pointed out that Gloria has refused to go on dating apps. Only her friend Isabel has been on the apps, but Isabel also posts a lot of sexy selfies. She has an anonymous Instagram account where she posts them and that’s simply for own self-esteem. She tends to post sexy selfies, as a lot of people do, when she is really down and lacking in self-esteem.

Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories 2025 are available to preorder!

Why do you think more people are dissatisfied and unhappy?

The culture of the image is making people unhappy. The culture of competition around appearance is exacerbated by Instagram. It’s terribly unhealthy. There’s an instant gratification in being attractive. If you’re attractive and you’re having an attractive day, and I’m sure this applies to men too, you put an attractive photograph of yourself up and lots of people respond positively, it is validating and gratifying in the short term. There’s a little rush that comes with that that I’m sure can be very addictive but not fulfilling in the long run. And Daryn also needs validation from people to find that he’s not alone in feeling miserable and rejected and that the whole world hates him.

In a way they become isolated in their own online communities, where they get their insecurities or anger amplified. The more obvious one causing harm being that of the incels, but Gloria’s social media and online wellness culture can seem just troubling. Were you trying to compare the two?

Yes, and as I said Daryn’s concerns and Gloria’s concerns are very similar. They’re upset about inequality in the world, they’re both lonely and find it difficult to find loving, committed partners.

Now Daryn’s hasn’t really tried. He doesn’t try because that’s what incels are like. They don’t try and they’re subject to a kind of delusion. They feel they’re unattractive. I was inspired here by reading a lot and watching documentaries about incels. You can actually see some video interviews with young men who are incels online and they say “I’m so ugly. I’m unattractive.” And they’re absolutely normal looking guys. They’ve got a kind of body dysmorphia. They look in the mirror and they see someone ugly and the rest of the world doesn’t, but they’ve convinced themselves that they are ugly. They’re convinced that women don’t like them, but they don’t associate with women at all. They don’t know women. They don’t try, I think, for fear of rejection, for this decision that they’re not the right kind of guy. They don’t know women enough to know that women aren’t looking for what they think they’re looking for.

What links Gloria and Daryn is a sense of dissatisfaction with the world generally.

It’s almost like Daryn thinks his appearance is also out of his control too, similar to how he feels like he can’t get ahead financially. And Gloria starts her relationship with Daryn almost as an experiment in control, of wanting a sense of control because every other part of her life is in flux.

Control is a great word, because that’s the problem with both of them. They have no power in their lives. Gloria feels powerless in her career and her love life, and the same with Daryn.

Gloria doesn’t really know what she wants. She’s very confused. She doesn’t know why she’s going after Daryn. At first she thinks it’s just because she hates him and wants to punish him. But then she realizes she’s actually intrigued by the idea of a boy falling so helplessly in love with her. She tries to resist the idea, but it’s a very attractive idea since all of her hipster boyfriends have been unable to do that. She finds that there’s something in Daryn’s twisted worldview that is actually appealing to her and that’s the idea of traditional gender roles, his idea of a monogamous relationship in which a man takes care of a woman, like a knight and a princess. Something about that idea really lights up her brain because that’s the absolute opposite of what all the boys in her life were too cool to give her.

Now why did she start first having sex with Daryn? Well she wants sex, but she’s nervous about him. She doesn’t know if he could be an actual violent man. It’s funny enough, but the men who scared her with possibly violent acts during sex are all the cool, sensitive hipster boys. Those are the ones who know that some women like to be choked during sex and so they’ll do it without asking your consent. That’s how the novel opens. Gloria is really nervous about power imbalances in sex with someone who’s declared himself an incel. So she puts herself in the role of a dominatrix, which doesn’t come naturally for her. She’s not really turned on by the sex, but that’s the only way she can feel safe in having sex with him. But also, she wants to teach him a lesson. She’s mad because when she first saw him, he was participating in a neo-nazi, anti-immigrant demonstration. In her mind, she can’t separate the desire to love and the desire to punish. She wants control of him, and the only way she can do it is through this particular kind of sex.

Coming soon: Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers (Sep 30), Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way (Oct 7), Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (Oct 14), and The Sorrow of Angels (Nov 4).

Is there anything you would like people to take away from reading this?

That you read books just to find out what happens in the story, not to learn a lesson about anything. But if there’s any one message it’s possibly just that you can’t change people. In a way, Self Care can be seen as a modern retelling of the tale of the scorpion and the frog. Are you familiar with that?

No, I’m not. Can you explain it?

You’ve maybe heard some version of it with different animals, or sometimes it’s a young girl and snake, but it goes something like this with different variations depending on what people or animals are involved:

There’s a forest fire on one side of the river, and the scorpion wants to flee the forest fire by crossing the river, except he can’t swim. But he’s next to a frog who obviously can swim. The scorpion says to the frog “Listen, would you do me a big favour? Can you carry me on your back and swim me across the river?” and the frog says “Why would I do that? I know you’re dangerous and that you sting and kill frogs. You’re going to hurt me.” Then the scorpion says “No, absolutely not. Why would I do that? If I sting you as we are crossing then we both drown. So it wouldn’t help me. We both need to get out of here. Just do me this one favour and I’ll never harm you or your family as long as we live.” So the frog agrees. He puts the scorpion on his back and swims him across the river. As soon as they get to the other bank, the scorpion bites the frog and poisons him. As the frog is dying he says “Why on earth would you do that?” and the scorpion says, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

Sometimes the punch line is simply the line “It’s in my nature.” It’s a parable that applies to Gloria and the incel.

You don’t think Daryn could have ever changed?

No, I don’t. Daryn is messed up. He gives hints at his violence from early on, but she’s blind to them because she’s desperate for love. And we’ve all done that. We’ve all ignored red flags, and I’ve even been the red flag, and we all kick ourselves and say “What was I thinking?”

In good publicity news:

  • Scout Magazine featured several Biblioasis titles in their Scout Book Club: Revolution issue:
    • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio: “One of the most engrossing and activating books I’ve read so far this year . . . both thoroughly researched and deeply nuanced.”
    • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide by Batool Abu Akleen, Nahil Mohana, Ala’a Obaid, and Sondos Sabra: “It’s impossible not to be moved by these devastating, honest human accounts dispatched from on the ground.”
    • On Oil by Don Gillmor: “Gillmor covers an impressive amount of ground in this slim 134-page volume.”
    • On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “A compelling and jam-packed argument against the banning of books . . . Long live literature and reading for pleasure!”
  • The 2025 Seth’s Christmas Ghost Stories were featured in Guelph Today.
  • We’re Somewhere Else Now by Robyn Sarah was reviewed in The Woodlot: “Robyn Sarah’s work is powerful, visceral, but also elegant and pared down when it needs to be . . . Her poetry collections are consistently lauded, and this one I believe will be no different.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, wrote an op-ed in the Toronto Star on the ongoing Alberta censorship campaign.

The Bibliophile: “Arnhem”

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Elise Levine’s Big of You comes out next Tuesday, September 9 in Canada. I’ve been waiting, with anticipation, for about six months—ever since reading that first story on my work computer between emails—for everyone else in the country to pick up this unsettling, strange, beautiful book.

Big of You ranges across Europe, North America, and space. It includes all sorts of characters, from a mythological, millennia-old creature, to a nineteenth-century inventor and photographer, to a group of older women vacationing in the desert. What I find most stunning about Levine’s writing is her ability to convey the expressive interiority of each character. Tonally, her characters are wildly, humourously, iconically individual. These are some of the realest people I’ve ever encountered in fiction (and by real, I mean so exceptionally unique they border on the surreal).

Below is an excerpt from Big of You’s opening story, “Arnhem.” Coincidentally, this piece also appeared in Best Canadian Stories 2021 (edited by Diane Schoemperlen). I hope you’ll love this one—and the others—as much as I do.

Happy reading,

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

Photo: Big of You by Elise Levine. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

An excerpt from “Arnhem”

My husband leaves—I asked him to, or I didn’t, I can’t keep it straight—and I’m thinking, two girls on a hill. Heidelberg, or Conwy in North Wales where there’s also a castle. Two girls, telepathic as ants, making fast along a wet street. Oxford or Bruges. One girl’s freezing in her white summer dress. The other girl’s clad in army surplus pants and a baggy turtleneck sweater. Both of them seventeen, smug as cats, having blown off the archaeological dig on Guernsey, for which they’d secured positions six months earlier by mail. Mud labour, fuck that shit. On the appointed start date they simply hadn’t shown. Instead they thumb around, do all the things.

In a fancy café in Brussels, they order frites, which arrive on a silver platter, grease soaking into the paper doily. North of Lisbon they sleep on a beach one night. They run out of money in Paris and panhandle, not very well but they get by.

Who do they think they are?

Who did I?

I think we went to the zoo in Arnhem. I think we met a composer at some youth hostel who was from Arnhem. We met two young Italian men at a hostel in Mons. No one else was around and they tried to kiss us near the bathrooms when we went to brush our teeth that night. One of the young men forced one of us against the wall of the repurposed army barracks and thrust his pelvis a few strokes, while the other man stood back with the other one of us and watched. One night in the hostel in Amsterdam there was a phone call for one of us, and we both trundled barefoot down the stairs to the hostel office in our prim cotton nighties. Turns out one of our grandmothers was dying, the grandmother of the one of us who still had a grandmother.

I was the friend. We were friends.

I slept beside her in a roomful of older young women, all of us on cots half a foot off the damp floor. This was Cambridge. Dew on the windows all night, late June. The women were real diggers, by day excavating a nearby pre-Roman site. The men diggers, including my friend’s older brother who we were visiting, and the reason we’d dreamed up the scheme of ourselves volunteering on a site, slept in another large room, down the hall—so much for the men. But the women—solid, practical, tough. Intimidating to the extent that when I say I slept, the truth is I barely did, cold, legs aching, bladder wretched because I was too scared to get up. To be weak. To even think it. Be that person.

Which one was I?

Not the one in the summer dress. The one in the Shetland turtleneck.

*

If I were telling this to my husband, I’d say: the next morning in Mons the sky was clear. Awake for much of the night, my friend and I rose early and packed and picked through the continental breakfast array in the main hall. Individual portions of spreadable cheese wrapped in foil. Crisp rye flatbreads. Ginger jam. I’d never seen anything like it. The Belgian couple who managed the hostel, in their mid-thirties probably, kindly asked how we’d slept. We spilled the beans about the young men and the couple’s eyes grew round and their foreheads pinched. They would have a word with those guys.

By the time the couple did, if they did, and it’s true we believed them, my friend and I were gone.

*

We left Lisbon broke and caught rides up the coast. Mostly guys, some with their own ideas. Sometimes a woman who’d ask if we were okay. We were okay.

*

The beach was small with large-grained sand. We didn’t bother to take our shoes off.

The man who drove us there was slight of build. His mustache was light brown. At dusk he parked on the street and led us down to the water where we thanked him and said goodbye. He’d asked if we wanted to sleep on a beach that night and we’d said yes, please. Anything for an adventure to recall later in life. To say, How cool was that?

The sea frothed at our feet and the air smelled of brine. We toed a few half-circles and the sea erased them. We stretched our backs, yawned. He refused to take the hint. Thank you, okay?

He made himself understood then. He was spending the night with us. He’d called a buddy from the roadside café he’d taken us to earlier, where under his guidance we’d eaten squid in black ink very cheap and drunk cheap wine. Soon his friend would be here to meet us too.

It’s not like the driver had a tent or sleeping bags. Was there even a moon that night? There was a family camping nearby. A woman, a man, a child maybe eight-nine years old. They had a tent. Sleeping bags, no doubt. Judging by the track marks, they’d dragged a picnic table over, and the fire on their portable stovetop burned brighter while the sky grew darker and the man and my friend and I sat on the sand waiting, he for his friend, my friend and I for some notion of what to do, clueless as sheep.

It grew dark-dark. A flashlight made its way toward us. It was the woman. With her nearly no English and our no Portuguese and a little French between us, she ushered my friend and I into the tent with her husband and son.

How did we all fit? I must have slept the sleep of the dead, for all I can remember of the rest of that night.

Check out Elise Levine’s interview with Katherine Abbass in The Ex-Puritan!

*

When we first got together, my husband complained I slept like a swift. When things went from infrequently to occasionally bad to totally the worst between us, he said I slept like a fruit fly.

I pull the covers over my head. He’s not here to stop me, he’s at a friend’s—his, not mine. A week since yesterday. Good thing I brought my phone with me, light in darkness, all that. Especially with the news bulletins the past few days. Will I be okay? Will he? I hit his number and hang up when he answers. He immediately calls back, probably to yell, and I press piss off.

I ferret my arms out from beneath the covers. Stop calling me, I text-beg. Please.

For the next hour, while I still have my phone on, and for the first time in several years, he does as I say.

*

Around midnight I run a bath. I’m thinking again about the beach in Portugal, the family’s tent—the next morning my friend and I woke and stretched and crept back out. The driver lay curled like an inchworm on the sand near the waterline, no friend in sight.

He did drive us back to the highway, game of him. We girls, young women, once again stuck out our thumbs. Auto-stop, they call it there.

I switch off the bathroom light and climb in the tub for a long soak. My phone is still off, but I’ve got it holding down the toilet seat, in case.

My husband is in IT. He’s never once in his life hitchhiked. Like never even tried? No, he said on our first date, dinner at a pasta bar before a movie. Pale noodles, pale sauce, what can you expect for Cleveland, I thought, having recently moved there for the second of what turned into a seemingly endless stream of visiting assistant professor gigs. Before adjunct was what I could get. Now, not even that.

Like not even once? I’d pressured him that night over dinner. Never ever?

My date—who became my husband, at least for awhile, if I understand his intent by hightailing it to a friend’s, if I understand my own intentions—said no in a way that I knew to shut up about it for good.

*

Before he left us that morning by the side of the highway, the Portuguese driver tried to kiss me. I bit his lip to stop him. Where had I ripped that idea from? Some movie or book.

He got mad. Pushed me from him and fingered his mouth. Looked like he was considering options.

Later, in the back seat of our next ride that day—a Spanish couple returning from holiday, non–English speakers—my friend turned to me and said, I thought he was going to hit you. Why on earth would you do that?

I shrugged her off. But I’d also thought he was going to deck me. Some memorable story, one for the ages, something to one day tell the kids.

*

Weeks before Portugal, immediately after the phone call at night to the hostel in Amsterdam—when my friend learned her grandmother had cancer, and might not make it, and I took this news in grave solidarity, assumed a mournful expression that said I understood, I was by my friend’s side forever in all things—we sat on the floor outside our hostel room, nighties tucked around our legs. The old woman. The fights she fought with my friend the raging vegetarian, she of the curly hair she refused to tame. The stubborn fact of the fierce old creature—gone? Weird to think. But I nodded, weird I knew. The previous summer my father had an affair, and my mother told me about it, and now I told my friend about it. How the woman called my mother on the phone and said she and my father were in love. You’re only in love with his credit cards, my mother told the woman.

My friend put her feet flat on the hostel floor and rocked back against the hallway wall, she laughed her ass off. My god, she gasped. What a stupid cliché.

Earlier on the trip, fresh off the plane, well before we’d hit the road thumbs out, we’d stayed in London, and things hadn’t gone so well between us. At Trafalgar Square, on our third afternoon away from home, my friend undertook a spat with me. Talk to me, she semi-shouted. You literally dumb bitch. You need to tell me what you’re thinking, share your thoughts. Otherwise I might as well have left you at home.

The sun is nice today, the sun is too hot. Another beer, why not. Look at that old man over there. In Madrid, I told her I was afraid of morphing into one of the numerous homeless some day. You won’t, she said airily, you have family, friends. This sun is too hot.

Photo: The chapter title page for “Arnhem.” Interior by Ingrid Paulson.

*

I will share this: after my friend’s first suicide attempt, when we were fifteen and she was in the hospital over March break, I declined her single working mom’s invitation to host me at their house so I could help my friend through this difficult period. Instead I went to Myrtle Beach with my parents and little brother. Every afternoon the sib and I rode the Monster, tentacled and huge, at the sleazy mini-fairgrounds down the street from our efficiency motel room. Mornings we crossed the street to the hotel that actually was on the beach and baked in the sun by the heated pool. We swam too, hotfooting across the sugar sand to plunge in the icy waters, before reverse scampering and jumping in the pool to feel our skin burn. What else? I got mild sunstroke on our last day. For six bucks in a tourist shop, I bought my friend a pickled octopus jammed into a small jar.

You bet it was expired. Worse, by fifteen my friend had already gone vegetarian. When I got back home, more red and blistered than tanned, I paid her a visit in the hospital, and presented my gift. The look on her face. The shapeless blue gown, the big bandage around her wrist.

This was before Europe. I had no excuse. It was before my friend told me, that night on the Portuguese beach—sitting on the sand beside the driver who spoke little to no English, waiting for his friend to arrive, and before the family with the tent rescued us, that time in between, when the scope of our situation was beginning to sink in—that I really did not want to lose my virginity this way. Believe her, she knew all about it, having lost hers that spring, in the sleeping bag she’d borrowed from me, so she could go camping with this guy from our history class. He’d been a child actor in popular TV commercials and evolved into a cute teen actor doing same. Years later, years after this night in Portugal, he became a handsome adult actor, with a dimple so deep it nearly cleft his chin, and portrayed a cooped up astronaut in a popular show, and penned screenplays about the world wars, assigning himself the tortured-hero roles.

The night my friend and I slept in the tent in Portugal, I hadn’t heard the ocean waves, though they couldn’t have been more than twenty, thirty feet away. I hadn’t felt the pounding. Like I said: sleep of the dead. Those waves crashing closer, shuffling farther out, and neither my friend nor I possessing a clue about tides.

In good publicity news:

CROSSES IN THE SKY longlisted for the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize

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We’re excited to share that on September 2, 2025, the longlist for the 2025 J.W. Dafoe Book Prize was announced, and included Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie! View the full longlist and announcement on their website here.

The shortlist will be announced on September 25, and the winner of the J.W. Dafoe Book Prize, valued at $12,000, will be named on October 14.

The J.W. Dafoe Prize memorializes Canadian editor John Wesley Dafoe, and is one of the richest book awards for exceptional non-fiction about Canada, Canadians, and the nation in international affairs.

Congratulations to Mark from all of us at Biblioasis.

Grab a copy of the book here!

ABOUT CROSSES IN THE SKY

From the bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Esprit-Radisson

This is the story of the collision of two worlds. In the early 1600s, the Jesuits—the Catholic Church’s most ferocious warriors for Christ—tried to create their own nation on the Great Lakes and turn the Huron (Wendat) Confederacy into a model Jesuit state. At the centre of their campaign was missionary Jean de Brébeuf, a mystic who sought to die a martyr’s death. He lived among a proud people who valued kindness and rights for all, especially women. In the end, Huronia was destroyed. Brébeuf became a Catholic saint, and the Jesuit’s “martyrdom” became one of the founding myths of Canada.

In this first secular biography of Brébeuf, historian Mark Bourrie, bestselling author of Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson, recounts the missionary’s fascinating life and tells the tragic story of the remarkable people he lived among. Drawing on the letters and documents of the time—including Brébeuf’s accounts of his bizarre spirituality—and modern studies of the Jesuits, Bourrie shows how Huron leaders tried to navigate this new world and the people struggled to cope as their nation came apart. Riveting, clearly told, and deeply researched, Crosses in the Sky is an essential addition to—and expansion of—Canadian history.

ABOUT MARK BOURRIE

Mark Bourrie is an Ottawa-based author, lawyer, and journalist. He holds a master’s in journalism from Carleton University and a PhD in history from the University of Ottawa. In 2017, he was awarded a Juris Doctor degree and was called to the bar in 2018. He has won numerous awards for his journalism, including a National Magazine Award, and received the RBC Charles Taylor Prize in 2020 for his book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre-Esprit Radisson. His most recent books include Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada’s Most Powerful Media Mogul, the national bestseller Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, and Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre.

The Bibliophile: Like working a piece of clay

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An interview with Robyn Sarah, author of We’re Somewhere Else Now

Robyn Sarah has been a household name among Canadian poets since before I started reading poetry, and it’s been a privilege to work (even in my small way) on her latest collection—her first book of new poems since 2015’s Governor General’s Award-winning My Shoes Are Killing Me (maybe one of my favourite titles of the century).

We’re Somewhere Else Now: Poems 2016–2024 by Robyn Sarah. Cover designed by Vanessa Stauffer.

We’re Somewhere Else Now compiles poems written between 2016 and 2024, documenting the pandemic years with a quiet, lyric attentiveness. The poems are full of lovely—alternately foreboding and humour-tinged—imagery. One of my favourite images describes a high-rise apartment in the midst of lockdown: “balconies / stacked skyward like open bureau drawers.”

Another highlight of this book is the extended sequence poem, “In the Wilderness,” a poem that combines various forms and voices, a meditative yet playful unmooring of faith and “jam session with Doubt.”

I had the immense pleasure of asking Robyn a few questions about her work.

Thank you for reading,

Dominique
Publicity & Marketing Coordinator

A Biblioasis Interview with Robyn Sarah

It’s been ten years since your last poetry collection was published. In this time, your selected poems came out, and you wrote a music memoir. I wonder what you see as having changed (intentionally or not) in your poetry since My Shoes Are Killing Me? Have the experiences of writing a prose memoir and compiling a book of selected poems also altered your more recent poetic preoccupations?

I wouldn’t say that compiling a second selected in 2017 (the first was The Touchstone in 1992) altered anything in my poetic practice or preoccupations. Nor did working for close to a decade on an extended prose work—except in the sense that its completion freed me to write poems again, something I felt good and ready to do! The memoir was extremely demanding, and from 2016 until 2020 it took the place of poetry-writing almost entirely (though around 2018 I did begin scratching out fragments towards what would become the long mixed-genre poem in the new collection). I’ve always written both prose and poetry (first stories at the age of six, first poems at nine) and have also sometimes mixed them (there are prose poems in every collection I’ve published). Many reviewers have observed that my poetic practice and preoccupations have been remarkably consistent from one collection to the next (“stubbornly so,” as one put it).

Montreal is a consistent backdrop in We’re Somewhere Else Now. Early on in the book, the speaker is “buying a potted narcissus / at the Atwater Market,” and later on in the poems we get glimpses of intersections: Hutchison and Villeneuve, Parc and Villeneuve. I wonder how important a place—and specifically Montreal—is to your work?

Some writers find visiting new places indispensable to their creativity. I am not one. Travel is stimulating, but I find it very stressful and disruptive, so I minimize time away from home; I need stability in order to do creative work. I’ve lived in Montreal almost continuously since the age of four—that’s a lifespan—and have rarely left it for longer than a few weeks at a time. I watched the city grow and change as I grew and changed. If you live in a city for long enough, you don’t have to go somewhere else to find yourself in a new place: you see it become one again and again—for better or worse. The same with a street or neighbourhood, like the Mile-End block where I’ve lived (in four different flats) for more than forty years. The current view out my window overlays memories that go back forty years—not to mention memories passed on by immigrant grandparents who lived within blocks of here in the 1920s. I love this city and neighbourhood. You mention Villeneuve (referenced in poems set in 1981 and 2021). Villeneuve was the name we gave to a small press I co-founded in 1976—based at home, in a third-floor walkup on that street, and then in two successive flats around the corner on Hutchison. My kids grew up on this block—a two-minute walk to Mount Royal Park, a half-hour walk downtown along Avenue du Parc. Literary forbears also lived here: the poet A. M. Klein raised his family in the block above ours; Mordecai Richler apparently lived briefly on ours as a college student.

Photo (L to R): My Shoes Are Killing Me: Poems; Music, Late and Soon: A Memoir; and Wherever We Mean to Be: Selected Poems 1975–2015 by Robyn Sarah.

Your poetry collections are usually varied on a formal level, and this one is no exception. I’m curious to know how you approach form: does it happen intuitively, or do you set goals for yourself? Is there a form you’d like to attempt that you haven’t yet?

Hard to answer, because what begins intuitively can later become more goal-directed. (I’m almost entirely an intuitive writer, but at a certain point in the process, unconscious intentions become conscious and begin to direct my choices.) I don’t go about looking for new forms to attempt, like learning a new trick—it’s more like one day I become aware of the formal pattern of a poem I may have known and loved for years without noticing it was in a form, and I become intrigued by the form and am inspired to imitate it in a poem of my own. (I wrote my first villanelle without knowing that the form I was imitating had a name.) I rarely begin a poem with a form in mind, but my training as a classical musician has always had an influence on how I write: I like my poems to have a shape or pattern, even if they’re free verse. I start a poem usually with a few lines that come into my head from nowhere, lines I like the sound of, and I let the poem grow from there, shaping as I go along. It’s more like working a piece of clay than like trying to impose a template on the words: you could say I invent new forms, some looser and some more obviously formal. But really it’s like I let each poem find its own form—either it begins to fall into a particular traditional pattern or it evolves into a shape I create just for that poem.

The second half of We’re Somewhere Else Now comprises a long sequence poem, “In the Wilderness.” I’m interested to know about the evolution of this one: did you set out to write a long poem, or did the various pieces eventually come together? Although thematically cohesive, I was struck by the variations in form and tone throughout (for instance, the playful, shorter lines at the beginning of “The Fiddler” are enticingly opposed to other, almost prose-like sections).

The title poem in My Shoes Are Killing Me, which I called “a poem in nine movements,” was not a suite of individual poems but an extended single work, meant to be read continuously as one, even though its nine sections have individual titles. At eleven pages, it was the longest single poem I had ever written, and it gave me the idea I might consider doing something similar, perhaps even chapbook or book length, on a single theme that had begun to preoccupy me: the irony that in a world where a glut of information on any topic was available at the click of a mouse, the effect seemed to be not to advance us in knowledge but increasingly to cast all knowledge into doubt. I had in mind, vaguely, an extended text that would be philosophical in impulse, but not theoretical—not a treatise on doubt, but an inquiry with a human face, in layman’s language. How does the human being anchor itself at times when truths that have been our common ground for understanding the world begin to break down? The poem evolved very slowly; for two years there was no poem at all, just an accumulating body of disjointed fragments (ranging from a few lines to the equivalent of a paragraph or two, sometimes prose, sometimes free verse) scribbled by hand and eventually filling the equivalent of a Hilroy notebook, mixed in with other jottings and failed poem starts. This was not at all how “My Shoes Are Killing Me” had begun. I had no clear sense of what I was doing or how to work with this material, and no confidence that it would ever amount to anything. But I had to start somewhere, so at some point I began transcribing the “doubt” fragments onto the computer in a single long document, in the order in which they were written, separated by asterisks. Each time I reopened the file to enter the next batch, I would find myself beginning to “ work” one or more of the fragments already entered—letting them grow in stages, sometimes to merge with other fragments, sometimes to incorporate and dialogue with quotations from literature, scripture, prayer, popular song, film, and other sources. Sometimes I moved them around as I saw sub-themes begin to emerge. I wanted the segments, in the voice of a lone speaker, cumulatively to enact the sometimes chaotic thought processes of humanity cast adrift from its moorings as technology pulls familiar ground out from under the world we once knew, erasing landmarks and disrupting our belief systems. I wanted this text to sound and feel improvisatory, like “thinking aloud” in real time—a sort of ad-lib soliloquy with starts and stops and rough edges—not like polished poetry. Hence the variability—moving back and forth between prose and verse, sometimes within the same segment; different line lengths and stanza patterns, different vocal registers and tonal shifts.

Three poems featured in the collection were nominated for a 2025 National Magazine Award in Poetry!

Your book is filled with questions. These often seem to point out, or dismantle, the absurdity of human logic: “Why put a name on a day? / How can it matter what a day is called? / The cat doesn’t know it’s Tuesday.” What do questions mean to your work? What do you think they contribute to a poem that a statement might lack?

Many readers have remarked that my memoir, too, is filled with questions. I’m not necessarily looking for answers. I think questions are my “way in” to something I wonder about and would like to explore. I’m a wonderer. Even when I don’t voice them in so many words, I think the impulse to poetry comes to me as a question. It can be directed to the poem’s subject or addressee, or it can be a question I ask myself. It may be a “question arising” from the poem or implied by it, left to linger unanswered. Questions invite a reader’s involvement. A question opens the way to thinking about something, where an answer or a statement tends to close it.

As a final question, I’m curious to know who your great poetry loves are. While writing this book, but also more generally—who are the poets who’ve guided you in your own work over the years? I might guess Gerard Manley Hopkins, for one, from the appearance of some of his lines in this collection . . .

Single poems encountered at the right moment, by poets I might not otherwise consider “great poetry loves,” have inspired many of my poems. Different “loved poets” have guided or influenced me at different times, and there have been so many. Generally, in my early high school years the poets I loved were A. E. Housman, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Walt Whitman; in my late teens and early twenties it was primarily T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and Wallace Stevens, but also Emily Dickinson, Robinson Jeffers, Theodore Roethke, Dylan Thomas, Conrad Aiken, Wilfred Owen, more ambivalently William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore . . . . Well, I could go on. Donne and Herbert and Hopkins. Philip Larkin was a later discovery, I don’t know how I missed him before. Of contemporary Canadian poets, I have especially loved the poems of George Johnston, Margaret Avison, and Don Coles. Along the way I’ve also read poetry in translation and have been inspired by poems originally written in French, Latin, modern Greek, modern Hebrew, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Polish, Swedish, and Chinese.

In good publicity news:

  • The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson (trans. Philip Roughton) was reviewed in Kirkus Reviews: “‘Some books are essential, others diversions,’ the boy thinks to himself. This book belongs in the former category.”
  • Precarious: The Lives of Migrant Workers by Marcello Di Cintio appeared on CBC Books’ Fall Book Preview: “Di Cintio investigates . . . and questions whether a system that relies on the vulnerability of its most marginalized can ever be made more just.”
  • Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide was reviewed in several outlets recently, including:
    • Asymptote: “As long as these powerful voices continue to speak to us, we—and anyone with the power to stop this ongoing genocide—will repay them with our listening.”
    • Arab Lit Quarterly: “Their words go beyond the frame . . . [and] requires of the reader an emotional strength to see Gaza in depth, to follow day by day—or for as long the genocide allows them to write—the thoughts of Batool, Sondos, Nahil and Ala’a.”
    • The New Arab: “The artistry and creativity displayed by these four remarkable women both astonish and humble readers . . . Instead of cold numbers and abstract political jargon, these pages offer irrefutable proof of lives lived and spirits tired, but unbroken.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was mentioned in the Guardian’s and the Globe and Mail’s articles on Alberta book bans.
  • Elise Levine, author of Big of You, was interviewed about her short story collection in The Ex-Puritan.
  • Benbecula by Graeme Macrae Burnet was featured in Publishers Weekly’s article on Big Indie Books of Fall 2025.

The Bibliophile: Biblioasis Women in Translation

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Some of us are still enjoying sun and sand, but we’re bringing the Bibliophile back with a feature for Women in Translation Month, highlighting not only some of our fabulous writers, but the amazing work done by their dedicated translators.

We’ve got novels, nonfiction, and linked stories—including one book forthcoming next year! Check them out below, and join us in celebrating translated works by commenting some of your favourite translations by women (from Biblioasis, or elsewhere).

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

Baldwin, Styron, and Me. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Baldwin, Styron, and Me

Mélikah Abdelmoumen, translated by Catherine Khordoc

An unlikely literary friendship from the past sheds light on the radicalization of public debate around identity, race, and censorship.

In 1961, James Baldwin spent several months in William Styron’s guest house. The two wrote during the day, then spent evenings confiding in each other and talking about race in America. During one of those conversations, Baldwin is said to have convinced his friend to write, in first person, the story of the 1831 slave rebellion led by Nat Turner. The Confessions of Nat Turner was published to critical acclaim, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1968, and also creating outrage in part of the African American community.

Decades later, the controversy around cultural appropriation, identity, and the rights and responsibilities of the writer still resonates. In Baldwin, Styron, and Me, Mélikah Abdelmoumen considers the writers’ surprising yet vital friendship from her standpoint as a racialized woman torn by the often unidimensional versions of her identity put forth by today’s politics and media. Considering questions of identity, race, equity, and the often contentious public debates about these topics, Abdelmoumen works to create a space where the answers are found by first learning how to listen—even in disagreement.

Near Distance. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

Near Distance

Hanna Stoltenberg, translated by Wendy H. Gabrielsen

“Stoltenberg’s elegant prose makes each scene . . . so engaging that it gives plot a bad name.”—John Self, Guardian

For her entire life, Karin has fled anything and anyone that tries to possess her. Her job demands little, she mostly socializes with men she meets online, and she’s rarely in touch with Helene, her adult daughter. But when Helene’s marriage is threatened, she turns, uncharacteristically, to her mother for commiseration, and a long weekend away in London. As the two women embark on their uneasy companionship, Karin’s past, and the origins of her studied detachments, are cast in a new light, and she can no longer ignore their effects—on not only herself and her own relationships, but on her daughter’s as well.

An unnerving, closely observed study of character—and the choices we do and do not make—Near Distance introduces Hanna Stoltenberg as a writer of piercing insight and startling lucidity.

Love Novel. Cover designed by Jason Arias.

Love Novel

Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić

Winner of the HKW Internationaler Literaturpreis • Shortlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

Love in late capitalism: in an unnamed city, a husband and wife wage a silent war of rage and resentment. He, an out-of-work Dante scholar, is trying to change the world—and write a novel. She was once a passable actress, but now she’s failing at breastfeeding. They take on gigs and debts. He drinks cheap wine; she cleans obsessively. In their two-room flat the tension rises and turns exquisite: the rent is past due, their careers have stalled, the regime is crumbling, and there’s always the baby, the baby who won’t stop crying.

Intense and astutely ironic, devastating and darkly comic, Ivana Sajko’s Love Novel takes a scalpel to the heart of modern married life.

And forthcoming…

Keep an eye out in January for Ivana Sajko’s next book, translated again by Mima Simić!

Every Time We Say Goodbye is a novel about departures, about childhood, about the end of love and about the lost idea of ​​escaping to a better place. Each chapter is one long sentence that moves from the past to the present, from the skin of a frightened boy to the suit of an adult man, from one end of Europe to the other, following the fate of a man who travels from a coastal town on the Adriatic to Berlin in order to start again. Ivana Sajko paints a portrait of an intellectual at a crossroads with stylistic care and precision.

The Future. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

The Future

Catherine Leroux, translated by Susan Ouriou

Winner of Canada Reads 2024 • Longlisted for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction

In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the US. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.

When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.

The Music Game. Cover designed by Natalie Olsen.

The Music Game

Stéfanie Clermont, translated by JC Sutcliffe

Winner of the 2023 French-American Translation Prize for Fiction

Friends since grade school, Céline, Julie, and Sabrina come of age at the start of a new millennium, supporting each other and drifting apart as their lives pull them in different directions. But when their friend dies by suicide in the abandoned city lot where they once gathered, they must carry on in the world that left him behind—one they once dreamed they would change for the better. From the grind of Montreal service jobs, to isolated French Ontario countryside childhoods, to the tenuous cooperation of Bay Area punk squats, the three young women navigate everyday losses and fears against the backdrop of a tumultuous twenty-first century. An ode to friendship and the ties that bind us together, Stéfanie Clermont’s award-winning The Music Game confronts the violence of the modern world and pays homage to those who work in the hope and faith that it can still be made a better place.

In good publicity news:

  • The Future by Catherine Leroux (trans. Susan Ouriou) and Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) were both included in Read Quebec’s feature for Women in Translation Month.
  • Let Me Go Mad in My Own Way by Elaine Feeney was reviewed in Publishers Weekly: “With arresting imagery and skillful shifts in perspective, Feeney weaves together these narrative threads to gut-wrenching effect . . . It’s a potent drama of a family shaped by a nation in upheaval.”
  • Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press: “A wholly engrossing, multi-layered story told with a slow burn.”
  • On Oil by Don Gillmor was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada: “Gillmor exposes the many myths of a multi-billion-dollar industry . . . [A] strong indictment of the most earth-destroying economic force that exists today.”
  • Casey Plett, author of On Community, was interviewed on the TELUS Talks podcast.
  • On Book Banning by Ira Wells was reviewed in the Seaboard Review of Books: “A thought-provoking read . . . For readers concerned about intellectual freedom, On Book Banning is worth a look.”

The Bibliophile: An introduction from our new Sales Coordinator

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Hello, Bibliophile readers! It’s a pleasure to introduce myself as the new Sales Coordinator here at Biblioasis. This is the last day of my first week of full-time work, most of which I got to spend in the office in Windsor. Toronto is my beloved home base, but I’ve had a great time exploring the city and its environs—including one of the best Turkish bakeries I’ve yet come across in Ontario.

It’s hard to put into words just how exciting it is to have joined the (brilliant) Biblioasis team. Before starting at the press, I was working as a bookseller at the beautiful Flying Books on Queen Street in Toronto, which connected me to a vibrant literary community. I had spent the years between 2019 and 2024 teaching full time at The University of King’s College in Halifax, an experience I found incredibly meaningful, but publishing was my first love. Since as long as I can remember, I’ve had more books than space to accommodate them. Books have accompanied me throughout my life. They have given me a sense of place and rootedness in the midst of many types of transitions.

Sitting in the Biblioasis office with shelves of wonderful titles behind me has been a genuine thrill. There is a lot to learn, but after teaching for so many years, I’m enjoying feeling like a student again, making one discovery after another. Everyone I’ve met so far has been patient, supportive, and welcoming. I’m passionate about our books and I’m looking forward to championing them.

As a bonus, here are some of my favourite Biblioasis titles. Incidentally, they are all works of fiction written from the perspective of mothers: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (if you haven’t tackled the tome yet, take this as your sign—it’s more relevant than ever), Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (one of the most lyrical genre-bending works I’ve come across), and Hanna Stoltenberg’s Near Distance (an unflinching modern take on the mother-daughter relationship that I think Simone de Beauvoir would have loved).

Hilary Ilkay
Sales Coordinator

In other news, Lazer Lederhendler is the fiction winner of the French-American Foundation Prize for his translation of The Hollow Beast! The foundation conducted a short interview with Lazer about his experiences working with Christophe Bernard’s “beast of a novel.” We’re delighted to present it here, ahead of the awards ceremony in New York next week.

Q: What did you enjoy most about translating The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard?

Lazer: Problem solving is one of the things I love most about translating good fiction, and I was well served in that department by Christophe’s fabulous beast of a novel. I did a good amount of research on English dialects of Eastern Canada that are comparable to the French spoken on the Gaspé Peninsula, where most of the action is located. This proved to be not the most fruitful avenue, as the linguistic idiosyncrasies of the book are mainly due to Christophe’s unique and highly evocative visual style. In fact, it occurred to me that The Hollow Beast has all the makings of a wonderful graphic novel. So rather than focusing primarily on language equivalencies or approximations, I would picture the characters and scenes in detail and render those images into English (and afterwards, of course, make sure I hadn’t strayed from the original). On the other hand, however, there was the challenge of depicting the evolving speech patterns of the story’s hero, Monty, who starts out quasi-illiterate but through self-education (he carries around a copy of Homer’s Odyssey) progressively acquires a more sophisticated level of French.

Q: You specialize in translating contemporary Quebecois literature. What are some differences you’ve noticed between contemporary French literature in Canada and French literature in France?

Lazer: That’s a huge question, perhaps best left to academics. But one clear difference that does immediately come to mind is this: today, more than ever before, Québécois literature and Québécois culture and language in general are very much creatures of North America, whose references and influences point increasingly south and west rather than to Europe. This is true, at any rate, for most of the writers I’ve translated since the early 2000s — Nicolas Dickner, Catherine Leroux, Perrine Leblanc, et al — who are assuredly representative of contemporary Québécois fiction. Another basic difference worth mentioning is that the literature of France by and large takes the language for granted — ça va de soi. The same can’t be said of Quebec, where the French language has always been a battle field that, as a friend of mine put it, is foregrounded as a constituent part of the landscape.

Q: The French-American Foundation Translation Prize seeks to honor translators and their craft, and recognize the important work they do bringing works of French literature to Anglophone audiences. What does being named a winner for this prize mean to you, and, in your own words, why does a Prize like this matter?

Lazer: Translators are among the unsung artisans of literature endeavouring to carry the words and artistry of writers across the barriers of language and culture. We for the most part labour in the shadows in order to extend the reach and longevity of an author’s works. So it’s always encouraging and gratifying to have one’s efforts as a translator acknowledged and celebrated. What’s more, awards like the FrenchAmerican Foundation’s Translation Prize, spotlight books and writers that otherwise might not get the attention and readership they deserve.

In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: To live through a single day

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Alice Chadwick’s Dark Like Under follows a large cast of characters—made up of students and teachers at an English secondary school in the 1980s—in the aftermath of a beloved teacher’s sudden death. The premise reminded me of Phillippe Falardeau’s devastating film Monsieur Lazhar, yet Dark Like Under, despite the grief and uncertainty that propel the narrative, feels radically life-giving.

This 336 page novel takes place over the course of a single day, which allows for a heightened attentiveness to the nuances of setting and character. Chadwick really does justice to her characters. I think Pamela Hensley (The Miramichi Reader) gets it right in her recent review:

“Every character is so richly depicted, so expertly drawn with emotional depth and intelligence that we understand not only the individual, but the way each person influences the others and how the town—and the country—has evolved.”

Dark Like Under is the kind of deep, soul-defining book that counters the train chug of reels and the trashiness of beach reads. It allows for immersion in a way that reminds me of summers reading Hardy as a young teenager (before I was expected to work).

Chadwick’s craft is care. This is a beautiful debut novel. It’s also a lovely physical object, with a cover designed by Kate Sinclair, and pages that smell of glue and early summer mornings.

I had the privilege of asking Alice Chadwick a few questions over email, and I’m delighted to share her thoughtful responses here.

Dominique Béchard
Publicist

Photo: Dark Like Under by Alice Chadwick. Cover designed by Kate Sinclair.

A Biblioasis Interview with Alice Chadwick

DB: Dark Like Under takes place over the course of a single day. What inspired this decision? Did you encounter any pitfalls (or surprising benefits) to the circadian form? Are there any other circadian books that inspired you?

AC: My novel is set in a school, and I’m fascinated by the ritualistic nature of the school day. The routines are familiar to us all but, from the distance of adulthood, can appear quite strange. Despite their repetitive quality, there are some school days that stand alone, that remain with us throughout life. I wanted to write about one of those days.

The idea of writing a novel based on a school day slotted into the circadian form in a way that felt entirely natural, even irresistible. The single day as a metaphor for the span of a human life has a rich history (I’m thinking of Shakespeare’s sonnet 73—“In me thou see’st the twilight of such day, As after sunset fadeth in the west . . .”). In my novel, the teenage characters are still in the morning of their lives, moving towards the high, bright point; their teachers and parents feel the light dimming as the decades accumulate. I wanted to explore those distinct stages of life and, as we move through the day of the book, the structure itself carries some of that meaning.

Working with the circadian form was tremendously helpful in structuring the novel—I had a beginning and an end, as well as a natural high point. The one-day structure keeps the narrative fresh, the characters in the present moment and the whole thing moving forwards. There is, quite literally, a ticking clock at the heart of the book. Having those things in place allowed me to write very freely. In that sense, I found it unexpectedly liberating and didn’t feel any disadvantages—perhaps those are for readers to point out!

Before I started working on Dark Like Under, I hadn’t realised that a lot of the literature I love best takes a circadian form. Despite the constraints, it’s hugely flexible and seems to inspire innovation. At one end of the scale there is Katherine Mansfield’s short story sequence Prelude, a masterclass in brevity and restraint; at the other, there’s Joyce’s exuberant and encyclopedic Ulysses. My own favourite is Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway; a hundred years after it was written, it still has urgent things to say about female experience in middle age, motherhood and marriage, and about trauma. The spectre of death haunts all these works. Reading them, our appreciation of what it means to live through a single day and through a single life is heightened. They return us to our own daily existence with a sharpened perception of life’s beauty, strangeness and fragile value.

Photo: Alice Chadwick, author of Dark Like Under. Credit: Beth Boswell-Knight.

Even though the novel is focused on a single day, this day is perceived polyphonically—through multiple characters. I’m curious to know if this was always going to be the case. Do you have a favourite character, or has that favourite changed over the course of writing the novel?

When I began to write the book, I experimented with the first-person plural perspective—the collective “we.” The whole town has suffered a loss, and I was looking for a way to voice that shared grief. Gradually I realised that individual experiences were equally important, and I shifted to a more polyphonic approach, with each chapter drawing close to one character to observe their particular response (a close third-person perspective). Nevertheless, I wanted to retain something of that initial choral feeling. There is considerable social division in the town of the novel, as in 1980s society more broadly, and it felt important to have a plurality of voices, as far as that was feasible within the school.

Initially, I was writing only from the perspectives of the teenage girls and women. At a certain point, I saw that I needed to open it out further and include those of the boys and men. When I had this thought, I stood up from my desk and walked out of the house—I felt extremely ill-equipped to enter the minds of teenage boys! But it was one of the turning points of the book. A character like Kelly, who had initially functioned as a sort of irritant in the classroom, became quite different when given his own chapters. That took me by surprise—he is now one of my favourite people in the book.

I feel a great deal of tenderness for all my characters, but some were easier to write than others. Nicolas, for example—who is at sea in all the teenage drama and would just like to get on with his homework—flowed out of my pen. He could have taken over the novel! I also love Robin. Her life is far from easy but there is not a speck of self-pity in her. The art teacher, Sue Sharpe, is another character close to my heart. She is not conventionally heroic, or even particularly sympathetic, but she has endured. She attempts to communicate something of genuine value to the kids in her classroom and, despite the disappointments and compromises of her career, still carries the flame of her artistic life.

The 1980s serve as a backdrop for the novel. How much do you think the time period factors into the story? Do you think it would have made for a very different novel if it had been set, say, in the 2000s, or today?

I do think it would be different. The premise—that a teacher could die, and no real explanation be given, no support for staff or children be put in place—is, I hope, unthinkable today. The silence around “difficult” subjects such as death and mental health, gender and sexuality, felt almost total in the 1980s; there was a lack of vocabulary and openness about many things that we discuss more freely and fluently now. That said, some events are inexplicable. People, even those closest to us, can remain mysterious and unknowable. The book, in one sense, is an exploration of that.

The novel is underpinned by the tension between communal experience and social division in a small town. For that reason, the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, a period of growing inequality and social destabilisation, felt like the right backdrop for the book, even the necessary one. However, the debates of the 1980s remain pressing: how do we look after the most vulnerable in our communities? How do we share the resources of land, money and education?

I also really wanted to capture an “analog” way of being alive that has almost entirely disappeared now. The texture of life was so different in the 80s—the way we passed little handwritten notes around and did all our learning from books; how, if we wanted to phone someone, we had to stand in the hall and use the landline, where the whole family could hear. Photographs were rare; we didn’t walk around with cameras and films were expensive to process. It was a different way of being an individual and of experiencing time; as a teenager you might be alone or bored, isolated or idle, to an extent that is almost impossible now. That said, teenagers are teenagers. The excitement, defiance and uncertainty of those years belong to us all, whichever decade we grew up in.

Dark Like Under is so richly detailed and elaborate. It seems to go against the distracted, content-driven culture we live in. The level of your attentiveness is impressive. What are your writing habits like?

Thank you! One of the things I love in books—and not just books, in painting, photography, cinema too—is the noticing, the observation of small details that are everyday but at the same time surprising and telling. There are many ways of paying attention, but I love an immersive book, one that takes you wholeheartedly into a place, into the lives of its characters, and lets you have a long look around. It’s a slowing down, yes, and in that respect requires a level of close attention, but that, to me, feels generous and nourishing.

But to answer your question: my writing habits are very regular, very workaday. Every morning I get up, make coffee and go outside, often before London has fully woken up. I like to write in the garden, surrounded by my neighbour’s houses, by trees and birds. It’s a small patch of urban Eden! I work in cheap exercise books, which are often covered in soil and smudged by rain, but the work I can do by hand, early in the morning, seems freer and more unexpected than anything I can do on a screen. Later, I do go inside and work at my desk—I like to type things up and edit on my computer. In the late afternoon, I might go for a walk to clear my head, and sometimes I do other (paid) work. Evenings are for reading, and reading is very much part of writing, a crucial part.

I write every day and most days I struggle, but I’ve learnt that these dull, difficult days are necessary. They often herald a breakthrough, a dreamlike period when words finally flow and stray ideas come together.

I’m interested in the title, Dark Like Under. I love the cryptic imagery it inspires. Could you tell us about how you came to it?

The title came to me slowly, I had to wait for it. I’ve had this experience with poetry; it can take a long time for the right words to surface and find an order. I always knew that there would be “dark” in the title, however. In the western tradition, in the Bible or Dante, say, knowledge and goodness are often associated with light and illumination, but some of the most important lessons we need to learn, not to mention things of great mystery, nuance and beauty, come from places of darkness. It’s where ghosts, and Time itself, accumulate—sometimes in a literal sense, in the buried, archeological layers under our feet. The art teacher in the school tries to teach something of this to the kids: to draw a pebble, to describe a human face, requires a sensitivity to the shadows as well as the highlights. There is only so much that light can teach us. But it is, of course, a question of balance, of not being pulled under by the dark.

Have you read anything lately that you’d like to recommend?

I am halfway through Rose Tremain’s 1992 novel, Sacred Country. Told in multiple voices, it’s a portrait of a sleepy, slightly eccentric village and the story of a young girl who discovers, aged six, that she is Martin, not Mary. It’s funny and deeply touching, and I feel as though I’ve left behind friends every time I put it down.

I’ve also just finished James Agee’s A Death in the Family, a novel (as mine is) about a sudden death and how people live through those first hours and days. I now know that it’s a classic of American literature, but I hadn’t heard of it until a bookseller pressed a copy into my hands. I’m grateful that he did.

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