The Bibliophile: The ghost in the machine

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It surprised me that the most riveting book I’ve read this year is on a topic I knew nothing about and didn’t think I would care to know much about anyway. But Don Gillmor hooked me. That won’t surprise anyone who has read him before. In On Oil, Gillmor, a journalist and former roughneck, takes us through the rise and fall of the oil industry. He had a front row seat to Alberta’s oil boom in the ’70s while working on the oil rigs and he uses that perspective to show how it transformed the province and the wide-ranging influence oil has had across the world. It has given some countries immense wealth and power. It has also corrupted governments, started wars, and worsened our environment.

Photo: On Oil by Don Gillmor. Designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Reading this book I learned that one of the first oil companies was started by a devout Baptist and some of the biggest oil companies were run by Christian evangelicals, which aided in building the mythology of oil as the key to a kingdom on earth. And now, as Gillmor says, “we find ourselves in a landscape that looks increasingly like the Book of Revelation. ‘A third of the earth was burnt up, and a third of the trees were burnt up, and all green grass was burnt up.’”

Please enjoy this short excerpt from On Oil, which will be released on April 22.

Ahmed Abdalla,
Publicist

***

Babylon

In boardrooms in Houston, Calgary, Kuwait, and a dozen other oil capitals, and on the floor of the New York and Chicago Mercantile Exchanges, oil was a global chess game where commodity futures were sold and bartered, oil shipped and traded. Millions of barrels lurched across the globe each day, traders hunched over streaming charts, puzzling over contracts for difference. Over the years, oil has won wars, started others, been a force for nationalism and colonization, and provided a stubborn mythology. It is the one true global religion. A glimpse of oil’s reach can be seen in America’s oil industry. Under Joe Biden, it produced 13.3 million barrels per day, enough to meet the US’s own needs. But in 2023 it imported 8.51 million barrels per day (bpd) from dozens of countries, and exported 10.15 million bpd to 173 countries. The oil network envelops the world in a complex web of shipping and refining capacity and capability, depending on cost-effectiveness and the grade of oil. Part of this is economic; it can be cheaper to import from countries with lower labour and capital costs and fewer environmental regulations. And part of it is chemistry; the heavy, sour (high sulphur content) oil that the US was importing from Venezuela and Mexico when it still needed to import oil requires a specific kind of refinery. Some of the refineries on the Gulf coast are equipped to process that oil (along with Canadian bitumen), as opposed to the light, sweet oil that Texas produces. Refineries take years to build and are expensive—between US$5 and 15 billion. With the exception of a small North Dakota refinery that came online in 2020, no US refineries have been built since 1976. Past the economics and chemistry, there are the geopolitics. Countries (Russia, Saudi Arabia, the US) sell oil at advantageous prices to other countries to gain influence and status. It is the world’s most pervasive diplomatic tool.

Photo: We’re hiring a new sales coordinator! See our website for more details.

Canada’s oil landscape is equally byzantine. Canadian pipelines tend to run south rather than east, so Ontario and Quebec get their oil from an evolving patchwork of sources that shifts depending on economics and politics. Since 1988, eastern Canada has imported more than $500 billion in foreign oil, coming from the US, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Nigeria, Norway, and others. The landscape can shift quickly. In 2012, Quebec got 92 percent of its oil from Kazakhstan, Angola, and Algeria, and just 1 percent from Alberta. Five years later, it was getting 44 percent of its oil from Alberta, the result of Enbridge’s Line 9 pipeline.

It binds us all. Oil has a pulse, it evolves and migrates, transforming cities and governments, entire countries. It fuelled economic growth and triggered recessions and gave us the romance of the open road. But at its source, in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana and in camps in the Arctic, and outside Medicine Hat, it was men trudging onto the drilling floor, labouring in the heat or cold amid a symphony of engine noise, wrestling with drill pipe, spinning chains, tongs and slips, the kelly hose bobbing above them as they punched another hole in the earth. Even for us, oil remained an abstraction. I never saw it; there were no dramatic gushers, black oil spewing from the earth, coating everything. It powered our cars and homes and was used in the manufacture of a thousand products, from plastics to fertilizers to Aspirin. It powered our lives: We are Hydrocarbon Man, Homo Oleum. Yet it remains unseen, the ghost in the machine.

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After graduating from university, I worked on an oil rig for a hundred straight days, with what was probably the oldest crew in the oil patch, weathered, gnarled men in their late sixties, one in his seventies, ancient for rig work, their lives a country and western song. Pete, the wobbly seventy-two-year-old derrickman, came home to find his wife gone, along with all the furniture, appliances, and curtains. There was a note on the floor: “Your dinner’s in the oven.” There was no oven. The driller was a ropy-muscled troll who had worked on the killing floor of a meat-packing plant but quit finally, saying it took too much of you, all that death. My fellow roughneck was a farmer whose modest crop had been lost to drought. He was in his late sixties, with a deeply lined face, a face that could hold a spring rain, as my grandmother might have said. Between connections he would roll a cigarette and walk to the edge of the lease and smoke and stare at the horizon.

Photo: Check out Don Gillmor’s new feature in Maclean’s.

I went up in the derrick when Pete was drunk or too hungover to climb the thirty metres onto his perch. We were south of Calgary and I was ten storeys off the ground, a view of the Rockies to the west and limitless prairie to the east, farms and ranches laid out like a Mondrian painting, a glorious solitude.

With my first paycheque I bought a plane ticket to Europe, then counted the days like a convict. Four months later, I was sitting on a beach on the Greek island of Crete, blobs of sticky oil dotting the sand around me. A tanker carrying crude oil from Libya had run aground off the south coast of Crete and here was the residue. Only two months earlier, the Amoco Cadiz had split apart off the Brittany coast in France, spilling 230,000 tonnes of oil, at that point the largest spill in history. Twenty thousand birds were killed and millions of sea creatures. Two months after the spill, six thousand French soldiers were still cleaning up the coastline.

The 1970s was a banner decade for oil tanker spills. More happened in that decade than any decade before or since. It was peak spill, with an alarming 788 of them (by contrast, the 2010s saw 63 spills). Millions of tonnes spilled into the seas. The world was awash in oil.

***

In good publicity news:

  • Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda, and wrote the article “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil” for Maclean’s.
  • Ripper was mentioned in The Hill Times: “A bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.” Mark Bourrie was also featured in Vancouver CityNews’s Bookshelf.
  • Question Authority by Mark Kingwell was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books: “A master of words . . . [Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road.”
  • A few of our titles appear in the Literary Review of Canada’s May 2025 issue:
    • Review of On Book Banning by Ira Wells: “Persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.’”
    • Review of Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc): “Demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”
    • Review of UNMET by stephanie roberts: “With a resolute inward stare, Roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

We’re hiring! Now accepting applications for a full-time Sales Coordinator

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Sales Coordinator

We are seeking a full-time sales coordinator. This position entails liaising with key accounts and our US sales team, managing relationships with independent booksellers and librarians, analyzing and reporting on sales data, coordinating author events, and assisting marketing staff with sales materials and other marketing vehicles.

We are looking, especially, for someone who reads widely and well, someone who is familiar with the types of books we publish and can understand and place them in a wider context. We are looking for someone who can talk and write about books intelligently and with enthusiasm and enjoys proselytizing on their behalf. A person who enjoys working with booksellers and buyers, discussing ideas, making things, someone who likes mail and isn’t afraid of heavy lifting: the real business of books is moving boxes from one place to another, and then back again.

Though we are ideally looking for someone to join us in our Windsor office, consideration will be given if the best candidate requires a hybrid or remote role. Please make clear whether you are applying for an in-person or remote position in your cover letter.

Major responsibilities:

  • Liaise with key accounts across North America to increase awareness of our books, including scheduling and holding sales meetings with Canadian accounts and related follow up
  • Analyze sales data and report on the performance of individual titles and the list as a whole and assist with sales projections, stock management, and reprint schedules
  • Work in collaboration with sales representatives in the US so they are informed and enthusiastic about new titles, and present in-person and remotely at sales conferences
  • Coordinate author events with host accounts
  • Develop academic and new markets and solicit course adoptions and direct sales
  • Create and implement special promotions and co-op for key titles
  • Assist with planning and implementing national and international marketing strategies for 16–20 books annually and interact with colleagues and authors to strategize marketing and publicity opportunities and to plan and execute promotional and publicity events
  • Assist with metadata and other digital marketing vehicles, including Edelweiss, Catalist, and Bookmanager catalogues
  • Assist with production and coordinate the mailing of seasonal print catalogues and newsletters
  • Assist with production and distribution of digital newsletters and other title updates
  • Assist with production of promotional material such as shelftalkers, postcards, bookmarks, posters, and advertisements
  • Assist with writing catalogue and cover copy for various markets and soliciting blurbs and endorsements
  • Travel to trade shows, press events, and sales conferences
  • Other duties as assigned

Knowledge, skills, and abilities required:

  • Individuals must be extremely organized and detail-oriented
  • Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  • Excellent analytical skills
  • Excellent interpersonal skills
  • Must have a high degree of creativity and the ability to think strategically
  • Must be willing to work occasional evenings and weekends

Education and experience:

  • Previous experience in the book publishing and/or bookselling industry is required
  • Previous sales experience would be an asset

Ultimately what we’re looking for is the best possible person for the job. We’ll be more impressed by what you’ve read and how you write and speak, by how you think and where you’ve worked—including the automotive factory or shoe store—than where you went to school.

Salary expectations:

Salary will be commensurate with experience but will range from $50,000–60,000 to start, with an additional flexible health spending account.

Who we are:

Biblioasis is an award-winning independent publishing house based in Windsor, Ontario. We publish approximately twenty-five titles a year, including short fiction, novels, poetry, literary criticism, memoir, belle lettres, local and regional history, and general nonfiction. We are also the publishers of the critical journal CNQ: Canadian Notes & Queries and the annual Best Canadian anthologies.

To apply:

Email a single document containing your resume and cover letter to Vanessa Stauffer at vstauffer@biblioasis.com by Friday, May 16, 2025. In your cover letter, please pitch us on three books you love. If you want to include something about why you want to work in publishing, and specifically why you want to work at Biblioasis, that would be welcome. We thank all candidates for their interest in working with us, but only those who have been selected to proceed to the next stage will be contacted.

Media Hits: UNMET, The Passenger Seat, Baldwin Styron and Me, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

UNMET

UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in a poetry feature in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Emily Mernin writes,

“In alternately nervous and incisive modes, roberts explores the profound contradictions behind even the most clear-eyed criticisms or desires . . . With a resolute inward stare, roberts reveals the cumulative nature of life.”

UNMET was reviewed in The Woodlot on April 7, and you can read the full review here.

Chris Banks writes,

“[roberts’] language is ‘surprise-drenched’ . . . this fantastic book is a piling on of surprising images and poetic structures and creative desires allowing both reader and poet the opportunity to rise above the Dollar Store desolation and grief and human injustice that plague our society.”

UNMET was featured on the CBC Books list of “39 Canadian poetry collections coming out in spring 2025.” You can check out the full list here.

Get UNMET here!

ON BOOK BANNING

On Book Banning by Ira Wells was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Keith Garebian writes,

“With this slim volume, Wells lays out cogent arguments against culture warriors who continue to warp our children’s relationship to literature . . . Wells persuasively explains how book banning reduces and devalues art and how it constitutes an attack on intellectual autonomy and on ‘your right to determine the future of your own mind.'”

Ira Wells spoke on an episode of TVO’s The Agenda for the segment “How Does Book Banning Hurt Democracy?” You can watch the full segment here.

Get On Book Banning here!

ON OIL

Don Gillmor, author of On Oil, was interviewed on TVO’s The Agenda on April 10. You can watch the full segment “Should Canada Rethink Its Relationship to Oil?” here.

Don Gillmor wrote an article, “Why Trump Needs Canadian Oil,” for Maclean’s on April 8. Read the full article here.

On Oil was also featured on the CBC Books list of “29 Canadian books you should be reading in April.” You can view the full list here.

Get On Oil here!

BALDWIN, STYRON, AND ME

Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (translated by Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in the Literary Review of Canada. The review will appear in their May print issue, and is available online here.

Amanda Perry writes,

“Abdelmoumen’s work . . . demonstrates the good faith conversations being held within a cultural scene that is both local and transnational in its outlook.”

Grab Baldwin, Styron, and Me here!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was listed in the Guardian‘s “Best Australian books out in April.” The list was published on April 4, and can be viewed here.

Steph Harmon calls it,

“A tense and gripping power struggle of toxic masculinity, as the teenagers push each other further and further down a violent road of no return.”

The Passenger Seat was reviewed in Rabble on April 10, in the article “Walk like a man: Toxic masculinity in crime fiction, fact and spoken word.” You can read the full review here.

“The structure of the book and its lyrical prose combine to make telling points about toxic male bonding and its relationship to sexist violence, all without any counterproductive lecturing or explicit judgements. The magisterial way that Khurana uses the classic elements of noir crime writing to challenge and subvert those very elements is impressive.”

Grab The Passenger Seat here!

RIPPER

Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was featured a The Hill Times article about Poilievre on April 14. Check out the full piece here.

Susan Riley writes,

“Former political journalist Mark Bourrie’s new book, Ripper, is a bracing reminder of some of the reputations Poilievre has ruined, the malicious fictions he has promoted, [and] the tiresome slogans he stitches into every utterance.”

Ripper and author Mark Bourrie were featured on Vancouver CityNews’s NewsRadio Bookshelf on April 13. You can listen to the short interview or read the article here.

John Ackermann notes,

“The book is a more pointed treatment of its subject than Andrew Lawton’s Pierre Poilievre: A Political Life, which came out last year when the Tories were still riding high in the polls.”

Ripper was mentioned in Dan Garner’s Substack as a book to check out. You can read the full article here.

“If it weren’t for Mark and a small number of others willing to make sacrifices, popular Canadian history would have vanished entirely from book stores.”

Get Ripper here!

OLD ROMANTICS

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press on April 5. Check out the full review here!

Ron Robinson writes,

“Armstrong offers fine, astute turns of phrase in her writing . . . The reader’s delight in the stories may range, then, from ‘you go, girl’ to a censorious ‘it will all end in tears’ depending on your age and experience.”

Grab a copy of Old Romantics here!

COMRADE PAPA

Comrade Papa by GauZ’ (translated by Frank Wynne) was reviewed in the Winnipeg Free Press on April 12. You can read the full review here.

Zilla Jones writes,

“This is a postcolonial novel that questions the dominant narrative with humour and heart.”

Grab Comrade Papa here!

QUESTION AUTHORITY

Question Authority by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in the New York Journal of Books, which can be read here.

Karen R. Koenig writes,

“A master of words who is well-versed in philosophy, political science, sociology, and psychology, [Mark Kingwell] writes with deep affection and hope for humanity and openly shares his darkest and brightest moments along life’s bumpy road. Though this is a serious book requiring thoughtful reading, Kingwell’s wit will make readers laugh out loud at him and at themselves.”

Get Question Authority here!

SORRY ABOUT THE FIRE

Sorry About the Fire by Colleen Coco Collins won 3rd Prize in the Alcuin Award for Excellence in Book Design in Canada’s Poetry category! The award was given to the book’s designer, Natalie Olsen. You can view the full list of winners here.

Grab Sorry Abou the Fire here!

THE HOLLOW BEAST a finalist for the French-American Translation Prize!

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We’re thrilled to share that on April 10, the French-American Foundation announced the finalists for the 2025 French-American Translation Prize, which included The Hollow Beast by Christophe Bernard, translated by Lazer Lederhendler!

Since 1986, the French-American Foundation has awarded the Translation Prize for the best translation from French to English in both fiction and nonfiction, guiding these important works of French literature to the American market. The prize is awarded to translators to recognize and celebrate their work.

Winners of the 38th Annual Translation Prize will be announced in May 2025 and celebrated at an Awards Ceremony in June in New York City. The Translation Prize, funded by the generous support of the Florence Gould Foundation, is one of the flagship programs of the French American Foundation.

Grab a copy of The Hollow Beast here!

ABOUT THE HOLLOW BEAST

Finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award in Translation • Finalist for the 2025 French-American Translation Prize • A Globe and Mail Most Anticipated Spring Title

Don Quixote meets Who Framed Roger Rabbit in this slapstick epic about destiny, family demons, and revenge. 

1911. A hockey game in Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula. With the score tied two-two in overtime, local tough guy Billy Joe Pictou fires the puck directly into Monti Bouge’s mouth. When Pictou’s momentum carries them both across the goal line in a spray of shattered teeth, Victor Bradley, erstwhile referee and local mailman, rules that the goal counts—and Monti’s ensuing revenge for this injustice sprawls across three generations, one hundred years, and dozens of dastardly deeds. Fuelled by a bottomless supply of Yukon, the high-proof hooch that may or may not cause the hallucinatory sightings of a technicolor beast that haunts not just Monti but his descendants, it’s up to Monti’s grandson François—and his floundering doctoral dissertation—to make sense of the vendetta that’s shaped the destiny of their town and everyone in it. Brilliantly translated into slapstick English by Lazer Lederhendler, The Hollow Beast introduces Christophe Bernard as a master

Photo Credit: Monique Dykstra

of epic comedy.

ABOUT LAZER LEDERHENDLER

Lazer Lederhendler is a full-time literary translator specializing in Québécois fiction and non-fiction. His translations have earned awards and distinctions in Canada, the UK, and the US. He has translated the works of noted authors, including Gaétan Soucy, Nicolas Dickner, Edem Awumey, Perrine Leblanc, and Catherine Leroux. He lives in Montreal with the visual artist Pierrette Bouchard.

The Bibliophile: Scathing, surgical, and colourfully entertaining

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Mark Bourrie’s Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre has quickly become a national bestseller; this week, it sits at #3 on the Canadian Nonfiction list. Despite initial worry that the election call would hinder the media’s ability or willingness to cover a critical biography of the Opposition leader, it’s great to see Bourrie’s hard work pay off. And we’re especially grateful for all the journalists who are showing up to write thoughtful, non-partisan coverage during this increasingly terrifying period. We’re also grateful to the people who are taking the time to read books like Ripper ahead of election day (or any day): we all have to stay vigilant.

Dominique Béchard,
Publicist

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Ripper: Ottawa Launch

The Walrus

“Poilievre is a pro-American libertarian who moralizes the sufferings of the marginalized, insists the free market has inherent genius, drives wedges between the regions of the country, and exploits class envy. By the early winter of 2025, the political gears of the country changed. The political fight in Canada quickly became about who was best to face the external threat and whose ideas were best to help Canadian families and businesses at a time of real danger. On April 28, we’ll know if his brand of politics will survive the very crisis it claimed to prepare for.”
—Mark Bourrie, excerpted from Ripper

Globe and Mail

“Mark Bourrie has produced a searing but convincing critique of the Conservative Leader’s shortcomings that will give pause to anyone outside the diehard Poilievre base.”
—Charlotte Gray

“In his pull-no-punches book, Mr. Bourrie portrays Mr. Poilievre as one serious ripper: mean, sneering, insulting, truth-evading, skilled at whipping up mass anger.”
—Marsha Lederman

“If Pierre Poilievre is going to win, shake [the comparison to Trump] he must. This book, with all its pungent reminders of his record, will make it harder to do.”
—Lawrence Martin

“‘It’s an intense subject, the future of Canada—there isn’t anything more important than that, and at a time of revolution, which I think we are in,’ [Bourrie] says . . . The story was there; he just needed to collate the pieces.”
—Josh O’Kane

Photo: Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Toronto Star

Bestsellers Lists: #3 on the Canadian Nonfiction list, and #7 on the Original Nonfiction list.

Interview with Mark Bourrie and Stephen Maher, excerpted:

Stephen Maher: One of the pleasures of your book is the attention it pays to the social and economic forces Poilievre has harnessed. You argue persuasively that Trudeau let Poilievre become a champion for the working class by neglecting their concerns and failing to communicate. But every incumbent government around the world had a similar crisis. Was it really Trudeau’s failure, or was it just that the situation created an opening for a person such as Poilievre?

Mark Bourrie: I think it’s a systemic failure among centrists, people on the left and even the union movement to maintain a good, strong relationship with shop floors. And we saw that folks realized there was this great big working-class vote out there that wasn’t being tended to. And the Liberals, after the first year of COVID, could not communicate with anybody. They were just so disconnected. Canadian conservatives went to the United States and learned this stuff, but it was also something that former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was able to pick up on. It’s something that the Brexiteers were able to pick up on, as well as the AFD in Germany.

Winnipeg Free Press

“Despite [the rush to print], the work never seems rushed. It is lengthy and historically detailed while relying on media, secondary sources and parliamentary debates.”
—Christopher Adams

The Tyee

“This book is a phenomenal effort, carefully researched and nicely written. Ripper should be widely read by everyone who cares about the value of casting an informed vote on April 28.”
—Michael Harris

Hill Times

“Every Liberal in their war room, every journalist covering the campaign and—should he win—every stakeholder doing business with an eventual Poilievre government owes it to themselves to read Bourrie’s Ripper so that they can have a clear picture of who Poilievre is, how he came to be, and how that past is almost certain to shape his decision-making going forward.”
—Jamie Carroll

CBC Windsor Morning

 

 

 

 

 

Cult MTL

“The page-turner is crack for political junkies.”
—Toula Drimonis

NB Media Co-op

“Mark Bourrie’s new book is a detailed and surgical examination of the man who could be Canada’s next prime minister.”
—Gerry McAlister

UnHerd

“In a scathing but comprehensive recent biography, Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, the historian Mark Bourrie points out that his [Poilievre’s] thinking on most subjects has not advanced much since adolescence.”
—Michael Ledger-Lomas

Canuckleheads Podcast

That Shakespearean Rag

“By positioning Poilievre in the context of the global social and economic cleavages that permitted him him to attain power, Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment, one that should prove illuminating for anyone looking around in abject confusion and wondering how we got to this particular point.”
—Steven W. Beattie

Ken McGoogan

“Ripper has no business being so detailed and wide-ranging, so authoritative and convincing, so brilliantly analytical and colourfully entertaining.”

On Substack:

“Bourrie writes an honest and comprehensive account of Poilievre’s and offers a look at where he might take the country. The book is no hagiography, but nor is it a hatchet job (a lesser author might have been less disciplined). It’s a fitting, if disconcerting, election primer.”
—David Moscrop

“His [Mark Bourrie’s] latest book RIPPER isn’t just a biography—it’s a field guide to fascism wrapped in a Canadian flag soaked in Axe body spray.”
—Dean Blundell

“[Ripper] is far from a hatchet job. Bourrie appreciates Poilievre’s cunning and instinct for the jugular—he just doesn’t like him too much.”
—Ethan Phillips, Oversight

“Bourrie’s critical of Poilievre . . . But he reflects on Poilievre’s strengths and weaknesses, informed by close observation of the Conservative leader’s entire career.”
—Paul Wells

“Bourrie’s style is accessible, the prose is clear and sparse . . . Bourrie’s dry wit brings a chuckle now and then.”
—Margaret Shkimba

“[E]xcellent instant bestseller.”
—Rose Simpson, Rose’s Cantina

Biblioasis: Poetry Manuscript Submissions Opening May 1-May 31!

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Poets, get your collections ready! Our 2025 reading period for poetry manuscripts will begin on Thursday, May 1st, and remain open until Saturday, May 31st, or we reach two hundred submissions—whichever comes first.

Biblioasis poetry submission guidelines:

  • We can only consider unpublished work. Individual poems in the manuscript may have appeared in journals or anthologies, but the collection as a whole must not have appeared in either print or digital editions.
  • Manuscripts should range between 48 and 100 pages in length.
  • Manuscripts must be entirely human-created. We do not accept work that was written, developed, or assisted in any capacity by artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as ChatGPT.
  • Only one submission per writer will be reviewed. Multiple submissions will be deleted unread.
  • Only electronic submissions will be accepted. To submit, please email your manuscript as an attachment to submissions@biblioasis.com. PDF, .doc, .docx, and .rtf files are accepted. We will send confirmation that your submission has been received. Please send your manuscript only once: revised and updated versions will not be read, so make sure you’re happy with your text before sending.
  • Please include a cover letter outlining your previous publications and relevant experience. Include your cover letter as the first page of your manuscript.
  • Simultaneous submissions are fine! If your manuscript is accepted by another publisher, kindly reply to your submission email to let us know your good news so that we can withdraw it from our consideration.

This is not a contest and we do not guarantee that any manuscripts will be accepted for publication. If your manuscript isn’t quite ready for this reading period, we encourage you to continue working on it and submit it during our next period: we want to see your best work.

The Bibliophile: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

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***

Announcing the publication of UNMET by stephanie roberts (and our next open reading period for poetry manuscripts)

April is National Poetry Month here in Canada, and for our southern* neighbours, and I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than with the work of stephanie roberts, herself a citizen of both countries, and of Panama as well. We published UNMET, her sophomore collection, on Tuesday, April 1, though it’s a joke only as much as the Rose Garden events of Wednesday, April 2, can be called liberatory for any average inhabitant of Earth. As a dual citizen myself, born and raised and poetry-educated in the States, the question of national identity in art—what we mean by Canadian or American poetry—is often on my mind, to say nothing of times like these, in which allegiances, and the rejection thereof, are in overdrive.

Photo: UNMET by stephanie roberts. Cover design by Ingrid Paulson

Though her citizenships are not the subject of this collection, roberts’s vision does indeed contain multitudes, crossing—erasing—borders between styles and tones and modes. Rather than a title poem, this is a collection with title poems: seven, to be exact, called by or including the word “unmet.” It’s a contronym of sorts, at least conceptually: referring to that which is failed, thwarted, unfulfilled—love, desire, justice—but also to what may yet be possible. Similarly, its modes are capacious: roberts writes lyric, and surreal collage, and narrative equally well; addresses historic wrongs, and present frustrations, and the potential of the future; her voice is by turns vulnerable, powerful, playful, elegiac, at times wildly funny (“Of course I’m including the banana in the sale!”). Alongside her utterly unexpected turns of phrase, it’s this range that first caught my eye when the manuscript crossed the transom of our first open reading period,** and it’s what continues to reward me as I read these poems again and again, remembering what poetry is for: to challenge and console, argue and accept. To resist and to rest. To resist, sometimes, by resting.

Is it fruitless to wax poetic about poetics in April 2025? I’d suggest we should set art aside right around the time we determine it’s not the right moment for the production and consumption of food and the protection of clean water. In my former life, in what now feels like the halcyon days of the American university system, I once gave a poetry class a final exam consisting of a single question: What is poetry for? I didn’t have an answer. I only wanted a way to inspire original close reading of the poems we’d been studying rather than regurgitated lecture notes. It worked, and though I can’t recall a single argument advanced, this morning the answer feels obvious: it’s for right now. And for all the other nows. “This is what comes of taking dreams / off the horizon,” roberts writes in “Mall of the Sirens.” “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, / that wants it down,” Frost writes in “Mending Wall,” a poem unwittingly co-opted by unironic bumper stickers proclaiming “Good fences make good neighbors.” What that something is, he does not explicitly say. But I’d hazard there are many answers to this question as well, one of them being: poetry.

Read a poem or two today. Read a few: you can start with stephanie roberts. Maybe endeavour to commit something to memory. Resistance comes in many forms, and there’s no tariff on what we import into the sovereign territory of the heart.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

***

Excerpts from UNMET

When Harold Offers a Fist Bump

I stare. May 2020, on top of everything
the cool takes a rise for Kalahari desert.

I shower three times a day, and at night
bounce sexual fantasies about air-conditioner
installers off the ceiling.

When the heat is remedied by rain
no Cinco de Mayo is great enough.

We finally got together a year late
between waves and pre-vaccine. I break
lockdown without knowing what to do
with my hands anymore. Forget lips.
No two-cheek kiss. Now a pseudo bow,
not at waist but a little bit more than nod.

Mad chirps and neon brights feather
a backyard biome. Outside our interiors we
talk poetry and past relationship bullshit.
My neighbours on their Balconville fake-
drunk singing like kids who curse for attention.

I can’t remember what absolute agreement
drives his extended fist. It emerges
like a train, in slow motion, on a track
I am tied to. How to look away? How
do we manage not to keep wrecking
everything? A moment the brain
refuses to provide the correct French word
at the correct French moment; it can’t
knit a hand grenade into
a reasonable story. South of us
they had yet to slalom into the madness
of the later part of the year, when they
hit half a million with a slight shrug
from inside a body bag.

We get up
from the tables of our lives so abruptly
we knock over the chair behind us.

Who was the last man I touched?
What risk was right?

for Harold Hoefle

An Open Book interview with stephanie roberts.

George Junius Stinney, Jr.

In the third stanza he exits the poem,
black tears wishbone
ball lightning.

“On reflection,” he said, from the bottom
of his sepulchre, small dark brown fingers
stroking a hairless chin,
“I do not think it was
the hate what took my life.”
He straightens himself
on his slab of metamorphosed limestone.
It was the:

Cops kill white people all the time

I’m sure there’s another side to this story

If you just obey nothing will happen to you

My family came here legally

POC are the establishment now

I’m not racist but

“I reckon the stack and press of all that not-racist
eventually crowned that steel and wire diadem
upon my brow Bible at my bottom.”

Lord raise cool sponge to the opening of ebony thirst;
extend a pink hand that smiles without teeth.
White crimes of obedience click as silent syntax to
the flat and sharp sentences of death.

Decades without name, no headstone
no footstone, no identity to his rest lest the Samaritans
lynch even his bones after Old Sparky’s revered kiss.

In his final stanza he rises red and exonerated
named in the hearts of the fawn born
not as static electricity but as bolt
that strikes open the door.

An Ex-Puritan interview with stephanie roberts.

I Taste Good and Bad

At the end of a cartoon, one of the characters looks to the camera
And tells us take courage, tells us be vulnerable with
The ones we love. It comes to this—memento
Mori from a talking banana. I didn’t need it to tell you the truth
And what surprise when this sparked happiness can’t make you care.
When hurt I learned not to look in your eyes;
If I wanted to make you disappear I said I didn’t feel well.
Is the present road a grocery store or a walk through a needled forest?
By August, tho masks are briefly still required,
They remove the minimum-wager, at the door,
And management trusts us to sanitize our carts, our hands.
The man ahead of me walks in without stopping
While I squirt and rub the lubey gel, marvelling at how
It’s possible we aren’t blanketed in our own screams. I guess
I marvel because I want to participate, right now, add some
Shatner’s Captain Kirk, head-thrown-back, fists-pumping-
For-volume, screams. I loved you from genesis to revelations
Which silenced you like snowfall. Christians ponder what person
In their right mind could see god in all the old guy’s glory
And not worship? It seemed to them Lucifer was
By every definition criminally insane. We believe
If people could see our entirety they would run in disgust.
If we like surgeons could see our identical spaghetti
Spinal chords and the harms we suffered as children,
They might forgive us our cheats and bigotry.
In a tender and misguided way you euthanized love
Rather than suffer our inevitable parting you were mixing up
Gin and tonic style. The same ethos undergirds our invention
Of Satan the way we spread peanut butter on toast, when
We’re starving, an end to the unbearable mystery of living
The meaning of cancer and car crashes which pokes at us
Like the delicate edge between blade and grass, wind and wind,
Content and content, produce and produce, recreate and recreate,
And lead and lead. Yogurt is half-off so I fill my cart,
The neon-pink stickers beckon as if dairy goods on the edge
Of edibility need lipstick. And what says yogurt like pickles?
I burn old journals, manuscripts, and letters, unwilling to relive
A past with its whimsical relevance or obstinate irrelevance. Why
Try to kill the already so unlikely? Why not rather hope
And purchase this absolutely tremendous jar of garlic pickles.
And now, I Gotta Get Me Some™ chocolate syrup, and leave
The infliction of sorrow to god’s eager hand. I’m not asking
You to give what you haven’t got, like a beaver’s dam,
I’m telling you I can make something of unlikely ingredients.
I have somehow done so before and the earth turned
As usual. I am tempted to buy toothpaste.
My hand hovers over the red, white, or blue boxes, and
Spearmint goes in the cart. I was once in a church of surprise
Birthday parties and practical jokes. They were maniacal about it.
One birthday, the pastor’s young wife had to go change
Out of her nightgown; it’s not right that someone should look
That attractive so unprepared. Youth, its own beauty.
And once that same Beauty filled chocolate cupcakes
With creamy white toothpaste because that was what we were
Doing those days, biting hilariously into all the time in the world.
I go to the self-checkout and scan the boxes of toothpaste,
Scan my points card then place everything back in the cart before
Pushing it all into the ditch by the parking lot. I don’t know
What is obvious. I don’t know if you can see what I have suffered
To be ready to be me. I understand now how painfully too-good-
To-be-true slices, a papercut to the tongue. It hasn’t been easy
For either of us to arrive at my hand in yours. How far we keep
Coming thru zoos of zebras and pandas, misaligned decades,
Madness and marriage to be both at this sentence. Why discount
All this choice as fate? I don’t know what’s in a fly’s mind.
What makes it buzz my head and hands instead of
The maple-syrup-soaked leftovers at the next table. Flies can’t care
About which humans are murderous. Only desire. If you let me
Feed you I would fill your mouth with such tart sour sweet minty
Tenderness you wouldn’t believe it.

***

In good publicity news:

  • UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “A constancy is [roberts’s] vitality of alert, surprising, and precise language.” roberts was also interviewed in The Ex-Puritan and Open Book.
  • Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed in
    • The Globe and Mail by Charlotte Gray: “A searing but convincing critique.”
    • The Hill Times: “Every Liberal in their war room, every journalist covering the campaign . . . owes it to themselves to read Bourrie’s Ripper.”)
    • That Shakespearean Rag: “Bourrie transcends a simple biography and creates a snapshot of our riven historical moment.”)
    • The Tyee: “A phenomenal effort, carefully researched and nicely written. Ripper should be widely read by everyone who cares about the value of casting an informed vote on April 28.”
    • Bourrie was also interviewed for the Toronto Star.
  • The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Tyee: “In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed in The Jacobin.

***

* Technically our northern neighbours, here in Windsor.

** Speaking of: poets with book manuscripts should keep an eye out here and on our socials, as we’ll be sharing the guidelines for our May 2025 reading period imminently.

Media Hits: RIPPER, UNMET, ON OIL, and more!

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IN THE NEWS!

RIPPER

Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie was reviewed by Charlotte Gray in the Globe and Mail on April 1. You can read the full review here.

Gray writes,

“Mark Bourrie has produced a searing but convincing critique of the Conservative Leader’s shortcomings that will give pause to anyone outside the diehard Poilievre base.”

Ripper was also reviewed in the Hill Times on April 2. Check out the full review here.

Mark Bourrie was featured in the Toronto Star in conversation with Stephen Maher. The article was published online on March 29, and you can read it here.

Get Ripper here!

UNMET

UNMET by stephanie roberts was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader on April 1. Check out full review of this poetry collection here.

Pearl Pirie writes,

“[roberts] admirably permits wide swathes of herself on the page, yet without being didactic or maudlin and without overwriting.”

stephanie roberts was interviewed by Olive Andrews for The Ex-Puritan‘s Winter 2025 issue. Read the full interview here.

Andrews writes of the collection,

“The poems are both singular and vast, wading through moments, objects, and places with visceral clarity while guiding the reader through the thrashing waves of its overarching themes: loneliness, pandemic, domestic violence, ecological crisis, police brutality, and more. The work is grounded and groundbreaking, pointed and sprawled. “

stephanie roberts was also interviewed for Open Book‘s ‘Poets in Profile’ on March 28. Check out the interview here.

Open Book writes,

“stephanie roberts returns with another complex and stunning work that looks at both the seen and unseen, and explores social issues through lyric and line in a truly singular way.”

Grab UNMET here!

ON BOOK BANNING

Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed by David Moscrop this week in The Jacobin. The article, “The Shared Logic of Censorship,” discussing censorship and what’s being done to combat it, can be read here.

From the interview, Wells says:

“Education involves building up critical thinking facilities and faculties. Indoctrination involves breaking them down. Education involves inculcating independent thinking. Indoctrination involves submission to doctrine.

We need to rediscover that distinction. And we need to revive the best spirit of our democracy.”

Grab On Book Banning here!

ON OIL

On Oil by Don Gillmor was featured on LitHub‘s list of “10 Nonfiction Books to Read in April.” Check out the full list here.

LitHub writes,

“Gillmor . . . draws a line from the greed and hubris at the heart of that first explosion straight to the present day—and beyond.”

Get On Oil here!

THE PASSENGER SEAT

The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana was reviewed in The Tyee, for the article “There’s Power in Male Bonding. Must There Be Menace?” The review was posted on March 28, and you can read it here.

Tom Sandborn writes,

“Khurana employs classic tropes of the buddy road trip and crime novel/true crime genres while giving them a critical 21st-century twist—think In Cold Blood meets Grand Theft Auto with the psychological complexity and moral anguish of Dostoevsky and inputs from third-wave feminists.”

Get The Passenger Seat here!

OLD ROMANTICS

Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong was excerpted in LitHub. The chapter “My Success” can be read in full here.

Old Romantics was also given a pre-review by Kassie Rose in The Longest Chapter, which can be read here. Rose writes,

“I had other books lined up to read, but the narrator of all the stories in Old Romantics hooked me.”

Maggie Armstrong was interviewed by Tadgh Hoey in Brooklyn Rail, which you can read in full here.

Hoey writes,

“Reading [Old Romantics] left me vacillating between almost spitting out my coffee to laugh and feeling sunken and eviscerated at the recognition of Margaret’s many personal, professional, and romantic disappointments and the scalpel-like precision with which Armstrong renders them page after page.”

Grab Old Romantics here!

MAY OUR JOY ENDURE

May Our Joy Endure by Kev Lambert (trans. Donald Winkler) appeared on CBC The Next Chapter’s list of three books in translation to check out now. You can read the article here.

Reviewer Robert Wiersema says,

“[The translation] flows beautifully … it has a metrical rhythmic quality that is very unusual in English. So I think that’s Winkler’s translation from the French, at work.”

Grab May Our Joy Endure here!

The Bibliophile: Romance is a season in hell

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***

I’ve recently returned from my first London Book Fair, an event I found as chaotic, and stimulating, and frustrating, and inspiring, and just plain old fun as Dan had indicated I might. Talking with editors, agents, and translators from all over the world gives me only the paradoxical sense of its smallness: no matter the size of their organization or their territory, the language of their books or the size of the advances their authors command, everyone working in publishing faces a comically similar set of problems practical and existential both. And no matter how fatigued by the whirlwind of interaction or taciturn their sales strategy, it’s easy to get a smile from someone simply by asking about the last book they really loved, or the one they’ve just encountered that they can’t wait to go home and read. Books! We love them! What could be hard about that?

Well, for one, there’s the persistent need to successfully articulate that ardor. There’s no question I find more difficult to answer than “What are you looking for?” And there’s little else anyone wants to know about an acquisitions editor. Poetry’s not, for once, the problem: After reading the hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts submitted during two open submission periods, I’ve settled on “an original and urgent relationship with language.” As anyone who’s encountered a two-year-old knows, the problem with answers is that they beget more questions, so: What do I mean by original? That I’ve never seen it before, or have encountered it only rarely and think there should be more of it. (Thus far no one’s asked what I’ve never seen before, though I would appreciate that level of faith in my clairvoyance.) By urgent: the sense that this utterance had to be made, that the poem is the only way the poet could find to stop speaking, or—and this is what I tend to prefer—the only way to start.

When it comes to fiction, my instinctual answer inclines towards breathtakingly vapid. I’m supposed to be able to specify subgenres and subjects and the sorts of authors I prefer, but the truth is that I just want it to be good, and good . . . I guess I know it when I see it. By the third day of LBF, exhausted by the frenetic pace of my schedule and slightly alarmed by an ill-fitting manuscript I’d just glanced at after feeling confident its representative and I were simpatico, I finally just said to one agent, “I want the sentences to be good.” Luckily she turned out to be a poet as well, and only laughed and nodded and turned straight to a page in her catalog, knowing what I meant.

In our age of malignant certainty, when we have perfected the practice of judging just about everything and everyone we encounter by cover or codification, maybe failures of discernment aren’t the worst sin. But they don’t make for very interesting insight into publishing, and so I’ll beg off answering via poetry once again: “No ideas but in things,” Dr Williams wrote, so let me present this thing. What I’m looking for is Maggie Armstrong and her debut story collection, Old Romantics. This is the first fiction title I acquired start to finish, from soliciting the manuscript to signing the contract. It is simultaneously a book of hideously entertaining—this being the exact descriptor that caught my eye in the catalog of the inimitable Tramp Press, Maggie’s UK publisher—literary short stories, wickedly funny in their honesty about love, sex, family, class, ambition, work, motherhood, and a linked collection with the emotional and narrative heft of a novel.

Photo: Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong. Cover designed by Fiachra McCarthy.

The stories in Old Romantics all concern a woman named Margaret and follow her chronologically, if without strict continuity, through first love, first bad date, first job, first extremely bad date . . . Characters, as well as jokes, recur even as the narration switches between first and third-person. These are stories—and a heroine—that doggedly insist on Romantic, and romantic, ideals, yet repeatedly defer to the illusory nature thereof with cold-eyed Modernist clarity, and then leap agilely into a postmodern metafictional mode to arrive at an unvarnished and complex portrait of a single woman trying to understand, and to be, exactly who she is. It’s a Künstlerroman unlike any I’ve read before, about a female artist who must first come of age, and then to terms, with the life she’s been assigned by virtue of her gender: only after all of that can she come to her calling. It’s a trajectory little described, perhaps very well because so many women who aspire to lives in the arts are derailed along the way, and in Armstrong’s hands it is moving and funny and a triumph of invention and simple determination.

Did I mention funny? Witness fictional Margaret struggling with her prose style whilst the real Maggie demonstrates an incomparable metafictional wit (emphasis mine): “I found the sight of such bland sentences distressing—they all began with I, and ended me—and slammed the notepad shut as if its contents had offended me”. “It was a lightweight story I was working on,” Margaret continues, “to do with infantile and everyday desires, a slow descent into disappointment, with attempted anal penetration at the close.” The marshalling of syntactical expectation as the list progresses from the benign to the shocking, the soft chime of rhyme (slow / close; infantile / anal), the trochaic crescendo of “anal penetration at the close” to end the sentence, combine in an intelligence, ironic wit, and musicality I can’t ever seem to get enough of. In another story, a youthful Margaret makes some bad decisions and finds herself alone with a more experienced, intoxicated and/or unscrupulous man, a confusion of agency and passivity that Armstrong articulates through a blackly comic grammatical enactment: “This had taken place. Patch had had sex with me.” And throughout, brilliant description and metaphor abound: “A fluffy female bathrobe hulked around the door”; “She gazed back at him like a sedated hawk”; “Her chest banged like a broken toy.”

What am I saying here? The sentences are good. Really, really good. They are what I’m looking for, and I couldn’t be more proud that we can call them ours.

Vanessa Stauffer,
Managing Editor

***

Old Romantics comes out on Tuesday—just in time for April Fools’ Day! To celebrate the upcoming release, here’s publicist Ahmed with an interview with Maggie Armstrong.

Photo: Maggie Armstrong. Credit: Bríd O’Donovan.

A Biblioasis Interview with Maggie Armstrong

Can you tell me a bit about yourself and how this collection came about?

Well I have been writing short stories for about ten years, possibly fifteen. I used to perform at spoken word things around Dublin, but I was working as a journalist at the time. It wasn’t until 2020 that I actually started to publish stuff. This book came about from those short stories. A publisher came to me, had read one in a magazine called Banshee and asked if I had any more. That was Sarah from Tramp Press and that led to this collection.

I heard you had made some changes to the stories since the collection was first published in Ireland last year. Could you tell me about that?

Oh, sure. I was sort of thinking they’d be subtle changes that nobody would notice. They were so subtle.

So why did you make them anyway?

Because I’m never happy with anything. I will perennially rewrite everything. I feel terrible for editors that I’ve worked with. It feels like I’m disregarding all of their hard work and insights, but I just can’t help myself once I get my hands on something. A text seems to read differently and sound differently every time you look at it.

I knew that while I was revising it that it was sort of fruitless because I’ll never be happy with a published book. I like getting up and reading stories and I always change words here and there every time I read something live. A text remains malleable to me forever.

How would you define an old romantic?

An old romantic is a damn hapless fool who continually authors their own destruction by way of repeated mistakes and self-delusion. Or a fantasist who’s swallowed a love potion and been let loose on the town. This kind of character is not great to have in your personal life, but it’s a rich study for fiction.

I can see that in Margaret. A lot of the stories seem to test Margaret’s sense of reality with her ideals of romance. What kind of role does romance have in Margaret’s life and what does this say about her?

I think romance drives all of her actions and appetite. It dictates her decisions and it often robs her of agency. Feeling controls her rather than thought. Some of us are driven by a feeling rather than by practical considerations, which can be interesting to examine. To follow the path of a life somehow enslaved to desire and feeling and what possibly amounts simply to dopamine, the hormones, the chemicals that are sometimes leading us one way or another.

What kind of change do you see in Margaret as the stories progress?

There’s a book that I really adore by Elizabeth Bowen called The Death of the Heart. It was published in 1938 and it’s to do with a young woman called Portia whose life is on the margins and who moves to London and falls in love and is jilted and rejected by her much older lover and she has to grow up overnight and realize just how cold and hard this world is. And I think that happens to the anti-hero of my book. The heart is shattered halfway through. We see as soon as Walls comes on the scene, he’s a real menace to her belief system, and he really dismantles this fairytale of being swept off her feet. He dismantles it and leaves her high and dry and puts her life at risk in a speeding car. He is a destructive person given to extremes. That’s when we see a change happen. I think the axis turn of those stories is pivotal. Once there is a situation where there is control and cruelty in a relationship, nothing is ever going to be the same. And then of course our protagonist goes from out of that frying pan into the fire of Sergio who she has her children with.

It’s like the labyrinth, or the snake pit, where you go in and cannot find your way out. You know the Minotaur?

The myth where Theseus goes down into a labyrinth to fight the creature?

Yes, exactly. In the underworld of dates and liaisons this book tries to depict, I feel like it’s all Minotaurs and all monsters and there is a maze you’re trying to get out of. Romance is a season in hell from which you emerge a broken and changed person. Oh, that sounds so terrible.

I’m wondering if you could also speak about the form of these stories and the genre of autofiction in general. These stories obviously invite comparisons to your own life, but they also take metafictional turns with sly comments from the narrator or characters acknowledging that this is fiction. It’s a unique take on the genre.

I love a first person voice. I love the intimacy and the immediacy of slipping into someone’s consciousness like that, and indeed unconscious, and moonlighting as them. I have just adored, and maybe I shouldn’t even start mentioning names because then I can get carried away, and I have mixed relationships with all of them, and these aren’t necessarily my influences, but I’ve loved Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy, Ben Lerner. I’ve loved Karl Ove Knausgaard and the whole phenomenon of the life saga that he put on paper. That great project of oversharing that he went about really struck home with so many people.

I was never able to write a story until I did it in a first person voice. I had tried out the omniscient narrator thing and it went very badly. It always read like some Edna O’Brien pastiche, like I was just copying from my literature textbooks. The first person felt more like a guilty pleasure and I never believed anyone would publish it. I never thought it was something that anyone would take seriously. I felt it was somehow frowned upon in literary circles to write autofiction because maybe there’s an assumption that if you can only write your own story that you lack empathy, that you’re not able to imagine what other lives and communities are like, or maybe that you lack imagination because you simply can’t think of any other plots. Or just that you’re in love with yourself, because you find yourself so fascinating that you would genuinely be content to spend your entire day narrating your own life.

So all of these felt like obstacles to calling this real work. Then I just went for it. I thought to hell, I’m really enjoying writing this. And the finished product has no resemblance to my own life. It may be inspired or be drawn from it and the only reason for that is because I have pure unrestricted access to my own experience and consciousness. I can access it just sitting here and through my extremely unreliable memories and notebooks. It’s all there and it’s very rich material I find. I’ve always found life hard. It never came naturally to me, just being a person in the world. I have often gotten into scrapes and funny situations. I was exhausted by just my own escapades or my own sagas that I just thought: listen, at least I can get a bit of copy out of them.

I suppose writing more what you’d call autobiographical fiction is a bit of a highwire act. And it’s a dark art. I can’t vouch for the ethics of fictionalising the real, as opposed to pure invention. You have to be very careful what goes in your stories and what stays out. I’ve learned just because something terrible happened does not mean that it’s fair game for fiction.

You say you could only start writing in the first person, but some of the stories are in third person. Why the switch for some of them?

Honestly, I became disturbed by the material that I was reading. I no longer wanted to be associated with the author of these stories and did not like the tone I was taking. I felt particularly the story “Trouble” where you have extraordinary upheaval and cognitive dissonance, with a young woman, aka my fictional alter ego Margaret, who’s having an affair with a real charlatan and at the same time entering into a very serious relationship with a highly unsuitable married father of two. Reading this kind of dark testimony, it was like the room started to turn. I felt I couldn’t any longer inhabit this voice because it was all just so odd. The narrator’s level of dislocation from her actions did not feel honorable. So in order to process it in the form of a story, I needed to tell it in the third person. Does that make any sense?

Photo: First page of “Trouble” in Old Romantics.

Almost like you needed some distance to really be able to tell it?

Then even the distance of the third person didn’t feel quite right. The protagonist’s name is Margaret so clearly some of these things kind of almost happened to me, but then that’s weird to talk about yourself in the third person. Children talk about themselves in the third person, and mad Shakespearean characters. It was just an odd voice. That’s not to say I’m admitting that these are entirely myself. It’s a very distorted claustrophobic universe which happens to be very familiar to me and similar to the tiny universe of Dublin where I’ve lived my whole life.

Also there’s something about an “I” voice that’s hard to pull off, where you have to remain sort of likeable to your reader and vaguely charming to hold their attention and keep their commitment to the book. The kind of stuff Margaret was up to was not likeable nor commendable.

Margaret also spends a lot of time trying to be a writer and thinking about all these important authors. The classic Irish ones (Joyce, Beckett, O’Casey) and the Russians (Dostoevsky, Chekhov). But she seems disenchanted with them or maybe just the idea of them. What kind of influence have they had on you?

All of the big books that appear in these stories come in for a reason. I grew up with parents who read constantly and voraciously, particularly my mother. Her face was behind a very big book as she sat on the sofa most of my childhood, or she was howling laughing or reading passages aloud. Her favourite outlet from her four children was going to her book club. We grew up reading a lot and time was frittered away with literature.

Then I went to study English, and I had quite a lot of attention difficulties at school. It was a very odd choice to go do something academic because I love doing practical things and I always struggle to sit at a desk, but I read English for four years at Trinity. Nothing but books. Weighted and crushed by books. I have to a comical degree been haunted by books my whole life.

Both of my parents died in the last few years and we recently dismantled their bookshelves, which was a very sad and truly physically demanding job. Carrying boxes of books with my children buckled in the back and trying to manage everyone and all the books. I continue to not know how to keep track of books everywhere I go. This is kind of long-winded, but I’m not sure how to see that whole tradition of Western literature now and the great doorstoppers that we grew up with. They were written by men of letters, let’s say Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Dickens, who had no domestic responsibilities, who likely had servants, maids, cooks, secretaries in some cases. They didn’t have the internet, they had few distractions and the intricacies of their sentences within these formally robust paragraphs testify to that. I’m just interested that the novel form has held for so long and that we’re still expected, while our lives are so fragmented in so many ways, and our attention is so divided and splintered, we’re still expected to make sense of the world through the bastion of the novel, a form which was invented in far more fallow circumstances.

Is that why you chose to write linked short stories as opposed to a novel? I suppose people could read this as a novel, since it follows the same character, but they are distinct and also stand on their own.

Yeah, they’re great for short attention spans. A short story is perfect for the age of TikTok, a platform I have never in my life even glimpsed. I’m too distracted by other things. But I think the short story form sort of chose me. Many writers of course begin with short fiction in their apprenticeship. Same as with any craft. My nephew is studying carpentry at school—he started by making a spice rack, not a bed or a cabinet. I will one day soon make a cabinet, I’m sure of it, but I would never have got anywhere with a project more mammoth than a spice rack. Actually I was doing both short stories and novels at the same time, I’ve written two novels that I’m never going to publish, they ended up so unhinged and full of plot holes. With stories you can free yourself of the wider responsibilities of world-building. Then it was just a happy accident that Old Romantics turned out to be a linked collection. One of my fears was that all the stories were all similar and had a similar emotional thrust and that the same character was recurring. They all had the same obsessive, monomaniacal quality. And actually, that turns out to be not the worst thing about it. That’s what has really hit home with a lot of people. People enjoy tracing the adventures of short story characters as much as they do those of any series. I mean I really love John Updike’s Maples stories, Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart, Alice Munro’s The Beggar Maid, all linked collections.

What are you hoping people take away from reading these stories?

I hope people take nothing but a pleasant memory of being lost in a book briefly.

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In good publicity news:

The Bibliophile: Under Pressure

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This week we’ve invited Ottawa-based lawyer and journalist Mark Bourrie, author of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, to contribute today’s Bibliophile. As an election call draws near and copies of the book make their way onto shelves (and into the Globe and Mail), Mark offers a brief look at how he came to write this political biography.

Ashley Van Elswyk
Editorial Assistant

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Photo: Finished copies of Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre by Mark Bourrie. Cover designed by Ingrid Paulson.

Writing books is a bad habit that I’ve wanted to break for a long time. I started doing it just after I quite smoking. Authors chase their own kinds of dragons. The next book always seems like such a good idea. Then it comes out into a world where your countrymen, patriots all now, camp out overnight to buy American thrillers and tell you on social media that they’re certainly not going to buy your book. The subject is too unpleasant.

You learn to live with that. After all, your idea for that next book is a “can’t miss.” And that’s in normal times. Which these aren’t.

Last May, Dan Wells and I sat down together on a lovely spring day on the patio of a coffee shop in Walkerville, the best part of Windsor. I was in town to launch Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and the Destruction of Huronia, a biography of a mystic missionary priest that’s really an account of how European-Indigenous relations were toxic from the start.

The geography of this story is important. We were an easy walk from Detroit. My grandparents met in that city. I’ve got cousins all over Michigan. There’s a statue of Lewis Cass, my first cousin eight times removed, downtown. (He was Michigan’s governor and the first Democratic Party nominee to fail to win a presidential election). Windsor is Detroit’s southern suburb. It’s a place that is neither fully in Canada or the States.

Photo: Mark Bourrie reading from Crosses in the Sky at Biblioasis Bookshop for the Biblioasis Spring Launch event, May 2024.

It seemed clear to me that the story arc of 2024 was the return of Donald Trump. Not only was he coming back, but the Constitution bound him to just one term. Electoral politics would not be a factor in White House decisions.

In Canada, the Prime Minister had stayed too long, as they usually do. Conventional wisdom said Pierre Poilievre, the nerd equivalent of a hockey goon, couldn’t possibly lose. It wasn’t just Poilievre’s campaign skills—admittedly, the best we’ve seen in modern memory—but also the new media environment that gave him the advantage. Toxic media in a toxic time.

And, I yammered at Dan after my eighth or ninth coffee of the day, Canada—at least at the federal level—was one of the last Western countries to resist the movement fronted by Trump, Putin, Orban, Wilders, Farage, Le Pen and the rest. In 2014, I’d written a book about Stephen Harper’s information control and manipulation. In many ways, Harper was a scout for Trump’s movement, which still does not have a decent name. Now, it seemed, we were going to endure a more extreme, vindictive regime, verging on fascism. A sort of Fascism Lite.

So let’s do a book, I said to Dan, even though I was already on the road trying to keep Crosses in the Sky on the Canadian bestseller lists and was (am) convinced that writing non-fiction books is the worst thing to do with my time. Summer was coming. I had an old sailboat in the water and a second home, a 180-year-old farmhouse in Quebec, that needed renovation. I’d just come off a brutal defamation trial, representing a former porn star who was being sued for “me too” posts about her ex. Part of the trial turned on whether he deliberately harmed the women in his life with his massive penis.

Let’s leap ahead. Sometime in August, about noon on one of those 30-degree, 90 per cent humidity days that are surprisingly common in Ottawa, I got a call from the marina. My boat, the caller said, was doing something weird. When I got to the dock, I saw how my 26-foot sailboat was very low in the water. Inside was 18 inches of Ottawa River that needed to be hand-bailed.

I hadn’t been to the boat in six weeks. The water came from a leak in the toilet water intake line, no more than mist, really. At home, I had maybe 75,000 words of my 40,000-60,000 word book drafted, and a wife adjusting to life with a newly broken ankle.

A few weeks later, I was back, scrubbing the inside of the boat, feeling guilty about stealing time from the book. At the end of the day, I hooked up a borrowed pressure washer, something I’d never used before, and swiped the side of the boat. It was a life-changing experience, the most fun I had all summer. The pressure washer that I got for Christmas sits in a box in the shed.

All of this happened when Dan and the Biblioasis folks were running on a schedule based on the idea that we’d have an election in October 2025, the “fixed” date. But, while it’s arguable that Canada is not broken, our election dates certainly are not fixed. I still had the manuscript—now pushing over 100,000 words—when Trump was re-elected. I gave it to Dan at the beginning of December.

But events . . . Trump had noticed Canada and was ruminating about annexation. Chrystia Freeland pulled a caucus coup. It was clear we’d have an election before the fall.

Everyone worked their asses off. Everyone came through on this book. The editors, the cover artist, the printers, the bookstores all did things in weeks that they usually need months for. We got Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre into stores this week. And, frankly, it’s a better book than I thought it would be.

Now, I just need to cope with two things: my car, which may or may not have a broken transmission; and the knowledge, imparted to me last night by a Cate Blanchett video on YouTube, that “ripper” has a meaning in Australia that was previously unknown to me. The Law of Sheer Perversion, which runs my life, has a very weird sense of humour.

—Mark Bourrie

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In good publicity news:

  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie was covered in the Globe and Mail’s article “Inside Biblioasis and Mark Bourrie’s mad rush to get a Pierre Poilievre bio on shelves.” Mark was also interviewed about the book on David Moscrop’s Substack.
  • Ripper by Mark Bourrie and Old Romantics by Maggie Armstrong both appeared on the Globe and Mail’s spring books preview.
  • Baldwin, Styron, and Me by Mélikah Abdelmoumen (trans. Catherine Khordoc) was reviewed in The Miramichi Reader: “By knitting together this literary history with her own personal experiences, Abdelmoumen has created something new and vital.”
  • Near Distance by Hanna Stoltenberg (trans. Wendy H. Gabrielsen) was reviewed in roughghosts: “Closely observed, well composed . . . a very confident debut.”
  • Ira Wells, author of On Book Banning, was interviewed on the Quillette and Canadaland podcasts, and was featured in the Toronto Star.