Thames Tempos

Penn Kemp concludes her “Foreword” to River Revery with an immersion in sound that prepares for most of her verse: “I live in the house I grew up in, on land I revere for its long history, and I am grateful to be here.” In this prose tercet a clutch of monosyllables feeds into revere and history with their elongated e’s to rhyme with “here.” She reveres and revels in rivers and reveries, geography and dreams, ecology and etymology in the flow of water, metaphor, and generations. She traces the river Thames through her city of London, Ontario: since it forks into two streams, it was originally named “the antlered river” by its Algonquin inhabitants. Not only is her landscape antlered (“A buck rubs his antlers against the maple”), but also her poetry which bifurcates sound and sense, attuned in different directions, and resisting any temptation to be tamed by the Thames. Her revery is also a wake-up call, a reveille to environmental ethics. She antlers beyond sounds of poetry to other genres of drama, photography, painting, videos, and political activism.

Her eponymous poem, “River Revery,” antlers her experience in tercets and quatrains of sound and vision, bearing in mind the origin of “antler” as in front of the eyes. The poet’s antennae absorb the river’s antler. Each line carries the sleeved, folded, or enveloped title in it; that is, the sound, sight, and sense of “river revery” is a sleeved phrase embracing an abundance of signifiers: “Water abounds here, with this river.” The r’s in this opening line arrest the river before releasing it in its enjambment to the next line, “five times normal width for winter.” The arresting rhyme in winter river turns to spring in a couplet at the bottom of the page where w’s of water, width, and winter land on “Weird how all reverts, reverberates in / spring clarity as old detritus is dredged.” Kemp sleeves her cyclical seasons at the river’s selvedge.

The antler’s optical illusions connect with Kemp’s trompe l’oreille – those hearing tricks sleeved in river revery, reverts reverberates, and tranceform – a Joycean play of phonemes and double entendres. This combination of antlered and antennaed sound and sight leads to the delight of metaphor and meaning – the trompe le cerveau that tricks the mind with its radiant abundance and ambiguity. “Five times” swells tenfold to “Yellow willows drop fifty-year / -old boughs in high winds.” In addition to the rhyme of yellow willows, these trees exhibit and almost palindromic spell mirroring their own undoing. Their drop highlights horizontal and vertical tensions and dimensions within climate change. Horizontals appear through enjambed stanzas that reflect the river’s flow: “The swell / carries whole trees along stampeding // currents.” Swell and stampeding get arrested in the following sentence: “Standing / waves cover our usual walking path.” That oxymoron underscores stasis and motion with climate crisis.

Numbers from five to fifty return “from eleven below to eleven above in / hours, sinking back below freezing.” Stampeding and standing lead to sinking in a downward trend, as below heads underground “to bury the remnants / of flood.” Kemp’s antlers and antennae nudge the ground and seasons to clarify climate. Over the page she continues in stanzas of varying lengths as her “rant runs along the river.” Her warblers’ trill enters a sonic and scoped labyrinth that tricks ear and eye: “unknown we cannot now locate / since sound is not where sight is / and the willows are leafing out.” They leaf out by spreading, but they are also running out of leaves.

The next stanza deflects that leafing out by sleeving leaf and echoing the earlier weird:

Leaving out the paw-tracked mud,
the grocery cart obliterated by winter
storm back to origin, a mess of
twisted rust like an old fishing weir.

That metaphor gently jogs the mind in a trompe le cerveau, while the ear adjusts to twisted rust and weird weir. The concluding stanza returns to standing waves which have gathered momentum throughout the poem. “The current courses by standing waves, / standing in momentary eddies against / momentum.” Kemp’s Thames differs from Edmund Spenser’s sweet river that runs softly, and T. S. Eliot’s river’s tent that is broken; but in her tributary she hears a cold blast with its “rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.” Her antlers detect the trompe l’oreille between ears, her rant contrasting with warblers’ trill. She dreams and dredges the sweating oil and tar of her precursors.

“Riparian” delights in auditory trickery between rip and repair for the tear: “Left alone. Let the word itself slide along / a corridor of flood plain // – riparian – ” Lines glide not just through enjambment, but also through liquid l’s and long vowels that channel n’s against pausing double r’s. That flow halts in the accentuated double-dashed riparian and final word of the stanza – “Interface” (which itself contains the burial of inter as well as turf on banks). The second stanza picks up the first through rhyme of surface with interface as f’s accumulate to complement the initial “Left,” while onomatopoeia augments the synaesthetic experience: “A bobble-filtered bottle bobs along the surface / above overflow from sanitary and storm.” In tandem with “above,” repetition of the preposition “along” situates the rhythm of the river, while banking “alone.”

The next stanza plays with the vernacular and doubles meanings in the Thames’s trompe l’oreille: “A word in the mouth sidles in wet rushes over / the tongue to burst upon banks of the Thames.” A linguistic overflow enters this couplet. Mouth of river and poet sounds and tastes the twist of slides to sidles, bulrushes to speed. The rest of the poem oscillates between bird and bush: woodcocks, mallard, osprey, swallows, meadows, marsh, ash, groves, sedge. This interchange between ecosystem and echo-system appears in “Let alone” which repeats the opening “Left alone.” “Let word of mouth ripple (water ways) and ripen” looks back to “word in the mouth,” as the poet meanders along the river in tempo of Thames: “Without us, the river would repair (itself) in time.” Kemp speaks and hears the river’s rumours; she begins in dream and ends downstream.

If “Riparian” (like most of Kemp’s poems) sleeves sight and sound, then “Mutative Metaphors” exhibits the sleeving of tenor and vehicle in a trompe le cerveau where hammock and canoe interchange along her river. The opening sentence conveys a hypnotic rhythm and dreamscape: “My lazy hammock dips and sways, paddled / with silver, dappled in sun yard, belying any / need for action beyond its own rhythm.” Imitative harmony in lazy sways balances paddled and dappled in the belying illusion of metaphor. With hammock in air and canoe in water, the poet “could / be brewing Earl Grey,” but her tea rhymes with rosemary and immunity in the second stanza. “Or I could make Bach Flower Remedies from impatience, chicory, clematis to ward off moods.” Impatiens plays into moods while Bach Flower fugues in a similar vein within her incredible edible garden.

But she leaves all that activity for other years. “Leave / valerian and foxglove growing unadulterated.” Just as hammock derives from fish net or stretch of cloth, so foxglove sleeves into Kemp’s abundant garden and body of poetry. “This garden I am lazily pleased to watch / parade its season and fall as though my gaze / were enough to bestow medicinal property // by osmosis, direct / through vision.” She will have to rely on her mind’s eye for these optical illusions and trompe l’oeil effect. Exotic names such as “dittany of Crete” and “Jacob’s ladder” play on the tongue to rhyme with litany. “A river / of words on the Thames, floating downstream.” Metaphor mutates in the final stanza as part of the mind’s eye’s trickery: “Bubbles arise when the hammock turns into / an old canoe.” The poet heads home with her antlered head transformed. With her prolific pen, Kemp paddles and gardens through all seasons and times in the depths of deception along a dark river or mind’s ditch – la tranche or la trompe. She rolls up her pants like Huck Finn and her sleeve like James Joyce on the Liffey: “A way a lone a last a loved a long the riverrun.”

About the Author

Penn Kemp is a poet, playwright, and performer who lives in London ON. Her most recent collection is Colour Fielding (2026),  https://www.silverbowpublishing.com/colour-fielding.html. The League of Canadian Poets honored her with their Inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award, 2025-6. Check out www.riverrevery.ca for poetry films based on her text.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.

He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Insomniac Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Nov. 15 2019

• Edition ‏ : ‎ Illustrated

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 114 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1554832381

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1554832385

In this issue:

• The Unnameable by Stephens Gerard Malone (Fiction)

• Shoebox by Sean Bedell (Fiction)

• Mobilizing Data for Justice (Non-Fiction)

• On Friendship by Andrew O’Hagan (Non-Fiction, Essays)

• The Lightning Tree by Rebecca Hendry (Poetry, Chapbook)

• We Match! Written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Sharon Glick (Children’s)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

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About 18 months ago, I got an email from someone I’d lost touch with almost 20 years prior, a friend I met in Goose Bay, Labrador. I was only there for a few months, but we had a great time raucously bonding over loud music, unguarded talks, and mud-soaked CRV rallies deep into the endlessly sprawling wilderness that loomed over town. Now we’ve become fast friends again, building a new connection even as we live provinces apart and haven’t actually seen each other in person. Across rivers, hills, forests, and a gulf, we send pictures, videos, and texts, and we talk on the phone now and then too. It’s like old times, but even older—and better for it.

The richness of this gift is the kind of thing Scottish author and journalist Andrew O’Hagan would appreciate. In his new book, On Friendship, he presents eight short essays on platonic love, exploring amity among children, adults, and even people and other animals. Coming after 2024’s epic and stunning Caledonian Road, this work is a much smaller affair, so short that it sometimes feels unnecessary—and unfortunately, he’s not shy about using the tight space to plug a few of his other novels—but it’s still a memorable read thanks to his keen insights and ruby prose.

In “Boys United,” O’Hagan remembers his first best friend, a troubled but inventive kid with a “mop of chestnut hair and [a] deep fund of jokes.” He traces those early stirrings of loyalty and devotion that were so possessing in our younger years, and he reminds us, without getting nostalgic, just how hard it can be for adults to do what comes so naturally to children and teenagers.

Some of the book’s best lines are in “Losing Friends,” where he writes that “death doesn’t really end a friendship; it sanctifies it. The fact that you won’t see the friend again is a bitter loss, but at another level their vital presence may be guaranteed, a friendship that is now safe from the vagaries of human nature and changeable weather.” He remembers the passing of his friend Keith Martin, and the account has a beauty and pain that his brief connection with Julian Assange simply couldn’t allow; the disgraced whistleblower was only in it for the praise.

If you’re like me, you’ll get a jolt when you read that name: This guy was friends with Julian Assange? The Wikileaks founder is just one of the big personalities O’Hagan mentions, focusing as well on Colm Toíbín and Edna O’Brien, among others. Naturally, as a famous artist and intellectual, O’Hagan keeps notable company. But that success sometimes makes his anecdotes feel out of touch with the so-called friendship recession that’s been cleaving so many less fortunate people apart, particularly men. In fairness, O’Hagan clearly puts a lot of energy into his social life, so class and accomplishment don’t tell the whole story. Still, that he doesn’t really explore the recession seems like an oversight, with one scant mention of “these straitened times for fraternity” in “Boys United” and an overly familiar critique of social media’s ironic toxicity in “‘Friendling.’”

It’s too bad. That balance would’ve made for a longer, more relatable read, even if O’Hagan couldn’t have pulled from his own life to nail it. Personally, as I’ve made my way through the opening salvos of middle age, I’ve accepted that several of my older friendships went toxic long before they finally ended, and others quietly expired due to mutual (maybe even intentional) neglect. But I say that without grief. In fact, not only does it make my recent rekindling such a remarkable experience, it also reminds me to appreciate the healthy bonds that have stayed in bloom—while cautiously keeping space for anything new. Adult friendship, it’s fair to say, is a far more deliberate than instinctual engagement, and O’Hagan’s new book is something to linger over during those deliberations, even if it’s not as substantial as it could be.

About the Author

ANDREW O’HAGAN, a Scottish novelist and essayist, is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, a three-time nominee for the Booker Prize, the editor-at-large of the London Review of Books, and a contributor to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. He lives in London.

About the Reviewer

Paul Carlucci is the author of one novel, The Voyageur, and three story collections, The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, A Plea for Constant Motion, and The Secret Life of Fission. He won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and has been a finalist for two Ottawa Book Awards and two ReLit Awards. He’s a freelance editor, working with academics and research professionals, hybrid and traditional presses, and aspiring authors.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Faber & Faber

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Oct. 9 2025

• Edition ‏ : ‎ Main

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0571397476

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0571397471

“There are no rules in grief,” says Patti Smith, a good mantra to hold close when reading Rebecca Hendry’s The Lightning Tree. The book contains a beautifully woven sequence of lyric poems, circling the impossible burden of loss through spare, exquisite lines, and in doing so providing a kind of navigational map for the grieving heart. “Grief is a primal, universal force that unites us all,” she tells us in the book’s preface. “Wail and keen / shriek like a banshee / on the Irish moors /… / wear his sweater on St. Patrick’s Day.”

The book cover is a photographic image of a tree struck by lightning, close to Hendry’s home in Gibsons, BC. In her epigraph, we learn that when trees are struck by lightning, “the damage is instant and explosive.” The wound will not heal. The tree attempts to seal off the wound from the healthy parts—nature’s wisdom—as with grief, when we walk the dark halls of loss. A black and white faded image of the wounded tree appears again on the title page.

We walk the long path of grief with Hendry, “the primal universal force that unites us all.” We feel the weight of her sadness in lines like “how the joy of togetherness / and the sting of apart / inhabit the same space / how they always will” and “imagine / he looked back at you / on the beach / toddler on your hip / praying, always praying / for his safety.”

We learn in the preface that Hendry lost Garrett, the father of her children, to accidental poisoning in August 2020. This was during the COVID-19 years when street drugs increased in lethality. From 2020-2024, there were over 11,000 overdose deaths in British Columbia, a statistic that doubled from the previous five years.

Hendry’s beautifully crafted poems are universal: tender, real, “yes, the universe had cracked apart / solar winds howling.” They offer up raw instructions: “take his ashes / to the wetlands of Sergeant’s Bay / to the tree that was struck by lightning / forever altered / alive but no longer whole.” The closing poem is followed by a photograph of the bay, close to the wetlands near the lightning tree.

The book closes with a photo image of the waterlilies “in the rich silt of the marsh bed” where the ceremony with Garrett’s ashes took place. The book’s closing lines leave the reader with the certainty of nature’s eternal cycles:

remember
that atoms
are eternal
they will live on
in the rich silt of the marsh bed
in the waterlilies
fed by the minerals of his bones 

The Lightning Tree was awarded honourable mention in the 2025 Raven Chapbook contest and is published as part of the Raven Chapbooks Indigo Series. This is a small and timeless book of intimate dimensions (7” x 4 ¾”) that can be gift from heart to heart.

About the Author

Rebecca Hendry has published two novels, One Good Thing (Touchwood Editions, 2018) and Grace River (Brindle and Glass, 2009), and her short fiction has appeared in the Dalhousie Review, Wascana Review, Event, Windsor Review, Room, and other literary journals. She has been a book editor for over twenty years, working for Canadian publishing houses as well as self-publishing companies and private clients. She lives in Gibsons, BC.

About the Reviewer

Catherine McNeil is an author living in Gibsons, BC and was the recipient of the National Milieu’s Emerging Writer’s Contest for her first poetry book under the influence (Bedazzled Ink) in 2016. emily and elspeth, her second book of poetry (Caitlin Press, 2023) won first prize in the Sunshine Coast Book Awards in the category of Diversity. Poems from emily and elspeth are in Queer Chroma, Rampike, Sinister Wisdom and Room of One’s Own. Other publications include Event, Capilano Review, West Coast Line, Exact Fare 2 and The Fed Anthology. Recently, she received first prize in fiction in the Sunshine Coast Not An Island Literary Contest.

Book Details

• THE LIGHTNING TREE by Rebecca Hendry

• Raven Chapbooks, 2025 ISBN:978-1-7781603-9-4

• available at RavenChapbooks.ca $20

Ownership of data, and control over interpretation of data, represents power in today’s digitized landscape. Data activists seek to wrest some of this ownership and control away from the powerful, in service to their own communities and struggles. As the authors of Mobilizing Data for Justice are careful to note, the techniques of data activism are politically neutral. Activists may align to the right as well as to the left. Being themselves of a left-leaning disposition, the authors choose to focus on similarly aligned groups and to call this “data justice” in analogy with the terminology of “social justice.”

As part of a four-year, multi-institutional research project based out of Concordia University, the research team interviewed representatives of approximately fifty groups engaged in data activism across Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, and Germany. These interviews form the basis of the book.

The authors classify data-related activities of activist groups as involving access, archiving, or visualization. The predominant tool for activist organizations seeking access to state-level data is the Freedom of Information request (FOI), or Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) request as we would say in Canada. Activists interviewed by the authors discuss some of the challenges and setbacks they experience in navigating the cumbersome process of filing such requests and interpreting the responses. Technological tools can be useful to assist with filing simultaneous requests across different jurisdictions, and generative AI can help to organize and summarize unwieldy response sets. In some cases, the data being accessed is one’s own. For example, apps can be built to log gig workers’ activities separately from the company’s systems so that individual workers can see their own information.

The importance of archiving has been highlighted recently as individuals and organizations have scrambled to download and store information being removed from US government websites pertaining to topics deemed out-of-favour by the current administration. This problem is hardly unique to the United States, though. Mobilizing Data for Justice shines a spotlight on an organization called SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online), which has been working to archive Ukrainian websites in danger of going dark due to infrastructural and cyberstructural impacts of warfare in the region. The Wayback Machine is another example of archivist activity, preserving data that would otherwise be lost as websites go offline or change their content.

The chapter on data visualization concerns itself more with critiquing the objectivist underpinnings of the field, and the “occularcentrism” of visual representation, than with guidance on how activists might develop data visualization skills. The authors focus heavily on mapping, and on the augmentation of maps with different layers of information such as oral histories and videography.

It’s a little unclear just who this book is for. The authors have academic affiliations, and the book reads a bit like a monograph reporting on their qualitative research project. The tone seems to aim at a broader audience, but retains a substantially academic flavour. Activists seeking a how-to guide will not find one here—they may take ideas and inspiration from the case study examples shown, but won’t learn how to organize and analyze data for themselves, nor are they pointed in the direction of the multitudinous open resources for learning the skills of data visualization. The main text is interspersed with explainers on techniques like collective mapping, or OCAP principles for working with Indigenous communities, which could be useful for people looking to undertake projects in this space. These sections would be even more useful if they were listed in the table of contents or in a separate index; they are differentiated by font but cannot be easily referenced within the chapters where they occur.

Those looking for actionable resources should visit the project website at datajusticehub.ca where one can find webinars, podcasts, and links to books and documents by other authors. The organization and presentation of information on this website is a little glitchy; for example, the “Guidebook on Guidebooks” that purports to help readers navigate this section of the site is shown within a window that’s smaller than the page size, so it requires constant clicking and scrolling. The guidebooks themselves are then hidden under obscure tiles that only show their names on mouse-hover, and several of these link out to books that must be purchased elsewhere rather than being available open-access online.

Overall, this is a really intriguing project that attempts, if not entirely successfully, to assemble and corral a lot of disparate information and resources in an under-researched field. The work is commendable. The challenge for readers like myself, who may feel frustrated by gaps in the presentation and who may have some relevant expertise to bring to the table, is to ask: What am I doing? How can I help?

About the Authors

Chris Hurl is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. His research examines the politics of knowledge production in public sector restructuring. He is the coauthor of The Consulting Trap and coeditor of Professional Service Firms and Politics in a Global Era and Corporatizing Canada.

Elena Rowan is a graduate student and researcher in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and the Department of Psychology at Concordia University. Her research explores the intersections of culture and community in sociology, anthropology, and clinical psychology. Her graduate research looked at questions of community, copyright, and advocacy within libraries, published in Platform Power and Libraries. She produces the Data Justice Hub podcast.

Marius Senneville is a Montreal-based researcher trained in STS and political economy. His academic works have touched upon the AI innovation ecosystems in Montreal and Toronto and the changing forms of partnerships being developed between university and industry laboratories. He also investigated the way AI governance emerged as a strategic sector of management consulting and the different actors vying for market credibility. He currently works as an applied researcher at CÉRSÉ, where he is developing the research programs on the digital sectors and renewable energies.

Kevin Walby is a professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Winnipeg. He is coauthor of Police Funding, Dark Money, and the Greedy Institution. He is coeditor of Disarm, Defund, Dismantle and Changing of the Guards. He is the director of the Centre for Access to Information and Justice (CAIJ) and coeditor of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Between the Lines

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ March 17 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 288 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771136812

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771136815

Young ’uns get taught to make things match. It’s tradition. For myself, the challenge took the form of a hand-me-down copy of Somebody Forgot!, by Gladys M. Horn. The smiling family in that 1954 story, apparently none of them very bright, each chose a colour to paint a part of their house. But, as the title suggests, they then forgot their respective choices. It was up to the young reader to open a box of crayons and match them to the various colours the family wanted. Then, to shade in the roof, wall, porch, whatever as appropriate.

Being able to discern what-matches-what was, and no doubt still is, deemed important. But is it always? Couldn’t non-matching things, or indeed living beings, also complement each other? In our polarized world, that could be just as valuable a message to impart to budding minds as making exact matches.

Which is the theme that writer Chris Barton and illustrator Sharon Glick, with their charming dog story, have um, embarked on. Their lively tail, oops, tale We Match! begins with Button, a sportscaster-like fluffy grey terrier, announcing, “GOOD AFTERNOON, DOG PARK FANS!” Note: all the We Match! dialogue is in cap letters, befitting both dogs’ and sportscasters’ fondness for being loud.

And indeed Button, like the late, legendary ’caster Howard Cosell, is loud in both dress and voice. Cosell famously wore an ABC Network jacket of eyeball-searing yellow. Button carries on the tradition with his blazing-red-edged, bright blue jacket.

Oh, and Button’s owner and all the other dog owners in the story are mere background. It’s the dogs who star—and, thanks to the vibrant illustrations, actually seem to speed across the pages.

Anyhow, on with the sportscast. Two black-and-white dogs of a Border Collie mix (all dogs in the story are mixes) chase a ball. “ONE THING IS CLEAR AS TODAY’S ACTION KICKS OFF. THESE DOGS MATCH,” bellows Button.

“THIS NEW ONE DOES NOT,” he then comments, as a Golden Retriever bounds up. But, as she joins the collies in ball play, Button amends that to, “OR DOES SHE?” To show the drama of Button’s change of opinion, both his exclamations are in dialogue bubbles with lightning-bolt stems.

More non-matching dogs show up. Two examples: first, a fluffy white Bichon-poodle mix named Lucille Snowball. Impossible not love Lucy, who finds common ground, or perhaps that would be air, with the other dogs in the fun of sticking their heads out windows of moving cars. Then there’s Bozeman, a tough-looking mastiff who faces down the other dogs. That is, until they similarly find commonality: in this case what food they prefer, wet or dry. Team Dry wins, paws down.

There’s a plot twist with one arrival, but you’ll have to read We Match! to ferret that out for yourself. The same theme applies: no matter that folks come from different backgrounds, they can find things to agree on—and coexist quite happily.

Oh, and that sound you hear is an approving woof!

About the Author

Chris Barton is the author of many beloved books for children, including the New York Times bestseller Shark Vs. Train, the Sibert Honoree The Day-Glo Brothers, and three Texas Bluebonnet Award Master List books, one of which—Whoosh!—was celebrated on 20 other state lists, as well.

About the Illustrator

Illustrator and art educator Sharon Glick’s first children’s book, ¡Perros! ¡Perros! Dogs! Dogs! was a Junior Library Guild selection and made the Bank Street College Best Books list. More recently, Sharon illustrated 11 books for the Sharpen reading program and designed the exterior of the Bozeman Public Library’s bookmobile as well as the banners outside the library.

About the Reviewer

Melanie Jackson is a Vancouver writer/editor. She’s also the award-winning author of middle-grade/YA suspensers, including Orca Books’ Dinah Galloway Mystery Series, and several chillers set in amusement parks. Visit Melanie at The Writers’ Union of Canada.

Book Details

• Publisher: Astra Young Readers, July 15, 2025

• Language: English

• Hardcover: 40 pages

• ISBN: 9781662621062

Steve Lewis does nothing by half measures. A dedicated family man and devoted husband to Annie, Steve is also a paramedic who gives his all to every shift, to every call out, to every accident and medical emergency victim. He prides himself on his abilities as a first responder and the quality of care he provides. Indeed, his commitment to the job is such that, in his mind, his worth as a human being is inextricably linked to his ability to save lives. This is commendable, to a point. But Steve has taken this commitment a step further and has begun to perceive a failure of care as not just a professional failure, but a personal failure, even though his more rational self is perfectly capable of understanding (without necessarily accepting) that people die, unexpectedly and for any number of reasons, many of them beyond anyone’s control.

Sean Bedell’s tightly wound novel, Shoebox, draws on the author’s long career as a first responder, with the result that the drama depicted in these pages is vivid, sincere, and poignantly, achingly human.

Steve’s problems begin with money. Because he loathed the work, he quit a secure position as an insurance salesman and trained to become a paramedic, even though it meant leaving behind predictable hours and a salary that met many of the family’s needs. Now, with shift work and money pressures compelling him to volunteer for “extras,” Steve is absent from home for long stretches. With two school-age children and a baby, Annie needs him to pitch in. But working himself into a state of exhaustion means that even when he’s home, he’s hardly present. This provokes tension between the adults, which finds expression in Annie’s snarky comments and Steve’s seething silences.

Then the very worst happens, a family tragedy that hits Steve and Annie where it hurts the most. But was it preventable? Grief-stricken, Steve is certain that if he’d only been more attentive, more prepared, less selfish, more willing to sacrifice his own well-being for that of his family, it would never have happened. Seeking redemption, he returns to work. But the pressures continue to mount. Relentless calls from creditors, a looming strike, a fatal traffic collision with Steve at the wheel of the ambulance. The accumulation of grief and guilt sends Steve spiralling into an existential crisis.

Shoebox (the title refers explicitly to the tiny, cramped structure in Sheet Harbour where Steve’s paramedic team is stationed, but also seems a fitting metaphor for Steve’s own life) is the story of a man who takes everything upon his shoulders, who never gives himself a break, and who loses sight of what’s most important when his sense of self-worth begins to break down. Steve Lewis is an intense guy, an emotional powder-keg, who can become lost in the moment, whose responses to events are often extreme. Without a doubt, our hearts break for him when everything goes off the rails, though the reader can be forgiven for thinking that at times Steve is his own worst enemy.

Much like his previous novel, Somewhere There’s Music (which this writer described as a “searing gut-punch”), the emotions we encounter in Sean Bedell’s follow-up come to us raw, unfiltered. All of it is real and deeply felt. It can be hard to take, but Bedell’s artistry draws us in and, much like the proverbial train wreck, we can’t turn away.

About the Author

Author of the novel Somewhere There’s Music, Sean Paul Bedell has been writing and publishing for more than 30 years. A longtime paramedic and captain with the fire service, he lives with his wife Lisa in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

About the Reviewer

Ian Colford has published three novels and two collections of stories. Evidence was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill and won the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award; Evidence was also shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and the ReLit Award. The Crimes of Hector Tomás followed in 2012. Published by Freehand Books of Calgary, it won Trade Book of the Year at the 2013 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. Perfect World was published by Freehand in 2016 and shortlisted in the book design category at the 2017 Alberta Book Publishing Awards. In 2019 A Dark House was published by Nimbus Publishing of Halifax and was shortlisted for the Alistair MacLeod Prize in Short Fiction at the Atlantic Book Awards and the Relit Award. In 2022 The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard won the Guernica Prize and was published by Guernica Editions in November 2023. Witness, a sequel to Evidence, will be published in 2026 by Galleon Books of Moncton, NB. He lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. More info can be found at www.iancolford.com.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Now Or Never Publishing Co

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Oct. 15 2025

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 264 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1989689884

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1989689882

Coming to terms with who you are is hard for any teenager, but coming to terms with who you are as a queer teenager in the 1960s, while living on a military base is harder.

The Unnameable by Stephens Gerard Malone follows Audie and Gib, two boys who live next to each other on the base who are similar in more ways than one: they both enjoy reading, both are kinder and gentler than the other boys around them, and they eventually enter into a secret relationship. The Unnameable has a bit of a slow start, but once things get moving you won’t be able to put it down, you may find yourself reading well into the night.

While we explore Audie and Gib and their time together, the overarching story focuses more on Audie. Gerard Malone expertly draws the reader into his life, feeling as if you are painting on the wall observing and ultimately relating in many ways to a kid who just wants to be who he is without judgment. He’s someone who strives not to lose himself as so many around him have.

With Gib, most of what we know is told from interactions with Audie, but that doesn’t make him underdeveloped. Through Gerard Malone’s writing, and Audie’s observations, you see a character who is struggling with being two sides of a coin, one who, even more so than Audie, wants to escape. And he almost does.

Knowing the time period of the book, and through a few subtle hints, you know there isn’t going to be a happy ending, but you keep hoping. Even as you wait for the other shoe to drop and the boys to be discovered, you keep hoping. Even after you finish that last page, you keep hoping.

About the Author

Stephens Gerard Malone is a Canadian writer who caught the literary bug early, taking refuge in big novels and TV miniseries while growing up on a military base. Honing a love of story took years and U-turns: university in Montreal, waiting tables in New Zealand, exploring subjects ranging from war-torn Europe to Victorian elephants to mid-century Halifax by night, tech writing by day. Although Malone likes to extensively research and visit the places he writes about, he has long called Nova Scotia home.

About the Reviewer

Katie Ingram is a freelance journalist and the author of Breaking Disaster: Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion and The Undesirables: A History of Rockhead Prison. She’s also a part-time instructor with the University of King’s College School of Journalism, Writing and Publishing.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Nimbus Publishing & Vagrant Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 28 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 264 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1774715058

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1774715055

In this issue:

• Variations on a Dream by Angélique Lalonde (Fiction)

• Northern Bull by Michelle Swallow (Fiction)

• Bad Advice by Susan Carpenter

• Excerpt: Northern Girls by Michele Willms (Non-Fiction)

• Unequivocal Magic by Alex Bertram

• “Look at That Sky Again:” In Dialogue with John Wall Barger (Interview)

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

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Fiction

Non-Fiction

Interview

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In Angélique Lalonde’s Variations on a Dream, Sarah is a people-pleasing mommy blogger marked by the mysterious death of her often abusive father when she was young. She’s married to Trevor, a sex-addicted author and professor she met when they were both in university. He carries his own damage from childhood, specifically to his perception of women after discovering his dad’s stash of messed-up pornography. They started dating after his failed pursuit of her gorgeous, brilliant, and boundlessly creative roommate Ariadne, a woman she loved as well. When the novel begins, Sarah and Trevor are newly middle-aged parents about to be triggered into a spectacular transformation inspired by a porn video featuring someone who looks eerily like Ariadne did all those years before—someone who turns out to be a student in one of Trevor’s classes.

Arriving five years after her Giller-longlisted debut story collection, Lalonde’s first novel is scrappy and ambitious, flickering with gorgeous sentences by turns abstract and grounded, wry and disturbing. They ignite a constellation of symbols, from yellow chickadees to black swans, red cars to red dresses, and blue marbles to grey hex keys, not to mention the myth of the labyrinth from which Ariadne gets her name. It’s a heartfelt and intellectual book that stumbles over excesses in characterization and a lapse in structure, but it’ll make fans of readers who want a modern relationship novel that doesn’t shy away from graphic sex without (ultimately) debasing its characters and, by extension, readers themselves.

Its flaws are intertwined. Although neatly packaged in the first paragraph of jacket copy, the setup actually spans almost half the book, starting in the present before taking us back to each character’s childhood and university days, and while these chapters are some of the strongest, they give over to a long and largely expository account of Sarah and Trevor’s marriage, during which the author repeatedly underscores the latter’s vile characteristics: he’s emotionally manipulative and endlessly self-prioritizing; he’s frail and furtive; he’s sexually frustrated and extremely crass when he gets it; and he loves Charles Bukowski, a tedious creep by any measure.

Despite a touch too many exclamation marks, the writing is indisputably rich, and Lalonde frequently uses unmoored dialogue to help carry the long tract of exposition, but with so few fully rendered scenes, we don’t get many narrative crystallizations of Trevor’s traits. If we did, there probably wouldn’t be a need to reframe them so often, and not only could the setup be confined to the more traditional third of the page count, the brevity would make Trevor less satirically archetypal (or at least less gratingly), which might better serve the book’s politics. How many women wind up this ensnared by men so transparently awful? A fair few, no doubt, but don’t the greater threats come from the more insidious predators?

Although the mid-story and climax are stalled by the extended beginning, they still bring a lot of movement when they come, much of it making crafty use of the multiple points of view previewed in the opening pages. All the symbols, themes, and arcs are braided with the unique approach to language, offering a memorable payoff that will likely hit a resonating, emotional, and emancipatory note for most readers. While not without baggage, Variations on a Dream is a hugely ambitious first novel, and even if we have to wait another half decade for Lalonde’s next book, no doubt we’ll be rewarded with something better still.

About the Author

ANGÉLIQUE LALONDE’s work has been featured in PRISM International, The Journey Prize Stories, Room, and The Malahat Review, among other pub­lications. She received the 2019 Writers’ Trust McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She lives on Gitxsan Territory in Northern B.C. Her short story collection Glorious Frazzled Beings was shortlisted for the Giller Prize.

About the Reviewer

Paul Carlucci is the author of one novel, The Voyageur, and three story collections, The High-Rise in Fort Fierce, A Plea for Constant Motion, and The Secret Life of Fission. He won the Danuta Gleed Literary Award and has been a finalist for two Ottawa Book Awards and two ReLit Awards. He’s a freelance editor, working with academics and research professionals, hybrid and traditional presses, and aspiring authors.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Feb. 3 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 464 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771012608

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771012600

Maggie is 32 years old, single, and living next door to Jacques, who keeps stealing from her woodpile. She has less than 24 hours to finish writing a five-minute piece of erotica for Yellowknife’s sexy storytelling competition, but she’s been hit with a serious case of writer’s block. Jacques, meanwhile, has woken up hung over with two strange women in his kitchen, his phone buzzing with the news that his buddy is gunning for him over a gigantic trophy moose head he supposedly stole last night. For the life of him, Jacques can’t remember what happened, but he has until midnight to put it right. He’s also flat broke, and he has more than a little bit of a crush on his neighbour.

Northern Bull is a romantic comedy wrapped around a mystery (who did take the moose head?) accompanied by plenty of slapstick, and more innuendo than steamy stuff. (The most explicit scenes are the ones Maggie is drafting in her many failed attempts at literary smut.) The book makes the most of its setting in and around the Northwest Territories’ capital city. It’s chock full of sled dogs, skidoos, shotguns, woodstoves, weasels, beaver mitts and one highly impressive lynx fur hat. While these things do exist in the North, it isn’t the case that most Northerners use all of these things every single day, but that’s okay—it’s all in the tradition of romance novels set in picturesque or exotic locales, and part of the fantasy element of the genre. For that matter, it reads somewhat like a CBC television regional sit-com in written form (hint, hint).

The book also incorporates lesser-known aspects of life in the North, like substandard housing, excessive partying, an enduring obsession with participatory community burlesque shows, and a phone-in radio programme where people sell second-hand goods. (To be honest, I don’t actually know if these are also common elements of life down South, but I don’t seem to hear them talked about that often in mainstream novels about folks in Toronto.)

Michelle Swallow presents the reader with a panoply of classic Northern characters, from the legendary “bushman,” to the inveterate bar star, and the small-time bullshitter … er, ahem, that is, outfitter. The book kicks off with the main characters in full party mode, living a lifestyle where it’s normal to regularly find yourself blinking as the lights come on in the bar at closing time. This all seems fun at first, but by the three-quarter mark it’s become clear that there’s a darker side to the non-stop drinking and drug use. This arc is deeply characteristic of Northern lives, and it’s to Swallow’s credit that she’s able to build a light, entertaining romance novel around such deadly serious material.

The storyline unfolds in a compressed interval of a single day, at some points pushing credibility as to how much hungover humans can actually accomplish before lunchtime. The deadline forces tension and the action becomes quite frenetic. There is a physical comedy element to many of the scenes, and lots of lines that made me snort, like this one: “He’d never heard of northern strippers, thought they all came from the south, like fruit and tourists.” Or this bit, where Jacques is reflecting on his attraction to his neighbour:

“He thought about Maggie, her dark curls and wide smile, chopping wood in her long johns. “She’s probably a lesbian,” his mom had said. He wasn’t sure about that, but it didn’t seem like they had much in common. She was some sort of environmentalist. Constantly exercising and recycling.”

Jacques is part of a group of guy friends, none of whom really seems to have it even slightly together at this point in their lives. Swallow portrays them as variously off the rails, but you can’t help rooting for them—whether to actually accomplish their ridiculous money-making schemes, or to reform and settle down, it’s hard to say—but for everyone to come through safely and well. I won’t give spoilers, but this is a romantic comedy, and you can expect a happy ending … which is, of course, a new beginning.

About the Author

Based in Yellowknife, Michelle Swallow is a long-time resident of the Northwest Territories and has lived in Norman Wells, Aklavik, Inuvik, and Hay River. Her non-fiction book, The Mackenzie River Guide, has helped paddlers travel down Canada’s longest river for over a decade. Northern Bull is her debut novel.

About the Reviewer

Dawn Macdonald lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny. She posts weekly on Reviews of Books I Got for Free or Cheap (on Substack), as well as reviews for journals and The Seaboard Review of Books.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Freehand Books

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Jan. 21 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 252 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1997534053

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1997534051

When Empathy Turns Risky

A female therapist sets a boundary. A male patient crosses it. In Bad Advice, Susan Carpenter transforms this unsettling scenario into a taut psychological thriller, posing urgent and uncomfortable questions: when a woman identifies danger, why is she still so often asked to prove it? When does empathy tip into liability? And what drives groups to turn on women who insist on protecting themselves?

The novel follows Tess, a Toronto psychologist who excels at the disciplined containment of other people’s pain. At thirty-nine, she is professionally successful, well respected and privately unravelling. Tess constructs her life around discretion, control, and emotional distance. Carpenter vividly conveys the emotional vigilance required to sustain such a posture: how self-command can harden into isolation, and how empathy, carefully cultivated as a clinical skill, can be pernicious.

That risk arrives in the form of Hal, a troubled patient who straddles the line between therapeutic dependence and personal threat. Bad Advice underscores the double-sided nature of empathy. Tess has learned to resist easy judgments, embrace contradictions, and listen for injury within aggression. Her psychological distancing skills trigger Hal, who feels thwarted and threatened when women assert boundaries. Their tension highlights how empathy is a gendered expectation, demanding women to show generosity even when faced with physical danger.

When Hal follows Tess to her hometown of Midland, the situation turns deadly. What began as a private conflict culminates in a chilling act of random violence. Tess’s fear for her personal safety is misread by the townspeople as evasion and moral ambiguity. In their eyes, her past professional relationship with Hal is grounds for suspicion. After taking brave steps to defend herself, Tess is treated as if her motives demand explanation.

Midland adds to the novel’s foreboding atmosphere. The lush green landscape of Ontario cottage country is littered with dark memories, incessant gossip, and unfinished business. The town watches, interprets, and remembers selectively. Carpenter ably captures the claustrophobia of intimate communities, where surveillance masquerades as care and judgment is delivered as concern. Tess is pursued not only by a dangerous man but by a social world primed to misread her.

Carpenter’s prose is one of the book’s main pleasures—crisp, stylish, and psychologically precise without sacrificing momentum. She has a clear sense of structure and a sharp ear for the moral evasions hidden in everyday speech. The novel is also darkly humorous, offering a pointed critique of how social cruelty often comes disguised as truth, fairness, and compassion. Through wit and wordplay, Carpenter reveals the disconnect between genuine danger and the platitudes used to mask it.

In its concerns and execution, Bad Advice aligns with a recent wave of Canadian fiction that pairs literary style with narrative urgency to explore women’s interior lives. Readers of Mona Awad, for instance, will admire Carpenter’s piercing social insights; fans of Ashley Audrain will prize her command of suspense grounded in psychological distress. However, Carpenter’s voice remains her own, particularly in its attention to the moral theatre of empathy and the penalties imposed on women who stand up for themselves.

Bad Advice derives suspense less from overt menace than from the pressures that shape how threats are understood. Carpenter frames the novel around pursuit and interpretation, tracing the shift from belief to suspicion and, ultimately, demonization. Darkly entertaining and sharply observed, Bad Advice offers the satisfactions of a propulsive literary thriller while leaving a quiet, persistent unease about the social pressures shaping women’s lives.

About the Author

SUSAN CARPENTER is a writer, actor, and teacher whose short fiction has appeared in numerous publications. A graduate of Western University and the Humber School for Writers, she has taught memoir, short fiction, and crafting stories rooted in real life with a sharp, humorous edge. She lives in Calgary with her husband and their pony-sized rescue dog. Bad Advice is her debut novel.

About the Reviewer

EZRA ANDERSON is a writer and bookseller living in Toronto.

Book Details

• Publisher: Now or Never Publishing

• Publication Date: April 15, 2026

• Format: Trade Paperback

• ISBN: 9781989689974

Editor’s Note: “We recently posted Dawn Macdonald’s review of Northern Girls: True Stories by Michelle Willms (see below), and I thought an excerpt from this book, along with Michelle’s intro, would be a good way to stir interest in this fascinating collection of linked true stories.”

Michelle Willms explains the background of the stories as a way into the book:

“I started writing about what happened in my childhood after my mom's death as a way to understand how everything broke down in our family. My mom was a northern girl from the far reaches of Ontario, and I also lived up north for part of my childhood (that's when things got especially dicey for me and my siblings). I didn't know how to write nonfiction well, so I started reading nonfiction by other writers and studying writing craft. I love nonfiction as a genre now, and I deeply appreciate all the brave writers who've bared their lives and inner worlds on the page. It has helped me feel less alone in this world and I hope my work does the same for others. Over the last decade and a half, I've slowly been writing this collection of nonfiction stories about the most difficult parts of my northern upbringing. Northern Girls: True Stories, is a collection of eight stand-alone nonfiction stories, some published in literary journals prior to their culmination in this book.”

Northern Girls

It is true, you were complicated, and you killed small animals, but then, so did I.

Growing up, there was always someone waiting in line to love my mother, and after my parents divorced when I was two years old, your father took his turn. I had a great deal of prejudice against you before we even met, and I mistreated you the first years we were forced to live in the same home. Before you arrived, my mother asked our young teenage babysitter to help prepare my siblings and me for your arrival, but with her limited understanding of blended families, our babysitter told us that adopted girls, like you, were very angry, and that in a fit of rage you might try to scratch our eyes out.

Soon after your father married my mother, he started yelling at us, spanking us at random, pushing my mother up against the wall, and slapping her in the face while she screamed. Their brief cycle of love, violence, and marriage came to a quick end. In one last agreed course of action, your father and my mother planned his exit while my siblings and I were on visitation at our real father’s house. Over a weekend, all evidence of your father vanished as he moved out of our house. When we returned, the living room felt especially naked—he had contributed a soft, comfortable sofa set to the marriage, and now he’d have it all for himself. What was worse, I could not see you when I walked in.

I had no claim on you because you’d come to live with us through him, but my mother, who had a marbling of tenderness throughout her broken and toughened heart, took me in her arms and said, “Britt stayed with us; we knew it wouldn’t be fair to separate you two.” Even though we remained family, it must have been hard for you being the only adopted one. It must have been hard to hear our mother say so matter-of-factly throughout your life, “I don’t like Britt.”

After your father left, you and I watched a string of male lovers, as well as one mysterious woman whom we were told to call Cookie, come through our house. They’d all sit around our table, share our meals, care deeply for our mother, and take up her precious time. And then all of a sudden, there was Joe. He was young, and handsome.

Things moved fast, and caught up in the whirlwind of love, the Great Getaway was set in motion. We would sell our house in the south, and move to the north. We’d exchange thick Steeltown air for conifer-filtered breaths.

After we moved into a house with some forested acreage, you took to the woods so often, walking alone. I never joined you because Mom had made it perfectly clear that we were to keep watch for bears, wolves, fox, and ticks, not to mention potential lusty men.

Northern Girls Book Tour Dates:

Sunday, May 3rd, 2026
at Mahtay Café and Lounge from 4 - 6 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Address: 241 St. Paul Street, St. Catharines, Ontario.

Wednesday, May 6th, 2026
at the Rittenhouse Library from 6:30 - 7:30 pm.
An “In Conversation” event with Kelly Spence!
Address: 4080 John Charles Blvd, Vineland, Ontario

Sunday, June 7, 2026
Niagara-on-the-Lake Book Expo from 11 am - 4 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Address: 14 Anderson Lane, Niagara On The Lake, Ontario

Sunday, June 28th, 2026
Chapters, Fairview Mall, from 12 - 4 pm.
Book Signing and Open Conversation!
Where: 285 Geneva St, St. Catharines, Ontario

About the Author

Michelle Willms holds a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and a Bachelor of Social Work from McMaster University, and a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of British Columbia. Her writing has appeared in multiple literary journals, as well as the anthology This Side of the Divide: Stories of the American West (Baobab Press). She is the 2021/2022 recipient of the Norman L. Rothstein Memorial Scholarship, awarded by the Smith Family Foundation on the recommendation of the Department of Creative Writing. Michelle and her family live in Southern Ontario, Canada, as settlers on the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Ojibway/Chippewa, and Haudenosaunee peoples.

Alex Bertram’s Unequivocal Magic traces the journey of Sarah Bernhardt’s 1910 portrait, and along the way she includes a history of photography and phenomenology. Although Bernhardt may be the protagonist of this story, she shares the stage with her Australian photographer H. Walter Barnett, as well as with Bertram herself who engages in dialogue with her subjects. Her French phenomenology not only appears in her subjective experience as narrator but also derives from such philosophers as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, and John Berger. That concatenation of Bertram, Barnett, and Bernhardt joins with all the other B’s in a multi-frame approach.

Her “Preface” indicates that this book has its origin in a creative writing doctorate: “My reasons for choosing this portrait and all the pictures in the book were very much based on instinct. I trusted my first impressions and chose accordingly…. I adopted a reflexive first-person account.” Fortunately, her instincts and impressions are sound and stimulating. She begins in Barnett’s studio in London, 1910, and in her daydreams and quest she identifies with A.S. Byatt’s Roland in Possession. Exploring the history of Knightsbridge, she uncovers the River Westbourne, a tributary of the Thames and one of London’s lost rivers. Barnett’s glass studio leads to a discussion of the history of glass linked to the development of photography, the repeal of window taxes, the rise of the railway, and the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851.

Bertram bolsters her historic perspective with Isobel Armstrong’s scholarly book, Victorian Glassworlds, Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880. She acknowledges Armstrong in her “Bibliographic Essay” which further emphasizes her phenomenological approach: “In works of creative nonfiction, such as this, the evidence of the creative process is built into the narrative through the use of natural language and the author’s self-aware point of view.” Although the author’s natural language and self-awareness are evident in her text, one wonders what unnatural language would look like. To justify her methodology, she adopts “the approach used by one of her sources, the Cherokee scholar David Heath Justice, “in their work Why Indigenous Literature Matters.” That approach is more mindful, ethical, and inclusive in its citational practice, as opposed to a more traditional bibliographic entry with its objective status.

In other words, Bertram takes her reader along for the ride at every stage of her exploration. Immersing herself and her reader in her London quest, she walks and catches her reflection in a shop window. “But I also see that I am not the only one there; the cyclist behind me and a woman with an umbrella are present too. All our images, and those before us, momentarily collide to form an intricate collage.” Unequivocal Magic may be an intimate and intricate collage of Bernhardt, Barnett, and Bertram in which the actress’s portrait forms a palimpsest between past and present where actress, photographer, and writer journey phenomenologically. This experiential quest includes French sources mentioned above as well as Francis Ponge.

So much about Bernhardt is elusive, and photos reflect that elusiveness. In the first one around 1880 she is in a travelling costume, her left hand clasping a belt while her right holds a handkerchief. Her hair stands high, her face alluring and evasive, distant even in a close-up, for the actress and her roles are inseparable. Bertram frames her in a historic context of Proust and Bergson. Of her travels the actress writes: “I cling for a second to what, and then I fling myself headlong into what is to be…. I adore what is to be without ever seeking to know about it.” She suffers from stage fright. Another portrait in London’s National Portrait Gallery shows her seated, her head tilted in bright light with a wistful gaze, her hand clutching the chair, a floral pattern shielding her torso.

Bertram also includes Sir Joshua Reynolds’ eighteenth-century painting, “Sarah Siddon as the Tragic Muse,” before commenting on Bernhardt’s playing the role of Hamlet. She also includes a section on Ethel Arnold who became Barnett’s business partner in 1914 and travelled to St. Louis, Missouri to lecture on women’s suffrage. In addition, there is a section on Josephine Baker. In passing, we also learn that German troops burned books in Louvain, Belgium as early as 1914. The Japanese art of kintsugi also makes its way into these pages. All in all, Bertram presents her reader with an unequivocal kind of magic before she disappears into the crowd like so many latter-day flâneurs of myth and optical illusions.

About the Author

Alex Bertram is a writer and educator. She has worked for trade and academic publishers in Melbourne and London and holds a PhD in Creative Writing. Alex lives in Victoria, BC, and works as a writing instructor at the University of Victoria and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.

He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Wilfrid Laurier University Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 28 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 216 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 177112718X

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771127189

John Wall Barger is the author of six previous collections of poems and one collection of essays. He lives in Vermont and lectures in the Writing Program at Dartmouth College.

John and I met to discuss his seventh book of poems, Resurrection Pie (LSU Press, 2026), between publication day and a North American tour (dates listed below). Edited with permission, this conversation took place March 19, 2026.

The Grace of a Monday Evening

At home my wife was chopping salad, talking to herself, something about tectonic plates that rive continents and make oceans. I just came out with it. “I banged Grace,” I said, “in the baptismal font.”

My wife spun. “You mean grace,” she said, “as in gratia, from Latin, meaning good will, gratitude?”

“Yes! Grace,” I cried, “as in absolution, mercy for a life well lived.”

She held me in her arms. The sun was setting. We stood trembling in the jonquil light. We were ecstatic. She whispered in my ear: “The sun! The sun! It’s not even sinking below the rooftops, as it seems to be.”

“It’s stationary!” I yelled, perhaps too loud.

“It’s us that fly,” she said, holding my arms as if I might float off.

“Glued,” I said, “to this massive spinning rock, hurtling through space.”

“It’s unthinkable!” she said.

We kissed like babies.

Kevin Andrew Heslop: So, I wanted to start with “The Grace of a Monday Evening” because, by this point, about thirty pages in, the delight I was taking in the book, which feels fully mature and uncompromisingly self-possessed, inflected and intensified and there was a sense the book was giving itself a kind of permission and that anything that would come next would feel inevitable.

John Wall Barger: I don’t know if you do it this way, but for me, each book I put together as a kind of vibe: it’s more based on that than form or content. My book Smog Mother was made up of poems that happened in Asia, but besides that, most of my books are held together with a kind of vibe.

I was working for a while on prose poems which I was calling Amateur Escapologists. I loved that book, but it wasn’t quite working; it grew into a stitched-together story of human evolution, which then grew into this book. “Grace on a Monday Morning,” which used to be called “Grace Canticle,” is one of those—emblematic of a kind of human every-story with a kind ecstatic absurd vibe.

I’d been thinking about film and Yorgos Lanthimos’s early films in Greece—Dogtooth and Alps—that happen in a parallel reality: it looks like our reality but some of the rules seem to be different. What are those rules? Poems can do that, too. Poems that occur parallel to our world, a dream-space that comments on our world, but it isn’t exactly our world.

These poems all reach for a kind of ecstatic language, a language parallel to Buddhism, describing the Bardo (for example) but it’s a porn actor. To me it’s always some fool in the Bardo. That’s what those poems should be called, Fool in the Bardo.

I’m thinking of the fool in the Bardo and it feels like a line from the end of “Border Ballad:”

I look and look between the slats. I wake 
		to the sound of mosquitoes

	electrocuted on the aluminum Pest-Rid machine.

This feels like an ancient poet who’s plopped into a very contemporary, brutal world he renders as he would render his environment of the past.

Beautiful. Yeah. When I got Shane McCrae’s blurb back, for Resurrection Pie, I was mystified but then I realized I think he’s describing something that I didn’t really understand about my own poems.

He says, “Again and again one reaches the end of the poem only to discover the floor has disappeared from beneath one’s feet.”

I was like, Oh, that’s interesting.

I remember telling a friend years ago that I want every poem to be an amnesiac at dusk, from that perspective. And he said, “You should call your book The Amnesiac at Dusk.”

I think that was the early incarnation of Amateur Escapologists.

It’s how I feel in my body while walking, especially at dusk, during the magical hours of the day. It’s July and it’s 8:20pm. You’re walking and the air is just starting to shift. Something about that hour feels like McCrae’s words: all of a sudden the floor’s disappeared from beneath your feet and everything is permissible. To me, this entire book is coming from that place. Things are so, so, so fucked up in the world, but there is this ecstatic lens, still.

Why 8:20 rather than 8:30?

Maybe it’s just a kind of private joke between my mother and me, but 8:20 has always seemed like a kind of charmed time. A poem like “Twilight in the English Department” could only happen at 8:20pm:

The student stepped in without a word and sat bolt-upright, just as I was sitting, across the swamp of papers, nodding as I did, mirroring each of my gestures. “Welcome, my boy,” I said. “Excuse my labyrinthine chamber of—” 
“Please sir!” he said. “I’ve lost something crucial.” 
I assumed he was referring to the “F” I’d awarded him for his last essay. “What’s wrong?” I said, leaning back in my chair, slow. 
He, too, leaned back. “My son,” he said, “doesn’t know me.” We sat in silence, staring at each other in the darkening office. 
“Father!” I shouted. 

Do you feel like the poems have always been in a kind of dialogue with your mother? Maybe?

My mother is my greatest fan [chuckling] and my greatest supporter by far. But maybe it’s common for us poets to have one super-fan in the house? If we’re lucky. My mother is my greatest fan, and I’m an only child. For a long time, she was my first reader, too. And maybe my mother’s brain is a bit similar to mine. We both have a similar perceptual system, I think, making logical jumps, some kind of ADHD in common that makes communication between us simple.

You might say, spontaneously, “Toronto is a feral child” and she’ll say “Ex—That’s exactly what it is.”

[Laughs] Yes, that line from “How I Became a Sleepwalker.” You’ve read the book closely! That’s a crucial question: when something comes into your head, who can you say it to, who won’t judge you? Who can we share these weird thoughts with? For me as a poet, I can share them with a reader. I can follow that irrational metaphor into that place, into—I’m not saying I’m Paul Celan, but—into the Paul Celan place. Into the—

—Van Gogh place?

Into the deep Van Gogh place, yeah. I don’t claim that I am those people but in the way that art all goes toward the same place. To me this is crucial. “Toronto is a feral child” is a link between the two worlds: the conscious world of I have to the go the bank and the surreal world of “today I banged grace” which includes the forgiveness of the universe that happens in that poem. “Toronto is a feral child” is a bridge.

When we have an irrational thought that invites us deep into ourselves, what do we do? Do we lock it away? Do we think that it’s bad? Do we not share it with others? Or do we tell our mother? Do we write a poem about it? Do we talk about it to our friend Kevin who’s in Brazil, for fuck’s sakes? Maybe he can help us to lift it into the light.

Maybe she gave you a kind of permission that then the abstract reader would give you.

She definitely gave me permission. My dad did too, but he doesn’t exactly speak that language so he couldn’t really follow me. If I said, “Toronto is a feral child,” my dad would be supportive. He’d be like, “That’s neat. What are you going to do with that?” But my mother would be like, “Yes!” and enter with me under the water of that image.

That’s great. So, maybe as a consequence of my age, I’m beginning to look for some kind of totalizing explanation of things—it’s a very bad habit, but—I have been recently enchanted by a mammoth work called The Master and His Emissary, a kind of retrospective cultural analysis of the preference for the different kinds of thoughts or perceptions or consciousnesses that the left as opposed to the right hemisphere can produce, a study of the way that the world now so profoundly prefers the operations of the left hemisphere and logic and an ability to separate and categorize things from one another. I feel like your work is partaking of the recalibration of the hemispheres insofar as you’re working with logic but from a sort of right-brain relational, atemporal place. And I wonder: how do you discern the difference or boundary between the comprehensibly illogical and the incomprehensibly illogical?

What I’m trying to do is, partly, something that cracked open for me almost twenty years ago when I started reading James Tate: the sense of a poem as having a kind of entryway that invites a reader in. I think of it like an architectural façade over a New York City building that says “MARKET” and there’s a big doorway and you can see there are some fruit stands on the inside and you’re like, Oh, this is a market. And it looks like a normal market and you go in and then it’s not a market: those aren’t fruit, those are human organs on a table.

Yeah. That’s you.

You know? And then the fruit cellar starts to speak riddles or incantations. Sometimes I feel like I cater too much to a reader because I want the reader to stay in the poem. A poem is a funhouse at a fair: there’s a conveyor belt that carries you all the way through.

Certain poets will let you get lost. I respect that also, and maybe I do that sometimes: “Okay, fuck you, reader. This is my brain. This is my perceptual system, and I’m just going to bombard you.”

I think a lot about the reader, not that that implies some kind of big empathy on my part—I don’t mean that—or that I’m compromising my own perceptual system. I just think, How can I get the reader into this weird funhouse?

The façade of the poem—the “MARKET”—tells a little white lie, implying that you’re entering a space that is left-brain. Here, it promises, is a left-brain space: maybe like a memoir or a non-fiction essay. It’s a space you’ll recognize. Relax! Here’s this couple. She’s cutting vegetables. Everything is normal. But then once you’re inside of the poem, the conveyor belt of the funhouse yanks you in, and you’re like, “Oh, shit! I’m actually in this other space.”

So there’s a bit of sorcery involved, a bit of trickery in the craft. Some poets who I admire write only sonnets. They’re obsessed with the octave and the sestet. They’re obsessed with that volta after the eight lines. They spend their whole life on that hinge.

I’m obsessed with the theatre of the reader’s brain: getting the reader into a space and then immersing them into that Lanthimos doubleness of “it sure looks like our world but something else is happening.” Or David Lynch is maybe even a better example: “Oh, shit, Kyle MacLaughlin found an ear!” To me this moment in Blue Velvet where Kyle MacLaughlin finds the ear is what I’m trying to do in every poem. It looks like a normal summer day in Lumberton and then you find a fucking ear, and the ear leads you into the funhouse where—ready or not—the demon Dennis Hopper is waiting for you.

Given you mentioned banking, the market, and cutting vegetables as facades, I wonder whether you feel consumption is the mundanity that we all live in, that you’re inviting people beyond mere consumption to a food more nourishing than that.

Yeah, I am responding to capitalism specifically. We’re the fish in water, who can’t see the water, and the water is consumer capitalism. I mentioned the bank because, to me, money issues are jarring. They rupture my reverie [chuckling]. Like taxes. Even the word taxes: I can’t even use the word taxes in a file on my computer because it is just too upsetting [laughs].

I am writing disruptions of consumer capitalism. To me, poems and art have the opportunity of gently shaking the fish bowl so that the water becomes visible. That I like.

Critical thinking does a similar thing, or can. I love Roland Barthes. I think Barthes might agree (maybe?) that if we can articulate the lens that has been normalized around us, we take back a little bit of agency. It’s like, “Oh, I have choices here. This is not necessarily normal. There are other ways to think about this.” To be stuck without a bridge away from left-brain thinking would be very constricting. It feels like a little closet.

There’s an elsewhere to go to.

Isn’t that what art is trying to do? You mentioned Van Gogh. Van Gogh was like, “Look at that sky again.” With Starry Night he’s just going, “Look at that sky again.” I feel like that’s what all artists are doing. That grace poem is trying to say, “Your marriage is actually fucking potentially sublime. Look at that marriage again.”

I don’t think I’ve ever heard as concise or poignant a tribute to Van Gogh’s body of work as “look at that sky again.”

Look at those sunflowers again.

Those sunflowers you think you know as sunflowers.

You mentioned our entering into stages of development where we become dependent on classification. As artists, I feel like we’re trying to bust those open. On Twitter it’s so often just people violently responding to other people having classified or indexed each other. Can’t we fuck this up somehow?

The perennial friction between indices.

Yeah. By the way, Kevin, this is a great way to wake up. I’m just waking up now. Can we have an interview every morning of my life?

8:20am.

I’ll meet you at 8:20 every day for the rest of my life. I don’t know what you’re up to, but ...

John is currently on tour through the following locations:

USA

April 8: Philadelphia, PA (Fergie’s, Moonstone), 7pm
April 11: Rockville, MD (Beltway Editions), 6pm
April 12: Baltimore, MD (Ivy Bookshop, Hot L), 4pm
April 15. NYC (Quantam Age Poetry), 6:15pm
April 20: Birmingham, AL (O’Neal Library), 6:30pm
April 21: Birmingham, AL (film intro) TBA
April 23: Roanoke, VA (Big Lit), 6:30pm
April 30: Hanover, NH (Dartmouth), 6pm

CANADA

May 3: Toronto (Ben McNally Books), 5pm
May 4: Kingston (Novel Idea), 6pm
May 5: Kingston (Workshop) TBA
May 6: Montreal (Argo Bookshop), 5pm
May 11: Halifax (Cafe Cempoal), 6pm
May 14: Fredericton (Westminster Bookmark), 2pm
May 18: Edmonton TBA
May 19: Calgary TBA
May 20: Calgary

To keep apprised of his tour and future work, follow @johnwallbarger.

About the Interviewer

Kevin Andrew Heslop (b. 1992, London, Canada) is a theatre-trained filmmaker and the author, most recently, of a non-fiction debut, The Writing on the Wind’s Wall: Dialogues About ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ (Guernica Editions, 2026), as well as a forthcoming sophomore poetry collection, here lies the refugee breather who drank a bowl of elsewhere (Biblioasis, 2027). He lives abroad.

Exciting news: Our short fiction section is really coming together! We’re excited to be publishing “Riot at Legion No. 9” by the critically acclaimed Sarah Mintz, author of NORMA and handwringers. Stay tuned!

Do you have a story you want to send us?

The Seaboard Review of Books is launching a monthly fiction department, and we’re looking for submissions from new, emerging, and established writers from around the world. All genres are welcome, so long as the stories are driven by character, theme, and language—which you can interpret however you like. We’re looking for stories no longer than 4,000 words, and this first call will be open until May 29, 2026.

Unfortunately, we don’t have the budget to pay writers at this time, but we promise to give you a warm and helpful editing experience, and we’ll promote your work like we wrote it ourselves. Our response time will be between one to three months from the close of the submissions period.

Send your stories (and any questions) to seaboardfiction@gmail.com. Include a cover letter with a short bio outlining any past publications, and send files that are compatible with Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx, etc.).

Simultaneous submissions are no problem as long as you let us know if your work is accepted somewhere else.

Thanks!

James M Fisher, Editor-in-Chief

In this issue:

• The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston (Fiction)

• The Usual Desire to Kill by Camilla Barnes (Fiction)

• Good Guys by Sharon Bala (Fiction)

• Hooked by Asako Yuzuki (Fiction)

• Rum Diary: Canada, Alcoholism, and the Colonial Sweep (Non-Fiction)

• Interview with Naomi MacKinnon, an Independent Bookstore Owner

Thanks for reading this issue of The Seaboard Review of Books!

James M. Fisher, editor-in-chief

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Fiction

Non-Fiction

Interview

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Not until about two-thirds of the way through Liz Johnston’s debut novel do we find an explanation of her title: “She’d learned the concept of the fall-down effect in school, how timber production declined as the old growth was depleted – logged.” The character in question here is Sylvia, one of three children named after a connection to nature in British Columbia: Sylvia in her sylvan setting, her brother River, and Fern the middle child in this somewhat dysfunctional family. Each member of the family is engaged in the ecosystem of Johnston’s roman à thèse. “Whatever grew back would not be equal to what had been lost.”

From the outset The Fall-Down Effect oscillates between entropy and empathy for family and forest. The novel is structured around three years – 1989, 2001, 2020 – each introduced by a telling epigraph. The first epigraph belongs to Adrienne Rich who focusses on forestry and empathy: “Because you still listen, because in times like these to have you listen at all, it’s necessary to talk about trees.” In pleasurable prose Johnston talks about trees from her opening sentence: “Fern pressed her body into the bark.” A symbiotic relationship between nature and character tills the novel, despite the forces that stand in the way. This young tree-hugger appears to prop up any fall-down effect: “Amid the spare lower branches, she’d found a perfect outline for her seven-year-old frame, no limbs or knobs sticking out where her head and shoulders wanted to go.” This chameleon camouflaging foreshadows Fern’s disappearing act later in the novel. Oscillating among each member of the family, the novel’s outline frames character and setting in an ecological drama.

The youngest of the three siblings, Fern is also the most politically active, following in the footsteps of her mother, Lynn. She eventually sets fire to the local mill and disappears for decades in the United States. “The hemlock welcomed her” – as if this ominous tree prepares her for her destructive activism. In their game of hide-and-seek Sylvia and River call out to her, but Fern remains camouflaged, even as she later loses her identity to become Di, goddess of the hunt. When the small child wets herself in the woods, her older sister reassures her: “We can fix everything before Mom or Dad comes home.” In this first fall-down effect, the children try to repair the world around them. Sylvia knows that “she wasn’t a free-floating atom. Her family was a molecule, and she was bound to every member.”

Although the novel’s events turn around the turn of the twenty-first century, there is an epic backdrop surrounding contemporary life in British Columbia’s timeless forest. “River travelled softly along the boundary line between sleep and waking.” In this semiconscious state he invokes Dante’s epic: “he was also wandering through a deep dark wood, looking for Fern.” This prepares the way for Lynn and her children chaining themselves together to block logging trucks. After this incident Constable Stott addresses the family: “We can’t have a five-year-old running around.” Johnston’s narrative wanders between woods and words; between forestry and their car (Maeve), which “felt like an animal, a lumbering, legged creature;” and between padlock and Mom twisting on her seat “so she could lock eyes with each of them in turn.” The narrator locks eyes on each character in turn through a wood darkly. The family is forced to give up home schooling, and the children enter the local school with varying degrees of success and fall-down effects in their bildungsroman. Their transition from home to school is marked by trees: “As they got closer to town, the trees stopped being forest and started being decoration.”

Lynn and Tom eventually divorce, as she finds love with a woman instead. Part 2 jumps to 2001 when Fern detonates five homemade bombs at the local mill and sets it ablaze. She then leaves for the United States where she disappears. Part 3 skips to 2020 when the family members gather but maintain distance during Covid. B.C. forest fires also plague their lives. The novel ends with Fern composing a postcard to River. “She wanted to explain everything, but she could never explain.” The novel instead does most of the explaining.

About the Author

LIZ JOHNSTON grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Cardiff Review. Johnston is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.

About the Reviewer

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English (Université de Sherbrooke). He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published extensively on Victorian, Canadian, and American Jewish literature.

He has published 250 essays and reviews in books and journals across Canada, the United States, and Europe.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Book*hug Press

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ April 21 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 352 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771669624

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771669627

Claire Talbot has spent most of her career working in reputation management for large corporations. She has recently swapped this soulless work, which her ex-husband criticizes her for, for a small NGO where she can put her talents to use. The NGO, started by former musician turned philanthropist, Crispin St. Onge, whom Claire first met when she was a starry-eyed 15-year-old.

Crispin is the face, name, and driving force of the NGO. Children of the World is on the brink of financial ruin when Clair is contacted by an A-list celebrity, Dallas Hayden, interested in volunteering at one of the organization’s orphanages. In Santa Rosa, Dallas is taken into the mountains on a rescue mission where she and an employee from the orphanage find an infant suffering from an ear infection, club feet, and possibly malnutrition. Dallas and the employee return to the orphanage with the child, and Dallas becomes instrumental in nursing the infant back to health. After several days, Dallas wants to adopt the baby even though she has living parents and siblings. Dallas promises a hefty donation to the charity, and they facilitate initial negotiations with the parents via their manager, Lucca. The promised donation is a massive sum that will rescue Children of the World from the brink of collapse and help them reinstate their services in other countries.

A tenacious reporter familiar with religious missionary work writes a human-interest piece on the organization’s founder and becomes curious. Emmanuelle begins to dig, and all is not what it seems. Some project claims have been overstated, and through her investigation, she uncovers a crime. As Emmanuelle gets closer to exposing the crime, charity employees shrink from the responsibility they have to protect the people they are there to help. Fingers begin to point, looking for the person inside the charity guilty of betrayal. As the characters navigate the crisis, they discover ugly truths about their principles. The uncovered crime ultimately leads to the organization’s demise, while individuals strive to protect their reputations through damage control.

Good Guys is an unflinching examination of the world of global charitable work. Told from multiple points of view and jumping from the charitable headquarters in Toronto to the charity’s operations in Central America, the motivations, successes, and failures of the charity are examined. It raises questions about the power dynamics of philanthropy in impoverished countries. The strength of the novel is in the sharp writing, and it represents all sides and does not shy away from its critique of the do-gooders. A propulsive story, no sides are taken; readers will be left with a satisfying sense of this complex tale. This was a great read, and I highly recommend it.

About the Author

Sharon Bala’s bestselling debut novel, The Boat People (2018), won the Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction and the Newfoundland and Labrador Award for fiction, was a finalist for Canada Reads, the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and was longlisted for the Aspen Woods Literary Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. It has been translated into four languages. In 2017, Sharon Won the Writers’ Trust/McClelland & Stewart Journey Prize. She lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland, where she is the Creative Non-Fiction Editor at Riddle Fence.

About the Reviewer

Pamela Sinclair is a writer and lifelong reader. She enjoys reading multiple genres, both fiction and nonfiction. She lives in Halifax, NS, with her husband, daughter, and a grumpy grey cat named Ben. Pamela is currently working on her first novel.

Book Details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ McClelland & Stewart

• Publication date ‏ : ‎ Jan. 20 2026

• Language ‏ : ‎ English

• Print length ‏ : ‎ 376 pages

• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0771005237

• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0771005237

Saturday, April 25th, 2026 is Independent Bookstore Day in Canada, so we thought the best way to celebrate —other than buying books from one— is to interview a bookshop owner. One of the newest stores in the Maritime provinces is The Happy Duck Bookshop & Readery in Truro, Nova Scotia. It is owned and operated by Naomi MacKinnon, who is no stranger to the Atlantic Canada literary scene. Let’s get acquainted!

James: Naomi, it’s so great to finally connect, even if it’s just through this interview! I’ve been following your blog, Consumed by Ink, for quite some time now. It’s difficult to believe we’ve never met in person!

I remember back in 2013/2014 when I was contemplating starting a book review blog. I happened upon your site during my search for book review platforms, and I was immediately drawn to it because of its focus on Atlantic Canadian books and authors. Since I was planning to highlight authors from New Brunswick, your blog felt like the perfect inspiration for me. That’s how The Miramichi Reader was born, which I had the pleasure of running as the owner and editor-in-chief until 2024. I just wanted to share how much your site meant to me and how it sparked my journey!

Naomi: Thank you for sharing that with me! I too cannot believe we still haven’t met – it feels like we have. I have so admired how you’ve taken your blog and made it into a review site (twice!) featuring so many authors and reviewers. Well done! And I’m so pleased to be even just a small part of it. 😊

Tell us how and when you came to set up Consumed by Ink.

I started Consumed by Ink when I was still at home with my kids. I loved being a stay-at-home mom, but I was seriously starting to crave more intellectual stimulation. I had been reading more Canadian books and was starting to get excited about Atlantic Canadian books, but had few people to talk to about it. I created CBI to share my thoughts about the books I was reading. I didn’t know if anyone would read my thoughts, but it felt good to get them down anyway, even if it was just for myself. I didn’t know anything about blogging when I started—I bought myself a copy of “Blogging for Dummies”--how wonderful when I discovered the welcoming world of book blogs! It was so great to connect with other readers and book lovers from here and around the world. Including you!

James: Now, fast-forward to 2025, and you still have the site going strong, but now there’s an actual brick & mortar bookshop, THE HAPPY DUCK Bookshop & Readery, in your hometown of Truro, Nova Scotia. Every ardent book reader has thought of opening their own bookshop, so I’m sure you’ve thought of doing the same for some time. Please tell us how that thought went from a dream to reality.

I still can’t quite believe I did it. I’ve been talking about it for years. I really did just take a leap of faith, but there was also a lot of lead-up that made this time in my life the right time to go for it. I have three kids who are mostly grown now, and I didn’t want them to have spent half their lives hearing me talk about a bookstore just to watch me not try it. How disappointing that would be.

I also have to give a lot of credit to my job at the Truro Library and the fantastic people who work there. Having that experience really helped me feel confident in my ability to do this thing. Lastly, a space opened up that felt right and I knew it was “now or never.” I tried not to scare myself away by thinking about it too much, and once I signed the lease, there was no going back. I had the key on October 1^st and we opened Oct. 29^th. I knew I had to open as soon as possible, so I spent all my waking hours working at the shop to get it ready. I couldn’t have done it so quickly without my kids – they helped me so much with painting, putting together shelves, inventorying the books, and just generally having a lot of energy. My kids are THE BEST. I am so lucky to have them. I also had help from family and friends. It would have been much more challenging to have done this alone.

What was the most difficult aspect of starting a business? Does the province of Nova Scotia assist small business owners in any way? Did you seek any monetary assistance?

I have been very fortunate not to have to seek outside financial assistance; we managed to borrow from ourselves. It helped that The Happy Duck is primarily a used bookstore, so inventory was much less expensive than needing all new books. I do have a small ‘new book’ section, though, that has grown since opening.

The most difficult thing was overcoming the fear. I had to just do stuff and not think about it too much. For me, it wasn’t so much the fear of failure (if I fail, I have no regrets!), it was more a fear of getting myself in too deep and not being able to keep up, and—as a huge introvert--fear of putting myself out there. Some days are still scary. Lol

(Something I didn’t anticipate was finding it difficult to take people’s money. I wish I could just hand the books over for free!)

Another very difficult thing was telling the library that I was leaving. I still miss my library people every day. But I see them once a week when I pick up my holds – I don’t know who I’d be without a stack of library books in my house.

How have publishers and authors responded to your bookstore?

Everyone in the literary community have been so supportive. All the authors I’ve met through reviewing and volunteering on boards have made a huge effort to congratulate me and many have even made the trek to Truro to say hello, see the shop, and sign books. And I have to give a shout-out to Nimbus Publishing, who have made ordering books a friendly and painless experience. (Nimbus distributes the books for other publishers, as well, like Pottersfield Press, Acorn Press, Bouton d’or Acadie, Breton Books, and Nevermore Press.)

There have also been many self-published authors living in the area who have found a spot on my shelves for their books.

I would like to take the opportunity here to give an extra-special thanks to Sheree Fitch and Sarah Emsley (author of The Austens) who came to my store for the grand opening weekend, even though they knew I was still too new to attract many visitors. They came to support me and I am so grateful to them for that. Another special thank you goes to Lisa Doucet at Woozles, a children’s bookstore in Halifax; she has taken the time to coach me through some aspects of book selling.

Since then, I have had the privilege of meeting virtually with other booksellers and bookstore owners across the Atlantic provinces, and they have all been so friendly and supportive.

I thought I was in it for the books, but the people might be an even greater reward!

How have the residents of Truro responded? Is it a reading community?

Every community is a reading community – you just have to figure out what they’re looking for! I knew Truro was a reading community from working at the library, but what I didn’t fully realize was how supportive Truro is of local authors and local businesses. Many people have made a point to get books through me whenever possible rather than order online, and that makes my heart happy. Thank you, Truro! 😊

I also have to say how generous people have been to share the news of my shop on social media and by word of mouth.

And, of course, I have to take the chance here to thank all my friends, new and old, for cheering me on, as well as people I’ve met since setting up my shop and all the customers who’ve come into the store since I opened. I have some regular customers who I’ve been getting to know, and that’s been the absolute best. Again, I got into it for the love of books, but it’s the people who make it really special.

Have you any interesting experiences? Does a particular one stand out?

Almost every person who walks through the door offers an interesting experience. I get to hear about the books they have loved, the books they are reading now, and the books they are looking for. I also get to learn about books and genres I haven’t read myself and get recommendations from my customers. What could be more interesting than that?

I’ve been getting to know some of the other independent bookstores around, like NovelTea Bookstore & Gifts (also in Truro!), Pages & Pieces in Elmsdale, The Fluffy Cat Bookstore in Lower Sackville, and a brand new one in Tatamagouche called Once Upon a Bookshoppe. We’ve got to stick together and make Nova Scotia a destination for book lovers!

If you had to do anything different, what would that be?

This is a hard question. It might still be too soon for me to know the answer to this one. One thing I will say is that there is a lot more to learn about the book selling world than I thought, and my advice to anyone just getting started would be to take it slow. Don’t try to jump in and do everything all at once, even if you want to, because it’s a lot. I’m still in the process of figuring things out (often the hard way!): What types of books should I be carrying? How many new books versus used books? What else should I be offering at the store? What types of events is it feasible for me to hold? How do I want to use social media? How do I want to handle book donations? Do I just close shop when I get sick or take time off? At what point will it be feasible for me to hire someone? And, probably the biggest one, how can I strike the ideal work/life balance as the sole operator of a small business?

What does the future look like for The Happy Duck?

I want people to know they can just pop in and say hello, chat about books, or sit for a while in the Readery. I would like it to be a place where authors can come to interact with readers, and where readers can interact with authors and other readers.

But, right now, the main goal is to have the privilege of staying open to provide books for people and homes for books. Most of the shop is dedicated to used books, because I believe in re-using as much as possible and making good books more affordable. I would like to help contribute to a world with more reading and less scrolling.

Thanks for the great questions, Jim! Happy Reading! 😊

Contact:

The Happy Duck Bookstore & Readery
586 PRINCE ST. TRURO, NOVA SCOTIA
(902) 814-7726
the.happy.duck@outlook.com