Alan Woo (Vancouver) “One of the most influential books for me as a gay Asian-Canadian writer has to be Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony. It tells a tale of what growing up in Chinatown Vancouver back in the 1930s and 1940s was like. “Told in three sections, the book splits up the narration...
Jane Byers (Nelson, BC) “Many years ago in Toronto, I had the pleasure of seeing Ann-Marie MacDonald and her mother on stage at Five Feminist Minutes. Her mother read tea leaves and Ms. MacDonald provided comic relief. Somewhere in the thick middle of Adult Onset, the lesbian protagonist...
Christopher DiRaddo (Montreal) “I first read Andrew Holleran at gay camp. This was back in the early naughts when about twenty queer friends and I would get together every Labour Day for a weekend of camping, revelry, and relaxation. Looking back, it still feels magical. It was on one of...
Andrew Binks (Vancouver) “One of my most memorable early influences as a novelist was Patrick Roscoe. When many people open a book and are hooked by plot (and, as writers, we are told to hook our audience with plot), I was, and still am hooked by prose. On the continuum from fancy to spare, I...
Kamal Al-Solaylee (Toronto) “I don’t remember how I got hold of Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots in Cairo of the mid-1980s. Perhaps my friend Omar, on whom I had an embarrassing crush in my early twenties, lent it to me. He was educated in the United States of America in the late 1970s and...
Deborah Ellis (Simcoe) “I continue to be impacted by From Anna, a novel by acclaimed Canadian children’s author Jean Little. She takes big topics — war, immigration, disabilities — and breaks them down into a story about an awkward girl trying to find her place in her family...
Shawn Syms (Toronto) “For me, queerness signifies difference, including an expansive notion of sexual difference, rather than a strictly limited notion of ‘gay identity.’ “Exploring — and exploding — the limits of sexual and social identities has long been part of the...
Arleen Paré (Victoria) “One of my favourite books is The True Story of Ida Johnson, a slim volume of exemplary Canadian fiction written by Alberta writer Sharon Riis and published in 1976. I read it years ago, twice. “I love the novel for its sharp exquisite prose and for its commitment...
Daniel Gawthrop (New Westminster) “Reading Alan Hollinghurst is a guilty pleasure on par with eating foie gras: you know you probably shouldn’t—the very idea seems decadent and passé, redolent of neocolonial tastes—but oh, how the finer notes linger on the palate. “Hollinghurst’s class...
Lydia Kwa (Vancouver) “I don’t remember exactly how I came across Adrienne Rich’s poetry, but when I read Dream of a Common Language while studying psychology at Queen’s University, and having just come out as a lesbian around that time, Rich’s earthy yet deeply philosophical poems gave...
Vivek Shraya (Toronto) “Brian Francis’ Fruit is one of best contemporary gay coming-of-age stories I’ve read. The protagonist Peter Paddington’s struggle to connect and understand his own body is painfully relatable for any teenager. “As an adult, I also found Peter’s self...
Proma Tagore (born in Kolkata; visitor on unceded Coast Salish Territories) “The first time I opened Lydia Kwa’s The Walking Boy it was a beautiful September afternoon in Vancouver, 2007. Redorangebrownyellow. Fallen leaves scattered on streets. Soft slant-wise sun, warm breeze, playing...
Dennis Denisoff (Toronto) “In 1994, I was struggling to suture a trepidatious yet bucolic vision of gay love that I’d developed while growing up in a BC lumber town with the cocky, experimental formalism of the Language Poetry scene. And then Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe entered the room...
Michael Harris (Toronto) “My writing career began around the time I came out. I was muddling through the first couple years of university. Discovering Edmund White at just that moment was, more than anything, like being given permission. I found, in his first auto-fiction novel, A Boy’s Own...
Tara-Michelle Ziniuk (Toronto) “I hope it goes without saying that there are so many books and writers and mentors that it’s near impossible to pick a favourite as that, a favourite. As someone who reads and writes poetry, there are not only books and authors that come to mind, but also...
Brett Josef Grubisic (Vancouver) “Sure, there’s memorable Christmas reading on my book shelves. For darkly comic, turn to Augusten Burroughs’ You Better Not Cry. And if he’s not exactly Dickens, David Sedaris’ Holidays on Ice is a new classic for a reason. “Better still: Derek...
Darren Greer (Halifax) “Like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers or William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Tennessee Williams’ experimental novel Moise and the World of Reason is a thinly disguised pan-dimensional portrait of the writer himself—a scathing...
Rachel Rose (Vancouver) “In Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity, Andrew Solomon’s quest is to explore those traits, whether acquired or inherent, that separate parents from children. In chapters such as “Deaf,” “Dwarf,” “Autism,” “Rape,” and “Prodigies,” Solomon...
John Miller (Toronto) “I was thrilled to hear that Ann-Marie MacDonald had a new novel coming out, her first in ten years. In 1996, I had been ruminating about beginning what would become my first novel, The Featherbed, but I lacked the courage to begin writing. Then I picked up Fall On Your...
Leah Horlick (Vancouver) “JackPine Press describes this gorgeous, hand-bound collection of poems from Adrienne Gruber as “a book that literally swings both ways”—how could you resist? “Featuring mythic and magical blue pencil illustrations by Zachari Logan, Intertidal Zones is a...
Matthew Hays (Montreal) “I have thoroughly enjoyed Chloé Griffin’s new book, Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, a fantastic, exhaustively-researched book about the work and life of the late great “child of suburban 1950s Maryland,” who John Waters freaks (and I count myself among them)...
Farzana Doctor (Toronto) “I’m thrilled to promote two unique contributions to Can-Lit and Queer-Lit released this past September. “Vivek Shraya’s first novel, She of the Mountains, is a must-read. Frankly, I’ve never seen bisexuality addressed quite like this; Shraya pairs a tender love...
RM Vaughan (Toronto) “I don’t care about the scandal Lynn Crosbie’s masterpiece Paul’s Case caused. The scandal, such as it was, began on an inept note – a Toronto Star columnist, I forget which Agony Auntie, proclaimed she was so offended by Crosbie’s novel that she wanted to slap Crosbie or...
Plenitude Magazine has been asking around, checking in far and wide with queer Canadian writers—poets, novelists, playwrights, comic makers, spinners of short stories, journalists, and whoever else comes to mind. We’ve been keen to discover the literature they’ve devoured and savoured, the books...
