Jane Eaton Hamilton (Vancouver) “I am a dyke, a visual artist, a writer who longs for the sentences I read to be painted instead of typed. Can I tell you how excited I was when a friend recommended the beautifully composed The Last Nude, by Ellis Avery? This is a novel about the nature of art...
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...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Writer, filmmaker, and performance artist Amber Dawn has released a new collection of poems this year, titled Where the Words End and My Body Begins. Her previous works, Sub Rosa and How Poetry Saved My Life: A Hustler’s Memoir, have garnered wide acclaim and...
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...
Interview by Matthew Walsh Plenitude Magazine has established a writing award for up and coming queer voices called the Emerging Writer Mentorship Award. The award alternates each year between poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, and the recipient works with an established writer on a...
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...
Interview by Nancy Jo Cullen Tamai Kobayashi is the 2014 winner of the Writer’s Trust of Canada’s Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBT Emerging Writer. She is the author of the novel Prairie Ostrich, published this spring by Goose Lane Press and two short story collections, Quixotic Erotic (Arsenal Pulp...
Interview by Leah Horlick A native of Los Angeles, SD Holman is a photo-based artist and Artistic Director of The Queer Arts Festival, an artist-run three-week, multidisciplinary arts festival in Vancouver, Canada. Recipient of the 2014 YWCA Women of Distinction Award in Arts and Culture, one of...
Interview by Rachna Contractor Vivek Shraya is a Toronto-based artist working in the media of music, performance, literature and film. His Lambda Literary Award-nominated collection of short stories, God Loves Hair, has recently been re-published. On May 5th he launches a new video project, Holy...
Interview by Shannon Webb-Campbell Jane Byers is a poet that conjures mind, heart, and embodiment. Her stunning debut collection of poetry, Steeling Effects (Caitlin Press, 2014), is deeply queer, beautiful and expansive. Byers lives with her wife and two children in Nelson, British Columbia, where...
By Dorothy June Fraser Bitter Lamentations from Adam Wojtowicz on Vimeo. Adam Wojtowicz is a Vancouver-based artist who works in a variety of media. Over the past decade, he has been involved in the Vancouver film scene, as well as the larger Canadian entertainment industry. In his creative...
By Dorothy June Fraser Maureen Bradley likes making narrative film, because it’s difficult. Her history in film and video began with herself; she speaks about overcoming the gender barriers present in media at the time through teaching herself. Like many of us who aspire to learn the...
Alan Woo was born in England, came to Canada when he was a young boy and grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he still lives. He always wanted to be a writer, and gets his inspiration from his Chinese-Canadian heritage, friends and family, reading lots of books, going to live theatre...
Bo Luengsuraswat © 2006 Interview by Dorothy June Fraser Occidental Paradise is an experimental film that questions constructions of racialized and gendered lived experience. An early work of interdisciplinary artist Bo Luengsuraswat, this film pulls pop cultural references into the entanglement...
by Dorothy June Fraser Basin from davideo on Vimeo. David Geiss doffs his tweed cap as we exchange introductory hellos and sit down in a comfy corner of Swan’s Pub in downtown Victoria, BC, to discuss his latest works over a beer. Geiss, born in Saskatchewan and a relatively recent transplant to...
John Barton has published nine previous collections of award-winning poetry, six chapbooks, and two anthologies. He has won three Archibald Lampman Awards, a Patricia Hackett, an Ottawa Book Award, a CBC Literary Award and a National Magazine Award. Born and raised in Alberta, he worked as a...
Meet one of Plenitude’s Advisory Editorial Board members, Arleen Paré. Her latest novel, Leaving Now, is from Caitlin Press: In Leaving Now, Arleen Paré, winner of the 2008 Victoria Book Prize, weaves fable, prose and poetics to create a rich mosaic of conflicted motherhood. Set in the...
I’d like to introduce you to one of the contributors to Plenitude’s inaugural issue: 2012 Journey Prize nominee, Nancy Jo Cullen. Andrea Routley: You were recently nominated for the 2012 Journey Prize for your story, “Ashes.” Can you tell us about that experience...
