Romeo, Romeo, Where Art Thou? Before. I wander through the women’s bookstore in Toronto. My eyes fall on a title, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I read the description, dip into the first chapter, and buy the book. My discovery of Jeanette Winterson comes early in her ascendancy and, really, it is...
I first read Denton Welch a few years ago. Actually, that’s not completely true. I read his short story “When I Was Thirteen” in Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson’s anthology Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest a good decade or so ago. It’s probably Welch’s most anthologized story, and it’s...
Rose and Dorothy, by Roslyn Schwartz (better known for her “Mole Sisters” books), tells of a mouse and an elephant who are taken by one another: “Dorothy was larger than life to Rose and twice as charming.” Dorothy moves into Rose’s house. Dorothy is big in every way, loud, open...
Sub-Rosa & Other Fiction, Catherine Bennett’s collection of poetic prose, couldn’t be more aptly titled. Sub–rosa means “in strict confidence, privately” and comes from the Latin for “under the rose,” an ancient symbol of secrecy. Not to mention female genitalia. Most contemporary English...
Charlotte is crying and she looks up at me with big watery eyes. She says something really quiet. What? says Kate. Say it, Charlotte. You didn’t have a problem saying it ten minutes ago. Tell her. Charlotte cries and looks up at me and she is like a bird I saw once with a broken wing, hopping...
In addition to the compelling storytelling, something I particularly admire about Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is the structure of how the story unfolds. It slowly unfurls, chapter by chapter, from the politics within the microcosm of a children’s world to conflicts on the national level, and...
The Hard Return, a book of poems by Marcus McCann, is a lover that confesses into your mouth during sex. It creates space inside the reader; spelunkers through you, cool and disconnected, then suddenly seizes something precious. It creates a new and almost extrapolated kind of literary criticism...
I was in a magic realist phase, reading a lot of Latin writers, mostly women, in translation. I loved the way these writers defied North American literary conventions. Anything could happen: a broken hearted lover’s tears fell into batter and made all those who ate the cake sob inconsolably;...
I was twenty-one in 1992, living in Toronto with my first boyfriend. We’d spent our last two years in high school dating in secret, so by early ’92, I was relieved to be out, proud, connected. The public streets were still hostile. Dangerous. Bedrooms were dangerous. Sex was dangerous. That...
All of the essays in Brazen Femme do just that–help ‘good girls’ reach down and grab hold of our wild selves, throw out what we have been taught in favour of what we innately know. That to be femme is to be a survivor, an unbending battle ax. And it helps ‘bad girls’...
“First I found myself daughter, then granddaughter, and eventually, femme. Anna Camilleri’s I Am a Red Dress: Incantations on a Grandmother, a Mother and a Daughter is a poetic meditation on identity, empowerment, personal history, sexuality and abuse. Part mythic storytelling, part personal...
“When I first read Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies by Persimmon Blackbridge, I couldn’t stop holding my breath, this hard ache in my chest solidified like a fierce, red hot ember throbbing through every page. It’s impossible to ask an author to pick only one favourite Canadian queer...
“Strip, a novel by Andrew Binks, describes the dancer’s ego as a ‘frail and determined thing.’ We meet a boy in Edmonton, a swimmer, who longs to be a ballet dancer. Strip follows the trajectory of this gay male dancer, and his frail yet resilient ego, from secret ballet lessons...
“Around the time that I was coming out, my university invited Shane Rhodes to visit our school and read from his debut collection of poetry, The Wireless Room. I was mesmerized by his work, and it opened up a whole new vista of possibilities for me. Here was poetry written by a young...
“Writers tend to feel isolated and misunderstood at the best of times, and that seems especially true when you’re gay or a still-in-the-closet-poet-and-former-competitive-junior-curler-from-the-suburbs like I was when the writer Lynn Crosby, during a boozy reading in Victoria that included us...
“Arleen Paré’s Leaving Now is a deeply thoughtful, courageous work that transgresses boundaries, challenging the lines between poetry and prose, memoir and fiction, realism and fantasy, the acceptable and the taboo. “Set in Montreal and Vancouver in the 1970/80s, it’s about...
“When I was nineteen, I lived in a rented room in a house that I shared with eight other people. The place was constantly noisy and hopping. Then winter break came and my housemates all left and I had the place to myself for the first time. My friends and family were far away. In the eerie...
“I once attended a panel discussion where the topic was ‘Canadian Literature: Quiet Writing for a Quiet Nation.’ Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers is anything but quiet. It rants, seethes, and uses humour as a machete. The hyper-sensual language and extravagant fantasy of the...
“I’ve always been a fan of restraint, in both literature and life—what’s held back, what’s not said, the untold story unfolding and germinating underneath the main action. I’m a fan of the short stories of Adam Haslett, Amy Hempel and Neil Smith (among many, many others) for this reason...
I came out of the closet in grade nine on the basis of my attraction to men, which was undeniable
Serendipitous Corruptions and Erroneous Ghosts in the Culture Queer Sea: An Amble through jam ismail’s Work hibiscus mentioned that mushrooms are good for cholesterol. jaggery scoffed: what d’you mean, good for! chesnut dehisced: she means good against, good...
When Plenitude invited me to write about a book, I was paralyzed. You see, I’m like the guys who work in the record store in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity with their top-five lists of songs for every occasion. Except instead of songs, I have top-five book lists. For instance, I could do a top-five...
“If you scan my bookshelves you can pick out the books I gobbled up coming out in the ’80s—the green-spined Virago re-issues of lost women’s classics, the zebra-striped spines of The Women’s Press with the little clothes-iron colophon (so clever! so ironic!) and ‘Steaming ahead...
“There are three books by three different people that I can’t stop recommending. These are the books I read over and over again while writing Davie Street Translations (Talonbooks). The three books being Billeh Nickerson’s The Asthmatic Glassblower (Arsenal Pulp Press), Sina Queyras’...
“Poetry is exploration. Writing, a line springs to mind and I let it lead me through my imagination. As a reader, I willingly follow the path into another poet’s world. And, as a collector of Canadian poetry, I search out books at garage sales, church bazaars, school book sales, thrift shops...
“People, listen! The great lessons of philosophy and art and religion are now being reinforced by evidence from science. This may bore the poets of this world but I find it heartening, because the evidence offers a thousand mirrors, reflecting the complex but ultimately altruistic essence of...
“Summer 1992. Her name is Lisa, and every weekday during that stolen time between 4:30 and 5:30 p.m., the end of my summer job workday and when I have to go home to my mother eating oranges, in sin and in secret I kiss my first love Lisa. I am a double agent. When I’m not with her, in my...
“I’m a big fan of well-crafted writing that entertains and at the same time deals with social issues past or present. An excellent example of this is the far-too-short Morgan O’Brien series by Alex Brett. Both Dead Water Creek and Cold Dark Matter creatively explore problems serious enough to...
“Gorgeously mythic and ceremonial, Neil Bartlett’s Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall marked me when I first read it back around 1990. Its events unfold in a timeless time that somehow suggests the not-so-distant past and the aevum simultaneously, and in a place—’The Bar’—that also...
"If you want to be considered a good mother, there are things you do not admit. It is a simple equation. If you are not a good mother, the corollary is bad and if you are queer, you are already battling stereotypes.
“I’d like to talk about Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912), a novella that continues to haunt and inform me almost twenty years since I first read it. For those unfamiliar with it, here’s a brief synopsis. The main character, Aschenbach, is an aging, accomplished man of letters sojourning...
“I love and am inspired by the work of Suzette Mayr, who received much well-deserved attention for her fourth novel, Monoceros, but each of Mayr’s novels is a funny, topical, and fearless exploration of the subject at hand. The Widows, Mayr’s second novel, is populated by old ladies who are...
“Like many other readers I discovered Rebecca Brown’s voice through the unnamed caregiver in Gifts of the Body, her book of remarkably plain-spoken meditations that came from the AIDS crisis. I don’t know anyone else who writes like her, who takes the kind of chances she does. In The Terrible...
“GB Jones—Toronto-based artist, filmmaker, musician and ‘zine editor—is probably best known for her pencil drawings, many of which satirize Tom of Finland’s work with a sexy lesbo twist. Jones’ drawings depict the macho-dyke ghosts of queer punk fantasy—girl gang potential realized, complete...
“I recently read The Young in One Another’s Arms for the first time, a Little Sister’s Classic published by Arsenal Pulp Press. The nice thing about this edition is that it includes not only an introduction but contemporaneous reviews. You can see how the reviewers ‘deal with’...
“I came upon Ian Young’s Year of the Quiet Sun in the mid-seventies, either on the bottom shelf of the poetry section in a Calgary bookstore or, worse, in the remainder bin. I’m not sure if I realized then that it explored themes of love between men but, decades later, research revealed it to...
“I love young adult fiction. It is at its best when it asks the reader to go beyond the expectations of the category of ‘young adult’ while embracing the limitations of the genre. Darkest Light, the companion book to Hiromi Goto’s Half World, is a remarkable book, unusual in that...
“Casey Plett’s A Safe Girl To Love (Topside Press) is a book of stories about friendship, parenthood, celebrating and fearing your identity, and the rough road to finding community. “I love Plett’s book for the brave sweep of relationships—a parent/child bond between two trans women; a...
“I came out when I was twenty-one. At the time I was going to school at Western University in London, Ontario. There was a place downtown called Mandala Book Store that sold meditation CDs and crystals and other new age type stuff. It’s still there, on Central Avenue. I associate that place...
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...
