Category - The Query Project

Daniel Allen Cox The Query Project

Daniel Allen Cox, Montreal

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...

Anna Nobile The Query Project

Anna Nobile, Sechelt

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;...

Michael V. Smith The Query Project

Michael V. Smith, Kelowna

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...

Kaleigh Trace The Query Project

Kaleigh Trace, Halifax

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’...

Shannon Webb-Campbell The Query Project

Shannon Webb-Campbell, St. John’s

“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...

Debra Anderson The Query Project

Debra Anderson, Toronto

  “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...