“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...
“Arleen ParĂ©’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...
