Michael V. Smith I’m in the chapel on the Titanic but it’s modern and kind of tacky. The ceilings are twenty feet high. There are huge dark panels on the walls where stained glass windows should be. When you walk past them, you can see in, see three-dimensional representations of...
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...
by Andrea Routley “Descant has an enormous community. It is an international magazine with a strong focus on Canada and on emerging artists. We have trained dozens of interns, hundreds of editors have worked with us over the years, and thousands of writers and visual artists and musicians and...
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...
Of the fifteen longlisted books for 2015 Canada Reads, at least four of them are queer-authored–definitely overrepresented among the barrier-breakers. Perhaps this is unsurprising. After all, we encounter a lot of barriers! Not all of them are the same, of course. For example, Kamal Al...
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...
