“I felt like I had some kind of weird responsibility, having had the privilege and burden of that experience that is closed to most people, to try to make it clear.”

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The promotional life of a book is generally short: a year of sporadic reviews and interviews, maybe a festival appearance, with the possibility of a brief extension if the book gets nominated for a prize. After that, in book-marketing world, it’s over; we’ve moved on to the next shiny new book.

But that’s not how book lovers read. Sure, we read new books. But just as often, we’re discovering and delighting in books that have been out for years. In this segment, I want to celebrate books the way we, the book lovers, actually read them: on our own schedules. Because great books deserve more airtime.

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I’m so pleased to be talking with Marina Endicott this month about her novel The Observer, which was published in 2023 and won the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award and City of Saskatoon Book Award. In keeping with my “That’s Not How We Read” theme, I read it three years after it was published.

Marina is the author of five other novels: Open Arms, Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows, Close to Hugh, and The Difference. Her books have won and been nominated for more prizes than I have the space to list, and she’s widely described as one of Canada’s most beloved novelists.

The Observer is grounded in Marina’s own experience in Mayerthorpe, Alberta, where she and her husband, an RCMP constable, were sent on his first posting in 1992. Mayerthorpe, of course, is forever burned into the minds of Canadians as the location of the horrific murder of four RCMP members in 2005. This novel is a mesmerizing and tender examination of the fragility of life and law in a small rural community.

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LG: First of all, The Observer is so close to autobiography in many ways – your and your husband’s career histories, the Mayerthorpe tragedy – that, even though you’ve been clear the story has been fictionalized, I imagine it was read very differently – by readers and reviewers and perhaps even your own publisher – from all your previous novels. Tell me about how you drew on both real experiences and fiction to create this novel.

ME: Yes, the open secret of autofiction – The Observer is as true as I could make it about me and my husband Peter (Julia and Hardy); everybody else is invented. I could not write the book as a memoir for two reasons: although the emotional reality of that time is deeply etched, our practical memories for dates and events and people are patchy, unreliable. More importantly, I didn’t want to impinge on anyone else’s story – or to presume that I could tell it accurately.

I had tried to write about Mayerthorpe many times: a novel about police wives first (while we were still in Mayerthorpe!), then a radio play, then poetry and short pieces of memoir – nothing worked. But that didn’t stop the past from nagging at me. I felt like I had some kind of weird responsibility, having had the privilege and burden of that experience that is closed to most people, to try to make it clear. When I decided that it was time to try harder, after long research and work on The Difference, but still with no idea of how I could do it, I mentioned to my mother-in-law that I was going to write about Mayerthorpe, and she said, “Oh, you’ll want the newspapers, then!” I’d completely forgotten that in my first bout as editor of the Mayerthorpe Freelancer, I signed my parents-in-law up for a subscription to the paper, thinking they’d like to know what was happening in the community. Violet ran down to the basement and brought up two cardboard boxes full of papers: she’d saved them all.

As I read through them, my semi-journalist life returned vividly, mistakes and all, and opened a door into that time that let me enter the old life again.

LG: I love that your mother-in-law saved all those newspapers! Bless the hearts of Violet and all the savers in our lives who have basements in which to store such boxes long-term. And of course it was a brilliant way for you to find your way into framing such a challenging story.

“The privilege and the burden” is a perfect way to describe your need to write this story. The two are intrinsically tied in the telling, and I felt both aspects as I experienced all the delicate emotional, situational and scenic layers of The Observer.

ME: Thanks, Leslie – they are so often linked, privilege and burden.

LG: As well as being given the newspapers, did you find that the passage of time made it easier to find the distance you needed, in order to dive back into the intimacies of the time? I don’t mean to sound flippant when I offer this comparison, but in the days after 9/11, there was a lot of poetry flooding the world, and while I fully understand the need many had to express their fears and grief through writing in those early days, for me – as a reader and fellow citizen who felt no need as a writer to publish anything on the subject – it was the writing that came a year or more later that was able to more deeply and successfully capture those simultaneously global and personal layers of grief and seismic shift we all felt.

ME: I’m sure it did – that is, I’m sure I needed that much time to pass before I could tackle that time at all. I’m a terribly slow thinker. And yes, I felt revulsion at the very idea of writing about Covid, even as I knew people who were planning to. Don’t know if I’ll ever want to examine that particular period of grief and sexism, but look, worse may lie ahead!

LG: I don’t think you know this, but I spent five years of my communications career working with the Red Deer RCMP as their communications specialist. So I have also lived deep inside that very specialized world – a civilian, but one who worked closely with the police, read all the files, sat in on briefings during unfolding situations, translated what was going on for the public, and kept all the secrets. It’s a complex, dark world, so difficult for outsiders to understand. I like how you both did and didn’t try – how Julia knew some things but didn’t know others, and how she sometimes knew things from sources other than her husband, who took the confidentiality aspect so seriously. Tell me about the line you walked during the writing of this novel.

ME: No! I had no idea. You’re an ideal reader! We’ll have to talk, some day.

Yes, try/not try – Julia’s official role with the paper was such a useful perspective. Things that she knew, even though she wasn’t allowed to know them (and Hardy certainly hadn’t told her); things she couldn’t know, had to avoid knowing. A complicated relationship for a marriage, too.

When I set out on the book I had some idea of structuring it almost as a mystery novel, but as I worked, everything I did in that direction felt false. I think this disappoints some readers. The two small mysteries that Julia figures out (the insurance scam and the string of arsons at the end) feel false to her, and don’t help her either at the paper or at home; there’s no sense of justice achieved in either one, and no master criminals, just a wasteland of stupidity, greed and selfishness. As in life.

LG: Perhaps because of my own experience working with the RCMP, those mysteries landed perfectly for me – the stories of frustrating, wasteful, bad behaviours that pepper our daily lives and our media feeds.

ME: The one case that has a solution comes early on, the door with hammer marks – that was a real incident, and Peter did figure out that it must have been done with a high-heeled shoe. Very satisfying! Oh, also which of the horses is biting off the tails of the others (the one with the long tail, duh). Also a true story and one that reveals my complete lack of an analytical mind.

LG: I loved the horse tail mystery! I was just happily reading along, then when the solution was presented, I laughed at the idea of horse feuds and at myself for not having immediately understood who the culprit must be.

ME: Oh thank you for also not getting it!

LG: By the way, every time I told one of the RCMP members I was a writer, the first words out of their mouths were always, “Do you know Marina Endicott?” They were all so proud of you!

ME: Oh, that’s very good to hear! You’ve made my day.

LG: I love the narrator, Julia. I find her a challenging and fascinating character. She – the whole novel – reminded me in some ways of As For Me and My House (AFMAMH), by Sinclair Ross. That narrator – the minister’s wife, known only to the reader as Mrs. Bentley – is also living in a small prairie town, brought there by her husband’s work, which she is deeply tied to by marriage and circumstance, and yet feels outside of. And she worries constantly about her husband’s mental health, though theirs is a very different and one-sided relationship.

Do you know this novel and, if so, did it hang around in your head at all during the writing of The Observer?

ME: I do know the novel very well, so I have strong opinions here – I’ve been convinced from my first reading that Mr. Bentley is a closeted gay man in a false relationship, and I’ve always pitied Mrs. Bentley as a bewildered victim of the societal repression that forced people to hide in hetero relationships. Yes, there is a connection, in that Mr. and Mrs. Bentley are outsiders; she is shut out of her husband’s mind, and he does seem to be suffering some form of depression.

But the problem in that book is that they don’t have a marriage. Mr. Bentley is unable to enter into a real relationship with poor Mrs. B; the necessity of his sexuality remaining hidden (perhaps even from himself?) is the poisoned heart of the book.

LG: Very true, I had the same view of Mr. Bentley’s situation as a closeted gay man. Yes, that novel contains a one-way yearning that’s very different from the beautiful bond between Julia and Hardy, in which, even during the difficult times, you see the strength of their partnership, the give and the take that’s part of every healthy marriage.

ME: In The Observer, I hope it’s clear that the strength of the bond between Julia and Hardy is what saves them both, and that their marriage is not based on false premises. External factors, not just danger but the loneliness of Hardy’s work/Julia isolation in the country, shadow their bond for a time, but it is always there. (I always feel sheepish saying that, tempted to touch wood – I think about Sharon Olds writing such beautiful poems celebrating her husband and their undying bond, and then he left her for a smooth efficient runner. Then again, Stag’s Leap, her poems of their divorce, is a great, great book.) It’s hard to write about love, and I’m sure there are moments that make a sensible reader gag a little. But it’s worth trying.

LG: Ha! I feel this sheepishness when talking about my marriage a lot, even when it’s a simple conversation about Valentine’s Day, which we don’t observe because, speaking of gag-worthy sentences, we go on dates and hold hands and flirt all the time.

ME: Hahahaha good. Stag’s Leap was on sale at the liquor store last night (only $64, sigh) and I almost bought a bottle as a good luck charm.

LG: How did you feel about writing the Julia character, who both is and isn’t you?

ME: It’s interesting, writing a character who both is and isn’t you. Julia is slower on the uptake than I was, sometimes; often, she’s calmer and a better mother than I was! In fact she’s a better person, less oblivious and silly than I was – so I laughed when a book club participant last week informed the group that she hated the main character, who was “completely self-absorbed and selfish.” This came right after a prolonged discussion of how yes, Julia is definitely me, as close as I could write her.

LG: I just laughed out loud. Poor Julia – who I liked very much, by the way. And I enjoy hearing how you made certain of her traits richer or more limited than your own.

All these years, I somehow didn’t know that your husband was also a writer (nor, I think, did any of those RCMP members in Red Deer who were so proud of you and your writing!). Tell me more about that.

ME: Yes, both artists – that’s another link. He kind of kept it quiet at work, because people in Alberta tend to think of cowboy poetry first, when they hear that word.

Peter’s first book, Purity of Arms, won the Jewish Book of the Year award for poetry; he won Best Screenplay at AMPIA for Sightings, a one-hour television drama produced by Great North Productions; before that, with his old friends Steve Heighton and Michael Redhill, he created and co-edited A Discord of Flags, an anthology of poets responding to the Gulf War.

The deal was that I’d write for five years, and then he’d quit and I’d get a job and he’d write. It’s mostly my fault that the second part of the bargain never came to pass, but not entirely – police work is absorbing and urgent, and it’s hard to quit work that deals with life and death. After working hard to overcome the terrible PTSD he experienced in Mayerthorpe, Peter carried on to have an illustrious career, and retired as a Superintendent in K Division.

LG: I’ve brought up AFMAMH a few times; it’s the Canadian novel that lives in my head, and I think of it often when I’m experiencing that distinct prairie vastness in all its comfort and awe and coldness. The Observer now lives in my head in a similar – though also very different – way, and I appreciate that so much.

ME: It lives in mine too! My father was an Anglican priest in small communities not unlike Horizon, and for me AFMAMH illuminates their marriage, rather than my own. It’s unfair to say that, perhaps – but my mother’s discontent and my father’s silence and submission are something I’m now unpacking and examining in my new novel.

LG: The Observer has such scope and emptiness and constriction, all at the same time – the huge skies, the farms and fields, the solitude, all set against the tightly constricted life of police officers – the silence, the quiet suffering. Talk to me about the prairies and how they were such an important character in this novel.

ME: I’m glad to hear that works for you. The world around me was truly my religion in Mayerthorpe – in all my life in the prairies, now longer than my life in the East. I credit my dear editor Lynn Henry, at Knopf, for freeing me to write about the natural world without being shy, and those moments are still the main pleasure I find in re-reading the book.

I’ve started incorporating this more into my teaching, in fact: after not paying much attention to setting ever before, I now start off with proprioception exercises to encourage students to do that same work, to let the reader know how it feels to walk around in the world of their stories.

The rural community: what a revelation, and what a privilege to be welcomed into what is also a closed world, like policing. I think it’s a highlight of our lives, for both of us, that we were able to live there, to come to understand it a little; and that through the support of kind neighbours and friends, Peter was able to work with those beautiful horses. I think they’re what healed him most of all.

LG: An earlier novel of yours, Close to Hugh, has a lot of humour in it. It also deals with stifling closeness competing with aspirations, but in a less claustrophobic, more expansive way. How different was it, writing The Observer? Is it fair to describe this novel as “quieter” than your other books? And if so, is this in part because of the fictionalized autobiographical nature of this story?

ME: Good question. Where’s my sense of humour gone? The Difference is contemplative, but not really funny, although I hope there is some humour there. The Little Shadows is as funny as I could make it, stuffed with vaudeville jokes, and I hope Close to Hugh is too – depends on how you feel about puns. It was written while I was immersed in the lives of teenagers, all of them artists one way or another, and draws on my own young experience as an actor and director. I had a good time writing it. And I paid people $5 if I quoted them in it, as I very often did.

Writing The Observer was entirely different, of course. It was terribly painful, diving down into a past that we had locked firmly away in the cupboard. I had to brace myself every time I sat down – the long passage mid-book, Hardy’s worst depression, was written in two days, almost in one sitting, a long quiet immersion while everyone was away. That was a rough couple of days for me. Quietness might have been the only way I could write it.

LG: I wondered how easily you could shake off the feeling of oppressiveness and isolation when you finished your writing day. One of my stories in Apocalypse is also fictionalized autobiography, (“An Old Lady and Her Hair”) and I found it harder to pull myself out of the story at the end of the day. At the same time, I was ultra focused on wanting to change other details because the story wasn’t about the other people who’d inhabited that time in my life, and concerned that people would read the fiction as fact and vice versa. Was this a challenge for you?

ME: Secretly I’ve been doing this for a long time, mining my life for fiction. So I’m kind of used to it. And I had too much other work going on, as well as lots of reasons not to stay with the oppression! But it was a huge concern for me that people might recognize themselves in the stories around Julia and Hardy, and that they’d be hurt or angry. I asked a couple of readers to help me with that, to read through and see if I’d left anyone recognizable. One said, well, Vinn, yeah… but he can take it!

LG: That moment late in the novel when Julia goes to Saskatoon for a month for a dramaturgy job – I was struck by the surprise of it. She hadn’t really talked about it, as far as our readerly eavesdropping on her. It was a moment that stood out – I thought, what else hasn’t she told us? It was such an interesting authorial choice, and made me want to immediately reread her. And her description of that month takes only a few paragraphs. Tell me about those choices.

ME: That’s very interesting – what else hasn’t she told us? I like that! It seems to me that, like me, she tells you EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME OMG SHUT UP, so I’m always happy when somebody thinks she’s reserved.

LG: Ha! I think you wrote a terrific balance with her: we are with her, seeing everything through her filters, but she doesn’t flood us with every thought in her mind. I find myself drawn to characters like her, who we know and thinking and feeling more than they’re telling us. Perhaps because, like you, I sometimes feel like I’m constantly “expressing” myself to the exhaustion of those closest to me.

The reader can feel danger looming in many forms throughout the novel, but we experience some of that danger, and the resulting sorrow, in the day-to-day moments of the town. Tell me about your choice to render the Mayerthorpe tragedy off-stage, as it were, to not make it the focus of the book.

ME: That’s a great question. I consciously did not want to write a book about those murders – I wanted to write about how that was just, you know, Tuesday. That there are seven or eight of those guys in every detachment area in Canada, dangerous, damaged, maybe stupid and weak, and in all those detachments people are keeping an eye on a range of troubled people. Not knowing which one will detonate.

Every member I’ve talked to has agreed with the decision. Phew. Some book club participants are pretty mad, though.

LG: Based on my own experiences with the RCMP, I feel that assessment – the constant presences of troubled people who might or might not detonate – through to my bones. I’m glad members agreed with your decision.

Very important question before we move on: how do you pronounce dramaturge and dramaturgy? Hard G or soft?

ME: I pronounce it with a soft G, because I’m not a pretentious toad and have never been to Berlin.

LG: HAHAHA. I shall continue, heartened, with my soft G pronunciation.

I’ve heard you read aloud from your work and it’s always engaging and lively. Does your theatrical background come into play when you’re reading to audiences? Do you enjoy it?

ME: I love reading aloud from work in progress, and also from published work. I like reading to an audience because it’s active work, trying to entertain or engage them, and if it’s unfinished, I can go home and edit places I thought didn’t work, were too long, etc… Lynn Coady made my life happier when she showed me her reading copy of The Antagonist, with long passages crossed out and whole pages skipped. You don’t have to read the whole thing! You can do a director’s cut and make it better for that night!

But I don’t re-read my books to myself after they’ve been published, that’s too painful. I can see all the spots where I meant to go back and fix some clumsiness, or address something I missed – when I do come across a copy of one, say in Value Village, if I’m really lucky the book falls open to a page where I can read a passage and think Hey, who wrote this? It’s not too bad!

LG: How and what do you read? Do you have literary influences?

ME: Oh, of course. But you’ll laugh, they’re all writers who you probably wouldn’t see in my work. Penelope Fitzgerald, now and forever; Olga Tokarczuk more recently; William Maxwell, whose clean, modest prose and deep memory are such a strong model – and who like Stewart O’Nan wrote books so varied they can hardly be shelved together. Ursula Le Guin, the far-sighted one. I love my friends’ books but I think they themselves influence me more than their novels: I already said Lynn Coady, so in alphabetical order I’ll add Gil Adamson, Caroline Adderson, Jackie Baker, the glorious Helen Oyeyemi, Miriam Toews, Alissa York. My extraordinary editor Lynn Henry at Knopf is a huge influence; so is Melanie Little, who edited Good to a Fault. I’m still influenced by playwrights I worked with in Saskatchewan thirty years ago who were fiction writers first of all: Connie Gault, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Dianne Warren. I read a lot of poetry, particularly when I’m writing a book, and there I’m pretty catholic in my taste but would say that the poets who have influenced my writing most are Karen Solie, William Stafford, Louise Glück, and the mysterious M.S. Merwin. I’m leaving so many people out!

Because I teach, I read my students’ work – tons of it. That is often very sustaining; they are so surprisingly good. Maybe especially the poets, but the playwrights are great, and the short story writers! And the novelists… well there you are. It’s a good thing they’re good or it would be a hard job.

LG: There is nothing I enjoy more than a truly comprehensive list of writers I can either look up, or shriek, “yes, I love them, too!” about. You’ve named some brilliant writers who I also admire and enjoy reading. I’m going to zero in on the wonderful Jacqueline Baker for two reasons:

1. I always remember the time she interviewed you at Audrey’s Books – I think it was your Edmonton launch of Close to Hugh – and it was the most hilarious book event ever. She asked such smart questions and also gave you a very loving hard time and you gave it right back to her. We were all in stitches.
2. I reviewed her novel The Broken Hours years ago on a friend’s blog because I loved it that much. I have a gothic heart, which only occasionally reveals itself in my own writing.

ME: She is the best interviewer in Canada! So funny and sharp and loving. We should have a radio show, somebody told me after she interviewed me for the launch for The Difference. And at the launch for this book, The Observer, she asked me to read a tough passage, and when I said I wasn’t sure I could get through it, she said, “Don’t worry, if you can’t, I’ll read it for you.” And The Broken Hours is a masterpiece. Perhaps the best ending of a book ever.

LG: I want that radio show to happen! What are you working on now? Do you hate it when people ask you that question?

ME: I’m not unwilling to talk about the current ms, but I’m very bad at it – I don’t really know what I’m doing until it’s pretty much done, and let’s face it, even then… Six months later I might sort of begin to grasp it. I’m now at work on a sprawling epic/very short book about the lives of women in Canada in the 20^th century pegged by four events: the Cuban Missile Crisis, Expo 67, the Repatriation of the Constitution, and Y2K… (what?) But really it’s about four sisters, and their marriages… No, wait, it’s mostly about a child who hears the Holy Ghost telling her things she needs to know… Or it’s about being poor/being rich, being loved or not. See what I mean? Somebody I respect said it sounds like a Jonathan Franzen novel and that made me really really laugh. I’m having a good time, what a relief.

LG: Well, I’m sold.

ME: Ha! Thanks! Delivery date tba.

LG: It’s been such a pleasure talking with you, Marina. Thanks so much for sharing your time and your experiences with us.

Learn more about Marina Endicott and her books here.

“Relationships are messy, twisty and wild. In life and in fiction, I’m drawn to the outliers and the outrageous.”

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The promotional life of a book is generally short: a year of sporadic reviews and interviews, maybe a festival appearance, with the possibility of a brief extension if the book gets nominated for a prize. After that, in book-marketing world, it’s over; we’ve moved on to the next shiny new book.

But that’s not how book lovers read. Sure, we read new books. But just as often, we’re discovering and delighting in books that have been out for years. In this segment, I want to celebrate books the way we, the book lovers, actually read them: on our own schedules. Because great books deserve more airtime.

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This month I’m delighted to chat with the amazing Ali Bryan, a Calgary author who has published six novels and has several more coming out over the next few years. She writes across genres, interspersing award-winning and hilarious adult novels with young adult novels, creative nonfiction pieces and short stories.

Ali’s fourth novel, Coq, came out in 2024; a follow-up to her award-winning debut novel, Roost, Coq was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and won the 2024 BPAA Trade Fiction Book of the Year. Find out all about her incredible writing adventures here.

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LG: Ali, I’m so glad to get to hang out with you here. Last month I talked with Astrid Blodgett about revisiting characters we’d created, in subsequent stories, because we missed them or thought they had more to say or do. You’ve done this very specifically, writing Roost, and then, several years later, its sequel, Coq. How does it feel to revisit these characters after a span of years? Does it feel like a family reunion?

AB: A ‘family reunion’ is a great analogy. In a sense, revisiting Claudia and co. felt very much like a homecoming. Similar to how it is, in real life, when you return to your childhood home. You know exactly what step is going to creak, which window will never fully close and how the front door will only open if you jimmy the handle slightly to the left before turning it. The whole experience felt familiar and fun.

I never intended to write a follow-up to Roost. I was quite happy to leave those characters behind as I moved on to other stories.  And then one day I got a random social media message from a stranger who loved the book and thanked me for making her day. Something about the tone and surprise of that email triggered something in my brain because the plot for Coq almost immediately formed in my head. This was both a strange and serendipitous experience because I never think or write in ‘plot.’ I pitched the novel on spec and wrote it furiously in less than six months.

LG: I love this. I think many nonwriters would be amazed to learn how we actually come up with story ideas. We talk about this later on – how we get ideas and aren’t writing from our own lives – but it’s true for me, too: I’ll hear or see something that my brain immediately responds to, and suddenly there’s the story. Which happens about as often as the opposite, where I collect threads of ideas for years without knowing what I’ll do with them creatively.

AB: Which reminds me of another truth: there is no singular way, how or why to any of this (this being storytelling!)

LG: Do readers ever have different ideas about what your characters have been up to in the intervening years, and express surprise at where you took them next?

AB: Probably? I don’t spend a ton of time reading reviews (where a reader might pen their expectations) and I would especially steer clear if I knew I was writing a series (which in this case was not my intention). I was lucky that ten years had passed since I wrote Roost. To my knowledge, there were no expectations and even if there was, I would’ve ignored them. I do remember one review of Coq, where the reader expressed disdain because Claudia was re-engaging with her ex, Glen, from Roost. The reviewer saw this as a weakness, a ‘how-dare-you’ anti-feminist character flaw, but I just shrugged.

LG: This reviewer’s response makes me laugh, but it’s also frustrating. In the real world, I’d love for people to never hurt each other, and always take the high road, and make smart, kind choices. But that makes for truly boring books. Similarly, I don’t think any intelligent reader wants to read a story in which one side is pure-hearted while the other is evilly twirling their moustaches. I sure don’t.

AB: Precisely! Relationships are messy, twisty and wild. In life and in fiction, I’m drawn to the outliers and the outrageous. People who take the alternate route, who know they’ll be judged but say ‘fuck it’ and do it anyways. We know from the field of neuroscience that fiction allows readers to try on different lives, and different scenarios from the safety of the page. How boring if all characters took the road that was most expected of them. We get enough of that in the real world, which is probably why most people are miserable. There’s a reason the global wellness industry is projected to reach 9 trillion dollars by 2028.

LG: If only all the people spending all that money on mantras and manifestation courses knew – all they need is to pick up a stack of novels and settle into a comfy chair.

Let’s talk about writing humour. For me, I never start out intending to write funny, but I have a dark sense of humour, and a deep love for smart-ass characters who speak in sharp ways – and then I’m often pleasantly surprised to get laughs when I do readings. For you, humour is central to Coq, and to all your novels. How do you go about it, when you’re writing joyous slapstick scenes with multiple moving parts? It feels like chaos to the reader, and all the while you, the writer, are creating a finely tuned dance.

AB: Humour is the part of my writing that comes most naturally and unconsciously. Maybe because I’m Gen X, like you, and humour is how we survived because we didn’t have therapy or Tik Tik or work-life balance, but it’s always been my go-to, my mechanism for processing everything from grief to disappointment to the total absurdity of being human. I will say that as soon I try to be funny, I’m not funny. Also, it’s easy to overwrite humour. Honestly, it takes much more out of me to write dramatically. I still have to ‘think’ through more serious scenes because I find those harder to nail. Like, how do you make crying feel fresh and different?

I can find humour in almost anything (I’m a huge fan of Oliver Burkeman’s “negative path to happiness” as outlined in his book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking), which is why human suffering (from the loss of a loved one to the horror of having to hit up the grocery store at 5 o’clock) is front and centre in most of my work. I also love humour smashed up with something more poignant. It hits differently, oftentimes it hits better.

LG: I’m with you there. I know a darkly funny story in which someone is infuriated beyond reason with the way their dying mother dramatizes her death isn’t everyone’s cup of tea (my short story “Exit Interview”). But it’s my cup of tea, and I love that it’s yours, too. And when you invited me to contribute to Whatever, the Gen X anthology you’re putting together, my brain instantly went to a particular bizarre and terrible moment in the mid-80s, and the ways in which I wanted my characters to process it through dark humour.

AB: I loved “Exit Interview” for that very reason. It’s bold and gutsy and provocative. Also “infuriated” is a response and isn’t that the hope for any writer – to get a response? I would rather have someone feel something (even if it’s anger) than to feel meh. I like writing that presents the world as it is in all its beauty and horror (as opposed to writing that is aspirational or sanitized). Having said that, there’s nothing wrong with aspirational if that’s the goal. All stories can exist.

And of course every reader brings their own lived experience to the text. I once attended a book club and one of the guests hated The Figgs so bad she was seething. Later she admitted that she was in a similar situation as the protagonist (a custody/adoption scenario) and had limited access to her grandchild as a result. She was devastated and I got it. (In the same book club another guest didn’t like the book because it had a gay character).

LG: PS: I’ve just put a hold on The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking at my library! I already love it, based on the title alone. Maybe it’s our writer instinct to take the sadness, the failures, the shitty events, and turn them over in our hands and think about what they mean, how they can be used. Throughout my communications career, I distinctly recall a number of project conversations with people who mis-used Appreciative Inquiry as a cudgel to keep anyone from speaking negatively. I’d be sitting there screaming inside, trying to calmly explain that criticism – examining how and why something failed – is crucial for learning and improvement.

AB: Yes, we’ve been living in this weird period of censorship and radical positivity or maybe it’s radical avoidance? Like, don’t talk about uncomfortable things! For a period, it seemed we couldn’t tell the difference between offending someone and harming someone. No matter what end of the political or ideological spectrum, we all lose when we can’t talk about complicated and complex things.

LG: Is there a question no interviewer has asked you about your writing that you’ve always wanted to answer? I’ve always been disappointed that no one wrote about or asked me, really, about my story “Uterus/Utherthem,” with its appalling premise of women getting pregnant specifically in order to have protest abortions, to defend a woman’s right to control her own body. I thought I’d get outrage or laughter or … something … I was dying to talk about the lengths people will go to if they feel deeply threatened or backed into a corner, but no one wanted to dig into that story.

AB: This is crazy. I suspect people didn’t dare venture here because it made them uncomfortable – it made them feel something. Duh. That was the point!

Not a question, but I’m bothered by the assumption that all fiction is somehow auto-fiction or autobiographical. I’ve heard writers assert this all the time, like it’s truth. I’ve written six books. Can you imagine if they were all auto-fiction? Boring. Also, as someone who writes creative nonfiction, I’ll save the best ‘life writing’ for that form. The very idea of fiction is to explore ideas, lives, ideologies, thoughts and viewpoints that both align with and completely deviate from our own. I’m not talking about abject appropriation, I just mean writing outside our inner selves. Please don’t make me only write about myself or my experiences. Sometimes I spend hours playing a game on my phone where I fill bottles with different colour liquids until the bottles are all sorted. No one wants to read about that.

LG: Um, Ali, people might not want to read about that, but you and I are definitely going to discuss it in detail the next time we have a beer together.

Related question, do you have a million ideas in your head and have to decide which ones to commit to, or does it take you a long time to germinate a novel-length idea? Or something in between? I drive Blaine crazy sometimes because I’m always coming up with great new ideas, then waffling back and forth about what to focus on next. (And yes, I’m aware that while I like to think of this as evidence of my brilliance, therapists might flag it as a procrastination strategy. Can’t we both be right?)

AB: Haha! As for choosing the project that gets my time, it’s a balance between actual deadlines (grant, manuscript delivery on a contracted work) and what’s working. Usually the ‘right’ project is the one that flows with the least amount of resistance.

LG: Have you ever gone into a bookstore where they didn’t know you, and faced your book or added it to a display table?

AB: I’ve definitely faced my books in larger bookstores, but get the biggest kick facing my books when I find them at Value Village or Goodwill (going back to that dark humour mechanism …). Once when I was in Montreal, I did move copies of Coq onto a book table themed “books set in Paris” during the summer Olympics (which were being held in Paris). I normally would not do such a thing, but in this case not a single one of the books on the table were Canadian. Not one. So, I fixed that and then I tagged the store and thanked them. (I don’t blame the store; there are zillions of books on the shelves and as we know, Canadian representation hovers around 5% of books sold in Canada).

LG: I love that you then tagged them and thanked them – that’s hilarious. Do you enjoy doing readings, bringing your humour off the page and delivering it into a reader’s ear?

AB: I do love reading, but like anything involved in writing and publishing I have very low expectations. Audiences vary and so do their reactions. I’ve read parts of my book that I don’t think are funny and have to stop because people are laughing uncontrollably and I’m actually left thinking dude, that wasn’t even funny. In other situations, I’ve paused at a part that I think is funny or that people laughed at during a previous reading only to hear crickets. I remember reading from The Figgs in Halifax and no one laughed, or tittered. No one even smiled. You’d’ve thought I was reading an eviction notice. Once I wasn’t really prepared for an event and I randomly chose a particularly crude scene from the perspective of a horny prison inmate and my mom was in the front row. I do love choosing scenes that are deliberately uncomfortable or darkly humorous. The kind of humour people probably shouldn’t laugh at but do when they’re reading privately and then here we are in a public setting and they try not to laugh but they can’t help it and things just get ridiculous and messy. That’s amusing and fun for me.

LG: I do love that, as well. But enough about what we have in common, let’s talk about our differences.

You’re one of those writers who many of your peers feel in awe of, in terms of your work ethic, productivity, and energy. You write a lot, and you’ve had instances when you had several new books come out in the same year. I mean, I know there can be a lag of years between finishing a book and it hitting bookstores, so it’s not necessarily that you were actively working on three novels at the same time, but still – you work so hard, so committedly! As a lazier writer who doesn’t hit my desk every morning for hours, rain or shine, I’d love to hear about your writing habits. I won’t put any shame I feel back on you, I promise.

AB: Haha. Well, it’s become increasingly hard now that I’ve been working full time. Really, I’ve always leaned on my discipline (a lot of what I attribute to being a Maritimer and also for the decade I spent in the fitness industry as a personal trainer and as a lover of sport/competitor). When you’re training for sport, you can’t pick and choose the time to be inspired. You simply do the work. I don’t love writing in a velodrome as I did yesterday while my daughter was doing athletic testing but the reality is I have to make use of the time that’s available to me. For years I got up to write at 5 a.m. Then I got two needy dogs and a job and I pushed that to 4:30 a.m. That wasn’t sustainable, so now I’ve had to shift to evenings and weekends (I particularly block huge chunks of time on weekends). Right now, I have three consecutive books coming out in 2027, 2028 and 2029. I am literally using timers to get through my days. Even this interview I am doing in increments. Answer one question, set a timer and do 15 minutes of house work. Answer a question, then finish up a short story that’s due for an anthology today. Answer a question, do 20 minutes of strength training. Answer a question, register kid for football camp. This will be what it’s like for the next three years until these projects clear. Overall, it’s a mix of habit/discipline, being flexible and adapting my routine as needed and ultimately valuing my writing (and writing time) because if I don’t no one else will.

LG: I hadn’t thought about writing routines in these terms, exactly – as being an outcome of learned habits from childhood athletics. It makes perfect sense – you’ve been organizing your life into slices for a very long time. I, on the other hand, remember joining Brownies when I was in grade three, and then dropping out after two meetings because I couldn’t believe all the work they expected us to do – sewing buttons and baking? I already had my hands full after school, reading books, playing outside and mediating fights between my sisters (though I guess that would’ve got me a helper badge). This explains everything about my own writing habits to this day.

AB: OMG, I would never have survived in Brownies. I’m a classic third-born, hyperactive over-achiever. I would’ve killed myself trying to GET ALL THE BADGES. I would have more badges than everyone else. I would be still getting badges today.

LG: I’ve honestly never loved you more.

How do you read, Ali? Within your area, outside, both? And what are you reading these days?

AB: I read all over the place. Probably more nonfiction than anyone would guess, particularly in the areas of history/war and philosophy. When I need a break from Canadian fiction, I read American and watch TV. I feel that TV writers especially are taking bigger risks (Succession, White Lotus, Adolescence).

Canadian books that recently blew my mind because they felt fresh and different (structure, style, theme etc.) include Julius Julius, by Aurora Stewart de Pena, The Reeds by Arjun Basu, and Maria Reva’s Endling. I’ve also loved curating my upcoming Gen X anthology Whatever with co-editor Emily Weedon. Other than being so totally “Gen X” the stories are scathing, brave, funny and dark in the best possible way.

Another book I just started and am loving is Lost Lambs by American author Madeline Cash. Recent short fiction that I’ve read and have found memorable include Stephen Graham Jones’ short story Father, Son, Holy Rabbit, the short story Contrition: An Isekai by Andre Alexis and Judith Pond’s collection: That’s Where you Were, Then.

LG: I am currently #91 on my library’s wait list for Lost Lambs. And I loved Endling – the way she combined mail order brides with the war in Ukraine with snail extinction – it was strange and utterly amazing. I care about snails now! I truly can’t wait to read my fellow contributors in Whatever – your invitation to submit was so funny and flippant and smart, all in such perfect measure, I felt like I’d found my people before even knowing the contents.

AB: It is such a great book. Gen X often defines itself by who it is not (i.e. boomers or millennials). These stories somehow manage to define who Gen X is.

LG: Do you think the world is ridiculous?

AB: The world is absolutely bonkers. The only way forward is forward. For me that’s carrying on, living life like the world’s not on fire because if it ceases to exist one day in the near future, I’d rather go out with a glorious reckless bang than in a blaze of finger-pointing rage, fear and righteousness. Maybe that sounds apathetic, but there are a multitude of ways to make the world better and for me that’s finding ways to connect with people in the physical realm.

LG: Agreed. In some ways I’m relieved about how social media has fractured. We all got on there years ago, had a good time, and now we’re slowly moving away again – at least, I am – from the toxicity, from giving billionaires our information so they can afford to buy more elections, and from the lies and slop – and rededicating some of those energies to nurturing and deepening IRL connections.

AB: The online anger is real and warranted but I’ve had enough of it. The best I can do is care for myself, and the people around me. Support my kids so they can handle the shit-world they’re about to inherit. Looking for ways to be kind even when I don’t want to, especially when I don’t want to. Write. Stay fit. Be healthy. I’m tired of the rage, the division, the polarization, the screaming into the echo chamber. I want beautiful sentences, whale sightings, comfortable sneakers and, sadly, more protein.

LG: Ali! After my divorce from my first husband, when I began writing in earnest, I put a big note on my fridge, a quote from a Christopher Marlowe play that said, “These are not men for me. I must have wanton poets, pleasant wits, musicians.”

Now I’m going to add your words to this mantra: “I want beautiful sentences, whale sightings, comfortable sneakers.” (I already get lots of protein.)

Tell me, what are you working on now?

AB: I am finalizing the aforementioned Gen X short fiction collection Whatever, working on a contemporary novel called Some Sunny Day (the title comes from a line from the famous WWII Vera Lynn song “We’ll Meet Again”). The story takes place both on earth and in the afterlife. A contemporary sport-lit YA book called Pick 6 (flag football + romance + dysfunctional family), which is coming out in 2028 to coincide with flag football’s Olympic debut and Husbandry, the third (and dare I say) final book in the Roost-Coq series.

LG: And so we circle back to Roost and Coq with this breaking news of a third in the series – thank you for letting my newsletter readers hear it here first! I’m looking forward to all your next books, and to an incredible series of Gen X parties in 2027 when Whatever comes out.

AB: There will 100% be Kraft Dinner at the Gen X parties.

LG: I’m so glad you could hang out with me here and talk all things writing, Ali. And I’m glad you stopped for strength training in the middle: if you were thinking of me and our conversation while doing weights, in a way, I was working out, too.

Find Ali’s books and learn more about her here.

Canadian poet and fiction writer Barry Dempster died on November 27, 2025. Since then, I’ve wanted to say so much, but was held back by the usual writerly fears and intrusive thoughts. Who am I to speak? Others knew him better.

So much about him has already been said in online spaces. But here I am adding to it. Because I want to. Because today, January 17, is his birthday. Because you should know of his legacy. Because our friendship spanned decades and was filled with emails and visits between Alberta and Ontario – conversations about our lives, our writing, books and films we loved.

I first met Barry at St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, Saskatchewan in 2010. He was there to take part in a reading series at St. Peter’s College; I was there on a writing retreat. The day after his reading, I tipped unsalted peanuts into his palm as we walked down the windswept tree tunnel to the monk’s cemetery, and I laughed and took photos as he lured chickadees to his hand for the first time. We agreed this is how all the best literary friendships must begin.

This won’t be a eulogy. I’ll continue my grieving in private. But I want you, dear book lovers, to hear Barry Dempster. He was a gifted writer, a person full of generosity and curiosity and playfulness. A writer of intensity and darkness, and so much light and lushness of language. He wrote 18 books of poetry, three short story collections, two novels and a children’s book.

But this is not a review of his work or a summary of the prizes and accolades he received – there are many more qualified people out there who have already done this, and his website will tell you everything you need to know about where to find his books. And I hope you do find his books, if you haven’t already. Your life – maybe even your very heart – will be better for it. I’m here to share a few words – of his, of mine – from his books and from the hundreds of emails we sent each other over the years. I’m here to summon his voice and to celebrate his bright, rich, and joyous spirit.

Well, perhaps one review, of his short story collection, Tread (Tightrope Books, 2018). I was deeply honoured when Barry asked me to blurb it. The book broke my heart, and healed it again. Here’s what I said officially on the back cover:

“These marvellous stories by Barry Dempster are all about love – the striving for it, the rejection of it and the unexpected collisions with it. These characters find love difficult. They don’t know the language; the survival skills they were taught as children fail them as adults; they want love but only on their terms; they’ve never stopped to consider if they had terms. Dempster’s characters are often unskilled and seemingly hapless, sometimes funny, bursting with baggage and startling moments of awareness. Always, they are heartbreaking in their resiliency and in their push for joy. Dempster knows how to write about the human heart, flawed and hopeful as it is.”

More privately, a few snippets of our email conversation as I was reading the unpublished manuscript in preparation for writing the blurb (the short story is titled “Jeffers”):

LG: Barry, I’m out at the monastery … I’ll tell you about that another time. What I need to tell you right now is that I am completely shredded by the Duke and Jeffers story …. I couldn’t even scroll back up to check the title, I just had to move away from it and cry for a while.

It’s perfect and awful … I have to go feed the birds now and spend a little time at a slight remove from Duke and Jeffers so I can love them without feeling so wrecked … I think this means it’s a fucking amazing story.

BD: Dear Leslie,

You and I, Duke and Jeffers, drifting through the same story. I can’t begin to explain what a thrill it was to read about your reaction. Every line, every scene of “Jeffers” was a gift to me. Now, another gift, through them, from you … I pray that you’re feeling less shredded today, that the chickadees and nuthatches gave you healing as they swooped down into the treasure chest of your palm …
Thank you, dear friend.

Years later, Barry said in an email, “In my memory, [St. Peter’s is] a truly holy place, my having met you there, and to have felt the electricity of a chickadee landing on my fingers for the first time. I also fell in love with the graveyard. I sat out there on that blue Muskoka chair in the snow reading the tombstones.”

I also have a deep affection for that blue chair; I’ve photographed it hundreds of times over 25 years as it’s faded from bright to pale blue to a weathered grey. Barry and I shared a fascination with finding the holy in the commonplace, and I still feel his presence when I walk the monastery woods every year.

Another precious thing about Barry: he loved to be dazzled and dizzied; he looked for it and found it everywhere. In a chipmunk, in wearing a crown as he played dolls with his niece. In Barry’s world, bananas sighed hymns and peaches seduced each other “with soft false promises.” (“You’re the Last Thought,” Love Outlandish)

The Nanaimo bar has a motor at its core
which makes my tongue vibrate
long after the bite has been forgotten.
My teeth feel like pears that have just
been peeled. My uvula something rawer,
still clinging to a stem. What a glorious
way to get high. There are nights
when it seems okay to put anything
in my mouth, to be that intimate and hungry.

From Disturbing the Buddha, “Ten Thousand Repetitions /4”

Barry came to Red Deer one year when my husband Blaine and I lived there, to stay with us and do a reading at my favourite store, Sunworks (he wowed and charmed and delighted them all, and then we all stayed up late talking and drinking wine, the way writers do). And Blaine and I visited him and his wife Karen at their home in Holland Landing a number of times when we were in Ontario. (Karen: a wonderful woman, a painter, with a sharp intellect and a soft heart who made us brilliant salads and always made me laugh; she predeceased Barry and I mourn her loss, too). We all loved getting together in person, though because of the distance between our homes, the majority of our friendship took place over email, and through reading each other’s writing.

In 2020 Barry emailed me a poem that had been included in the Best Canadian Poetry Anthology in 2020 – this short excerpt, I think, captures the lushness of his imagination and language:

Even flukes dazzle: mushrooms
lined up on platters like
fascinators in a duchess’s closet; ferns
still learning how to chill; pine cones
hanging on by just one sticky drop.
We could praise Nature for days,
like statues gushing water
from their marble mouths.

(Excerpt from “From Cocks to Wings: Spring in Central Park’s Tavern on the Green”)

You know how sometimes you feel like a writer wrote something just for you? In a published interview Barry gave with his good friends and fellow writers Maureen Scott Harris and Maureen Hynes, Barry said this about family and becoming a writer:

“Everyone around me did things to such excess that I had no choice to but to ask myself, ‘What do I think here?’”

(All I Have is the Moment: An Interview with Barry Dempster, by Maureen Scott Harris and Maureen Hynes, 2020)

I’ve written this quote out on a sticky note and pasted it to my laptop. It makes me laugh every time I read it.

The last time Blaine and I saw Barry and Karen in person, in Holland Landing in 2018, he gave me a short Tarot reading. I didn’t know much about Tarot then, though I now have my own deck. On that day, as we talked about my writing, he drew the Death card and the Queen of Wands. His reading was perfect: at that moment for me, the Death card was a harbinger of change – signalling discomfort and pain, but bringing profound and positive change; the Queen of Wands was a reminder to fearlessly and joyously embrace the next stage of my writing journey. Not long after, the rogue editor at a publishing house who’d been stringing me along for two years ultimately rejected my short story collection, and off I went shopping for a new publisher – an exhausting, time-consuming task made brighter thanks to this timely reading and Barry’s ongoing encouragement and belief in me. (Not the Apocalypse I Was Hoping For eventually found its rightful, loving home with University of Calgary Press.)

In 2022, as his Parkinson’s disease continued to worsen and Karen was succumbing to early dementia, Barry emailed me:

I’ve pulled the devil twice in the last few weeks. What else can I do but buddy up with the guy, show him that I’m still capable of having a good time.

So here’s a tarot for you, I did my best to picture you and keep things fairly open to interpretation. The nine of wands popped up, meaning strength, stamina, and confidence. Not bad, eh? Your journey is near completion, but on this final stretch you’ll find yourself growing weary; doubt and fear are running through your mind. The nine of wands asks you to rally your confidence and realise how far you’ve come. Lift your eyes and take a few more steps … soon all your hard work will start to pay off.

This is what we do when we lose someone important: we find their words, and we listen for their voices, and we walk to the places we shared with them. Thus we keep them alive. Thankfully, Barry left an impressive body of work, rich with his spirit and talent, for family, friends, and readers to visit and revisit. And, for those of us lucky enough to be called friends, we have years’ worth of emails – and Tarot cards – we can pull up, when we want to laugh, to be reminded, to feel the comfort of that funny, loving voice.

Excerpt from “Heartbreak as a Bag of Prunes,” from Barry’s last book of poetry, Being Here: The Chemistry of Startle:

Who knows how my next life
will present itself –
a spurt of adrenalin
on a twisty Spanish mountain road,
a glisten of lemon in olive oil,
or that spring morning drench
of having wept everything
out of my system
but good, clean, hope.

In an email from 2013, Barry told me this:

The best way to deal with the bad stuff is simply to face it head-on. It doesn’t go away just because we try to ignore it. And it contains as much love and magic as the good stuff. It’s a wakeup call to something we wish we could just dream ourselves through, but it’s also an opportunity to live the moment and celebrate the preciousness of the whole story, beginning, middle and end.

Live the moment, dear book lovers. Celebrate the preciousness of the whole story.

Find Barry Dempster’s books and more information about his incredible legacy here.

I’m delighted to be part of a one-day writing retreat on June 2 at the Lacombe Performing Arts Centre. The day is hosted by author and all-around amazing human Fran Kimmel; I’m presenting a workshop titled, “Think of Your Poor, Poor Villain,” on creating memorable and three-dimensional villains. My husband, the hilarious playwright Blaine Newton, presents a workshop titled, “Comedy is Nothing to Laugh At.” Register here and find more details in the Lacombe Express article.