Our next read for THE READING TYPE book club is… Sula by Toni Morrison led by Jess!

Not only will Jess be leading us through one of St. Toni’s greatest, she has put together a playlist, featuring Moses Sumney, Sampha, Ravyn Lenae, and others, inspired by the novel’s protagonists, Sula and Nel.

Pick up a copy of Sula in-store or online, listen to the below songs once or thrice, shed some tears, and then join us, dear Reading Type, on Thursday, September 10th at 7pm.

Last month for the second edition of The Reading TYPE Book Club, we read Brittany Newell’s Soft Core. Cason Sharpe, writer, bookseller and genius book recommender, guided us through the dreamy, perfumed underbelly of San Francisco that the novel lays out. We discussed his thoughts on Soft Core post-book club, why we should judge book covers and asked some questions of his own about our next edition of The Reading TYPE: reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed on Thursday, July 23rd at 7pm.

— Luke

Luke: I loved that you started off the discussion by reading a list of ideas and questions prompted by the book. It felt like a big, beautiful poem. What were some of those ideas that came to you while reading Soft Core?

Cason: I was thinking a lot about the sensual. Soft Core is such an atmospheric novel; so much of its intrigue comes from evoking certain scents, sounds, textures, or qualities of light. I thought about those things while reading, alongside the book’s plot, of which there is admittedly very little. One thing I love about Soft Core is all the red herrings: you think one particular scene or plot point will be pivotal, and then it amounts to nothing. It’s like one big mystery that never gets solved. Much of my notetaking focused on that.

How have you been prepping for the upcoming book club for The Dispossessed? Do you note-take as you read, or do your thoughts come after you’ve finished the book?

Luke: I definitely did a bunch of notetaking throughout. I underline and highlight my books quite a lot while I read them, but especially in The Dispossessed since it has got lots of strange names and lore to unravel.

You’ve got an iconic shelf talker for Soft Core on the staff picks shelf: “If a Sean Baker movie was written by a woman”. We ended up talking about the cinematic parallels a bunch during the discussion. What do you think about the cinematic pull of the book?

Cason: A lot of contemporary fiction is written as though the author wants it to be adapted into an HBO miniseries (not naming any names, but you can guess who I mean...). I find that kind of writing cynical, and unimaginative in terms of what a novel can do formally. If you want to write a screenplay, write a screenplay! Soft Core is not that kind of book. It’s very cinematic in terms of plot, pacing, and tone (Brittney Newel cited Kubrick and Lynch as two major influences), but it also contains elements unique to the form of the novel, such as the ambiguous distinction between certain characters, or the narrator’s fluctuating reliability, which would be difficult to translate into film.

The Dispossessed, from what I’ve read, is also pretty cinematic, although in a very different way from Soft Core. I remember you once saying that you found the text occasionally difficult to parse. What drew you to The Dispossessed, what do you find intriguing about it, and why do you want to share it with the Reading Type book club?

Luke: Reading The Dispossessed was a bit of a homecoming to her work for me. I grew up reading her young adult novels and many years ago I read The Left Hand of Darkness, and loved it. I found the premise of The Dispossessed so interesting: what could it look like if a bunch of anarchists moved to the moon? I did find the book a bit difficult to parse. It’s dense and has a slightly disorienting narrative flip between the two planets. But I think that’s exactly why I wanted to discuss it! I’m excited to discuss the novel with others who read it and see what they got from the book.

For Soft Core, we ended up talking about the ways the two different covers made us feel. The North American hardcover edition features a suggestive gloved hand in pink painted by Aistė Stancikaitė, and the paperback edition has a stark and vibrating hyper-pink and acid green font of the title. Which do you think reflects the book better? Should we judge books by their covers?

Cason: We should absolutely judge books by their covers! I like to think of books as works of art, and ideally the (physical) form should match the content. I think both Soft Core covers did a good job of prepping the reader for what’s inside: both have a sleazy, almost tacky allure, reminiscent of the descriptions of the narrator’s outfits at the strip club. But I personally prefer the punchy pink-and-green of the paperback. The font choice reminds me of both alleyway graffiti and the flickering neon of a dive bar, and I think it captures the novel’s grimy atmosphere quite well.

I was Google-Image searching The Dispossessed to look at the design of previous editions, and it’s had some pretty iconic cover art since its original publication in 1974. Why do you think this book continues to resonate with readers 50 years later? What ideas does the book present that feel relevant or prescient today?

Luke: Such good covers! Vintage sci-fi books are the best. Actually, I think a lot of the previous covers are quite epic and bring out a real cinematic sheen to the book. The 50th anniversary edition is really beautiful too, and I think it illuminates the humanity of the book. Her ideas around sexuality and politics are really just... prescient! Le Guin certainly was a titan of the genre, writing in a way that was deeply ahead of her time.

How was it discussing Soft Core for the book club? Did it change how you felt about the book?

Cason: It’s always nerve-wracking to share something you love with a group of people, but I was so grateful for all the thoughtful insights everyone brought to the discussion. Some readers had wildly different interpretations than I did, and I realized that one of the things I love about this book is its narrative ambiguity, which feels absent from a lot of contemporary fiction.

What are you hoping to discuss at the next book club? What questions, propositions, or themes of The Dispossessed are you excited to explore with a group?

Luke: I’m most excited to discuss the notion of the ‘ambiguous utopia’ that Le Guin brings to life in this story. The original edition of the book has that phrase as its subtitle, which it has subsequently lost in different printings, but I’m curious what ideas people would have around that idea: how does ambiguity play out in this story? I’m also really curious to hear if people are used to reading science fiction, or if this is their first foray!

LUKE:

Read: I recently finished If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English by Noor Naga, a novel which follows the relationship between an American girl who “returns” to Egypt and a photographer of the Arab Spring. The oscillating narration between the two characters is a really compelling structure, but it’s the final third that cemented the book for me.

I’m also returning to my copy of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed in anticipation of The Reading Type Book Club on July 23rd. I love her writing, and I find this book in particular fascinating, but especially good to be discussed after reading. So if you’ve been wanting to read this book, now is your chance!

Listened: I got a ticket last minute to see Rosalia on her tour of her newest album Lux, which I had loved immensely. I was so happy that I nabbed one, but I did truly just get one, so it was a solo experience. Everyone in the audience came in white, a memo I luckily followed without knowing. Felt like kismet.

Watched: I saw Maddie’s Secret (2025) twice, so enthralled by John Early’s directorial debut that I simply had to go back. I’m open to receiving suggestions on hilariously-satirical-books-with-heart to give me a bit of that same feeling until I can go see screening number three.

JESS:

Read: Ruins, Child by Giada Scodellaro. The Sweet Spot by Chiedza Pasipanodya. Honey by Imani Thompson.

Listened: Over the past couple of months, I’ve settled into a few new music-centric rituals: I listen to piano by Duval Timothy most mornings with my lemon-ginger tea, then a rotation of Veeze, MIKE, Salimata, and Choker during afternoons spent working from home. And I’m turning into my teenage self again, listening to choral music and musical soundtracks while winding down for bed. “Impossible” from Brandy and Whitney Houston’s Cinderella (1997) stays on repeat.

Saw: I stopped logging my movies on Letterboxd, so I’m a little foggy on what I’ve watched recently, but I really liked Akinola Davies Jr.’s debut My Father’s Shadow (2025). I also rewatched the aforementioned Cinderella twice in one day last week.

BILLY:

Read: I finally grabbed a copy of Cannon and read it all in one sitting one lovely summer morning. It deserves every praise you’ve heard about it and I’m gonna need an up-and-coming queer Montreal director to adapt this for screen ASAP. Please and thank you.

Listened: On my 30th birthday I replayed one of the most formative albums of my (unfortunately basic) life: Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto. My sisters and I used to blast this album driving to and from our church youth group in our Volkswagen Golf, its custom stereo and subwoofer setup would hit the base drop on “Paradise” and make us feel sooooo cool. I can’t earnestly bring myself to shoutout Coldplay, but I would like to shoutout my sisters for always being able to make our own fun.

Saw: A couple months ago at Toronto Sketchfest I caught a solo show from Jon Blair that I haven’t stopped thinking about since. It’s coming back for Fringe and I can’t think of a better way to spend your time or your money, especially if you are an artist looking around the state of things these days and asking yourself why keep going in the face of it all. You’ll certainly laugh. You might even cry. You may find yourself leaving the theatre with an odd craving for canned beans. In any case, please go see “A Comedy Show At The End Of The World” by Jon Blair.

BRETON:

Read: Kill Dick by Luke Goebel. Picked it up thinking it would be a nice junk food read. Couldn’t have been more off, I refuse to explain, find out for yourself.

Listened: The new Dry Cleaning album. ABSOLUTELY. On repeat for the entirety of my shift yesterday at Type.

Saw: Paranormal Activity at Mirvish. A Paramount blockbuster adapted for the stage? Sounds like exactly not my thing, thank yewww. But then I loved it?! I was expecting expensive tech I’d roll my eyes at, but it was all that good old fashioned theatre magic of simple stagecraft and pacing. A moment I keep replaying: actor’s flashlight beam cuts through the total dark and creeps over the banisters of the stairs… UGH. THEATRE! I left reminded that the audience is not stupid. And even if the audience is stupid, the animal body is not stupid. Give it enough space to project its nervous system programming onto the moment and magic happens.

CASON:

Read: I re-read Soft Core in anticipation of The Reading Type, TYPE Junction’s book club (read my interview with author Brittany Newell to learn more), and now I’m reading Superstars by Ann Scott, translated from French by Jonathan Woollen, which came out earlier this spring. Set in the lesbian techno scene of Paris in the late 1990s, Superstars is like an episode of The L-Word combined with the sweatiest rave you’ve ever been to. Required reading for Pride.

Listened: I’ve been obsessed with So Help Me God, the latest album by singer-songwriter, producer, and cellist Kelsey Lu. The long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s Blood, this album amps up the atmospheric moodiness that has become Lu’s signature. Standout tracks include Reaper, the album’s lush opener, and Cutting Off The Head of a Ghost, its anthemic closer.

Saw: I’ve been slowly watching the third season of America’s Sweethearts on Netflix, doling out the episodes piecemeal to make the whole experience last longer. The show, which began as a docuseries exploring the lives of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, has since evolved into a meta-commentary on how the success of the series has impacted the team. However, the elements that drew me to the show in the first place still remain: the unparalleled athleticism, the strive for excellence, the tension between the desire to stand out and be a part of the group. Watch one of their hypnotic performances, and I guarantee you’ll understand what I find so compelling.

JOSH:

Read: Closest thing approximating a summer read was Slags by British writer Emma Jane Unsworth. Imagine there existed a third season of Fleabag in which the sisters take a camper trip through Scotland. A smoke em if you got em kinda book.

Listened: Kacey Musgraves is back big time with Middle Of Nowhere. I sure like a song that can make me smile, and some of these make me laugh (Lonely with a capital H?). But maybe no sound this month was sweeter than hearing Derek McCormack, reading from his new book The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide, making people crack up with a mixture of glee and embarrassment. Poop jokes man, what a force.

Saw: Terry Gilliam’s The Fisher King really sung for me. VHS nostalgia. Big city paranoia. Gilliam’s brand of camp hits a fever pitch when Jeff Bridges ties cinderblocks to his feet to go jumping in the East River. Or maybe when Robin Williams hallucinates a firebreathing (more like flammivomous?) dragon. Next night, Kitty and I were watching an Oliver Stone movie considered to be his best, when she turned to me halfway and said “I dunno, he’s no Terry Gilliam.” Truer words <3

MAX:

Read: The memoir about watching Columbo that I wish I’d written, Watching the Detective by Deborah Shapiro. And currently reading the following Peter Falk related books: Just One More Thing: Stories From My Life by Peter Falk (in Large Print, the only format at the TPL which seems fitting); The Columbo Phile: A Casebook by Mark Dawidziak. Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carney, which my friend Ryan bought me for my birthday; Elaine May by Elizabeth Alsop.

Listened: Like every year at this time (and I have an inkling I wrote this exact thing last year), 98% of what I consume is related to NBA Playoff basketball. And for every two-and-a-half hours of a basketball game that I’d watch, it’s probably about another extra three to four hours of NBA podcasts telling me about what I just watched and teaching me about things I hadn’t noticed in-game. There’s The Zach Lowe Show, The All NBA Podcast hosted by Adam Mares and Tim Legler, The Dunker Spot hosted by Nekias Duncan and Steve Jones Jr., and Thinking Basketball hosted by Ben Taylor.

And now that the Knicks somehow broke their curse and won it all, I can get back to more pretentious fare like literary novels, art galleries, The Theatre.

Saw: My first-ever viewing of Exotica, which screened at The Revue as part of Bleak Week. I ran into fellow Junction bookseller, Charlotte, and she allowed me to sit near her in the back row, right. Atom Egoyan came in a couple minutes into the movie and stood to my left and watched and laughed as if delighted and surprised and as if he wasn’t the director of said movie. A very good vibe with Elias Koteas playing the exotic club’s Greek Oracle, Mia Kirshner dancing in the prototypical schoolgirl outfit to the not-prototypical “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen, and Arsinée Khanjian in so many funny wigs. Appreciated Egoyan talking about Toronto being very sexually repressed in the 90s while being the site of the most strip clubs per capita. A new reason for me to consider why I, who grew up in this city at that very time, am such a repressed tightass.

Recently, Norm and I met in a coffee shop to discuss changes at Invisible, little siblings complexes, the enduring role of booksellers, and the state of the Canadian publishing industry writ-large.

— Josh

Josh: Earlier this month, you reissued Eva HD’s first book of poetry, Rotten Perfect Mouth, originally released by Mansfield Press in 2015.

Norm: Yes! It’s a soft reissue in the sense that we didn’t change anything except for the logos.

Josh: And made it available again.

Norm: Yes, it’s available!

Josh: I’m so glad. People bring up that book to me all the time, people who read it a decade ago, and for whom it left an impression. When I blurb Eva’s books for a staff pick, I also run it by her first. I sent her my blurb for the reissue last week, which goes: “If your friends aren’t reading RPM, get new friends. And she approved. I never know. But I knew, in introducing you to each other, that you’d hit it off.

Norm: Eva and I talk a lot now. You’ve really added a person to my life. Which is a good thing to be able to do.

Josh: I see, looking at the fall 2026 season for Invisible, you have some exciting books upcoming, including The Furrow by Valérie Manteau which is a translation by TYPE bookseller Claire Foster. And also an upcoming non-fiction book written by Jen Calleja, Fair: The Life-Art of Translation. I gotta say, I’m a new fan of Calleja’s. I just read her novel Vehicle and was blown away by it.

Norm: We’ll be publishing that in North America next year, I hope! We’re about to sign the contract.

Josh: Amazing! I had no idea… But I’m sorry: how do you pronounce her last name?

Norm: It’s kah-LAY-uh. And let me tell you how I know that. In September, I was on a fellowship in Sardinia. It was called the Mediterranea Publishing Fellowship and it was for publishers and editors from the Mediterranean or the diaspora. My parents are from Lebanon so I was the Lebanese contingent I guess, and the guest of honour was Malta. So most Maltese publishers and a selection of Maltese writers were there, and half of them have the last name Calleja.

Jen’s half-Maltese, half-Irish. She runs a press in the UK with a brilliant Maltese translator named Kat Storace, and they publish exclusively Maltese writers or Maltese writing translated into English.

I remember first opening up Vehicle and thinking “I’m not going to like this.” I thought with the style, with so much of the narrative movement happening in the chapter titles. It must have been my mood that day. I was in the UK and I remember buying it and then at the ten page mark I thought: “I’m in. I’m hooked.”

Josh: It’s nice to admit when you’re wrong, eh?

Well, thankfully it was private, until now. It was a very quick reversal. So many people I admire have talked to me about Vehicle. Books work on a referral system. And I think the publisher Prototype’s packaging is also a big part of the interest.

Josh: Tell me about the changes coming to Invisible.

Norm: We’re rebranding. Our twentieth anniversary is in February 2027, but the rebranding will drop in September 2026. We’d been talking internally, externally, about the direction of the press, the aesthetic direction of independently published books in Canada. We wanted to find a way to make the books look more recognizably ours while also appealing to a reader who likes experimental books or books with an intellectual spine. By and large, that’s the editorial direction I want to move the press in.

Basically what we’re doing is this: we’re changing our name from Invisible Publishing to Invisible Books; we’re changing our logo entirely; we’re changing the interior typefaces we use for our books; all of our books will have french flaps; and we’ve got a new cover design system. Every cover will have a coloured band on the top, the same font for the author and translator attribution, and an individualised title font. For this upcoming title Floating Islands, the title type is the original font from the first surrealist magazines the author, Joyce Mansour, was published in. The books should be very recognizable. It’s a bit of a 70s throwback design.

Josh: How do you think about poetry on your list?

Norm: For a while I was very self-conscious about the poetry list. I was a poet as a young person. I think I stopped writing poetry when I was twenty, but I retain a deep personal poetry readership. But my first few years at the press – beyond working with writers who were already on the roster, and bringing in m. nourbeSe philip on the reissue front – I had a great deal of anxiety around poetry. For fiction and non-fiction, I knew what I wanted to do, but for poetry I didn’t have the same confidence. I didn’t have a plan. So what I decided to do is to bring the DOCUMENTS series in-house as an imprint. Our first publication together is Sallie Fullerton’s book Baby Face / Face de bébé. The series publishes poetry, non-fiction, and hybridized poetry/non-fiction. DOCUMENTS books have a distinct direction and that’s why we brought them aboard. I think I’ll let them drive the bus where poetry acquisitions are concerned but, that said, if a great book of poetry comes in apart from the series, I’ll let the book tell me.

I love the m. nourbeSe philip reissues of Looking for Livingtone and She Tries Her Tongue – Her Silence Softly Breaks. And I came to them with your reissues.

I had a bit of anxiety doing so many reissues last year, but it’s been a surprising and fulfilling and generative process. Especially with the last two philip books. As we’re re-editing the text we feel privileged to work on books that have stood the test of time but still have so many readers to find, and putting new material around them like new introductions. It’s been unexpectedly regenerative.

Josh: As you’re moving the press into a more intellectual and literary space, do you think of books in translation as part of what gets you there?

Norm: Yes and no. But yes. But no. We’re going to ride, unwittingly, the fetishisation of translation right now.

Josh: It’s not just me?

Norm: No, it’s not just you. It’s not just me either. I think Fitzcarraldo started it – maybe – for this current crop of readers, and also Deep Vellum, Dalkey, And Other Stories. Presses that do amazing translation work have created a market of readers who are interested in something because it’s translated. The translation almost becomes a plot point. Readers are picking up on the fact that the best books from, say, Croatia are the ones making it into translation. What actually gets translated does tend to be the cream of the crop.

Josh: And it allows you to go to spots in the world that are underserved.

Norm: Yes. I get the same thrill finding a deeply Canadian writer in Saskatoon – a writer from a province, Saskatchewan, that I think is under-read in the rest of Canada – as I get when finding a great book from Ramallah, or from a language that isn’t translated very often. You get the double thrill of discovering and disseminating. That’s why we do what we do.

Josh: Can you talk about the alchemy that makes Canadian literature?

Norm: No.

Josh: Okay. When something is deeply Canadian, is it just something you feel?

Norm: Yeah, it breaks down to the regional for me. I can identify a New Brunswick novel. Or a Southwest Ontarian author. Or an Albertan author. Prairie authors have such a distinct approach. But I don’t see us as having a national literature. Except, I see us as having the conditions that, materially, could create a national literature, which is to say that we’re dwarfed by the US and the UK – mostly the US – so in a way we’re writing in a shadow and it puts us on a backfoot a lot and informs the books themselves. That’s how I see it.

We’ve stopped going to the US recently, but we still need to be out in the international publishing community, so I’ve found myself in Europe and in the UK a lot more and giving people the spiel about Canadian publishing. And the statistics are easy to shock people with: 5% of books sold in Canada are from Canadian publishers. But meeting Maltese publishers, where most of the population speaks Italian or English, they point out there are very few sales of books in Maltese. Malta is right next to Italy and Italy is a massive book market. Or in Ireland, even though they produce some of the greatest writers in English, almost all of those writers are published by UK presses. Sally Rooney lives in Ireland but is published by a British imprint of a multinational publisher. I would like to one day have a conference of little sibling publishing markets, so we could talk about how to scrap together a domestic publishing market. Ideally, we’d confer in Ireland, so I could get a trip to Ireland out of it.

Josh: In your view, what is the role of independent presses in Canada?

Norm: I have lots of conflicting thoughts about what an independent publisher should be these days. Do you want to be a farm team? Or is it your place to do weird books? But there’s been an obvious and powerful commodification, conglomeration, and mainstreaming of the “Weird Book.” For a while I thought we would just do challenging literature, but, as those books have become sellable, and as the tendrils of the big publishers reach where the next trend in book sales will come from, it means that challenging literature is not exclusively the domain of the small press anymore. So maybe we’ll get pushed into weirder and weirder directions.

Josh: In a previous conversation of ours, you awoke me to the fact that 85% of Canadian writers are published by independent Canadian presses but independent presses account for only 5% of book sales in Canada.

Norm: If not in the public interest, it’s in the interest of Canadian writers to change that.

Josh: It’s in the interest of everybody.

Norm: But you don’t want it to be like eating your vegetables. You want people to buy your books because they’re good books. It’s so hard to change those patterns. So all we can do is get better, and hopefully get more support from everybody in marketing our books.

Josh: And who’s ‘everybody’ in this scenario?

Norm: Indie booksellers. We only exist because indie booksellers sell our books. By the numbers but also by encouragement. There are lots of books coming out always, and booksellers are excited by books being published by multi-nationals, but I think sometimes they don’t consider themselves to have a responsibility to the ecosystem. Or they do, but it only extends to the authors, not always to publishers. So there’s a lot of give and take. I’ve been a happy customer of many bookstores who seem to take it as a challenge to surprise and bring their customers to places they didn’t expect, and of ones who just sell them the thing that has the biggest marketing budget, or the biggest buzz, which is often the same thing.

Booksellers pride themselves on being tastemakers. I should hope that Invisible can publish books that can be the beneficiaries of these tastemakers; the under-the-radar publisher that booksellers are the first to tell a customer about. Booksellers have to lead the charge, but they have to want to lead the charge.

Josh: Another problem is that there’s a big void too with media, nationally.

Norm: Massive. But then I think mass media is a problem everywhere. A Globe & Mail review does not do the numbers it used to do. We got one last year and it didn’t move the needle. But there are lots of smaller publications now that are doing book reviews. I’m hoping those will have a cumulative impact. To me the biggest challenge is in getting people to find out about the books.

I think about Biblioasis, who have turned themselves into an independent powerhouse in Canada, and a lot of their incredible success has been from their dogged pursuit of booksellers. They spend time, money, and energy making sure that indie booksellers know, read, and care about their books. And that’s a model I want to replicate. That seems to be the most assured thing. Maybe a newspaper review will sell way less books than it used to, but if a person has read a book and loves it and handsells it, that’s what counts.

Josh: What can we expect from Invisible in 2027?

Norm: We have good books coming out! We have debut fiction by Katherine McKittrick, debut stories by Josiah Nelson and Sarah SC Dillon. We have lots of story collections coming out after not having done any for a while. We have a sort of unclassifiable book from Lee Suksi. We’re doing the second graphic novel by Barrack Zailaa Rima; her first book was Beirut, which did extraordinarily well internationally. We have a debut novel from Badar Salem, who is from Ramallah in the West Bank, but she lives in Montreal now. The brilliant translator, Michelle Hartman, is also in Montreal so it will be a fully Canadian Arabic-to-English translation. So that’s an interesting expansion of the sometimes limited idea of what a Canadian book is. A Canadian book can be written in Arabic.

You can view and preorder Invisible Books’ fall season at typebooks.ca.

In anticipation of THE READING TYPE, I talked to Brittany about Soft Core, San Francisco, sex work, and Japanese “pink films.” Enjoy the conversation, and please join us in-store at TYPE Junction on Thursday June 11th at 7pm for the latest edition of THE READING TYPE.

– Cason

Cason: Soft Core is a smelly book. The title refers to the name of a particular perfume that smells “of liquorice and orchids, leather and plums, borrowed cigarettes, a zigzaggy purple mix.” We get these lush descriptions of scent throughout the novel, and we’re often introduced to new characters and environments primarily by their stench. What’s the importance of smell in this book?

Brittany: I hadn’t realized my writing was so focused on smells until the book came out and I got so many comments like this one! I think I try to write in a sensuous way, creating a world that feels embodied and haptic, especially in a current landscape of very cold, minimalistic, abstract, disembodied, sort of fable-like contemporary literature that leaves me feeling alienated (I won’t name names........). So smell is one extremely powerful way to build a world within the novel that feels immediate and real-to-life. Smell is so evocative, so dense with association, especially in a famously smelly city like San Francisco (jasmine bushes and human shit and a sea-breeze)!

Cason: The novel is grounded in San Francisco’s particular geography and social politics, as well as the city’s lineage of sex work and underground culture. How has San Francisco influenced your writing? How did you go about representing the city on the page?

Brittany: San Francisco is as much a character in Soft Core as Ruth or Dino is. I love San Francisco and I think it is such an insanely romantic city. I feel like I am in a decade-long romance with SF in that she’s always seducing me, then depressing me, then confusing me, then luring me back in with her natural beauty. For real San Franciscans (not tech transplants), SF has long been defined by a live-and-let-live mentality, an invitation towards friction. There is SO much magic in San Francisco if you know where to look, like I really feel like San Francisco is a magical realist city where the rules of order are somehow bent; sometimes it’s fun magic, sometimes it’s dark, like the mysterious graffiti I’ve been seeing around my neighborhood that declares: Let Them Smoke Fent!

I’m so bored with the propaganda of SF as a “tech city” or “AI hub” when historically it is so much more complicated and wacky, as you aptly noted! Like, San Francisco has always been a place where people come to bottom out (or bottom, lol). Where sailors get washed up, where gays escape their old lives, where sex work thrives, where kink is normalized (look up pictures of the Folsom Street Fair), and where unhoused people or drug-users gather to form cities within the city. So SF is forever influencing my work, as it is also a very poetic city, and I try very hard to pay homage to her in a way that feels tender and loving but real.

Cason: I read Soft Core as a mix between mystery, psychological thriller, and workplace novel. Since the book’s title evokes the idea of genre (softcore vs. hardcore), I’m wondering how you see the novel operating in terms of genre? How would you classify Soft Core? Were there any genre tropes or archetypes that were you interested in exploring, discarding, or subverting?

Brittany: I love this description of the play on genres. I think some readers got mad at me because they went into Soft Core expecting a classic romance or potboiler thriller with a tidy ending but I’m a big vibes > plot girly. I was inspired by erotic 90’s thrillers and neo-noir films like Basic Instinct, particularly this trope of a woman’s descent into madness, or like the trope of the Sexy Woman Unravelling. I also love the aesthetics of noir as a way to explore San Francisco at night, to tune into that foggy mysterious vibe. As a reader and writer, I’m very drawn to atmosphere, a vague sense of unease, the slippage between reality and fantasy.

I think this slippage defines a lot of sex work, where you toggle between such extremes on the daily, like veering between mundane blunt reality and dreamy outlandish fantasy, gig worker and dream girl, defilement and adoration, pleasure and pain. And of course I’m always wanting to subvert a moralistic depiction of sex work (cough cough fuck Euphoria), which is why I love that you called this a workplace novel! I’m not trying to portray sex work as something salacious for the sake of being salacious, a titillating plot point that precedes the narrator’s demise, but I’m also not trying to fall into neoliberal girl boss territory where sex work is overly-glamorized and one-dimensional. Violence is ever-present but so is grace and magic, even in the strip club. Everything is always in flux. Lastly, as I mentioned above, I LOVE a heightened reality/magical realism, like a Kubrickian worldview where nothing is ever as it seems (I think the TV show Atlanta also does this brilliantly); sex workers, I think, are very attuned to the unreal nature of reality so a magical realism is actually the MOST true-to-form realism, if that makes sense.

Cason: Soft Core reminds me at times of Mulholland Drive, and at other times, Jane Campion’s In the Cut. Some writers that came to mind as I read it were Diane Di Prima, Anais Nin, and fellow San Franciscan Dodie Bellamy. Who are some of your influences, literary, cinematic, or otherwise? What was on the Soft Core moodboard?

Brittany: Thank you for these gorgeous comparisons! As I said, I love Kubrick’s heightened reality and uneasiness. Unsurprisingly, I love Mary Gaitskill’s short stories (not so much the novels) and Lorrie Moore. Two of my favorite books ever are Aliens & Anorexia by Chris Kraus, and Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel Delaney. I also love 100 Boyfriends by my SF sister Brontez Purnell for gay messy hybrid-genre skanky elegies. A show I think is so underrated and an amazing depiction of a young girl unraveling due to her obsession with a pop star is Donald Glover’s Swarm. This might be a terribly unoriginal answer but I really do think The Sopranos is insanely novelistic and the cinematographical attention-to-detail really inspires my world-building as a writer. Similarly, the book I’ve reread the most in my life is White Noise by Don Delilo for his impossibly gorgeous prose, barbed humor, and attention to the semiotics of everyday life.

I really like old-school smut when it comes to cinema, lol. Like anything sleazy and ultra-stylized and campy, like giallo films from Italy. Recently I’ve been inspired by the pink films of Hisayasu Satō; pink films are softcore pornographic thrillers from Japan but they have a very interesting history and are known for their avant-garde style and absurdist plots. It’s a very interesting research wormhole but in short, post-WW2 film studios in Japan got interested in the sexploitation genre and some big studios in the 70s would finance any pink film so long as it had four nude scenes per hour, which allowed for a lot of experimentation within the framework of the genre, including Love − Zero = Infinity (1994) which was a vampire film about AIDS.

Cason: I love how you write sex in Soft Core. Some of the sex in the book turned me on, while other moments I found sad, funny, sweet, uncomfortable, foreboding, or some mix of all of the above. Kinks are presented directly and non-judgementally, and sex work is presented as any other job (one image that stuck with me is Ruth describing all the doms carrying supplies from Costco into the dungeon). What was your approach to writing sex in this book, and what was your approach to writing sex work?

Brittany: I think I touched on this earlier, about not wanting to moralize but also not wanting to simplify sex work. As for sex, I think I might be desensitized because I don’t think this book is very sexy, lol! But lots of people say it is so you’re probably right! I think of it as more of a love story with a lot of romantic or charged moments. I guess I write about sex as one of infinite forms of relationality...sex or sex work as an epistemoligical endeavor by which you come to know something (or someone) you didn’t know before.

The Juncture thought right now is a good time to interview him, this being the eve of the re-issuing of his first novel Dark Rides from Pilot Press in the UK and the publication of The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide, from Cushion Works, which is both a showcase of Derek’s handmade jewelry and an imagined fictional world in which punk designers Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren design pieces for vampires visiting the Grand Ole Opry.

-- Luke

Luke: What inspired you to start making jewellery?

Derek: Well, I’ve always felt like I’m not that good at writing. I’ve always felt like writing was my fourth choice. I wish I had been an artist or a jeweller or fashion designer or something useful, and I failed at all those and so I ended up with writing. Part of my life is buying shit at flea markets and especially on eBay. I’m a gold star on eBay! I’ve been on since the third day they were open. I’ve been collecting Grand Ole Opry and country music memorabilia and over the years I’ve written many books about country stars or set in Nashville. I don’t know how exactly all that informs my writing, or if that’s just an excuse to buy crap, but when I’m writing about something, I buy a lot of stuff associated with it. For example, when I was writing Castle Faggot, I bought a lot of toy mountains and castles from when I was young, and somehow being physically surrounded by them makes me stay in that world. I’d rather be a toy maker, too. Buying stuff is the closest I can get to doing what I actually would like to do.

I thought I was done writing about country music. And then I thought, no, I want to write about Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood making clothes for Opry stars. And I started a short text. I realized it wasn’t a novel, it was really just going to be a long essay or an article, but I thought, “Oh, I could try and make the things that I was describing”. Not to belittle Vivienne and McLaren, but, you know, the early punks, they just safety-pinned everything for the jewellery, right? I was inspired by the simplicity of that. The cover of The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide says it has a forward by Malcolm McLaren, which is a lie: I wrote it, obviously. And then there’s an essay by me, and then there’s 250 images. So it’s an art book, it’s a monograph, which I’ve never done before, and I never will again, because I’m all out of ideas.

Luke: I feel like you have a sort of affinity for England since I know you have an interest in Leigh Bowery and that whole scene. And I think England has an affinity for you, with Dark Rides being reissued there. What’s your relationship with the UK?

Derek: I had an affinity, for sure, growing up in small town Peterborough in the 70s and 80s. It’s complicated though, because I also really loathe British culture. By which I mean, I grew up watching the Queen’s address on Christmas, and my family watched Benny Hill, The Two Ronnies, and Coronation Street. It made me feel ill. But on the other hand, there was pop music and club culture and the Blitz Kids and [the nightclub] Taboo. I dressed like them and wanted to be like them. So that gang I was obsessed with and never in my mind considered that that, too, was British. Of course it was. But in my mind they were different cultures.

I don’t know where the parts I liked came from, maybe some other imaginary version of England. And when Judy Blame’s Obituary: Writings on Fashion and Death came out in 2021 and [English DJ] Princess Julia blurbed it, I got in contact with people from that scene, and that was lovely for me after all these years. The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide is about Westwood and McLaren making clothes for vampires in the 1950s and using Grand Old Opry stars as models. At the end of the essay in the book, it comes back to those UK Club Kids. There’s a little biographical paragraph about Derek McCormack, stranded in northern Ontario trying to figure out how he, too, could be one of those guys. I romanticized that scene so much. Opry is supposedly set in the 50s, and it’s supposedly McLaren and Westwood, but it’s clearly me at my advanced age, looking back nostalgically and pretending I’m part of the story. I mean, that’s what all my fiction is: pretending to be part of things I’m not.

Luke: Yeah, even the piece you read for the Toronto-based reading series Pack Animal back in September had a revisionist quality.

Derek: Yeah, I wrote three episodes of The Andy Griffith Show for fun. The first one I really liked, that’s what I read from, and then the second one I liked less and the third one is terrible. I realized that I didn’t know how to make them better. But then part of my brain was like, well, conceptually, that was the run of the show: it started off great, and it got worse, and then it got even worse than you can imagine, right? And I finally just showed it to my friend in England. He read all three and he said, “You have succeeded in writing something that gets shittier and shittier.” I realized that was sort of praise. I feel it’s a warning: Derek, he writes something that gets really terrible at the end, right? I don’t know whether to show the other episodes to the world or not. I don’t know if there’s any excuse for putting shitty writing out in the world, even if it’s supposed to get shitty.

Luke: Do you find that all of the things that you write are always a new genre or experience or form? Because I know you say ‘novel’, but it’s often kind of ambiguous as to what the form or genre might be.

Derek: I thought of Wish Book as a mail order catalogue. The Haunted Hillbilly I thought of as a horror comic, and The Show That Smells as a Tod Browning movie. The Well-Dressed Wound I thought of as a stage play and Castle Faggot I thought of as a theme park brochure and a stage play. The Shithole Opry Collector’s Guide is modelled on an Avon collector’s self published book from the 60s that I bought multiple copies of and sent to the designer and publisher.

With Dark Rides, the publisher called it ‘a novel in short stories’ when it came out in 1996 because they felt novels sold better than short stories. It was such a preposterous lie that it’s a novel, since it’s really a book of short stories. The only novelistic through-line is that it’s all set in Peterborough, my hometown, in the early 1950s and every story has a character named Derek McCormack. But all the versions of Derek McCormack are different. Some die. One is straight. Some are gay. So that doesn’t make it a novel, and it doesn’t make it short stories. That was partially the influence of Kathy Acker, where Kathy is part of everything, and any novel ever written, and every movie ever made, and every political movement. So Derek is Kathy in that.

Luke: I think you have a great eye for buying stuff. How do you find out about new, cool books to buy for the store?

Derek: Part of it is competitive, part of it is personal, and part of it is practical. There are books that I think shouldn’t cost so much for our customers. They’ll see, for example, that there’s a limited edition Semiotext(e) chapbook about Virginia Woolf. But buying it from the US is prohibitive, right? If you buy a single copy they add $25 USD for shipping. Sometimes I think books in the store should be really pretty lures that creatures underwater see flashing. The whole experience of the store can be pretty eclectic: you want to get a book for your dad, you want to get a bestseller you read about, and then you want to be shocked. With computers and the internet, it should be getting easier to find interesting books. But it’s actually harder even though the world is technically smaller, since printing is more expensive and shipping is more expensive.

The US and especially Britain are having a small press renaissance. There’s so many small presses in the UK and in the States, people starting up and doing two books a year, four books a year, or whatever. And so I’m gonna be part of it. If you read about something online from a hot new press from Scotland, it’d be nice to have a store here where you can go and have a chance of actually touching it in real life. And publishing in Canada has none of that spirit. Whatever spirit there was, which did exist when I was younger, is apparently dead or unimportant. I mean, not to say young kids aren’t doing great stuff, like we have great reading series now, reviews, and other stuff. But Canada’s been deeply unadventurous at starting up publishing scenes.

Luke: With the excitement about your book being reissued, it’s interesting to note how there are more literary presses devoted to reissuing older titles, like New York Review Books and McNally Editions.

Derek: I feel that is part of the British and American scene. It’s funny in Canada, they’ll reissue these Canadian classics, like Bear and stuff. But it’s all books that you could already get if you wanted to go to a used bookstore and buy for a quarter, because they’d been on every University literary course for 40 years. There will be books that pop up on NYRB Classics that I’ve never heard of. I spoke to someone who was interested in reissuing lost Canadian queer titles, and he picked my brain. At first, I thought there weren’t any, but I came up with quite a list of people that I had known early on whose books have disappeared. You know, if you’re not lucky to live long enough, it doesn’t take long to get forgotten. I remember one of the first gay Canadian books I bought was by Peter McGehee, who at the time had a blurb from William Burroughs, which is a big deal. I don’t think his name conjures anything now, though.

Luke: That’s fascinating. That would be so cool.

Derek: I hope so. It would be a lot to justify financially.

Luke: Maybe if they can angle it as gay hockey books. Is that going to be your next book? Would you do a gay sports book?

Derek: No. Ok, I can’t say no. I can never say no. What would it be? Sexy curling? I don’t know enough about hockey and I know that I don’t want to write about it. It also seems like someone’s cornered the market on that.

Luke: Are you excited about any books at the moment?

Derek: I hate books.

LUKE:

Read: I had a bit of a slow winter of reading, starting a lot of books and not always finishing them. Some that I did complete (and loved): Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool, Fumiko Takano’s Miss Ruki, and Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent. I’m re-reading my staff pick Madonna in a Fur Coat, ahead of the inaugural session of our new Junction book club THE READING TYPE! I’ll be running it on Thursday, April 30th at 7pm at the Junction store (2887 Dundas St. W.).

Listened: Dorothy Ashby’s album Afro-Harping which has been my go-to album at the store and I find it to be the perfect album for a bookstore. It’s jazzy and energetic without being distracting, a hard balance to strike when most music I try and put on is either lyrical and intrusive or so ambient that it recedes completely. I came across Ashby’s work after Kelala’s most recent album In The Blue Light, which features LOTS of harp (virtuosically performed by Ahya Simone!). I’m a big fan of fellow harpist Alice Coltrane as well, who has a new biography out, Cosmic Music, and an artbook collecting art inspired by her work, Monumental Eternal. I hope someone will write some books on Dorothy Ashby and her work soon.

Watched: I re-watched Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet in February at The Revue. It’s a film which I love immensely and think does an excellent job of adapting a classic story to its contemporary moment. I feel completely the opposite on Emerald Fennel’s Wuthering Heights, which I thought was deeply disappointing, although I went in with little hope. Even my obsession with Hong Chau couldn’t salvage what I came to think was a total adaptation misfire. Whereas R + J expands upon the text, opening it up, I felt like Fennel’s film closed something on Emily Brontë’s original text. My rose of it all, though: it has been great to re-read the novel and getting to discuss it anew with customers and friends.

JESS:

Read: I read She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks & Looking For Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (both newly reissued by Invisible!) in preparation for my forthcoming interview with m. nourbeSe philip for The Toronto Review. Both books have forever altered my relationship with myself and language.

Listened: I’m on the Polaris Prize jury this year, so I’ve been revisiting some Canadian music from last year that I missed. I was also lucky enough to recently attend Listening Room: Sade, a local jam series where artists play and improvise around the music of neo-soul icons. Being there not only feels like a scene out of Love Jones, but reminds you that live music is a sort of sacred collaboration between the musicians and audience, creating an energy you have to feel to understand.

Saw: I was in my cinephile bag this winter. Here were the highlights: I finally watched Spike Lee’s Malcolm X (1992). The three-hour runtime always intimidated me, but I’m already looking forward to revisiting it. I also began exploring Satyajit Ray’s work, starting with his 1964 film Charulata, about a woman whose quiet life and marriage is disrupted by the arrival of her husband’s cousin, a fellow poet. I liked the visual language of this film; really delicate yet impactful. My partner runs a film series and recently screened dream hampton’s It Was All a Dream (2024), a documentary made up of footage from her personal archive, capturing moments and conversations with the golden age rappers she came up with. Watching her spark conversations with rappers about feminism and women in hip hop made me think about a topic I’m obsessed with: critique as a form of care, investment, and regard. What makes it possible? What makes it feel impossible? dream hampton is a force though and modeled a kind of cool, calm integrity I’ll be looking back to. I also spent time in Malta last month and one of the highlights was our day trip to Popeye Village, where Robert Altman shot his 1980 film Popeye. I was skeptical right up until entering the theme park but left absolutely mind-blown. I couldn’t believe the amount of detail that went into building such a large-scale set. When we came home the following week, we watched The Wiz (1978), another visual delight that has deepened my appreciation for production design.

CASON:

Read: My most memorable reads this winter include Larissa Pham’s Discipline, following the relationship between a young writer and her estranged mentor; Robert Ferro’s The Family of Max Desir, a soapy family drama from the early 80s; and Scott Heim’s Mysterious Skin, a queer coming-of-age novel that’s every bit as disturbing and beautiful as Gregg Araki’s 2004 adaptation (thanks to TYPE Junction regular Theresa for the recommendation). Currently I’m enjoying the beginning of spring alongside Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, The Rabbi, a psychosexual romp that’s gagging me, turning me on, and making me laugh all at once.

Listened: I can’t get enough of Girlfriend, the new album by indie singer-songwriter Grace Ives. Known for her simple, synth-heavy bedroom pop, Ives has expanded her musical palette to include live musicianship, resulting in much more lush and layered production than her earlier output (for more context, read her recent profile in Exclaim!, which does a better job explaining her musical trajectory than I can). Imagine Paula Cole but with a Gen Z hyperpop influence. I’ve been playing her at the store a lot lately; stop by when I’m working and you’ll probably hear it.

JOSH:

Read: The best book I’ve read this year is City Like Water by the Hong-Kong writer Dorothy Tse. For anyone interested in a surrealist look at life under authoritarianism, this novel is a ride and, somehow, a laugh and a joy.

Listened: Last week, I was in Lisbon with my family. We were staying in the Alfama district which is famous for its Fado music. Nearly every bar had live Fado issuing from it, but we chose a tiny club in the Largo Sao Miguel that locks in its twenty-or-so patrons for the duration of each five song set. The kiddo stayed up later than she ever has, watching set after set. She’s seen lots of live music, but I’ve never seen her as mesmerised as this. Come to think of it, could have been the late hour…

Saw: Brian De Palma’s 1984 movie Body Double is a mash-up of Hitchcock’s Vertigo & Rear Window. Sound like a mess? It is! In Vertigo the further Scottie ventures from reality the more real it feels, and the closer he gets to the truth the more surreal and disturbed everything gets. It’s the opposite in Body Double – the lies make you feel crazy. And the truth makes you feel just-this-side of crazy. All to say, I wish Melanie Griffith was in everything.

MAX

Read: Discord by Jeremy Cooper follows two characters, Rebekah, a middle-aged composer of classical music, and Evie, a twenty-something genius of a saxophonist, as they collaborate on a piece called Distant Voices. I have great love for Cooper’s previous novel, Brian, which follows an isolated middle-aged man in London who gets a membership at the British Film Institute and forms something like community amongst the other strange, isolated movie buffs that attend. Two books in a row by Cooper that depict not-quite friendships, depict relationships that look like acquaintanceships but have more texture and depth and eccentricity due to nerding out on culture and art, classical music and movies.

Listened: Like Jess, I went to the Truth and Dare screening of dream hampton’s documentary It Was All a Dream, which pairs her raw interview recordings of The Notorious B.I.G., Method Man, and Guru et al. with her voiceover as she reads from her The Source writings, circa early-90s. An incredible archive, my favorite being Lil Kim who goes from doing that girlish thing of appearing shy to hampton’s camera to that growling monster that shows up on stage. For the most part, the music that’s in the film, a film about hip hop, are rough tracks heard being mixed in the background of studios or the rappers themselves trying unpracticed lines for their very, very high friends. And part of me just actually wanted to put Moment of Truth or Tical on and listen all the way through.

Saw: Ever since I saw Mikey and Nicky last October, I’ve been obsessed with Peter Falk. You know, Lt. Columbo. And thank goodness for the seven seasons and over a hundred hours of Columbo available for me to watch Peter Falk on screen. There’s the episode “Etude in Black” which has John Cassavetes playing the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, who leaves preparations for the night’s televised concert to murder his mistress. Or the Johnny Cash episode “Swan Song”, where he plays a gospel country star, whose wife is the actual leader, and who keeps a tight hand on all his earnings and a lid on his taste for underage women. So, of course, Cash, first ten minutes in, kills this wife and one of his former lovers. What is it about Falk, specifically, that he can play the patron saint of not-needing-to-appear-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room?

BULLETIN BOARD

A stellar lineup of events this month. Mark your calendars!

Sunday, April 12th //STORYTIME & LAUNCH: FLY IN THE CHAI by Zenia Wadhwani // 1 PM @ TYPE Junction

Sunday, April 12th // JUNCTION READS: featuring K.R. Wilson, Lucy E.M. Black, Ashraf Zaghal, and Adelle Purdham // 6:30 PM @ TYPE Junction

Sunday, April 19th // STORYTIME & LAUNCH: BILLIE BUILDS A ROBOCORN with José Avelino Gilles Lourenço and James Braithwaite // 11 AM - 12:30 PM @ Victory Social Club (1166 Dundas Street West)

Sunday, April 19th // STORYTIME & LAUNCH: THE MOUNTAIN THAT WOULDN’T MOVE by Sandra Dumais // 1 PM @ TYPE Junction

Tuesday, April 28th // BOOK LAUNCH: TEN CLEAR DAYS by Eric Beck Rubin // 6.30 PM @ TYPE Junction

Tuesday, May 5th // BOOK LAUNCH: LYING, STEALING, AND OTHER WAYS TO SAVE THE PLANET by Curtis Campbell // 7 PM @ TYPE Junction

Soon, Paul will start teaching a six week class at Hot Pizza Studios (an art studio located here in the Junction) to introduce students to relief printmaking, using rubber and lino blocks to create prints on paper and textiles. And Paul’s work can still be spotted in the Junction, where we’re still sometimes graced by his touch in our windows, ie these most recent Summer and Winter seasons.

Recently, Paul and I took a stroll through the Church Wellesley Village, and talked about reading habits, nuclear families, art exposure, and whether it’s important to finish every book you start.

— Josh

Josh: How has your reading practice changed since you left TYPE?

Paul: I think I’ve only read 3 books this year. I’m out of the loop a little bit in what is brand new.

So I’ve let myself fall back into rereading a couple of things. I reread The Handmaid’s Tale. I was thinking “I’ve been talking about this book alot, I should go back and read it.” Oh, and I’ve got a nice big fat stack of original Hardy Boys. My stepdad said, “You’ve got these Hardy Boys in the basement.” There’s like 25. They’re hardcovers!

J: Were you ten the last time you read those?

P: I don’t remember reading them.

I think I inherited them and never read them. The ones I read were the Hardy Boys Case Files, and they were meant to be more mature.

J: Sure, I remember those – the Hardy Boys are in high school.

P: Yeah. They deal with more crime. There would be more guns and violence. In the first book, Frank Hardy’s girlfriend is killed in a car bomb and that sets the tone for this much darker series, where he’s grieving. The moral tone of the original series from the ‘50s is really striking, in that sort of gentle nudging towards proper behaviour. The boys knew to be home by 5 o’clock because mother would have dinner on the table. There’s always this reinforcement that your family comes first, there are manners, and your mother has dinner ready at five, so don’t be rude.

J: That’s nuclear family mores right there.

P: Exactly. They’re always polite. In one story they mentioned an immigrant family. The father was a mechanic in town, he’d been framed for a crime, and everyone in the family knew that they were poor, they’d just come from Italy after the war. Southern European immigrants were dirt poor in the period after the war, and the books find an interesting way of framing people. It was of a time and a place.

J: Are there other Young Adult books that draw you in for the same reason?

P: When I was at TYPE I could sell the Beverly Cleary books, the Ramona series, because what was presented in those books was such an amazing slice of America in the 1950s.

If one person on the street got a car, that was news. Only one person on the street had a TV set. The lucky guy who had the big job is the one who had the TV set. You can roll your eyes when you read some of those books because they’re very dated and they’re very puerile, but they’re also a really interesting snapshot of North America in a very specific time and place.

J: It resonates with me that your reading habits have changed now that you’re not in the store. Last year, I had a moment where I’d read a few new releases in a row and I didn’t love any of them. The joy had come out of it a little bit. And I thought: “I think I need to demarcate between what’s reading for myself and what’s reading for work.” So I would read for work for three weeks. Then I would read for myself for three weeks.

P: Also, If you’re not enjoying a book, put it down. How often do you just push yourself to finish the 700 page novel? How many times do you flip away from a song or a TV show or a movie if it’s not interesting you? I just read a really fantastically crappy book. A little bit of a thriller, a little bit of a future-set dystopia. Oh my god. And that one, I did not finish. It felt great to put it down. It felt wonderful. You have this feeling that you have to be morally upright and finish every book you start. You do not!

J: Do you want to take the alley up to Isabella, maybe? Wait – does this alley go anywhere?

P: Yes, it will.

J: Do you know where Neil Young lived on Isabella?

P: No, Neil Young lived on Isabella? Shut up!

J: Should we look it up and go see?

P: Yes. That’s great.

J: How long did you work at TYPE?

P: Almost ten years! The fall of 2024 would have been my 10th anniversary, but I left in July.

J: How long did you do windows for the Queen St. store?

P: Kalpna was doing windows for the first few years when I started. So I think I did windows for about six or seven of the nine years I was there.

J: How many windows, approximately, do you think that makes?

P: Maybe thirty? I’m thinking I did four a year. I kept a digital record. I took a lot of photos of the windows I did, but I know that I missed a few. I was just thinking of that the other day. There’s a few ones I really regret not photographing.

J: There’s no exit to this laneway.

P: No, apparently not.

J: OK let’s turn back. Do you have a favourite window?

P: My first window is one of my favourites because that was honestly the first 3D piece I’d ever made. I’d always been a drawer and a painter, and the printmakers have always worked two-dimensionally. That window was honestly the first thing I’d sculpted. I taped out the measurement of the front window depth on my floor and I built it in my apartment. I was very chuffed with myself because I knew that the window dressers at Barneys in New York City would build all of their windows at a warehouse in Queens.

J: And you were doing it in your apartment!

P: I do it in my apartment, baby! It was a good one. It was a Valentine’s window. I built these two sweet little desks, and I found the perfect light green paper to make the legs and bodies of the desks. It was that perfect enamelled green that we all grew up with in our schools. I incorporated kids’ Valentines going back and forth to each other. Anyway, it was a nice success.

And then there’s a window I did for Christmas, which is all folded paper Christmas lights. And I ended up just going so crazy, making them, I made more than I needed, and I think I probably had about eighty. I just kept hanging them and hanging them.

J: Well, you’ll be happy to know that those paper lights are in the basement of our store in the Junction. We put them up every year.

P: Oh nice! Good! I remember a very sweet moment. There was a mom in the store talking to another mom, and they were looking up at the lights, and one mom said to the other: “We tried making those ourselves last weekend. It did not go well.” I thought, oh, that’s cute. Some little kid having a little meltdown because they can’t quite fold the lights in the same way.

J: Imitation is the most intense flattery, right?

P: I think that Christmas window is probably my best, actually. My most favourite.

J: Tell me about this upcoming class you’re teaching at Hot Pizza Studio?

P: I’ve been at Hot Pizza Studio for a year. This March break will mark a year, because one of the first things I did was on March break camp last year. And I’ve done some PA days, I’ve done some summer camps. I’ve done a few one-offs. I’ve done a couple of adult classes, and I’m about to start a six-week long series of Thursday nights starting the first two weeks of March and then all of April. Each session is two hours of print-making, introducing people to linocut and rubber stamp printing. Some really nice basics.

Two hours is enough time to really make a mess, and then think about what you’re doing the next week when you come back. Oh boy, just the act of getting an adult out of their regular life for two hours where the only thing they’re required to do is make something...Wooh, stand back, because nobody sits around twiddling their thumbs!
They know that time is valuable and they enjoy it. It’s just like the kids that I teach regularly, some kids are just nose in, they know exactly what they’re doing, so don’t get in their way. Some other kids, and some other adults, want assistance. They want to talk about what they’re making. They want to run it past you, and they want to see it, sort of, filtered through your ears or your eyes and just want to hear you say: “Yes, do it. Make it!”

J: After six weeks, how vast of a project can someone expect to come out with?

P: There’s a lesson every class, and I’m not really thinking about an overall project. In week one, I’ll introduce the class to some simple rubber stamping, then move into lino. I want to open up the idea that if we’re working on something today, and you did something last week you still want to work on, just ignore me and keep working. Because that’s what I really enjoyed about what I’ve learned, I guess, from being at Hot Pizza: it’s really not a school. Julia Dault’s been very clear that it’s a studio.
It is a place to make things. It’s not curriculum based. There’s certainly no pass or fail. We’ll talk about what we’re doing today, and here are some supplies, here are some lessons. We’re going to draw some portraits of each other; we’re going to do ‘Wanted’ portraits. So here’s a great way to draw eyes and get the proportions right. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. And if you want to make a fort for your dog out of cardboard, do that. Here’s the cardboard, here’s the glue. I’m not gonna stand in your way.

J: When you see the kids having fun at Hot Pizza, and you think back to yourself, how different was your upbringing with art? And does that inform what you want to bring to the kids of today?

P: The word is ‘exposure’. I had a mom who was an art teacher and I think the main thing I benefited from was ‘exposure.’ The stuff was just there in the house and I was allowed to play with it. You know, there were a few types of paint that I wasn’t allowed to touch because they were expensive. But by and large, I was allowed to use X-ACTO blades and rubber cement and cutting knives and different types of paper, and I knew my paper thicknesses.

One of the things we love about Hot Pizza is that the studio is overflowing with stuff. There’s a fantastic mountain of cardboard. It’s a fantastic mountain of fabric.

J: How do you get a kid to come out of their shell?

P: Some kids, they really know what they’re doing. They came here guns blazing, ready to make some art. And other kids are still sort of struggling with it, especially at the beginning of the day when mom or dad just dropped them off. They’re not firing on all cylinders. But I make sure that whatever it is they’ve done, it’s awesome: “Oh my god, so much orange. I love orange. I see you love orange.” Just let them know that whatever they made is fantastic.

It’s not just the youngest, it’s sometimes physically the smallest kid in the class. Parents dropped them off and they’re very reticent. They are very shy. And I’m sort of thinking, “Oh, boy, there might be some tears later in the day.” But it’s those kids to watch. Like maybe 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock, they’ll come out of their shells and by the end of the day, that’s when they’re firing on all cylinders. So I learned to really give kids the time to warm up.

Soon after, our walk came to its end outside the address, 88 Isabella Street, where Neil Young had once lived during his days in the Yorkville folk music scene. What Paul and I saw, as we’d predicted, was a gravel hole in the ground, slated to, in the near future, become a condo tower. Google Maps, however, still shows the midcentury apartment building that replaced the rooming house, a white-bricked mid-rise not dissimilar to the building in which Paul lives a few blocks away, a building also slated for gentrification. It’s a given that nothing stays the same, but there’s still plenty of good stuff, as Hot Pizza demonstrates to us – the need for art, the spark of creating, the blossoming of imagination – that remain forever the same.

The Relief Printmaking class taught by Paul Dotey starts on March 26th, and runs for 6 consecutive Thursdays. Register here.

Welcome to Maker’s Mark, where The Juncture talks to local makers and artists about their work and their communities. Growing up in Scarborough, James Braithwaite was a ravine kid. He would disappear into the ravines and do whatever he wanted, where adults wouldn’t follow. James and his friends would build tree forts and swings. There was one tree they’d climb to throw apples at passing joggers. The joggers would yell and shake their fist and James would yell down “you can’t climb up here!” Besides, the kids had snacks and a radio. “We could have lasted up there for a while,” he recollects.

To anyone who meets James, it’s doubtful they’d be fully convinced that his tree fort and apple throwing days are behind him. He now lives in the Junction and illustrates under the pen name The Bathwater, working as an animator, children’s book writer, and teacher at Hot Pizza Studios. You’ll see his work throughout the Junction Neighborhood – be it the takeout boxes at Gram’s Pizza or the planful tote bag he designed for Type Books last year. And many, of course, know him for a film he worked on when he was still gaining his footing as an illustrator, the short film I Met The Walrus which was nominated for an Academy Award. His first picture book, Billie Builds A Robocorn, is due out on the 14th of April of this year.

In the Fall, James and I met up for a jog, and afterwards sat down outdoors to chat about art, children’s literature, cats, and things that make us laugh.

— Josh

James: I can see steam radiating off of your forehead

Josh: It just wafted into my eyes and I was thinking “What’s smoking out here?”

James: (to a cat) Hey, what’s up? My childhood cat looked much like that.

Josh: Have you had lots of animals in your life?

James: I’ve had lots of cats. I don’t currently. And I’d like one.

Josh: You had a childhood tabby?

James: Yeah, Ajax was his name. Because I found him when I was bicycling through the farms outside of Ajax. He ran out in front of my bicycle and I put him in my backpack and rode home with him.

Josh: How old were you?

James: I was thirteen. I was a serious cyclist back in those days. I called my parents from the GO Station and said, “You know how you mentioned you kinda want a cat? Well I got one. And I’m currently feeding him a Subway sandwich.”

Josh: Was he a good cat?

James: Oh yeah. Well, he would scratch.

Josh: You didn’t go to university for illustration; in undergrad you studied English Literature. So where did the drawing come in?

James: I’ve been drawing forever. Always. My third grade report card said, “James would be better in school if he didn’t draw all the time.” Then I was in university in English lit and I was thinking, “hmmm this doesn’t feel right.” But by then I’d been working on projects with my friend Josh Raskin. I would do the drawing and he’d do the direction, and we started working on this animated project for a John Lennon interview. It was an interview with John Lennon, we animated to it, and that was our first big project.

Josh: How did this project find you?

James: Jerry Levitan who was the kid who did the interview, he did the interview when he was a teenager.

Josh: And what year was this interview?

James: Sixty-nine. During the Bed in for Peace. His whole shtick was that he was a kid with lots of chutzpah who triangulated which hotel he thought John Lennon was staying in, and then found it and managed to get an interview with him. So we worked on animating the interview, and released it, and it went on to tour forever, and eventually got nominated for an Oscar, and won a daytime Emmy Award. The combination between slick animation and my naive-ass drawings is what makes for a nice mix.

Josh: And what’s their conversation about?

James: Their conversation is about how kids can participate in peace. How kids can make peace happen.

Josh: When I met you were animating something for the opening of Sphere in Las Vegas. How did that come about?

James: That was through my animation partner Fred. And the person who was running the tech for Sphere called us and said, “Oh my god, we need something for Phish for saturday!” We had five days but the first two were spent learning the parameters of building things for Sphere because technically it’s so confusing. We had to learn so much information so quickly that we were sleeping under our desks and working in staggered shifts so we could work 24hrs a day.

Josh: What do you love about children’s literature?

James: I love kids books that have a level for kids but also a level for adults, a second level that’s just not available to you as a kid. I want to go back and read a book with new eyes later in life, and find something else. I find some books allow that and some books do not allow that.

Josh: When working on a kids’ book, what are you trying to create?

James: I try to create kids books that are based on a core feeling from when you were a kid. For example I wrote a book about a cat, and the feeling is that I know this cat, but also it has a life outside of me. The same thing goes with your parents, you realize they have a life that’s outside of you. When you’re a little kid you think that when you close your eyes the world goes away. And then you realize “Oh okay, everyone’s the star of their own show, it’s not just me.”

Or when it’s your sibling’s birthday, and it’s not your birthday, how do you deal with those emotions? You see kids going through it, trying to metabolize their feelings, and then it starts coming out in strange ways. So how do you make a book that addresses that feeling – doesn’t make fun of it – but shows the kid it’s a natural feeling. Have it be seen. Name it. And how do you put a twist on that story.

Josh: Tell me about Billie Builds A Robocorn.

James: I came up with the concept with José Lourenço, who’s a TV writer and just generally a great writer, and we used to share a studio at Dundas & Ossington. We came up with the concept together, and then Jose wrote it and I illustrated it.

Josh: And what is a Robocorn?

James: It’s a Robot-Unicorn. The idea is that Billie has moved to a new town and she really misses her old friends. It’s summertime, there’s not a lot happening, and so she makes her own friend. She has an idea of what a robot-unicorn could be – she has beautiful ideas of what it could do, what they could do together – and the reality of it is that her Robocorn is a garbage can that she’s glued things to and it’s kind of broken and it’s not the friend she needs. But the whole crux of Billie as a character is that she’s never defeated. As soon as something has gone wrong she’s making a plan on how to get around it. Relentlessly resourceful, all of the time.

Josh: What was the nugget of childhood emotion you recognized in yourself that led to Billie Builds A Robocorn?

James: As a kid, I moved a lot. I was born in Edmonton. Grew up in Calgary. We moved a lot, often mid school year. And when you get to a new place, how do you work yourself into the ecosystem? You’re thinking “Who am I? What’s going on here? How do I fit into a world that didn’t already have me in it?”

James Braithwaite’s Billie Builds A Robocorn will be launched on Sunday, April 19th at Victory Social Club (1166a Dundas Street West) at 11:00AM. You can preorder the book here. And come by, in the countdown to its release, to see Billie in the front windows of Type Books Junction (2887 Dundas Street West).

Welcome to Maker’s Mark, where The Juncture talks to local makers and artists about their work and their communities. Nick is on the programming team for the documentary screening series, Truth and Dare which highlights cutting-edge documentaries that challenge the idea of what a doc needs to be. I went to their most recent screening, Dan Klein: This Is Comedy, which is a caricature of the hour-long stand-up set. It’s just Klein delivering unfunny non-joke after unfunny non-joke, to which the audience explodes laughing. It’s a punishing, fascinating, surreal spectacle and seems a skeleton-key to Nick’s filmic philosophy. So now, I thought to myself, seems the right time to find out more about him.

— Max

Max: Describe your different roles and what you’re doing in film right now in Toronto.

Nick: I work at Hot Docs and at The Revue. And I co-program Truth and Dare which is currently based at Hot Docs, though we’re extending it to other venues, too. It’s been really inspiring to build an audience through the series. It’s the most I’ve felt connected to film and film people in Toronto. Doing this alongside my co-programmers, Adam Bovoletis and Sacha Kingston-Wayne, who both have a lot of connections and who are very creative people in their own right, has allowed me to meet a lot of people who are making DIY stuff, some of whom have even expressed interest in us screening their work. Seeing people make films in different ways and on different scales has inspired me in my pursuit of my own creative goals. I’ve worked on film sets which had its ups and downs. It was not super sustainable financially and beyond that, it was pretty stressful. Working on film sets, you see these massive structures and crews, you see how much money it costs. I felt dissuaded from giving so much of my time to make something. I do know anything worthwhile will take time and effort but I don’t think it has to be so taxing on your well-being. I’d like to make films and now I have seen many more realistic examples.

M: When you’re programming for Truth and Dare, how do you toe the line between showing something idiosyncratic while not being exclusionary?

N: It’s kind of a risk reward situation. I think the most rewarding things are the most idiosyncratic films, seeing people react, good or bad, to them. But if you can get away with programming something more idiosyncratic, that’s what I’m drawn to, in terms of what I would go out to see, something that you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise, or isn’t going to be played otherwise. So that’s usually my preference. We’ve had screenings that people came out for and they have no idea what it was. It’s less like a safe outing. It’s nice for people to tell you, I had no idea what this was going to be, but it was so interesting, or I loved it. The Dan Klein: This Is Comedy screening felt that way to me. It was only ever released on YouTube. I honestly didn’t know anyone that had seen it, but it was something that has lived in my brain for a long while. When I announced it, friends and friends-of-friends began to tell me they have seen it, too, and that they love it. And then there were other people who had no idea what they were getting into. I feel like it was really made for that setting, to live in the discomfort and to see what people laugh at and stuff. So that was a really rewarding example.

M: It was sort of a captive experience.

N: Captive is a good word, yeah. I was nervous about showing it because, well, people can get tired out. I’m already sensitive to that. If I’m screening something for friends, when I have to sit down and watch it with them, I’m overthinking, wondering how they’re responding to it.

But in my role as a programmer it’s different because there’s money involved as people have chosen to buy tickets. They didn’t have to. I would hope that when people attend a Truth or Dare screening that they will be honest about if they like something or not. That’s always interesting to me. In another way, it feels like more pressure. This is money time. These people are traveling to the theater and you hope people will want to come back again because they’re getting an idea of the types of things we’re showing with our series, which is ongoing and growing.

M: For the Dan Klein: This Is Comedy screening, you did a printed zine, which, among other things, includes an interview with the filmmaker and an essay. That’s on top of the introduction at the event itself and the event promotion and logistics. What kind of endurance do you need to present all those pieces?

N: I’d wanted to screen Dan Klein: This Is Comedy for a really long time. I did that interview with him three years ago and I wasn’t really sure what was going to come of it. There was no screening series or zine back then so I was like, What am I going to do with this?

It’s been really encouraging to program Truth and Dare with a couple of friends. That has really helped with endurance. We encourage each other. There’s also a sharing of commitment. Some screenings are more important to one of us and become our respective babies. Me, Adam, and Sacha all worked at Hot Docs in concessions. The screening series was just born from chatting on shift. We would see the kind of things that Hot Docs was programming. Some of it worked and some of it didn’t, but in general, it was kind of all for a certain audience. We all thought Hot Docs is such a good space for bringing in so many different people. Young crowds, like our friends or peers, were not coming out. I wouldn’t say that the three of us are primarily interested in documentary but the theatre has a documentary mandate so we work within that. It’s been a surprisingly good challenge to find things that fit the mandate yet challenge the documentary form.

M: What are the qualities of the films that you’ve found yourself drawn to?

N: People often think of documentaries as instructional or informative. We get outside of the box and often program something that’s kind of manipulating reality. I’ve started to even look at a type of movie that is explicitly non-documentary, but looks like a document. Like Tinsman Road directed by Robbie Banfitch, which was not a documentary at all, but was found footage horror which plays on something that resembles documentary. It is a somber, low budget story about this guy whose sister had gone missing. The protagonist returns to his hometown in New Jersey to explore that mystery and make a movie of his experiences.

I’m pretty drawn to anything that invites your attention to its own construction, especially in terms of its own genre. It might have started when I first watched Scream. The first time I watched it, I was about 8-years-old and I ended up watching it four times in a row. I downloaded it onto some kind of device somehow. I watched it on a plane to Switzerland and I was blown away. And then when we got to the hotel room, I did it again. I remember the intensity of it and the fun and fear of it. To this day, Matthew Lillard in that movie is one of my favorite performances. I’ve always loved Wes Craven so I went on to explore his stuff more after that. And that 90s teen horror genre was always interesting to me because of its self-referential quality.

Billy Madison was also one of my most formative things. As a kid, you often just take that kind of work to heart. I love movies that present a world that matches these characters’ askew viewpoint and worldview. And that extends to Dan Klein: This Is Comedy and to so many comedies and texts that interest me. I draw this lineage back to Jerry Lewis through to Eddie Murphy and Sandler. They make these comedy star vehicles, where the stars are making themselves so elastic and expansive that they’ve totally infected the worldview of the film to the point that you kind of can’t think about anything other than that person. Which can get demented.

M: How do you relate to TYPE Books Junction?

N: So my lovely partner, Jess, works here at the store and we live basically around the corner. She is a great inspiration in everything I do. So that’s more about her than this place. But it is great to have a neighborhood bookstore.

M: What are you reading right now?

N: Right now I’m reading Animal Joy by Nuar Alsadir. I started reading it ahead of Dan Klein: This Is Comedy because I was really interested in a text about comedy and laughter. It’s such an amazing book. I’m not even that far into it, just 90 pages or so. I’m finding it so dense and I’ve tried to explain it to people and I have had trouble each time. I don’t even know where the book is going most of the time. Alsadir is kind of dismantling learned behaviors that pertain to laughter and the way that we move and carry ourselves in the world. The idea of comedy and wanting to make people laugh is so deeply tied into how we socialize in general. The book connects to the state of comedy because it exposes how unoriginal a lot of comedy is. How much it’s a contract and how a comedian can often be pandering and trying to get people to like them, to get specific reactions out of people. I think the great comedians have learned how to navigate the battle between, how do I be true to myself and also make people laugh. I think that’s also just kind of a daily ordinary life thing, too. The way you hold yourself socially, how much of that is performance so that you can get by? When I was younger, I was trying to figure out how I can get by without having to share too much of myself. As an adult, I’ve learned it’s better to be understood and to comfortably carry myself in the world instead of shaping myself to make other people comfortable.

M: Tell me about some of your favorite books about film.

N: I really like to read about film sets and about the making of films. I’m interested in the mythos of a person’s impact on a film or story, and how someone can loom so large over a particular film. There’s a book called The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale and Lost which is about the making of Lady in the Water. It was written at a time where M. Night Shyamalan was the next great thing but that movie was kind of a failure to a lot of viewers and critics. He burned bridges over how much he believed in it. That’s a great book. Another book I love is The Total Filmmaker by Jerry Lewis. He writes about working in every facet of film and he has this great understanding of how film works and how film sets work.

M: Tell me about the next Truth and Dare screening.

N: On Sunday February 1, we’re playing The Python Hunt at Hot Docs at 7pm. It’s a very lyrical and aesthetically interesting documentary about these people in Florida that participate in a state-commissioned competition to hunt and kill pythons. The government, through this competition, preyed on people who needed money to help get rid of these animals. It’s pretty sad and it’s really interesting. It’s an ensemble of characters who are doing it for different reasons. The film looks really great, sounds really great, and it’s somewhat more traditional than some of the other films we’ve shown. It’s less about snake-hunting as much as it is about what puts people in these positions to do things that they don’t even want to do.

JESS:

Read: Hala Alyan’s I’ll Tell You When I’m Home was especially mesmerizing and arrived at exactly the right moment: a meditation on rescuing yourself from other people’s fantasies and expectations and on writing yourself into the world. And I closed out the year with Deeping It: Colonialism, Culture & Criminalisation of UK Drill, a reflection on the history of drill and how, as a genre, it’s been demonized.

Listened: Jim Legxacy’s black british music was my top album of the year. Personal, experimental, and genuinely mind-blowing. Other musical highlights included Kelela’s In the Blue Light, Salimata’s The Happening, Nourished By Time’s The Passionate Ones, Blood Orange’s Essex Honey, and Addison’s self-titled debut.

Saw: I enjoyed Sinners, Hedda, Maddie’s Secret, The Mastermind, and Sorry, Baby this year, but most of my energy went into perfecting my movie-watching ritual: optimizing snacks, figuring out the most comfortable way to watch stuff at home, and prioritizing special format theatrical screenings. That said, it feels like I ended up spending more time with television this year; highlights included Industry, Reasonable Doubt, The Pitt, Death in Paradise, and my annual Sex and the City and Girlfriends rewatch.

LUKE:

Read: I picked up a copy of Frances Wilson’s Electric Spark for the amazing cover — a stylish photo of the writer Muriel Spark with a cigarette in between her lips and the contents of her purse tossed around the bed she laying upon. I didn’t know anything about Spark before starting it, but since beginning it I’ve read her novel Loitering With Intent and think it was the best read of my year. While I continue enjoying Electric Spark slowly, uncovering the life of the writer I’m predicting my 2026 will be my year of reading Spark.

Listened: While there was all manner of good music released this past year I almost exclusively listened to Olivia Dean’s album The Art of Loving for nearly two months, so if I had to choose (and I do) that’s what I’m going with. So easy to listen to and comforting, a really beautiful and moving album.

BILLY:

Read: County Music - Zane Koss. I was lucky enough to hear Zane read some excerpts from this work at a TYPE event many months ago, and when I went hunting through our shelves the other week to find a quick read that would punch me in the gut as thoroughly as Henry Hoke’s Open Throat did this summer, this book practically fell into my hands. It did not disappoint. In the collection, Koss’s candid and masculine voice ties together direct quotes from conversations with his loved ones in rural BC and his own ruminations on extractiveness and birthplace. I read it one sitting and have already gifted it to three friends.

Listened: Fela Kuti: Fear No Man. A new podcast series from the legendary Jad Abumrad (Radiolab) that delves deep into the history, life, and legacy of famed Nigerian musician Fela Kuti. This series combines politics, biography, music theory, West African history, and the American civil rights movement to investigate the power of art as a political weapon. And it does it all with some of the most rigorous story editing and sound design to hit your ears since the golden age of podcasting. For the documentary nerds out there, one of the things that impressed me most about this series was how thoroughly it relied on story and research consultants with lived experience and/or expertise in each episode’s topics, and how frequently these consultants were not only credited, but interviewed and heard from directly on the show. I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it felt like an encouraging step towards less extractive models of documentary storytelling.

Saw: Dinner With Friends, dir Sasha Leigh Henry. I missed the TIFF premiere of this gorgeous project from local director/writer Sasha Leigh Henry (Bria Mack Gets A Life) and was so worried it might disappear into the vortex of indie Canadian films hidden somewhere on streamers no one knows about and I would never get to see it. But thank god for the Revue, who screened it twice in early December! This film feels like a beautiful meal someone made just for you to enjoy. It’s very The Four Seasons meets Insecure and it’s bursting with local talent on and off screen. Check it out if it plays somewhere near you!

BRETON:

Read: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus.

Listened: To friends, lovers, and strangers talk and tell stories. Really listened. Thanks, sobriety.

Saw: POCHSY by Karen Hines, TWINLESS by James Sweeney, MUTUALITY by Jeremy Laing, a year’s worth of sunsets from the 24th floor.

CASON

Read: Unsurprisingly, I LOVED Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones, released in 2020 and reemerging with fresh life now that it’s been adapted into Pillion, the latest Alexander Skarsgård vehicle, which I’m excited to devour once it finally hits theatres in Toronto this February. I say unsurprisingly because this book features several of my keywords as a reader: gay, British, 70s, leather dom. Other top reads of 2025 include Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross, Joe Westmoreland, and Aisha Sasha John.

Listened: My top listens this year were Addison, Oklou, and Rose Gray, but right now, at the top of 2026, I’m toggling between this one song by John Frusciante (guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, duh), Neggy Gemmy (my boyfriend played her in the car as we drove through the snow-dusted backroads of rural Ontario over Christmas), and that song “Inner Smile” by Scottish band Texas, (belted flawlessly by friends of mine in a Korean karaoke room in the leadup to the holidays).

Saw: Sentimental Value, Universal Language, and am I the only one who liked Die My Love? One of Jennifer Lawrence’s best performances, fight me!

JOSH

Read: It took hearing Charlie Kaufman read from Antkind (2020) to finally get me to pick up the book, and boy am I glad it has now infected my brain. As postmodern (and strange) as you’d expect, every chapter is good for at least one guffaw-out-loud (or GOL). It’s been brought to my attention that, since its release was in deep pandemic times (or DPT), Charlie’s reading at TYPE this past November was his first ever from his novel.

Listened: For me this was the year of Moisturizer by Wet Leg, hands (and legs) down. Hell, this is what I’ve always wished my band sounded like, probably because I could never write any of these songs.

Saw: Sobriety has given me my evenings back, and this year I spent them watching so many movies, mostly classic Hollywood but some also subversively off-Hollywood. Standouts include: Angel Face (1952), Scarface (1932), A Face in the Crowd (1957) – k nuff with the face movies – Wages of Fear (1953), Bride Of Frankenstein (1935), Ace in the Hole (1951), Auntie Mame (1958), Jezebel (1938), Now, Voyager (1942), Night of the Hunter (1955), The African Queen (1951), Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970), Brazil (1985), Do The Right Thing (1989), How To Shoot a Ghost (2025), Sentimental Value (2025), Sinners (2025), but I’d be remiss to not mention that I saw One Battle After Another three times in theatres. Look, it speaks to me on many levels. But yeah, I’m one of those guys.

MAX

Read: In I Don’t Want to Talk About It, therapist Terry Real gives a cheatsheet that describes the default fragile man: first is a boyhood combination of inherited trauma and cultural patriarchy where he’s cleaved off (and Real emphasizes that manhood is about not growth but about cleaving off and loss) from emotions, relationality, and true self-worth; second is the adulthood where he’s covertly depressed yet coping and appearing functional, feeling not much else than the swings between extremes of shame and grandiosity; third is eventually life circumstances get hard and covert depression leads to overt depression and functional becomes non-functional crisis, and possible change and growth. Or no change at all. Pro-tip: read Flesh by David Szalay and The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana through Real’s lens and see how a millennial man’s life plays this cheatsheet out in the former and a Gen Z’ers in the latter. Or just turn your head to that guy sitting next to you right now, as you read this.

Listened: When I look back at my early-20s, I thought I had nothing to keep me connected with my interiority. But actually I had this album, Voodoo by D’Angelo. My younger self wouldn’t be able to explain why he felt so moved hearing these songs, how it managed to bring him to tears, the only thing that had done that for him then (other than being completely drunk out of his mind). So, Voodoo, one of the things that saved me and I’ve cried a couple times for D’Angelo these past months, RIP.

Saw: I watched Clare Denis’s Beau Travail twice, I was so mindblown by it (I’ve been slogging through drafts of my review that will evenutally run over at In The Mood Magazine). Ostensibly, a retelling of Billy Budd set in Djibouti where an older French Legionnaire is shocked out of his own covert depression — shocked first into hate and then into something grander — by the humanity, physicality, and warmth of a new, young enlistee. The CINNSU screened Mikey and Nicky directed by Elaine May which shows the opposite of change and healing. I expected it to be a fun buddy movie where gangster Nicky (John Cassavetes), believing there’s a hit on him, calls his friend, Mikey (Peter Falk), to help him get out of town to safety. It is something shocking that I’ve never seen in movies. Clare Denis and Elaine May: who knew women knew more about men than men know about themselves? I’m being sarcastic.

BULLETIN BOARD

Read and Rhyme Baby Time with Carmen is back! There’s so such demand we’re expanding to two classes on Tuesdays. Email musicwithcarmen@gmail.com to sign up and by doing so make Josh’s life a little brighter (Tuesday morning for Josh is the highlight of his week).

In 1992, Cosimo Mammoliti opened the original location of Terroni on Queen Street in Toronto. Back then it was a small shop that sold Italian food goods, along with panini and espresso. Thirty-three years later, Terroni is a culinary institution, serving traditional Italian food and wine in multiple locations in Toronto and Los Angeles.

The history of Terroni is beautifully and thoughtfully described in La Cucina di Terroni: The Cookbook, released this past September. It is a story that I’m very familiar with since I have worked for them since 2022, and my husband Graeme has been with them since 2011. And we were longtime patrons before that. We lived within walking distance from that original location before we got married and we watched as it expanded from a few bar seats and tables to the expansive two level space that it is now.

Even though I work for Terroni, you would think I would tire of having their food so often. Truthfully, it is still one of my favourite places to dine, and they have created dishes that my family craves regularly. And I know this is true for many people who know and love Terroni, so when I found out that they were putting out a cookbook, I felt like I was the right person to try it out.

First up, Spaghetti Al Limone. I chose this recipe because I had all the ingredients in my kitchen already and I have this for staff meal often. It’s one of my favourites and I also needed something quick because I was hungry. And the key to getting it done quickly when you’re hungry is having everything prepped and ready to go so that in the time it takes for the pasta to cook, you will have a hot bowl of delicious lemony buttery spaghetti in minutes. It is so easy to throw together on a weeknight and is adaptable to your personal taste. I like extra lemon and extra capers. I have even substituted arugula instead of spinach and it was still so good.

This past April my family went to Venice, Italy, for the first time. It had been our dream vacation and we finally made it there. During that trip, my daughter Audrey had tiramisu after almost every meal. She considers herself an expert on this dessert so of course I had her help me make Il Tiramisu di Terroni, Terroni’s tiramisu. Their version includes a little whipped cream to make it “fluffier”, Cosimo’s nod to his North American upbringing.

We used strong coffee instead of espresso to dip the ladyfingers in since we don’t have an espresso machine at home. To whisk together the mascarpone filling, we used a stand mixer but I’m sure with a little elbow grease and patience you could whip it together by hand. Layering together the coffee dipped cookies and mascarpone filling took very little time. We finished it with some chopped dark chocolate and then we put it in the fridge to chill overnight. The next morning, Audrey and I were very excited to dive in, so we had it for breakfast. Breakfast of champions! Tiramisu literally translates to “pull me up” or “pick me up”, and this recipe did that for us (and for the lucky TYPE Junction staff members we shared it with that day). We will be making this a lot in the future.

The last recipe I tried was Farinata Con Insalata di Barbabietole, chickpea pancake with beet salad. I work the salad station at my location and I love the farinata, and I’ve always wanted to make them at home. The version in the cookbook is a bit different from what we serve in the restaurant, theirs is family style with watercress, we use arugula and serve it as an appetizer.

One very important note for this recipe is that the batter for the pancake needs to rest for 12 hours overnight at room temperature. The cast iron pan I used to bake the pancake in was smaller than what the recipe calls for so I baked the pancakes in two batches. They also took longer to bake than they mention, but because oven temperatures vary, I just made sure the pancake looked golden and crispy.

The salad is made up of roasted beets, watercress, mint leaves, and chopped pistachios dressed in a balsamic and orange vinaigrette, finished with ricotta salata and pea shoots. Ricotta salata is a dry aged cheese that is salty and nutty, similar to feta cheese. I couldn’t find ricotta salata in my local grocery store so I substituted feta, and it worked just fine. I also added a bit of arugula to the salad because that’s how I know this salad. I ate this on a rare solo night when the rest of my family were out at work or with friends. It made me feel like I was treating myself to something special, and who doesn’t need that every now and then? The combination of the sweet roasted beets, peppery greens and salty cheese on top of the soft and crispy pancake, this is the perfect autumn and winter salad.

La Cucina di Terroni: the Cookbook is a labour of love. Knowing Cosimo and his passion for food and life, he put so much of his heart into this book. Reading the history, I can hear his voice and see his smile. Anyone that loves eating at Terroni will love this book.

(As I was putting this review together, I decided to look back at my previous reviews, and realized that it had been a year since I wrote my last one! Wow. Time certainly does go by fast. As well as working in the Terroni kitchen, I have created a collage art practice that has taken over my life! I have attended many collage night meet ups where I’ve met other like-minded creative people, and am currently taking a collage class to take my skills further. So for fun, I made a collage using images from the La Cucina di Terroni. I hope you like it!)

— Max

I’m sitting in the chemotherapy unit at the Princess Margaret Cancer Centre. Generally, the waiting room is full of camaraderie among the sick. Patients form relationships with one another and trade notes on their symptoms and progress. I overhear conversations about the loss of limbs, viral infections in stents, weeks to heal from cuts, and pleas to doctors for test results. It’s a cacophony of collective anguish, a sound bath of suffering, and as it clamors against my ears, I can’t deny that I too am sick, that I am dying.

In her cancer journals, Audre Lorde wrote:

I pretty much functioned automatically, except to cry. Every once in a while I would think, “What do I eat? How do I act to announce or preserve my new status as temporary upon this earth?” and then I’d remember that we have always been temporary, and that I had just never really underlined it before, or acted out of it so completely before. And then I would feel a little foolish and needlessly melodramatic, but only a little.

This is the thing about learning that you will die. There are moments where the knowledge is so surreal, so painful, that it will make you feral. I have stuffed socks in my mouth to keep from screaming. I have wept hard enough to produce a nosebleed and let myself bleed unchecked all over my shirt at the doctor’s office. Then, you come to realize that, of course, you’re dying. I was already dying, was always going to die. We are all just “temporaries upon this earth.” And you, I, feel sheepish about the histrionics.

In the early weeks after receiving my diagnoses, I booked myself a massage. Unsure how to tell my usual massage therapist that suddenly I was dying, I scheduled the appointment with a new therapist and filled out his intake form with the full details of my prognosis. I showed up for my appointment feeling like some kind of deity as I undressed, presenting my naked body as though it were holy. The masseuse chattered at me about the latest episode of The White Lotus while he worked the knots out of my shoulders. I agreed that Daphne and Ethan likely fucked.

As I grieve for my life and for my coming death, and for the people I will leave behind, my oldest griefs are here too. I think often of the car accident and of what it has meant to live a disabled life. I have long been a celebrant of the joy of living in a queered body, and I have felt deep gratitude for the kind of self-knowledge that living in difference has afforded me. These emotions are true. The joy I feel about the circumstances of my life is a very active part of me. I live a great life! It’s replete with deep friendships, meaningful relationships with plants and animals, and access to delicious foods. I’ve been alive during the development of the internet and the airing of The Simpsons, and I’ve witnessed what I think is going to be the beginning of the end of capitalism. I’ve gotten to watch every film of the Scream franchise come out in theatres, the good ones and the bad ones, and I’ve seen Alvvays play live. Pleasures abound! It’s been, and I’ve had a really good time.

But if I am honest, an ache lives alongside all of this. To be disabled is to experience exclusion and physical pain, oppression, stares, and jeers. To live through a massive car accident and life altering injury as a child is traumatic; it has given much, but it has also taken much away. But I recently heard Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s lecture about disability justice, describing the process of grieving “not as an impediment or something to get over, but as a becoming.” Leah said, “It can be a teacher. It can be something we are curious about and listen to. Viewing grief —feminized, disabled grief — not as a mess to be cleaned up but as a resource is disabled wisdom”. At this point in my life, I am able to perform a sort of controlled emotional balancing act, to feel the grief alongside the joy, to tap into it as a resource. Finally, I am coming to understand that it’s because of the grief that life’s joy can feel more vibrant. In this way it’s good, grief.

Maggie Nelson, writes in The Argonauts about Judith Butler: “[We] are for another or by virtue of another, not in a single instance but from the start and always.” From the start and always. We have only ever existed within relationship. So now as I explore the parameters of my own upending grief, I do it only and always with others. I feel all of my relations crowded around me, witnessing me and caring for me. I am learning anew that this is the only way to manage grief, to not bear it alone. I reorient myself to living and dying with cancer alongside my family, my friends, and my community. This practice is life giving. At the early stages of my diagnosis, I was reading a book about ecology by philosopher and biologist Andreas Weber called Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology in which he describes the biosphere as follows:

There is only one immutable truth: No being is purely individual; nothing comprises only itself. Everything is composed of foreign cells, foreign symbionts, foreign thoughts. This makes each life-form less like an individual warrior and more like a tiny universe, tumbling extravagantly through life like the fireflies orbiting one another in the night. Being alive means participating in permanent community and continually reinventing oneself as part of an immeasurable network of relationships.

I have held this quote like a talisman, using it to remind myself that I am still an active participant in living, and that means I am never alone.

Kaleigh Trace (C) 2024

Excerpt from Hot, Wet, and Shaking: 10th Anniversary Edition, Courtesy of Invisible Publishing

Kaleigh Trace is a writer, educator, performer, and therapist whose work explores sex, disability, queerness, and mortality. She is the author of Hot, Wet, & Shaking: How I learned to Talk About Sex, and co-curator of Little Deaths, a recurring performance series where artists and audiences gather to explore sex, death, and transformation through performance and song. The next Little Deaths will take place on February 18, 2026 at The Burdock in Toronto.

Dr. Rebecca Pardo is an anthropologist, death doula, and founder of The Nightside, a design studio and consultancy reimagining how we plan for, talk about, and support one another through death. She creates tools, resources, and events that make conversations about mortality accessible and engaging – including the Better Living Through Death Planning Workbook and the upcoming Death Drop-In event at Type Books in the Junction on Saturday November 22, 2025.

Rebecca and Kaleigh spoke on October 20th, 2025 about the intersections between sex, death, and radical imagination. Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Rebecca: One of the things that stuck with me after the Little Deaths event [on October 17] was how ritualistic the night felt — like it opened a space for collective mourning, joy, and hope. Each performance was embodied and transformative: Jody [Chan] reshaping the physical materials of their poetry, Rae [Spoon] inviting us into song, and Kaleb [Robertson]’s closing performance. It felt like the audience was invited into that transformation too. It really felt like a ritual of witnessing.

I’m curious how it felt for you, and what from that night has lingered?

Kaleigh: It’s so cool to hear your reflection. That was only our second Little Deaths. The first, in July, felt truly holy and joyful, with a lighter flavor. But the flavor of this one felt very raw and having to trust each other to be, like, here for it, which is a huge ask of a group of strangers. I left being like, Whoa. That was really big for me. Your language of “witnessing” and “ritual” is really spot on, so I’m really grateful that you gave it to me.

A lot of parts of that night stuck with me, but the thing that I keep thinking about was Kaleb. At the top of the night I’d invited the audience: “Let yourself get undone. Flirt with your neighbor. Grieve when you need to.” And then I felt like Kaleb ended it by being like, “Oh, you want to see me get undone?”, almost as if I had challenged him. When he removed his clothes it felt very defiant. I felt so moved by how generously he showed up, without knowing how the room would receive it. Kaleb watching us as we watched him unbutton his shirt — like, damn. It really reminded me: our bodies are so mortal and so powerful. We’re all gonna die; and also, look at this incredible body in front of me.

Rebecca: Kaleb — forget it, knock me over, it was incredible. His presentation was hilarious; and then to go from that, which was quite ironic, to this completely tonal shift of not saying a word, having the music and the confetti surround him as he did this quiet undressing, it was so powerfully earnest. Your word “defiant” resonates, and part of what felt defiant was the sincerity. I wondered if it would be a gag — since some of the set had jokes — but it wasn’t. It was: this is what we’re talking about. Let’s actually look.

Kaleigh: Totally. I love those words again. “Earnest” and “sincere” is very much the Little Deaths vibe. I love joy and I love to laugh, but I’m deeply earnest. I knew Kaleb was going to strip, so at first I was ready to cheer, and then as it went on, I realized it wasn’t about that. It was about witnessing a full, gorgeous body. Not “yay nudity,” but whoa, here we are.

Rebecca: You wrote in your book, “The most beautiful part of residing in difference is that you get to reconstruct everything that we’re told is the truth and build for yourself a way of being that fits for you.” That’s really powerful. When you live in difference, you have access to an imagination, a vision of alternative futures. And I think queer and disabled activists are at the forefront of this imagination, and have so much wisdom that everyone can benefit from in terms of revolutionizing how we approach sex, illness, and dying.

You said the first event felt “holy.” I keep thinking about the idea of the body as a portal, or threshold. And something that connects sex, death, disability, and illness is that they create experiences where boundaries dissolve — boundaries of the body, boundaries of the self. It can be defiant to pursue erotic experience when the body isn’t “performing” as expected or is losing capacity. It’s really quite a radical thing.

Since your book, you’ve been diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer. If you’re comfortable talking about this, I’m very interested to know how you think about erotic energy in the context of illness?

Kaleigh: I’m fine talking about it. There’s a lot in what you said, so I’ll riff.

That quote you pulled — people quote it back to me a lot, and it still feels true. It’s kind of my fundamental truth of who I am: my body was never built to fit. That’s a tragedy sometimes, and also a gift. So early in my life, it exposed the discrepancies and pain of this world, which let me ask what kind of world I might build instead.

And I really like what you just said about how there’s these strings between sex and death. To me, that’s about being in your body, like being really aware of your body, and the way that it is here, and not going to be here, and the ways that it feels, and the way that people perceive it, and the way that you get to control it.

When I got my diagnosis in 2022, it was horrific, of course. Nobody is prepared for a terminal diagnosis at 36 or 37. I suffered greatly, and I sometimes still do. But my capacity to handle it and make my life livable is informed by a life of being queer and disabled. I feel proud of the way that I’m living in the end of my life, which is now, and I feel like I’m doing it well because I have had a lot of practice at living with a radical imagination. I don’t always do it well, but I really love my life. It feels super rich, and that is not true for everyone. I wish it wasn’t ending soon, but it is, and what an intense privilege to get to feel really in it and like really feel its richness.

On your question about erotic liberation: I’ve gone through so many invasive cancer treatments in the last three years, and the most invasive was a major, major surgery, like a 14-hour surgery, where much of my internal organs were removed. I was terrified, I really thought I would die on the table. And what I did in the month leading up to that surgery is that I had a lover, and I just had so much sex. Like, my surgery prep was to have as much sex as I could in the body that I had before it became a new body. I joke about being a pervert, but if I want to be honest with you, it’s about grabbing life. It’s hard to not be present when you’re naked with someone. To me, sex done right is like grabbing at being alive, and that’s why I think about it a lot in relation to death.

Rebecca: I love that. It reminds me of a question that death doula Alua Arthur prompts her clients with: “What must I do to be at peace with myself so that I can live presently and die gracefully?” It’s like a work-back schedule from death: Okay, if I want that end, what do I do now? It’s like, oh, you have to actually be present in your own life. You having all that sex as your surgery prep is that idea in action.

In my end-of-life planning work, I try to help people do what everyone knows they should do, but avoids, because it’s confusing and complicated and emotionally hard. I heard a talk from behavioral psychologist Hal Hershfield, who said that when we imagine our past selves, we see them as other versions of “me.” But when we think about our future selves, we imagine them as strangers. He says the key to getting people to engage with their mortality, and end-of-life planning, lies in helping us strengthen our relationships between our current selves and our future selves, and actually being able to imagine them as us.

But part of the problem with advanced care planning is that it’s often rooted in a lot of ableism. If you ask someone, “What conditions would be livable for you?” there is this very ableist principle that, for example, lack of capacity is inherently undignified.

Kaleigh: Undignified, 100%

Rebecca: But we don’t pity babies because they can’t toilet or feed themselves. We say, “Lucky them!” It seems like part of the kind of radical imagination, or the insight from your experience has been the ability to imagine different types of being, or different types of capacity.

Okay, let me bring in a random sort of tangent that I think can maybe be a nice metaphor for some of the things we’re talking about. I learned something recently that I’m obsessed with. You know the thing of how caterpillars turn into butterflies, which is also a famous metaphor people like to invoke about death. So, I didn’t know how this actually happens. I thought the caterpillar goes in, maybe stuff gets kind of funky, and then they basically come out with wings, and now they’re a butterfly. But I learned that, no, they actually fully freaking disintegrate into cellular goo. And a few of the cells in there, called imaginal cells, are the ones that contain the blueprint and the literal imagination of what a butterfly is. The other cells even try to kill them, but the imaginal cells are like, “No! We will persist!” And then they’re the ones who rebuild.

Queer and disabled wisdom feels like imaginal cells – holding the blueprint for a different future.

Kaleigh: Wow. It’s an apt metaphor because transformation feels unimaginable. And what I hear you reminding me is, Oh yeah, these things feel unimaginable. Death feels unimaginable. We cannot imagine we will die. I mean, I have to because of my circumstances. Most people don’t.

I was texting a new date, and I said, “Yeah, I’m getting some scan results today.” We’re pretty new to each other, and she doesn’t know how anxious the scans make me, because I don’t know what they will say. And then at the end of the day, she texted me and said, “How are your scans?” like, not understanding how extreme it could be? And I replied, “Yeah, they’re good.” And I told her, “You need to understand, good just means stable. Like, I’m never going to have a good scan. I’m going to have a stable scan, I’m going to have a bad scan. So it’s fine to get a stable scan, but I’m not celebrating, nor am I grieving. I’m just living still.”

And she said, “How it feels for me when you tell me you get good scans is that I think, Oh, great, Kaleigh’s gonna live forever, just like me, and we’re all gonna live forever.” I think most people live like that, unconsciously thinking they’re not going to die. That’s how we’re able to have children and buy homes and invest in work without deep anxiety.

But I think what you’re saying, and what I agree with — although I wouldn’t have known this before I got terminal cancer — is that imagining that we’re going to die is actually the key to real revolution, and that it lets us really live much more beautifully than imagining that we’ll live forever. It’s way harder and way scarier, but imagining that we’re all gonna die like, what a fucking crazy liberation.

Rebecca: As the kids say: that part. People always ask me if death work is depressing, but it isn’t. I frame my death planning work as “for better living,” because connecting to your values in death connects you to your values in life. The reason people don’t want to do it is because it makes you confront your actual life. When you start asking yourself questions like, “If I had three months to live, who would I want to call and ask forgiveness from?” It’s like, yeah, maybe I should do that now.

Kaleigh: I completely agree with you. It’s so wild that that’s the framing that people take up. Like, oh, I guess I might have three months to live. I would do this. It’s like, then do it.

Rebecca: And that is a nice note for us to close on, is a reminder that when we talk about death, we’re talking about life, and when we connect to death, we connect to ourselves in life. And that’s a really cool thing.

– Luke

Luke: I’m curious to hear your thoughts on selecting the quote from Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story for the epigraph. What’s your relationship to her work?

Shani: I chose it because her work is not pure memoir, nor is it pure storytelling. It really is autofiction. But she does come into the present moment in her writing and question, in a memoir kind of way, what she is doing. So the author is always interjecting in her own work. That quote spoke so much to me:

The longer I gaze at the girl in the photo, the more it seems that she is looking at me. Is this girl me? Am I her?… The girl in the picture is not me, but neither is she a fictional creation. There is no one else in the world I know in such vast and inexhaustible detail, which allows me to assert…

And then I’ve got everything that I write in here. It’s a different book than anything that I’ve written before. I have always drawn on the emotional resonances of certain incidents in life and the possibilities in my own experience to write from. This was not trying to write a fictional story and seeing how I might have felt. I know this story. The girl in this story I know better than anyone else in the world. I also wanted to put photos in my book. I’ve always been attracted to [W. G.] Sebald’s use of photographs in his work and this seemed like the perfect work to do it in because I wanted to assert that this is a story that I’m telling, by the photographs would suggest that actually these people in the book are real. It was just so perfect when she said, “the longer I gaze at the girl in the photo, the more it seems that she’s looking at me.” Even when I’m not in the photo that you’re looking at, I feel like you’re looking right at me because we have a relationship.

Luke: I found the addition of the photos an interesting decision. I was also really curious about your decision to write in the voice of the child throughout the book. Most of the autofiction that I’m familiar with is in an authorial or adult voice. How did you come to that decision? And how do you stay in the voice of a child while writing?

Shani: If you notice there is that first page of the book in italics, and that’s in an adult voice. It basically tells the exact same story as the first few pages which is in the child’s voice, but what it does for me is that it says, here I am as the adult writer, but now I’m going to become the character. When I came to Canada, I came on my own. In my early childhood, there was a certain amount of trauma around belonging, identity, and place. That traumatic beginning, I believe, really has followed me my entire life and it made me who I am. But when I came on my own, there was no one here in Canada who was a witness to those early experiences. The psychologist Alice Miller writes about the idea of “the witness” in early childhood in her book The Drama of the Gifted Child. This is who tells the child, yes, these things are happening to you, I believe you. Those people were my grandparents and they died when I was a child. My parents didn’t know me as a child and now that I’m getting older and a lot of the people who would have been there after my grandparents died, they’ve passed away too. So, in a sense, I am the only witness to that child. And as I get older, I realize that story is lost. I wanted to tell the story, to keep that child alive.

In insisting on maintaining that child’s voice, I am constantly aware that I’m also writing in a culture that is different than the one the child comes from. So I’m aware that there are readers who may not understand certain things and I have to juggle the question of how do I explain that, or even do I explain it? And I chose not to. I chose to stay in the voice of the child, because if I were to start paying attention in that kind of way, to explain, I would kill the child. That was not what I wanted to do. And so it was a risk. I think this is the biggest risk I have ever taken in writing. I thought people might say, well, this is a child’s book, but I am so surprised at how many people are staying with it and appreciating it.

Luke: In reading Starry, Starry Night I was reminded of Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. It’s a perennial favourite at the bookstore and follows a six-year-old girl living with her grandmother and father for a summer on a small island in the Gulf of Finland. I wanted to read a quote from it to see what you would think. She writes, “an island can be dreadful for someone from outside. Everything is complete and everyone has his obstinate, sure and self-sufficient place.” I’m curious about this perspective of an island and what that might mean for your character and for Trinidad.

Shani: That would be more pertinent, I believe, for the person who has grown up as an outsider in the family, where the family is an island. The family is the island in which the child is trying to find her place. It’s like she’s trying to find a rock to stand on, on that small island and stand out. That is more pertinent as I get older and start dreaming past the actual island to what is greater. I was very, very fortunate to have a father who was so in love with Trinidad. So passionate about the world as well. My mother liked traveling, but he did not. And yet he was constantly reading about the world. From the time I went to live with him, we were hearing about the world, mostly the politics of the world. So that gave me the sense of this bigger place.

Luke: Are there other books that you were thinking about or reading in the writing of Starry, Starry Night?

Shani: A Girl’s Story did encourage me to buckle down and work on this. You know, I’ve been working on it and not working on it for about thirty-five years. In between the books that I would write, I would always pull this manuscript [of Starry, Starry Night] out. As I wrote other books that got published, I began to work on it in a different way, and it started to form into a book. When my father died a couple years ago, I felt a certain freedom to work on it and that coincided with me reading [Ernaux] and thinking it is possible to write the dark and transform the dark into art. That it’s not pure brooding, but it becomes something that is illuminating, not only to myself but perhaps other people would see themselves in it.

Luke: What are you currently reading?

Shani: I’m reading Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records. To me that is a writer’s book, a writer’s read. And an artist’s read as well. In my book, I was very conscious that I did not want to have an arc and a denouement kind of thing. I wanted the sense that things don’t really finish. And in Madeleine’s book, I see that as well. I see all these different worlds and time periods all coming together, collapsing and expanding out again. It’s like the Mandelbrot equation. It’s a mathematical equation where everything keeps opening up onto itself. And it’s an image that keeps opening up and becoming more of itself in little tiny fractals. And that’s what that’s what her book is like. I’ve never read anything like it. It is a reading experience, a gorgeous, gorgeous work.

– Max

On his favourite play:

Uncle Vanya, by a mile, is my favorite play. It’s terrifically sad, complex, and immersed in so many different stories of the family members. At various points in my life, different characters have spoken to me. I used to feel like the more ambitious, younger ones, and now that I feel at a kind of midpoint, the looking-back-looking-forward characters are speaking to me. I don’t want to identify too much with Vanya himself because he’s in such a tragic situation. But as time goes on, and I do have a melancholy sort of streak, I find myself absorbed by him. I think it’s the kind of Russian sense of life having gone by and your opportunities not having turned into what you thought they were going to be. You see different versions at different times in your life and they speak to you differently. I remember seeing a movie version, Vanya on 42nd Street, with Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, which opens with the actors arriving and talking to each other and chatting, and then you very gradually realize the play itself has started. But the best one I ever saw was a couple of years ago at Crow’s Theatre with Tom Rooney. I went on a Wednesday, and then I went back on a Saturday to see it again, just to absorb every moment of it.

On teaching doctors how to write fiction:

This is one of those happenstance things that I never planned. Originally, I had a fellowship at Massey College where I taught medical residents interested in writing. It’s become more professional over time. I taught at the Centre for Faculty Development at St Mike’s Hospital and now I’m doing it at Continuing Professional Development (CPD) at U of T.

Essentially what we’re doing is recognizing and understanding that everyone in the health community or in the healthcare experience is immersed in a story already: the story that you’re telling yourself as a patient of what’s going on with you, the story that practitioners are telling themselves, about each other, about their experience, about their patients. It’s not imposing narrative on medicine as much as revealing the presence of narrative in all these encounters and experiences that sometimes end up determining our lives. I am trying to teach people to get better at working with the elements of story and literary elements and narrative elements. The idea being that if you can handle those better as a writer and as a reader, not only does that have benefit for you as a person, but it can also affect your healthcare work. Though that part is taught much more directly by a colleague of mine, Karen Gold. She sits with practitioners and physicians and takes them through ways to think differently, and work narratively with their patients.

It’s unique in my experience, teaching writing and literature to people who are so hungry to be in class and devoted to the work. They do the reading, they do the homework. They have fascinating life experience to share. And they want to improve. They’re searching, at times, for a return to an interest that they had years ago that they’ve never been able to develop. They’re searching at times for some relief or recompense from the very devastating experiences of institutional indifference or outright hostility, working under incredibly challenging burdens and stressful conditions, day in, day out. Some of them feel like the clinical medical chart is a limited form for all the things a practitioner and a patient are experiencing and thinking. They come to class holding these stories, not necessarily wanting to tell them, but asking: What happens to them? They’re hungry for the satisfactions of literature.

On how his own writing differs from what he teaches:

I find that most people in the courses that I’m teaching are looking to give a sort of shape to their stories that will allow them to communicate it to somebody else, or to understand it better themselves. And then my own writing, it’s more kind of: how’s this story going to break things up for you or make you look at them differently? The book that I have out right now, Every Night…, is quite fragmentary and quite challenging to read, people tell me, and not a smooth or satisfying narrative at all. Every Night …. is almost a novel, almost a collection of stories, that follows a particular character over time as he goes through destructive experiences and conflicts. It moves between narrators, between stories, between forms to try to capture something about him over time. My aim is: what’s happening with these characters? What’s happening with those stories? What can I do to keep myself interested? I might get kind of bored with this person 30 pages down the line so how can I turn it around to keep the reader interested and keep myself interested? It’s much more linguistic-interest or story-interest or character-interest, as opposed to setting out and thinking I’m going to do something experimental, or I’m going to write a story that’s different from all these other kinds of stories that I’ve read in order to prove some point or make some idiosyncratic kind of gesture about literature.

On doing a cover version, but in writing:

My chapbook, A Friend to Words, is an adaptation of a Zen short story by Nakajima Atsushi called “The Expert”, about the myth of the archer who wants to be able to do archery without a bow and without an arrow. When I read that story twenty years ago, it felt like having my head split open. It was this shattering, wonderful experience I’ve never been able to put aside. One of the things I’m doing now is going back to those stories that marked me and reading them again and rewriting them in cover versions. You have your habits and grooves as a writer, the ways of structuring things. You have your modes that you’re not even terribly conscious about, about how you’re approaching time or narration. But reading “The Expert,” oh okay, we’ve just jumped through thirty years in a paragraph; we just jumped from one character to another within a sentence. I didn’t think you were allowed to do that. And the voice is a kind of fabular, folk voice. And I wondered, what would it be like for me to do that? If you’re a painter in a workshop, the teacher tells you, you need to paint this calf now, you need to paint this thunderbolt coming out of the clouds. It’s something that I instruct my students to do: read this carefully and mimic and copy. So I’m kind of finally teaching myself. It is a powerful way to learn and it’s a lot of fun.

On his interactions with TYPE Junction and what he’s currently reading:

Well, I love the store. I remember when it opened it was such a delight to have TYPE here with us. I was going through rough times when I first walked by the window and part of me wanted my book to be in my neighborhood. When the book came out I actually took a picture of it in the store window because I was so delighted, so happy to see it there. It’s one of those rare experiences in your life. I come by every so often to say hi to it. There’s a great pleasure and interest in our neighborhood store, and delight in seeing it thrive, and seeing our friends here. A busy bookstore is a sign of a great neighborhood.

Marta Bátiz has a glorious book out now, A Daughter’s Place, which is a telling of the story of Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. It focuses on his daughter, though, how she was present in the writing of that novel and how she was excluded from his family and excluded from his history. And it has telenovela vibes. A book that I’ve been returning to again and again is A Horse at the Window by Spencer Gordon, who’s a fantastically interesting and original and poetic writer. That book has those Zen elements I was getting at in my chapbook. I also love Andrew Kaufman’s deep, dark, dirty story collection Enjoy Your Stay at the Shamrock Motel. Finally, I recently went to a reading and heard Caitlin Galway read from A Song for Wildcats. The two stories she read were so original and lyrical that, inevitably, I ended up buying the book after having promised myself: “No buying any other books this month.”

The Juncture strongly encourages you all to attend the next Pack Animal event, which is a launch for Shampoo Boy by Stevie Manning. The event takes place on Sunday September 28 at Standard Time at 165 Geary Ave. in Toronto.

Luke: What was the drive to start a reading series?

Emma: Emily and I had gone to a bunch of readings when we lived in Montreal that we were really felt excited by. Particularly ones that Metatron Press ran. That would have been in 2018. And I think we were just really excited by the communal energy. By the time we were tapping into the Metatron of it all, it had already been going on for such a long time, there were all kinds of references to events that had happened in the past and this tight knit community that had formed. We were also really influenced by Hard To Read, Fiona Alison Duncan’s series. And the way that she was creating these events which seemed to be an extension of her writing practice.

Emily: The way that people talked about the readings immediately available to us was as if they were an obligation or chore. We felt that it didn’t have to be that way, and that they should be engaging and celebratory events. We believed that a reading could bring people closer to literature rather than alienating them from it.

Emma: I think that Metatron was the only group reading that I felt like I had gone to, where we were like, “Oh, this is interesting. This is so different”. But a lot of book launches or just more formal literary events had a stiffness to them. The biggest thing for me was that it felt like you could leave an event and feel like nothing had really happened or changed or shifted.

Emily: Yeah, many had a promotional or institutionalised energy, and were sometimes happening in a space that was fluorescently lit and wasn’t very welcoming when ideally it should be fun to engage with writing and literature in a community setting. We wanted a level of comfort and levity that felt infrequent at literary events.

Emma: We were both really wanting to meet other writers and feel like a part of some sort of community, and we didn’t really know how to go about doing that unless we were having coffee with a thousand different people in a row. You know what I mean? You follow these different writers on Instagram, you’ve read their books or read different pieces by them online, but you’ve never met them or you’ve never been in a space where everyone feels like they can all be talking to each other. And so that was also our desire post-Covid. Being at a certain place in our own writing life where we want to be in the thick of it somehow, but at the time there didn’t seem like there was a place to make that happen.

Luke: That is interesting because it does feel like this excitement around literary events in the city, like Esmé Hogeveen’s Oral Method and your excitement being in Montréal with Metatron, looking at Hard to Read in the US, intersect also with nightlife and partying. They actually feel like parties.

Emily: People get asked out on dates at Pack Animal.

Emma: Yes, many times!

Emily: We’ve never been asked.

Emma: Yeah, we’ve never been asked. We are both in relationships, but it shouldn’t matter.

Emily: Exactly, It shouldn’t matter. But people are being asked on dates.

Luke: Are people bringing dates?

Emma: Oh, yeah. It’s fun to hear the gossip afterwards. Sometimes after a night, we’ll hear about all these things that were happening at Pack Animal that we didn’t know about because we’re running around organizing and we’re like, “Oh my God, can’t believe all of this is transpiring”. But also, we have met so many of our friends through running Pack Animal which is really awesome. I think that people have met their own friends through going to the events, too.

Luke: Would that social aspect of the event come into the way you would choose the themes and readers for Pack Animal?

Emma: Yeah, that’s interesting because I think that we didn’t initially set out to have themes for each event. And also, we don’t vet who’s reading what in relation to the theme. I think our first one was Spring Fling. That was the first theme, quote, unquote. Right?

Emily: No, the first theme was Person, Person, Person. Right?

Emma: I guess that was a theme, but maybe more like a title. Two of our friends had a show that they were playing with their bands which they had already organized. And then we were pondering Pack Animal and not really sure at that point on how to drum up an audience. And also just knew way less writers than we do now. And so we were kind of like, to these boys, what if randomly we got writers to open for your bands? And we were trying to figure out a name for the event. And then I think one of our friends Ben was just like, “person, person, person” in the description of the order of readers. And we were like, okay, we’ll go with that. We also don’t require writers to create new work for Pack Animal. They can if they want to, but they’re also welcome to read something they’ve already written or published. I think for every reading so far we have a pretty strong curatorial vision that we bring to each event that makes the readings work together.

Emily: Even if you’re not necessarily inclined to attend literary events, the theme or the title itself can be captivating enough to pique your interest in what might happen.

Emma: And also for our poster design, it’s fun to have images to work with from the name.

Luke: Talking about the posters, the designs are quite compelling! Can you talk about that aspect of the series? The design and aesthetic instincts of Pack Animal?

Emma: We’ve known Sonja Katanic, who does most of the design for us, for a really long time. We both ran a magazine together in high school, which is actually how we met Emily. So we’ve all been in this triangle working on creative projects together for a long time. At first, it was just like well, we have this friend who is really talented at design. But as it kept going, she’s become an essential part of the visual language of Pack Animal, in how it’s presented to the public. And then in addition to Sonja, I think it’s also a huge asset to have Greg Trumper do photography coverage because he has a really artistic eye and the types of photos that he’s capturing of our event are unique, since he has his own really developed photography practice. That I think is really special.

Emily: We also grew up consuming similar art and films and visual references as Sonja, so it’s easier to translate our ideas to her than it would be to other people. Sometimes it’s hard to portray what you’re seeing internally if you’re not a visual artist. Whenever Emma and I have had to make a Pack Animal graphic, we go to Instagram Stories to design them [laughs]. Sonja’s very imaginative about how she puts things together and surprises us all of the time, which is really fun. And we don’t kind of feel locked into one quote, unquote, aesthetic. It’s Sonja’s vision, and it has threads of her creative spirit, but it’s not a uniform presentation that we have to abide by.

Emma: I feel like at the beginning, we were talking with her about if we wanted to do a logo, for example, and her thing was, well, we’re not a brand and we’re not actually trying to be branded in that way. It made for a more interesting design choice to not have a logo and instead just be this phrase that appears in different fonts and in different ways at each event.

Luke: That’s interesting, emphasizing the differences of each iteration. This upcoming one is even different again, because it’s actually a launch for Stevie Mannings’ new poetry book Shampoo Boy. What’s that been like?

Emma: Well, we’ve never collaborated with anyone else to organize the event before but we were approached by Matt, who runs Midnight Mass Books. It’s sort of like a roving bookstore but they now have a physical location in London, Ontario, and they also have published a few books just independently. Matt’s really involved in community building, and being a bookseller that’s really engaged with artists and writers. Basically he just approached us and was like, I want to host this launch and I want Eileen Myles to come read. And Eileen Myles had agreed! Matt’s been a longtime supporter of Pack Animal and really assisted us with that collaborative effort in this event.

Emily: And we love Stevie. Stevie’s read at Pack Animal in the past and she’s very charismatic. Just a really wonderful, delightful poet.

Emma: It’s been quite different than like our normal events given how it was planned and curated. Obviously we knew Stevie would read and then Eileen would read. Both Stevie and Matt were interested in having Kirby and Derek McCormack read, and Emily knows Derek from working at TYPE. So once we got that all sorted out and it felt like a really fitting group of people whose work speaks to each other in an exciting way. Normally we’re receiving submissions and then we’re asking people to read and then we’re trying to figure out a balance of tones and types of work. We try to have a mix of like, fiction, non-fiction and poetry in every event. And then also a tonal mix of people whose work feels lighter and maybe more extroverted or humorous. And then people who have more of an intensity of performance. So with this one it was interesting because everything fell into place without too much curation on our end in a way, and it was fun to be along for the ride.

Luke: What are your reading practices? Reading anything at the moment?

Emma: I’m reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing right now for the first time. I bought it last fall. I’d never heard of it, actually. And then I was at a bookstore that was called The Golden Notebook, and I was like, what’s that about? I’m only 50 pages in, so I don’t know what I think yet.

Luke: Emily, when I walked in on you at the cafe you were reading Fanny Howe. I started reading Radical Love by Fanny Howe the other day, while I was waiting for my friends Lucy and Robin to get dressed for our friend Chloe’s wedding. We had all just finished decorating this five foot-long cake that Lucy had baked and before we drove off, I started the first few pages of each of the five novels. Enormous book.

Emily: That one is huge. Yeah, I’ve been reading Fanny Howe. I actually was reading The Needle’s Eye which Emma introduced me to many years ago. A lot of it is about the figure of the child. I’m trying to get back into a place of, I don’t know if re-enchantment is the correct word exactly, but I’m trying to deconstruct cynicism towards the gifts and talents of others and my own gifts and talents and vocation. I’m trying to approach things with a beginner’s mind. I recently read Practice by Rosalind Brown, which is actually really, really good. It has some cynical Goodreads reviews where people are like, one star! I think many people were disappointed that it wasn’t “dark academia.” But I loved it. It’s about a girl at Oxford trying to write an essay about Shakespeare’s sonnets. It takes place over the span of one day. It’s not the most experimental stream of consciousness style, but it’s really amazing because you sort of follow the day through just like flashes, that sort of just mimics the episodic nature of the mind, especially when procrastinating.

Emma: Beautiful. Emily got me Helen Garner’s diaries for my birthday so I’ve been reading that in the morning when I wake up and also before bed. And that’s been really nice. It’s interesting because some of the passages are just one sentence. And it was making me think of The Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. But it’s like such a different reading experience because it’s like chronological and more like a narrative. I also just started reading Cruel Optimism by Lauren Berlant. To add a little theory in there.

Luke: What is your relationship to bookstores? Both of you are writers but Emily you’re also a bookseller at TYPE. How do you find that influences your work?

Emily: Bookselling is fun because you get to champion and enliven objects that can be sort of perplexing to people. It’s hard to put one’s trust in a book sometimes. So it’s really fun to develop a relationship with a book as a reader and then engage an inquisitive person who’s genuinely just like, “I’m just looking for something really good and fulfilling to read”, and being able to hand them something that’s maybe a bit out of left field or that you feel really passionately about. That’s how it feels sometimes to program Pack Animal because we are very excited about certain things and we want to enliven people’s writing and presence and form relationships through that. Also, a lot of books that are so incredible and amazing don’t sell very well. That can be dispiriting as a bookseller and a writer. But ultimately, I think what makes TYPE and other independent bookstores such a vital community resource is the passion of the people who have committed themselves to reading as a vocation and have developed a level of discernment and taste and style that kind of keeps a particular configuration of literary communities and community engagement alive. It ensures that the market doesn’t dictate the taste totally and produce a static idea of what literature sells.

JESS:

Read: I’m almost done reading Lonely Crowds by Stephanie Wambugu, so I’m sneaking it in. Every so often, a sentence jumps out and wrecks me. Baldwin said it best: "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." I also enjoyed this Add 2 Cart conversation with former Gap employee, Michael Bise. Bise runs a blog, Spotify page, and Instagram account that aim to emulate the soundscapes of a Gap store from the 90s through the mid-2000s. During the interview, Bise talks about how well-sequenced their playlists were back when he was working there: “It was The Cure running into Sabrina Johnston running into Erasure running into Simply Red or Annie Lennox. Soul II Soul, B-52s, Animal Logic, Sinead O’Connor.” Between this and Katseye’s recent collaboration with the brand – their clapback to Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad? – Gap keeps their finger on the pulse!

Listened: Such a good month for music! My favourite August releases: The Passionate Ones by Nourished by Time, Baby by Dijon, Essex Honey by Blood Orange, and Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party by Hayley Williams. I also did my yearly re-watch of Insecure this past month, so I’ve been revisiting the soundtrack, which provides the perfect sonic palette for L.A. and has some of the most impressive needle drops in TV history. The very first episode opens with Alright by Kendrick Lamar – how can you beat that?!

Saw: I turn 28 in a couple of months (the age Issa, the main character of Insecure, is when the show starts!), so it was affirming to watch her and her friends start off messy as hell, cycle through various coping mechanisms, but ultimately find their way. It’s my emotional support show. I also watched a TikTok where someone said they regulate their nervous system by watching videos of Vince Staples and Zack Fox, and I’ve never felt more understood. This interview with Zack Fox and Mandal on Danny Brown’s podcast is unhinged, but it successfully made me cry laughing after a difficult afternoon last week. Lastly, I’ve been way too invested in the most recent season of Love Island, so I was locked in for the reunion episode. If you too fell into this trap and have any thoughts on Nicolandria or Ace’s street style (my friend said it’s giving early 2000s T.I. and she’s correct!), let’s talk </3

LUKE:

Read: I interviewed Esmé Hogeveen about her reading series Oral Method last month and a highlight for me was talking about our favourite recent reads. Esmé spoke about Valérie Bah’s new novel Subterrane, a speculative comedic book which won the 2025 Amazon Canada First Novel Award. I mentioned my Staff pick Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali, which is a moving and melancholic portrayal of love and loss in 1930’s Berlin.

Listened: I’ve been playing a lot of bossa nova lately, at the store and out in the world. My favourite album is ...E Que Tudo Mais Vá Pro Inferno. It’s relaxing, beautiful, moving. I’ve been reading a lot of books coming from Brazil lately too, like Clara Drummond’s Role Play, Geovani Martin’s debut Via Ápia, and the reissued novellas of Hilda Hilst Letters from a Seducer and The Obscene Madame D, giving a more holistic picture of the creative output from a very creative country.

Saw: I went to see Oral Method and it was amazing. Luckily, Jess talked about the only movie I had seen last month which was Sinners so I had done the homework in preparation. I really liked Sinners. The vampires, the cast, the all-in-a-night all worked for me. But what was especially good was the music, and there is a beautiful musical interlude which pulls on the past and the future of Black American music history which was especially touching and effective in the film.

CASON

Read: Among my favourite reads this summer was The Longest Way to Eat a Melon, the debut collection of fictions by Vancouver-based writer and artist Jacqueline Zong-Li Ross. I say “fictions” because Ross’s style is highly experimental, the collection closer to prose poetry than traditional short stories. Take, for example, “Twenty-Three Versions of Disaster,” in which the author imagines a litany of misfortunes and presents them as a list of microfictions (“16. A curated famine wiped out the best of them while the worst of them ate well”). Formally and conceptually challenging, the collection offers a welcome antidote to the ubiquity of A.I. slop. If this description piques your interest, check out the book’s Toronto launch at TYPE Books Queen on Friday September 26th, where I’ll be reading a little something alongside the author, who will be joined in conversation with poet Lee Suksi.

Listened: No Brat Summer this year, no Espresso to unite us in monocultural euphoria. The closest we got, at least in my circles, was Zara Larson’s Midnight Sun, the sonic equivalent of the most dizzying rollercoaster at Wonderland. Everywhere I went this summer, this song was sure to play: on a yacht, at the beach, in a crowded living room, on a patio, at the park. More often than not, I was the one who requested it.

Saw: I didn’t watch much of anything this summer, preferring to be outside whenever possible, and then only turning on the TV at the end of the day as something to stare at passively while recovering from heatstroke. Integral to this ritual were the latest seasons of Big Brother and the Real Housewives of Miami, the combination of which provided the background noise for me this summer.

JOSH

Read: Encampment by Maggie Helwig. I’ve been recommending Encampment to a large cross-section of people. Helwig offers up wisdom for everybody, be it those who oppose encampments, don’t understand encampments, or struggle to see the humanity in them. But too to those young lefties (among which I count myself) who can benefit from hearing an argument elucidated clearly, morally centered, right-on-the-money, and with a broad range of appeal.

I loved this book and, but more to the point, I think it’s important that I read it. Maybe to better understand our community and those who fight for it, maybe to better talk about these issues and to effectively advocate for them, maybe to feel more intimately a part of it. Who knows for sure. Read it and find out?

Listened: I’ll try not to bore you here, but after a carousel (trying) of stereo equipment (I promise), I’ve finally managed to install (stay with me) a working CD player. Some of my early-20s-tastes that still checkout: The Chicks, late aughts NYC jazz, Outkast, Papa M. The duds? Well let’s just say that sometimes my tastes were… reactionary.

Saw: As my patient coworkers will attest, I’m kickin’ on The Chicks. Naturally, I revisited their 2006 documentary Shut Up And Sing. The background: in 2003, after a wise crack by singer Natalie Maines made in the UK on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq, American Country Radio and its followers boycotted and effectively cancelled the band, marking their demise in some ways. Those who took offence took a dark and misogynistic turn, and the things said about the Chicks were in a league much more derogatory and violent than Maine’s glib comment ever approached. But what I find most worrying is the group-think at play here, a herd "intelligence" (oxymoron?) I witness too when travelling through small town Canada, based less in morality and understanding than in a collective comfort in exhibiting fear and resentment. The Chicks, bless them, were an early warning sign of a crisis deepening still. So depressing. But in style, and to salvage a shred of the goodtimes, in the film Maines delivers some gut-splitting zingers.

MAX

Read: I have a working theory that straight men have urges but, for many, many reasons, can’t acknowledge their desires. E.g. Flesh by David Szalay, which tells the life of Istvan, his teenage years in 1980s Hungary, his early-adulthood spent in the military in Iraq, his years in the aughts working professional security in London, and his time trying to preserve his finances and family during COVID. Each of these periods of his life marked by big-stage world events and by Istvan’s little-stage experiences of sex.

Listened: Speaking of straight guy urges versus desires, I watched Beau Travail at The Fox Theatre and I have been obsessed with it. Say you’re director Claire Denis and you turn Billy Budd (which tells the story of the resentment and attraction a senior military officer feels for a junior) into a ballet, the all-male cast dance-fighting in the Djibouti desert, and you stick the Neil Young song “Safeway Cart” (“Like a Safeway cart rolling down the street / like a sandal mark on a savior’s feet”) in the middle of it. That is already nuts. But then you also stick in literally the last pop song (which I’m leaving unnamed for all of you out there who haven’t yet watched) that fits into a French arthouse film, and somehow you know it’s the exact right song, you know it’ll be the soul of the movie.

Also: am I obsessed enough to start taking dance lessons?

Saw: Only Lovers Left Alive at The Revue. Hot take: Only Lovers Left Alive is white privilege Sinners. Sinners being, in large part, a hangout movie about the upper limit there can be on Black Americans' access to joy and chill; Only Lovers Left Alive giving us beautiful white vampires having zero limit to their access to fun and creativity, and the ennui that come along with that. There's Tilda and Hiddleston, the hottest pasty Brits, John Hurt in his last great role, and Jeffrey Wright having fun as a hospital tech making some extra cash selling the best blood. And pour one out for Anton Yelchin, doing Tom Holland “Aw shucks” before Tom Holland was even a thing and Mia Wasikowska being such a hilarious piece of party-girl shit.

BULLETIN BOARD

If you have any extra funds this month, or are able to share this with your community, Jess wanted to highlight this fundraiser for a relative who will be arriving in Canada soon, on their own, and is hoping to rebuild after a difficult couple of years:

https://www.gofundme.com/f/helping-a-family-member-from-drc-rebuild

September events coming to TYPE Junction, including the fall return of Drag Story Time with Dank Sinatra!:

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4 – Reading group: Hour Of The Star by Clarice Lispector, with Rebecca Mangra. 6:30 PM.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 9 – Book Launch: Nowhere Girl by Carla Ciccone. 6.30pm Please RSVP through Eventbrite

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 – DRAG STORY TIME with Dank Sinatra. 1pm. *this event is made possible by the support of Hachette Book Group Canada*

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16 – Double Book Celebration: All Things Under The Moon by Ann Y K Choi & A Summer Of Dragonflies by Natasha Deen. 6.30pm

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 27: Book Launch: Annapurna's Bounty by Veena Gokhale, in conversation with Emily Weedon. 6.30pm

With a practice that spans print media, installation, and satirical interventions in public space, Shari Kasman makes art that emphasizes the absurdities of urban life. Take, for example, Bloordale Beach, a public installation that Kasman staged during the depths of COVID in a stalled construction site next to the Dufferin Mall. Through defaced signage and dollarstore props, Kasman transformed an otherwise unremarkable lot into a whimsical oasis of community connection. Her most recent book, Welcome to Bloordale Beach, documents the 18-month-long project through photos and a first-hand account of her experience as the beach’s chief custodian.

In conjunction with the book, there’s an exhibition dedicated to Bloordale Beach at Urbanspace Gallery until August 23rd, and an essay Kasman wrote about the project is featured in the anthology Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, which will celebrate its launch at TYPE Books Junction on Wednesday August 20th. In anticipation of the event, which will feature Kasman in conversation with fellow contributor Lorraine Johnson, I spoke to the artist about Bloordale Beach, Toronto’s penchant for rule-following, and blending fiction into civic history.

- Cason

Cason Sharpe: I'm wondering if you can explain Bloordale Beach to the uninitiated?

Shari Kasman: Bloordale Beach started during the pandemic. It opened in May 2020 and lasted roughly a year and a half. It was a stalled construction site in the Bloor and Dufferin area. There was this fenced off gravelly space, and the fenced off gravelly space was a pain because we used to have a shortcut through to Dufferin Mall, and this fenced off business meant we had to walk the long way around, which was annoying. This one guy in the neighbourhood started removing fence panels to get the shortcut back. The school board didn't like this, because the site was school board property. They kept putting fence panels back. Then it was COVID, and I was talking to this guy about the space and we were saying maybe if other people were interested in using the space, then they would leave the fence panels open for us. Meanwhile, it was sometimes open, and it was sometimes fenced off.

The first thing that went up there was, do you remember the shared space signs that they had on bollards? They were signs like person plus car plus bicycle, and we're all supposed to share the road. But they put these signs on bollards in the middle of the road, which made it more difficult to share the road because there were more things in the road. Anyways, this guy put those signs at the fence, and we started calling it the Social Distancing Compound. A few days later, I saw someone lying down there in nothing but a pair of shorts. And I was like, oh, sunbathing. It's a beach. There's sand at the edges. It makes total sense. So I sent this picture to the friend who had been opening the fence panels and I said, it's Bloordale Beach. So that night we made signs that said Bloordale Beach, and that’s how it became a beach.

This beach was not near a permanent body of water, which made it unusual, but it did have a low point where water would collect after a heavy rainfall, and so I put up a sign next to that that said Bloordale Lagoon. It was a humorous guerrilla art project, an installation that was essentially a creative placemaking initiative that grew organically. The community got really involved and participated. A lot of people contributed to it.

CS: Were they coming to you with their contributions, or they were just dropping stuff off on their own accord?

SK: People were just doing stuff. I didn't have any expectations. I didn't know what to expect. It's not something that I thought would become anything. But at the same time, I found it very amusing.

I really liked the humour of it and people contributing humorous things to the beach. And I'm just glad people appreciated that and saw the humour in it, and thought it was something worth participating in or found it inspirational. Five different people wrote songs about it. That's not something I would have ever imagined.

CS: They wrote songs about it?

SK: There are five Bloordale Beach songs. One is being recorded this summer, but I've heard the other four. There's one on Spotify. One band, Cat Jam, wrote a Bloordale Beach song.

They have a music video that's on YouTube. But the first one that came out was from a guy named Peter Demakos, who goes by the name Pete Moss. He's a kids’ musician. I mean, he's a musician for all kinds of people, but he does a lot of children's performances. Then the second one was by the band Pop Plug. The third song is by Cat Jam, and the fourth one was Eamon McGrath. And the fifth one is by an artist named Priya Thomas.

And then there were two documentaries made about it. One was for someone's school project. That one I didn't know about until it was complete and it screened at a few festivals. The other documentary I knew about. This woman, Elizabeth Littlejohn, followed me around on a lot of tours, because I was giving tours of the beach for the BIG on Bloor Festival.

CS: What did the tours consist of?

SK: Oh, they were fun. They were fact and fiction tours. I would talk about the high tide and sailing conditions and swimming conditions. I put up all these signs with the Beach Water Quality Hotline number, which is a sign I'd seen down at the actual beach. If you call it, they'll tell you about E. coli. So I’d call it and put it on speakerphone during the tour and we’d listen to the announcement. And because we had made the beach a UNESCO World Heritage Site, I learned a bunch of facts about UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Canada. At the time, there were 20 UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Canada, and Bloordale Beach was the 21st. And then I would talk about other UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and then talk about Bloordale Beach as a heritage site. I made a sea turtle nesting area with stuffed animal turtles. I would talk about how many eggs the turtles lay and that kind of thing. I love that blending of fact and fiction.

CS: It's so funny. Okay, so we've got five songs, two documentaries. What do you think it was specifically about Bloordale Beach that really resonated with people that they wanted to archive it in these various ways? Because it's this ephemeral site, there was this idea that one day it would be gone. And you documented it. And then also other people were documenting it.

SK: Well, I think one thing is, it really lifted people's spirits during COVID. A lot of people felt a strong attachment to it. And another thing is, things like that don't normally happen in Toronto.

CS: Why do you think that is?

SK: People tend to follow rules here. I mean, a lot of the time. Or things get shut down. Like in a subsequent project, me and a couple of friends made Parkdale Provincial Park at Queen and Brock. That was on that knocked-down liquor store property. And that was city property. The city did not like that and kept removing our stuff. I mean, with the beach, even when it did get shut down temporarily, they left all the linger signs up.

CS: What are the linger signs?

SK: Since the beach was a construction site, there were DANGER NO TRESPASSING signs around the entire thing. They were there even after the beach was open. My next door neighbour said she was very reluctant to go to the beach, although she wanted to, because there were so many danger signs, and I thought, oh, is that what's stopping people? Is that what's preventing people from going to the beach? So I changed all the DANGER NO TRESPASSING signs so they said, LINGER SO YESPASSING, or LINGER SO RELAXING. I used tape and markers. Then there was DANGER DUE TO DEMOLITION, and I changed those to LINGER DUE TO EMOTION.

So despite the school board shutting it down, sometimes, I mean, they were also letting things persist. Yeah, they did let things persist. There were a couple times they took signs down or broke signs, but maybe they saw the humour in it. I know the politicians in the neighbourhood ultimately liked the beach and thought it was a positive contribution to the neighbourhood.

CS: Yeah, it doesn't feel like there's a lot of opportunity for grassroots community initiatives like that in the city, ones that don't have a specific agenda, that are just about everyone in the neighbourhood being in on a joke together.

SK: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. That’s what it was. I mean, anyone could do anything with the space. And sure, there's a liability concern, but it was just a flat open space. Once there were cops there and I was worried. I was like, do they not like this? Are they gonna shut it down? But it turns out there was a missing person. And they were looking for this missing person at the beach.

CS: I also wanted to ask you about making the Bloordale Beach project into a book. We initially met when I was working at Art Metropole, and I knew you as a bookmaker. Your last project Galleria, Goodbye, which was documenting the Galleria Mall, also took the form of a book. I'm interested in these processes of urban documentation. Why have you decided to translate those into book projects specifically? What about the book form is interesting to you?

SK: That's a good question. What do I like about books? With a book, it's something that's longer lasting than a gallery exhibit. It's something that you can really remember all of the details, or all of the details from my perspective. I was trying to encapsulate this thing that was special because a lot of people have an attachment to it. I thought it would be nice to tell the story. I like telling stories. And it's nice to package it in a book and it can be there forever, even though the beach disappeared. It's a nice way for the beach to live on. In addition to the book, there’s also currently a gallery exhibit at Urbanspace Gallery at 401 Richmond until August 23rd. I'm giving some tours there through the summer and having film events as well.

CS: I see it all the time, people picking up your books and being so excited. I've seen it for years, being at Art Metropole and now here at The Junction, people picking up the Galleria book and being like, oh, I remember that mall. I'm now getting to see that with the Bloordale Beach book, too. People are like, oh, I remember when that happened. Or they didn't know that it was an intentional project or that there was someone behind it documenting the whole thing.

SK: Someone said to me, I didn't realize there was so much stuff going on there. It was someone who came by the gallery and was looking at the things people did there and created about the beach or at the beach and shooting the music videos and, you know, doing all kinds of creative stuff there, having the community garden and all of that.

CS: What's next now that the beach has eroded? Where are you heading next with your projects?

SK: I don't exactly know. I have one book idea, but it's a tiny book. Maybe it's a zine. I'm not a hundred percent. I'm still a little bit wrapped up in Bloordale Beach, doing these events in the summertime. I get a lot of people in the neighbourhood asking me, where's the next beach? People are waiting for another beach. Maybe there will be a next beach, but I don't know. I don't have any plans.

CS: I guess you can't really plan it.

SK: I'll see what seems inspiring. But I'm not committed to any particular next project. This was a lot to put a gallery show and a book together. I do have bits of ideas floating around, but I'm not married to any direction as yet. But I do plan to continue making stuff.

CS: Well, I look forward to seeing what's next.

SK: Oh, thank you. Bloordale Beach lives on.

In her essay "Interruptions", Junction-resident Zahra Ebrahim describes her day-to-day encounters with her neighbors on Edwin Avenue. She argues that the messy texture of these interactions are not just a big part of her choice to live in Toronto, they are also necessary for urban thriving and survival. Such messy, semi-random, neighborly encounters are, in fact, exactly why I work here at the bookstore.

On Wednesday August 20 at 6:30PM, we'll be celebrating Messy Cities: Why We Can't Plan Everything with a conversation between Zahra and contributors Shari Kasman and Lorraine Johnson here at TYPE Junction. Come join the festivities as they discuss how messiness can make our cities more liveable, lively, and inclusive.

– Max

“Interruptions” by Zahra Ebrahim

My day typically begins at 7 a.m. with a thud on the back door. The sound is that of my ninety-year-old neighbour, Irene, whipping The Toronto Star from her porch to mine as she’s already finished reading it cover to cover. As I get ready, I make sure to leave a lemon outside the door for my attached neighbour, Elizabeth, who texted early to ask if I had one to spare. As I step out the door to head to my first meeting, a few other neighbours are delaying the start to their days while they chat about a range of topics: news of the weekend’s upcoming subway closures, if anyone has an extra laptop charger to lend, a new vitamin regime. I stop and talk for a while, and then speedwalk to catch the subway, only to run into Amyn, the owner of our local coffee shop, who stops me to get the update on exactly where my sister has found a place in his old hometown of London.

This is a typical morning on Edwin Avenue in Toronto. I always make sure to add an extra ten minutes to my commute time, knowing that something – and more likely someone – will ‘interrupt’ my plans. Now, I should say that I’m complicit in this scheduling messiness. Running out of milk or coffee often means jumping the fence in my pyjamas and using the ‘emergency only’ entry code to get into my neighbour’s house early in the morning to forage for some. Or I’ll often be the one furiously knocking on my neighbour Shehnaaz’s door at dinnertime, as I’ve run out of saffron for the kebabs I’m making.

While I didn’t know it at the time, in moving to Toronto, I was seeking messiness. I’m the child of nineties sitcoms, the ones that included the likes of Steve Urkel and Kimmy Gibbler – the ‘annoying’ neighbours – coming and going as they pleased, participating in family decisions and enjoying staples at the dinner table. I watched these shows with a deep desire for the intimacy of those types of relationships. These neighbours weren’t just about polite small talk but rather embodied a type of chosen family that became enmeshed into their lives. While the story I tell about the move to Toronto is about finding opportunity for my work and wanting a city with a great culture scene and a range of fun neighbourhoods to explore, I was also hoping to build relationships like the ones in those sitcoms: being surrounded by a community that witnessed me in my everyday life, without pretense or judgment, for better or for worse.

When my partner and I moved to the Junction Triangle in 2018, we quickly realized that to talk to people – to embrace the chaos of the everyday on Edwin Avenue – is to honour part of the history of this neighbourhood. It’s a history of neighbours joyfully wedding-crashing, constantly sharing food, and asking each other questions that go deeper than the weather and plans for the weekend ahead. Out-of-town friends and family who come to visit often drop their bags and then pop outside to say hello to folks on the street. You don’t have to live on Edwin to be part of the community.

The strength of the network here doesn’t rely on the frequency of interactions but rather the sincerity and honesty within them. Urban scholars would call what we have on Edwin Avenue a type of social infrastructure – a resilient lattice of connections sustained and nurtured over time. These are the sorts of places, as is well documented, that are more likely to survive crises, stresses, or shocks, specifically because, in those moments, people ensure that everyone is cared for. In a well-known case study about the 1995 Chicago heat wave, survival was credited to people knowing their neighbours and ensuring they had what they needed to be safe and cool during a very difficult time. These ties between neighbours are not just ‘nice to haves’ but are also essential to our survival in cities as we face the tremendous environ- mental, economic, and social challenges in the decades ahead. I want all residents of the city, regardless of where they live or what type of dwelling they inhabit, to be surrounded by a social infrastructure they can lean on in all aspects of their lives.

They say that when you plant all the same sorts of trees in a forest, the forests don’t survive. They are sustained by the interactions between different types of flora, fauna, and other tree species, in order to realize their full potential. I often feel like Edwin Avenue is a thriving forest, full of chaos, spontaneity, and, well, interruptions.

I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Excerpt from ‘Interruptions’ by Zahra Ebrahim in Messy Cities, edited by Dylan Reid, Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, and John Lorinc (Coach House Books, 2025). Used with permission of the publisher.