Currently reading “First Snow, Last Light” the last of Wayne Johnston’s Newfoundland trilogy of novels and I’m pretty sure Sheilagh Fielding is my favourite literary character ever.
“There is something at the bottom of the pit of despair that, when brought up to the surface, ignites and gives off a greater light than people who have never known despair have ever seen.
“I had seen it and felt its heat the day they told me I was cured and the day I left the San. I didn't understand it. I would happily have forgone every stage of my first descent, and every stage of this one, for the light inside me now, like that of Lucifer himself, seemed to live nowhere but in perfect darkness.”
I mean holy shit I’ll never write anything as good as that.
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Final holiday read; back to work on Monday, boooooo. I unknowingly saved the best for last. Such a gorgeous novel. So lush and gothic while also being very precisely structured. I love books about queer people and mad people, and this has both.
I am super excited to reveal the cover for Progressive in Polyester: A Tribute to the Women of Saturday Night Fever. Cover art and design by the talented artist Joshua Tannis.
Progressive in Polyester is a collection of my essays about the women characters of the iconic 1977 film Saturday Night Fever and how these women both defined and defied the gender expectations of their day.
Release date: TBD but most likely end of summer/early fall 2026.
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Because a bonnet veil is preferable to a forced smile...
In honour of Mental Health Awareness Month, I wanted to share a video I made today of me reading a short excerpt from The Memory of Crows, my novella forthcoming August 2027 with DarkWinter Press. This excerpt was inspired by my grief journey and explores the feelings of isolation that follow a loss, and the insensitivity and forced optimism that the bereaved often encounter.
p.s. I just realized - hours after I posted the video, of course 😉- that I said the word "apostrophe" when I meant to say "asterisk" 😫...I always did get my typographical symbols and punctuation marks mixed up!
I’m coming to GUELPH, ONTARIO TODAY (May 8) to deliver the Musagetes Lecture.
Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:
https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/
This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:
Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.
Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).
These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.
This is where Cannon starts, as Cannon tries to resolve all these bad situations, each of which is only worsening. Trish disapproves of Cannon's sexual affair with the new front-of-house woman at the restaurant – even as Trish begins a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy from her fitness club who clearly wants more than the odd tumble. Guy the restaurateur positions Cannon as his hatchet-woman and confidante, driving conflict in the kitchen that she is meant to hold the bag for. Her grandfather enters a terminal decline, and still her mother won't answer her calls and texts about it. And then, Cannon discovers that Trish has violated her in a way that is intimate and appalling.
These may sound like the beats that you'd find in a melodramatic soap opera, but Cannon's affect is so stoic, and her interiority is so beautifully and inventively depicted – Lai deploying the unique strengths of the graphic novel form here with total virtuosity – that the vibe is more David Lynch than Dallas.
The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.
It's a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
A.J. Fotheringham is here with a great new series!
A. J. Fotheringham, a Canadian author from Montreal, writes cozy mysteries with an edge and a hint of romance. Her stories focus on strong female sleuths. Her books are available on Amazon and include The Lamb’s Bay Mysteries (9 books), The Bailey Summers Mysteries (3 books) and The Wine Bar Mysteries (2 books so far). A former journalist, editor and professional communicator, she is a graduate…
