Launched
Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life is now out in the world. I’m grateful to Another Story for hosting the launch, and glad it was a casual chat with my editor Jim Johnstone with excellent questions from Jim. The book has had good reviews at The Woodlot (my thanks to Chris Banks) as well as Hippocampus magazine (my thanks to Renee K Nicholson). An interview I did has appeared with the people at On Creative Writing that’s generally about modelling the clear, accessible style of Orwell.
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The Commentary and Book Launch
I had a very pleasant and interesting chat with Joseph Planta over at The Commentary about my new book of essays, getting inspired by George Orwell, life after death and more. Planta deserves credit for doing this a long time now and for coming up with thoughtful questions after engaging carefully with the work.
Also, my book launches soon: Jun 11 at Another Story Bookshop on Roncesvalles in Toronto, where I’ll have a discussion about the book with my editor Jim Johnstone from Palimpsest Press. It’s a book of 18 essays and 16 of the most interesting book reviews I wrote over the years so I think there’s something here for everyone, even as it’s a timely book in many ways.
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I published my first essay in the Globe and Mail in 1999. It was about working in a warehouse, and what a cold dose of reality it was after studying English literature. At the time, I thought “That was fun, but I’ll just write another essay when I think I have a really good idea for one.”
Here we are. My book of essays about faith, jobs, getting older, great books and the way life is changing (among other subjects) totals 18 essays and also includes 16 of the best book reviews I’ve written over the years. It also has many of the best quotes I’ve come across in more than thirty years of reading. It’s available for preorder from Palimpsest Press.
Early on, I read The Penguin Essays of George Orwell, and found them to be model essays of clarity and meaning. Am I comparing myself to Orwell here? I’m not, except to say it taught me the kind of essay I wanted to write would speak to all of us in a clear, concise way. And I didn’t want to be afraid to quote someone else if I think they had an extraordinary way of putting something. From my essay on faith, here’s a quote from Canadian poet Irving Layton:
“We have to fight this desire for the power, the desire to humiliate others, for that comes from our own terror of death and is an attempt to give our lives some kind of significance beyond the insignificance of the moment. You see, Freud was quite wrong when he thought that the guilty thing that people were repressing was sex. What people repress is the fear of death and the knowledge of their insignificance. It is this that breeds sadism, cruelty, and the desire to humiliate others… Man is the only animal that is aware of death… and he simply cannot come to terms with it. So our education should not be an education for sex, but an education for the acceptance of death and our own unimportance. In the billions and billions of years rolling ahead, what are we? My God, we’re not even a speck, not even a mote. It’s very hard for human beings to accept that – therefore the desire to humiliate someone else, to beat, to brutalize.”
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Hollay Ghadery is the author of Fuse, a memoir of mixed race identity and mental health, Rebellion Box (poetry), Widow Fantasies (short fiction) and most recently a novel: The Unravelling of Ou, from Palimpsest Press.
You’re written a memoir, poetry , short fiction and now a novel. Do you like the idea of writing for every genre? And what, if anything, nudges a particular experience in the direction of a particular form of writing?
I don’t know if it’s that I like the idea of writing every genre as much as it feels like a natural choice. Like how sometimes you feel like walking somewhere and sometimes you need to run. And sometimes you can dawdle. Any decision I am making about what genre to work in is happening in an unconscious split second.
I don’t mean to make it seem magical and I’m certainly not trying to be romantic about the process. But the truth is, I’ve tried to pinpoint when or how I decide a certain project is going to be poetry or prose or non-fiction or a children’s book or whatever, and all I know is that it comes to me with that decision already made. I’m sure there must be something happening—a pre-intellectualized sorting process—but I’m unable to access it. All this said, my factory setting is poetry. So even if I know that a piece I’m writing needs to be creative non-fiction, for example, when I begin thinking about it, it’s my poet brain that is feeling it out first: those needy tendrils of intrinsic sense seeking connection. Whatever follows is incubated in the poetic nidus.
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I’ve taken some time out to review a new book of articulate, moving and compassionate essays by Shane Neilson, and the review can be found over at The Woodlot, a site dedicated to Canadian poetry run by Chris Banks.
Neilson is a poet, and as I say in the review, writes the book in “staccato bursts of meaning.”
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Russell Thornton is a Canadian poet with nine poetry collections previous to Two Songs, Selected Poems (2026, Harbour Publishing) including previous titles shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, Governor General’s Award, the Raymond Souster Award, the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award. His poetry has appeared widely in literary magazines and in many anthologies, among them the Best Canadian Poetry series.
It’s an extraordinary accomplishment choosing poems from nine different collections, what sort of process was behind the selection?
Thanks for the question, Alex.
With Two Songs I was selecting from nine previous individual collections, so there was a fair bit to exclude. I’d heard from other poets how frustrating and even demoralizing the selection process could be for this kind of collection. They talked about drawing a circle on the floor, throwing the manuscript sheaf up into the air and simply including what landed inside the circle. I’m serious.
But the process was enjoyable for me. I didn’t worry about the subject matter of a poem or about how this or that piece might be received; I went simply on what I see as craft. If a poem seemed to me to work in its use of language and imaginative movement and meaning, I put it in the book. If it lapsed—if I’d indulged in cliché or was imprecise or clumsy—I got rid of it. That was my beginning anyway.
Then there was the presentation of the poems. I’d seen Selected Poems set out by subject matter, by the decade of the poems’ publication, arranged as a single long book of poems with no section divisions, ordered alphabetically by the first letter of the poem titles, ordered by the dates of the poems’ original composition, and so on. I decided almost immediately to go with the traditional approach—chronological presentation, book by book, with the poems appearing in the same order as they appeared in the individual books. I selected a little over 100 poems from around 400 poems in total in the books and added a handful of uncollected (outtakes from previous books) and recent/newish poems for a short final section.
I wanted a “Selected poems” as opposed to a “New & Selected poems.” After choosing the poems for Two Songs, I’d filled a notebook or two with new poems and knew most of them sounded different than my poems from before. The way I saw it, they were for a complete collection down the road. So, with Two Songs I felt I’d put a frame around the right bulk of poems, clarified myself, and as far as a Selected went, wanted to stop there. I’d place the outright “new” between covers in the future. With luck, of course.
A writer friend of mine said to me a few months ago, “A Selected is like marking time.” I’d say that’s true enough. I’d add that although the conventional idea of the chief theme of poetry is that it’s romantic love, it occurs to me that the deeper theme of poetry may be time. Of course, the two themes may be one. In any case, I’ve never really believed in time. I know that’s an odd pronouncement. But then, contemporary physics along with mystical philosophies going back millennia tell us that time is a human fabrication, an illusion, and doesn’t exist, at least not in the way we usually conceive of it.
What’s undeniable is that change exists. I don’t think I’m the same person who wrote the poems that appear in the first few sections of Two Songs. While I was assembling the book’s Contents, I knew I was hovering over and observing my own changes—and examining as closely as I could the processes in the form of poetry of my inner alterations. So, I see a Selected—well, my Selected, definitely—as a kind of organized address to change. But why put together an address in the first place? To what end? I’d say: Always to begin again. To write more. To feel and think more and at new levels—in the context of change that is both personal and beyond the personal.
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Cannibal Rats, Richard Greene
I don’t know who originally said that certain rare individuals might step over every body in a battlefield to mourn the passing of a butterfly. At first glance it suggests a useless personality, but declining to join mobs, and making observations no one else troubles to make are not bad things, they’re quietly valuable. Richard Greene begins his latest collection Cannibal Rats with the title poem. In the wreck of a ship (“Blue steel rusted by the sea, it was worth / only its salvage”) rats only have each other to consume. It’s a quietly superb poem, finding elegance in a ugly, overlooked moment the way most of us wouldn’t: “a wooden ship broached-to and on her beam ends, / remembered, then, in song where nothing mends.”
Greene can be “overcome by reverence,” and in a world increasingly encouraged to practice being resentful his voice is a welcome one. There’s a poignant, three page tribute to the poet Kildare Dobbs, “You Must Remember This.” I recall doing a reading with Dobbs, and being daft enough to assume as an old man he’d be at peace somehow. When I said it was an honour meeting him he surprisingly dismissed it as “More glue factory stuff.” Greene seems to capture his energy here: “You were comfortless, so you tended your jokes / like a garden – provision for the months of cold.”
In “Hurricane Season” as in some other poems (like “Corner Boys,” immediately following) Greene establishes certain commonalities, I think, before troubling to zero in and clarify the location (St John’s, as far as these two poems are concerned). It’s terrifically easy to being poems in a more self-centered way: I’m at blankety-blank doing blankety-blank. Looking back on thirty years of writing my own poems, my favourite (and most successful ones, I think) begin with me in the poems more indirectly, and are about something else, or someone else. Greene is a presence in his work as he looks around. Our commonalities resurface again in his long poem “Thole:” we “face the weather than awaits us all,” even as our universal but often-overlooked smallness as people is acknowledged: “Our ceremonies fall into the gap / between the systems on a weather map.”
And whatever old statements there might be about certain personalities stepping over bodies on a battlefield, Greene proves it to be flawed, visiting battlefields in a long poem that includes his tour of various civil war locations. His eye for detail is excellent: The cannon put paid / to all that drummed-up splendour; each ball laid / out a dozen men.” And this line: “When the fighting was over / thousands lay among wildflowers and clover.” I think he visits with extraordinary sensitivity considering lines like this, contemplating a residue of some kind still to be found in the land:
It’s daylight now and time to go. I’ve seen
what I may, and I’ve left much unseen.
There’s a limit to what the heart can learn
without pause and repair, but I may return
to this place of bayonets and cannon,
small gesture of one still living to what is gone.
Among the stones there is something silent
and blank that refuses all comment,
sorrow that could never belong to us.
This ground remains mute and impervious
to our most sympathetic inquiries,
a stronghold under oaks and black cherries.
If there’s ever a day no one remembers a war, is there still a feeling left in the land, or some kind of energy? It’s a fascinating thought, and if dogs smell ten thousand times better then we do, it’s worth considering if ghosts are the things we simply can’t see or hear but are nevertheless happening on some level. Whatever the reality, Greene asks elegant questions in a deeply worthy book with an eye-catching, somewhat disturbing title.
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This review was originally posted to The Danforth Review in 2006, the year before the introduction of the iPhone.
Editor Kevin Smokler explains in his introduction to Bookmark Now that the voices behind these essays were encouraged as a response to Reading at Risk, a National Endowment for the Arts report thatwarned literary reading is in sharp decline in favour of the Internet, TV and video games. Responses were swift and alarmed, but not often complex or useful: literary types should regroup and push on with the idea of convincing people to read, as though it’s an unpleasant pill to swallow. I admit, it’s hard to think of ways to sell reading to non-readers. And daily life can be discouraging, even without gloomy media blurbs. I work in an office where a few hundred people pass through every day, and at the end of the day I can count on one hand the number of people who waited with a book rather than an electronic device. As a writer, this has the advantage of keeping you humble and connected with the real world, and the disadvantage of feeling you love to do something increasingly obscure. Announcing at a party that you’re a poet would get the same reaction as announcing you’re fond of researching Viking rituals. So, writers need dialogue and reassurance in times of change, or even the best of times. Smokler suggests it’s only a traditional approach that leaves us upset: “If online reading was eating away at book reading, how did we explain literary weblogs that command thousands of readers a day, or book recommendations and dialogue as crucial features in the next generations of social software?”
The majority of essays here are thoughtful and articulate, if seemingly arbitrary in terms of what aspect of the literary life they approach. Adam Johnson notes, “the key to learning is a repository of humility, and it is for posturing against this that I most fault the myths of being an artist.” Paul Collins writes an account of being unexpectedly moved in a library during research: “By the late 1870s, though, I noticed the writing getting shakier and less frequent until, one day, it stopped altogether… I pulled my Walkman headphones off and sat there a moment. The volumes sat on my desk, mute, and I looked up from them, through the library windows, and at the clouds drifting by. I realized that my silent companion had died. And – absurdly, I know – I felt a little pang, even though I never knew his name, and he died a hundred years before I was born.” Here we find something wrapped up in the dreams of any writer: to move someone a hundred years after death. Benjamin Nugent questions our tendency to push workloads to the breaking point, warning “it’s a trend that works to deprive us of the poem by the doctor about her patients, the novel by the judge about the defendant.”
Finally, the essays of Tom Bissell and Douglas Rushkoff are right on topic in addressing literacy in a changing world. “Human culture keeps producing newer and technologically cannier things with which to distract itself,” notes Bissell, and we may be creating “a culture literally afraid of interiority.” Clearly, some do leap to embrace the technological umbilical cord, preferring cell phones to being alone with thoughts. Bissell stops short of suggesting cultural changes, only observing “love of digital distraction needs fortification with something that appreciates and rewards the inner life.” But how do you teach people to appreciate that inner life when they’re afraid of it? For every skilled poet, there are a few heavily financed teams of advertisers. In a reassuring set of observations, Rushkoff shows how our fears can be short sighted: he compares a publisher’s refusal to release free electronic versions of books to record executives in the 1930s who forbade radio stations use of recordings out of fear they’d lose sales. And he notes that digital media won’t completely replace the book, because “a new medium only replaces an old one if it does everything better.” The VHS cassette didn’t put theatres out of business but enhanced what we like about them, and reminded us why we go, “giant screens, THX sound, glamorous lobbies, and an evening out of the house.” You can’t take your digital media into the bath, or snuggle up with it properly, and anything you really cherish you’d want on paper, which does support his argument that some would read a few chapters of a book online and then go out and buy it.
There is optimism inherent in these dedicated voices, and humour. Literature isn’t a precious, endangered species here. Reading the book is like having a few pints with these writers, spending time with like-minded folks and hearing about why they love what they do, and find it fascinating. Tara Bray Smith communicates the pleasure of reading so warmly I wanted to invite her to dinner just to hang out. Neal Pollack tells of an exchange that began with him receiving an anonymous email that read, in its entirety, “Neal Pollack is a dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick dick licker.” Howard Hunt reveals a delightful line he read and has carried for years, describing the experience of interviewing Christopher Walken: “Fiddling with his lemons, he seems to repel conversation.”
And regardless of how directly they tackle the issue of a decline in literary reading, these pieces speak to the issue just by existing, written by articulate, passionate and relatively young writers who all felt the power and gravity of writing despite other distractions. Do these essays settle the matter? No, but it’s more important to begin the matter. The book may not be strong on tangible suggestions for change, but Smokler wisely recognizes it would have been fairly ironic for a book tackling this subject to be dull and preachy. It’s more important to stop for a deep breath first and recognize that the end is not nigh. We may not know what reading will compete with next, or how its weird marriage to technology will turn out, but it’s reassuring to hear from these voices that give a damn.
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Are things going to get worse before they get better? It’s among the questions In Crisis, On Crisis ponders. We have a decaying social safety net, or maybe the rising cost of living has forced more people out on the streets, or maybe both. And then there are the looming environmental concerns and international conflicts. Cairns observes “history is full of situations that couldn’t be much ‘worse’ when collective action was rare or non-existent for decades … The terror of the Nazi regime didn’t trigger a mass coordinated fight back among Jews in Europe. The transatlantic slave system held for more than three hundred years.” In short, it’s entirely situational. Clearly some situations just don’t allow for organized resistance, and yet: “If one goal of radicals is to learn from history to inform our efforts to change the world, then let’s be honest that sometimes worse leads to better.”
An essay on crisis moves – getting out of the city because of the pandemic, as one example – also asserts reality is muddled: “When we consider the nested nature of crises – a personal move within a cost-of-living crisis within a pandemic within a global economic crisis – it becomes very difficult to distinguish causes from effects.”
I found the generally balanced approach in these essays oddly reassuring, if only because of the reminder there’s no rush to choose from the ongoing assortment of finger-pointing and sweeping generalizations to be found on social media, and possibly regular news if it becomes flooded with AI journalism. The book gives the reader the evidence you need to be forgiving of your own errors and bafflement, even as you broaden your acceptance that everything takes time. I don’t think the suggestion is that we routinely back away from taking action, just that it’s worth remembering the answers may be more complex than we assumed.
Democracy has been in crisis before, and ongoing discussions of this may, to some extent, be “code for mass disaffection,” suggests Cairns, including income inequality. There’s also “radical potential for change,” in assuming Liberal democracy is broken, but Cairns argues we’ve been down this road before without democracy vanishing: “Major crises nearly toppled liberal democracy on a global scale in 1918, 1933, 1947, 1962, 1974, 1989 and 2008. Then, as now, public intellectuals warned of democracy’s imminent end. In the past, governments made structural adjustments in time to avoid irreversible disaster.” Cairns sees “no alternative political-economic system or movement (from left or right) with the social weight necessary to topple liberal democracy and assume control after the fall.”
But for years we’ve already had the brand of so-called journalism that encourages resentment, and now we face AI journalism and possibly a serious, further erosion of trust because seeing is no longer believing. Cairns reminds us change is not always progress. And yet he points out that AI is a tool we could collectively use to test the truthfulness of statements.
I really have no criticisms for the book, and I think every reader will find something fascinating here. I’m not even including in this review all the quotes I troubled to write down. It’s safe to say I wasn’t in complete agreement with a couple of bold statements, but no one should read a collection of essays just to have all their own opinions reaffirmed. The brief essay Cairns produces on his affection for his infant son isn’t one of the more thought-provoking ones, but I’ll take any antidote to the toxic idea men always need to project strength. Finally, the details of his personal struggles enhance the essays because it helps the book feel grounded in the real world. If you crave a book that addresses larger ideas in thoughtful and nuanced writing, this is a worthy one.
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Alex Boyd: BoydBlog 
Year in Review: 2025
Fiction: A House Without Spirits (David Homel) had characters that feel quite real, an intriguing premise about a writer getting to know a reclusive photographer, and lines like this: “The only difference between a rut and a grave is how deep.”
Enjoy Your Stay at the Shamrock Motel (Andrew Kaufman) is a set of linked stories I enjoyed both for their inventiveness and meaning.
Only Smoke (Millas) might speak to men than anyone else as a sort of fairy-tale about fatherhood, even as it’s a novel that’s a tribute to reading. The main character moves in to the apartment of a father he never knew and starts to get to know him through his books. I was a little puzzled by the abrupt ending, but a worthy book, for sure.
The Last Neanderthal (Claire Cameron) was unique, skillfully told and gripping.
Never Let Me Go (Ishiguro) is a novel I found slow, but I was thoroughly impressed with how convincing I eventually found the characters and moral questions.
Hangsaman (Shirley Jackson) was intriguing throughout, if not the most gripping Jackson novel.
Short fiction: The First Ten (Jamie Mathieson) and Pilgrimage to Earth (Robert Sheckley) are both books I’d recommend as inventive collections of SF stories, though you can really just track down anything by Sheckley, who wrote for decades. The First Ten, however, is the first ten stories to be self-published by Mathieson.
Genre fiction: The Demolished Man (Alfred Bester) is an extraordinarily inventive novel from the 1950s that reads like it could have been written today. Set in a world “everything has changed except for the ancient instinct for murder,” it was the first winner of the Hugo Award.
Lowfield (Mark Sampson) is reviewed below as a gripping horror novel set in PEI.
Titus Alone (Mervyn Peake) was, to be honest, a conclusion to the Gormenghast trilogy I found slim and a bit disappointing. But it has its moments, and the first two volumes of the trilogy are something extraordinary.
Dreamsnake (Vonda McIntyre) is a quietly brilliant book about pursuing knowledge and the struggle involved, even as it’s set in a post-apocalyptic world of the future. I already knew McIntyre from some of her excellent Star Trek novels.
Moonrise: The Golden Age of Lunar Adventures (Mike Ashley, editor) is a thoroughly enjoyable and intriguing set of stories written when people still imagined what life on the moon might be like.
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (Philip K Dick): The way some people are “noticed” by forces larger than themselves and buffeted around before ultimately fading into history (as even many of the more powerful fade into history) is an impressively handled and poignant theme here, and the idea of driving around in a “quibble,” must be my favourite term of all the terms I’ve seen invented by one SF writer or another. And for a book published in 1974 the idea of a “phone-grid sex network” is pretty impressive. But really, I’m not sure I’ve seen a writer tackle the idea we fade into history as poignantly since I read “The Bishop,” a story by Chekhov. It’s a story John Updike called the best short story ever written. Chekhov can perhaps be said to be more shoulder-shrugging about it, and Philip K. Dick. more cynical given the occasional truly repulsive character here, but it’s a worthy book now among my favourite SF novels.
Essays: In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times (James Cairns) is reviewed below as a meaningful and timely book.
Fan Mail: A Guide to What We Love, Loathe and Mourn (Jason Guriel) is a collection of immensely readable essays about books, music and film that I’ve reviewed below.
Court of Memory (James McConkey) has wisdom and grace to spare in a collection of essays I believe is now out of print. Essays written over a number of decades.
Best Canadian Essays 2026 (Brian Bethune, editor) is another fine, relevant collection in the series, now going strong since the 2009 edition. Do enough people know about it? Not yet.
Nonfiction: Stay Here With Me (Robert Olmstead) is an elegantly written memoir of that particular part of youth that never comes again.
My Dog Tulip (Ackerley) is a charming memoir of flawed but intensely meaningful love, with lines that are peak British, like “I permitted myself to be amused.”
On Book Banning (Ira Wells) is highly recommended as a concise, articulate look at the subject. Part of the Field Notes series from Biblioasis.
Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw: Travels in Search of Canada (Will Ferguson) is a book that again has me reaching for that word charming, even as Ferguson taught me about parts of the country I didn’t know.
Graphic novels: Absolute Wonder Woman (volume one) gets the feel of the character exactly right while re-imagining the story in a way I loved. Absolute Martian Manhunter (these are all reinventions of the characters) is a bit light on plot but has amazing art.
Space Ghost: With Only Ghosts to Comfort Us takes a character I enjoyed in cartoons as a child and re-imagines him as something closer to Batman, with terrific art.
The Hidden Life of Trees: A Graphic Adaptation (Wohlleben, adapted by Bernard and Flao) has extraordinary bits of information on the slow wisdom of trees we often fail to notice, never mind understand.
A Fire Story: A Graphic Memoir (Brian Fies) is a potent and highly readable memoir of losing almost everything and rebuilding.
Hope it All Works Out! and City Monster (Reza Farazmand) : the first is a collection of strips I loved for their oddness and charm, the second a graphic novel, both recommended.
Poems: This year I read Endpoint and Other poems (John Updike), a long but poignant final collection. The Essential Charles Bruce (edited by Carmine Starnino), Masculinity: An Anthology of Modern Voices (from Broken Sleep Books), and Quicker Than the Eye (Joe Fiorito) is a book I reviewed (link below).
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