Alumni Publish

Harold Skaarup, ’74, has published Cannon in Canada, Province by Province, Volume 3: Nova Scotia. This volume is an informed and detailed synopsis of the carefully preserved and restored guns and artillery on display in the province of Nova Scotia.

Lynda MacGibbon, BJ(Hons)’84, has written a memoir, My Vertical Neighbourhood: How Strangers Became a Community, published by InterVarsity Press. The book, based on her life in a Toronto condominium, explores her love for her neighbours.

With more than 30 books to her name, Martine Jacquot, BJ’84, has authored two new collections of poetry in French. Filigrane gives life to absence, pushing away darkness and solitude, revolt and injustice. La Couleur du Désir contains poetry where words dance in a dialogue of faraway voices. Both are published by Washington publisher Bridgevision Production.

Susan Flanagan’s, BJ’91, first novel, Supermarket Baby, was published this year by Flanker Press. It features Henry Puddester, a newly retired civil servant whose life goes off the rails after an innocent trip to the supermarket where he inadvertently switches his shopping cart with that of a young mother. Flanagan’s second novel, The Degrees of Barley Lick, was also published in 2021. Released by Running the Goat Books and Broadsides, this YA novel is about a 16-year-old who is drowning in despair when he finds out he’s needed.

Mark Sampson, BJ(Hons)’97, has published a fourth novel, All the Animals on Earth, with Wolsak & Wynn of Hamilton, Ont. His sixth book, the novel is described as a post-apocalyptic sex romp in a world with cratering birthrates. Certain species of birds and mammals get transmogrified into humanoid form with hilariously dire consequences.

“No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe—of one kind or another,” is where Stephen Marche’s, BA(Hons)’97, most recent book begins. The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future, published by Simon & Schuster, plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land and its government. Kate Cayley, BA(Hons)’01, is the author of Householders, a collection of short stories about families of all kinds including nascent queers, self-deluded utopians and sincere frauds. The stories move easily from the commonplace to the fantastic, from West End Toronto to a trailer in the middle of nowhere, from a university campus to a stateof-the-art underground bunker and back again. Named ‘Most Anticipated’ by CBC and Lamda Literary, a ‘Best of Fall’ by Quill & Quire, and a 49th Shelf ‘Book of the Year,’ the collection is published by Biblioasis.

Joseph Rosenberg’s, BA(Hons)’01, book Wastepaper Modernism: Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Ruins of Print, explores how modernist writers, like James Joyce and Elizabeth Bowen, imagined the ‘destruction of paper’ long before the advent of e-readers and the internet. Published by Oxford University Press in April 2021, Rosenberg points to the anxiety writers had about their medium and how it informed their work. Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, the book began when he started compiling a scrapbook of references to waste in modernist literature.

The latest short story collection from award-winning, “dirty nature writer” David Huebert, BA(Hons)’08, Chemical Valley doesn’t shy away from prickly questions— the distribution of toxicity, environmental racism, the line between the artificial and the natural. From refinery operators to longterm care nurses, dishwashers to survivalist preppers, sex dolls to hockey enforcers, Chemical Valley always puts character first, asking how to make new joy in this wounded, wheezing world.

For every kid who makes it to the NBA, thousands more seek out pick-up basketball in their local community centre or neighbourhood park. In his first book, Toronto journalist Perry King, BJ’09, describes how grassroots sports build the bridges that link city dwellers together in ways that go well beyond the physical benefits. Rebound: Sports, Community, and the Inclusive City makes an impassioned case for re-imagining neighbourhoods whose residents can be active, healthy and connected.

Devon Code’s, BA(Hons)’03, novella, The Green Notebook, has been published by Coach House Books as part of Disintegration in Four Parts. Co-authored by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Emily Anglin and Lee Henderson, Code’s novella documents the Wittgensteinian upheavals of the last days of an elderly woman.

In 2016, American backpacker Justin Alexander Shetler mysteriously disappeared in India's Parvati Valley, known as the ‘Backpacker Bermuda Triangle’ for the dozens of tourists who have vanished there. Harley Rustad’s, BJ’12, Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas, is about one man’s search to find himself in a country where the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. It's also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life.

Cate May Burton, BA(Hons)’13, has co-authored a book about her mom, Elizabeth May, and her early years of activism, targeted at middle-grade readers. Growing Up Elizabeth May: The Making of an Activist, tells the story of her mother’s life and what motivated her to act for the environment. The book shows how May continues to inspire young people today to stand up for the planet and is available from Orca Book Publishers.

Craigdarroch Castle in 21 Treasures by Moira Dann, MFA’16, published by TouchWood Editions, tells the story of a Victorian-era mansion and the people who lived there, through an examination of its architectural features and artifacts. Containing stories about Robert Dunsmuir, the Scottish coal baron who built the castle and tales of the Castle’s life as a WWI military hospital, the volume is replete with illustrations and colour photographs.

Susan MacLeod’s, ’79, MFA’18, first novel Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care, is the story of MacLeod’s nine-year journey seeking help for her elderly mom. A former government spokesperson who defended the system, MacLeod found herself at the pivot point between her frail, elderly mother’s need for love and companionship, the system’s inability to deliver and her brother’s indifference. Brutally honest and often funny, MacLeod’s book was named by the CBC to its list of ‘best Canadian comics’ in 2021. In April 1971, a handful of prisoners attacked guards at Kingston Penitentiary in Kingston, Ont., and seized control, making headlines around the world. Catherine Fogarty’s, MFA’18, book Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary, published by Biblioasis, tells the harrowing story of a prison in crisis against the backdrop of a pivotal moment in the history of human rights. Fogarty’s book has been praised by Publishers Weekly, the Globe and Mail and the Literary Review of Canada.

Phil Moscovitch, MFA’19, has two pieces of poetry in 2020: An Anthology of Poetry with Drawings by Bill Liebeskind, published by Black Dog & One-Eyed Press. The anthology features work from a hundred poets around the planet, framed around 250 sketches of people wearing masks by New York artist Bill Liebeskind. Moscovitch’s poems, Masked Men and Routine, join the likes of George Elliott Clarke, Bill Bissett and Ololade Akinlabi Ige.

Gregor Craigie’s, MFA’19, first book, On Borrowed Time: North America's Next Big Quake, has been an Amazon bestseller, a Globe and Mail ‘Top 100 Book of 2021’ and a finalist for the 2021 Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Craigie has also written two nonfiction books for young readers that will be published by Orca Book Publishers in 2022 and 2024 (Why Humans Build Up: The Rise of Towers, Temples and Skyscrapers and Walls: The Long History of Human Barriers and Why We Build Them). His first novel, Radio Jetlag, will be published by Cormorant Press in 2023.

Visiting Africa: A Memoir, written by Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin, MFA’19, is a personal and physical journey. It’s about his ongoing and evolving attempt to approach Africa and its cultures with humility and modesty and about his struggle as a privileged white man to ethically encounter and live in a world marked by injustice and racialized inequality. An investigation into how the privileged can stand in solidarity with the people they meet and write about, this book is about possibilities.

FACULTY PUBLISH

Before Jack the Ripper, the world’s deadliest serial killer was the Canadian doctor Thomas Neill Cream. He murdered at least nine women and one man in Canada, the United States and England before he was brought to justice. MFA Cohort Director Dean Jobb’s new book, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, published by Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada, exposes how bungled investigations, primitive forensic tests, corrupt officials and the stifling morality of Victorian society allowed the ruthless ‘Lambeth Poisoner’ to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, including many who turned to him for medical help.

In 2015, Toufah Jallow was a Gambian college student dreaming of studying abroad. She entered a presidential competition for young women and won, bringing her to the attention of the Gambia’s dictator, Yahya Jammeh. Jammeh proposed marriage and when Jallow turned him down, he drugged and raped her. Fearing for her life, Jallow escaped to Senegal and eventually Canada. When Jammeh was deposed, Jallow returned home and became a vocal advocate for survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Now, with co-author and MFA Executive Director Kim Pittaway, she tells her story in Toufah: The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement. It’s a book the New York Times called “riveting... harrowing and propulsive.”

MFA Cohort Director Stephen Kimber’s

collaboration with Jennifer Robertson, Bitcoin Widow: Love, Betrayal and the Missing Millions, a memoir of the Quadriga cryptocurrency scandal, made it to the Toronto Star’s bestseller list. It’s Catch Me If You Can meets ‘a widow betrayed.’ With Robertson’s life of fairy tale romance and private jets destroyed by duplicity she has been left to reset her life in the wake of one of the biggest investment scandals of the digital age.