Leah Bobet

Although I think it was just a matter of publication timing, this one fits: I’ve reviewed Ken Sparling’s short novel Not Anywhere, Just Not for The Ampersand Review.

If you want to be well and fully sent behind the sofa by a very quiet, small domestic novel, you have a friend in this book. To the point where I was late on this copy deadline because it unsettled me so badly and with such keen observational precision, and I can’t actually think of any higher praise for a book that’s so focused on communicating through structure and implication.

Available from Coach House Books and from Bookshop-slash-your local indies!

Freshly back from the Communicating Climate Hope conference, I’ve got the news that Ansible Press’s Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction — which includes my experimental 1920s New York ghost story “Sunday in the Park With Hank”, is the winner for this year’s Prix Aurora Award for Best Related Work.

On top of that: The book’s up for the 2024 World Fantasy Award in the Best Anthology category — that’ll be settled in October.

It’s available in most ebook formats in print through Kobo, Amazon Canada, Amazon US, or worldwide through other providers. And: Big congrats to editor Stephen Kotowych, who put this whole thing together from Moment One.

Home this afternoon to find my contributor’s copies of the Summer 2024 Prairie Fire, with two new poems: “February Wool”, which is a lil’ bit of play about the physicality of memory and the lint balls on your sweater, and “Rewilding”, a short piece that’s half fat trumpets and half ecological menace and a third half Infernokrusher-esque bears and logging trucks.

The issue’s available now via their website and on newsstands, and contains this year’s contest winners too!

Something I’ve been quite excited about is on the horizon:

I’ll be giving a talk at UBC’s Communicating Climate Hope conference on the intersections between climate art, organizing, and how we tackle problems bigger than our heads with a modicum of dignity and joy. It’s called How to Play in the Emergency, if that gives you a sense of where we’ll be at that hour.

The list of other speakers — academic, activist, and artistic — looks deeply nourishing, and there are digital-only signups. It’s all open for registration until July 31st. I would love to see everyone there.

Spring has brought, among other things, contributors’ copies:

First, I’ve reviewed Jade Wallace’s poetry collection Love is a Place But You Cannot Live There for Spacing Magazine. It’s really rather perfect poetry for people interested in psychogeography, place, and the relationships between people and infrastructure and history and each other. It’s drawing on a lot of smarts while staying accessible, and it’s by turns haunted, sad, thoughtful, and really dryly funny.

I also review Barrie poet Caitlin McKenzie’s chapbook Wifehood for Room Magazine. It is hand-sewn, very deeply layered, and doing so much beneath a deceptively simple surface about relationships and how we vision and revision them.

More to come through the summer!

Small event upcoming, if you’re in Toronto and love to cycle!

I’ve had the tiniest commission this month: to write and then read a full-moon poem to kick off Brompton Toronto’s group ride and picnic. The group ride starts around 5pm this coming Sunday, May 26, and there’s a chance to hang out and be social before and after.

I sort of love this as the kind of event that opens with an invocation, so this has already been fun in the privacy of my home and is going to definitely be fun in the streets/trails/park. Sign up to come along!

It’s close enough to the end of year to not turn, but reach threateningly for the Out of Office sign, so: This is what I published in 2023.

Short Fiction
“Sunday in the Park with Hank” in The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 2023.

Poetry
“white squirrel season again” in Canthius, January 2023.
“Notable Escapes” in Strange Horizons, June 19, 2023.
“Sisyphus, Mid-Flight” in The Deadlands, October 2023.
“what Mama says” in Fire from the Heart 2023: Winners of the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize, December 2023.

Non-Fiction
“Arboreality”, CAROUSEL Magazine, May 10, 2023.
“The Animal in the Room”, CAROUSEL Magazine, May 17, 2023.
“The Ending Isn’t More Important than Any of the Moments Leading to It: A Narrative Review of Freebird Games’s To the Moon, Finding Paradise, and Impostor Factory”, CAROUSEL Magazine, May 24, 2023.

Happy holidays, and see you next year!

It’s publication day for the first volume of Ansible Press’s Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy and Science Fiction — including “Sunday in the Park With Hank”, the very much experimental 1920s New York ghost story I had in The Deadlands last July.

It’s available in most ebook formats in print through Kobo, Amazon Canada, Amazon US, or worldwide through other providers.

A new short poem has gone live for non-subscribers in this month’s issue of The Deadlands: “Sisyphus, Mid-Flight” is about the particular tyranny of second chances.

It’s ending the issue, which I think was a lovely touch on the editors’ parts.

A nice — and somewhat unconventional — professional milestone this week! Public space standard Spacing Magazine‘s new issue is dedicated to Toronto in literature, and Toronto horror writer and journalist David Nickle’s contributed an article on the city in speculative fiction.

I’ve been reading Spacing for ages, so being quoted in that piece is a really neat little moment. It’s alongside some great writers, and overall it’s a neat piece, exploring how we shape the geographic imaginary in a really accessible way.

The issue’s available on the website, or at most Ontario magazine retailers!