Previous Q&A

Bob McDonald has been the host of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks since 1992 and is a regular science commentator on CBC’s News Network and The National. His book Measuring the Earth with a Stick was shortlisted for the Canadian Science Writers Association Book Award. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada.

In The Future is Now, Bob McDonald turns his focus to global energy sources, and shows how the global shutdowns may have been exactly what we needed to show us that a greener future is achievable.…

Leona Prince is from the Lake Babine Nation and Nak’azdli Whu’ten and belongs to the Likh Tsa Mis Yu (Beaver) Clan. She is a descendant of Chief Kwah and Stiche. Leona is an award-winning educator and is currently the District Principal of Aboriginal Education for School District 91 (Nechako Lakes). She is the co-author of Be A Good Ancestor.…

Tsering Yangzom Lama lives in Vancouver. She holds a BA in creative writing and international relations from the University of British Columbia, and an MFA from Columbia University. She was born and raised in Nepal and has lived in Toronto and New York City. We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, published in 2022, is her first novel.…

Jane Billinghurst is a nature lover, master gardener, editor, translator, and author of six books. She has translated and edited several books by Peter Wohlleben, including the New York Times bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. She lives in Anacortes, Washington, next to 2,800 acres of community forest lands.

Walking in the woods and using all five senses to explore your surroundings is immersive and restorative. Forest…

Anne-Marie Turza is the author of two collections of poetry, The Quiet (Anansi, 2014), Fugue with Bedbug (Anansi, 2022), and the chapbook Slip Minute (Baseline, 2018). She was a finalist for the Bronwen Wallace Award and the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award. Her debut collection, a Globe and Mail Top 100 book, was released to critical acclaim.…

Jennifer Egan Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction, including: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist.

The Candy House is a “sibling novel” to A Visit from the Goon Squad—an electrifying, deeply moving novel about the quest for authenticity and meaning in a world where memories and identities are no longer private.…

J.M. Miro lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest. His book, Ordinary Monsters, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2022. He is a novelist and poet.

Ordinary Monsters is a historical fantasy that introduces readers to the dark world of the Talents, who are children with mysterious powers. The novel is set in England in 1882 and two of these particularly gifted Talents are being hunted by a deadly man made of smoke and their lives, and the world, hang in the balance as the adults around them, including tough detective Alice Quicke, try to stop — or continue — what has been set in motion.…

Danny Ramadan (he/him) is a Syrian-Canadian author and advocate for LGBTQ+ refugees. His debut novel, The Clothesline Swing, was shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Award and longlisted for Canada Reads. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and lives with his husband in Vancouver, BC.

A deeply moving novel of forbidden love between two boys in war-torn Syria and the fallout that ripples through their adult lives.…

Yasuko Thanh is a Victoria-based award-winning author. Her first novel, Mysterious Fragrance of the Yellow Mountains, won the 2016 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, while her short story collection, Floating Like the Dead, includes the Journey Prize-winning title story and was on Quill and Quire’s list of best books of 2012.…

Jan Zwicky is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose, including Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, The Long Walk, and Wisdom & Metaphor. She grew up on the prairies in Treaty 6 territory, was educated at the Universities of Calgary and Toronto, and currently lives on the west coast of Canada.…

Neil Griffin is a poet, essayist, and former wildlife biologist. A former finalist for CBC’s Poetry Prize and two Alberta Magazine Awards, his writing has appeared throughout Canada, and Western Europe. He’s an MFA student at the University of Victoria, working on a book-length lyric essay about extinction. 

Interview by Joey Scarfone

Joey Scarfone (JS): Do you have a daily practice of writing or do you only write when inspired?…

Danielle Geller is a writer of personal essays and memoir. Her first book, Dog Flowers, was published by One World/Random House in 2021. She received her MFA in creative writing for nonfiction at the University of Arizona, and a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award in 2016. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review Daily, The New Yorker, Brevity, and Arizona Highways, and has been anthologized in This Is the Place and The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature. …