River Street Writing

01/16/2026

ICYMI: a review of Hollay Ghadery’s The Unravelling of Ou, published by Palimpsest Press.

Stacey May Fowles reviews Hollay Ghadery’s debut novel The Unravelling of Ou https://bit.ly/3NgOhi2

01/15/2026

These books by Liz Johnston, John Degen, Alison Gadsby and Hollay Ghadery are on the 49th Shelf’s Spring Fiction Preview!

And so is David Ly’s Not All Dragons, which is also out this spring with Wolsak & Wynn (cover coming soon!).

https://49thshelf.com/Blog/2026/01/15/Most-Anticipated-Our-Spring-2026-Fiction-Preview

01/15/2026

Feast your beautiful peepers on these three excellent novels on Quill & Quire’s Spring Preview! All three are published by Canadian owned and operated publishers.

Quill & Quire is a wonderful digital magazine that covers the Canadian book trade, so if you don’t subscribe already, we encourage you to consider it.

To check out the whole spring preview, head to QuillandQuire.com.

https://quillandquire.com/omni/2026-spring-preview-fiction/

More about the three books featured here:

🌼 The Fall-Down Effect by Liz Johnston, published by Book*hug Press, April 21, 2026

Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.

🌸Seldom Seen Road, by John Degen, forthcoming with Latitude 46 Publishing, May 7, 2026.

When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggest it was murder. Mark Roth is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the case.

🪻The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery, forthcoming February 15, 2026 from Palimpsest Press.

The highly-anticipated debut novel from award-winning Iranian-Canadian author Hollay Ghadery!

Moving on is hard. Even harder when it’s from a make-believe friend—someone, or in this instance, some thing—who’s been your strongest source of support.

Want to request a review copy of any of these titles? Drop us a DM!

w/ .d.s.johnston
ireadcanadian

01/14/2026

Seldom Seen Road by John Degen (published by Latitude46 Publishing, The Fall Down Effect by Liz Johnston (Book*hug Press) and The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery (published by Palimpsest Press) are both on Quill & Quire’s Spring Preview!

Check it out:

https://quillandquire.com/omni/2026-spring-preview-fiction/

01/14/2026

Coming this spring! 🌸 Weird Babies (short fiction) by Jaclyn Desforges, due out April 1, 2026 with Gordon Hill Press.

DM us to request a review copy!

Weird Babies is a short story collection about weird babies: a miraculous set of reincarnated quadruplets, babies born from the bellies of trout, babies who are destined to molt like tarantulas, babies who hatch from piles of warm clothes. It’s also about the weird baby living in each of us—the tenderest part of ourselves that longs, at whatever the cost, to be loved.

Stories from Weird Babies have appeared in The Ex-Puritan, The Temz Review, Minola Review, and CRAFT Literary. They were also nominated for the Best Of The Net Award (2025), Best American Science Fiction And Fantasy (2024), and Best American Short Stories (2024); were finalists for the Room Magazine Fiction Contest (2024), the CRAFT Short Fiction Prize (2023), and the 2024 CRAFT Novelette Print Prize; and were winners of the Short Works Prize (2019), and the RBC/PEN Canada New Voices Award (2018).

Jaclyn Desforges is the author of a poetry collection, Danger Flower (Anstruther Books, 2021) and a picture book, Why Are You So Quiet? (Annick Press, 2020). She lives in Hamilton with her partner and daughter.

01/13/2026

“K.R. Wilson’s Stan On Guard is a genre-bending, time-warping triumph that hurls immortal wisecracker Stan-formerly Ishtanu - through 3,000 years of civilization, from Troy to Toronto, armed with biting wit and zero tolerance for human nonsense. But when a vengeful Trojan princess resurfaces, ancient heartbreak and mythic justice come crashing into the present. Fiendishly clever, razor-sharp, and fiercely original, this is a daring tale of historical vengeance, speculative science, and the absurdity of living forever.”

-Wayne Ng, author of Johnny Delivers

We can’t wait for people to get their hands on this thrilling tale by Leacock Award long-listed author, KR Wilson.

Interested in reviewing Stan on Guard? DM us to request a copy. ✨

More about Stan On Guard, forthcoming with Guernica Editions on March 1, 2026.

This is an equally thrilling, clever, and heart-wrenching story that explores the sweep of human conflict, creativity and communion across the centuries.

Ishtanu (call him Stan) is a Hittite immortal keeping his head down in Toronto and recounting some of his experiences. Tróán is an immortal Trojan princess who thought she’d killed Stan in post-war Berlin but who now knows he survived. Yes, technically Stan can die. He has just managed not to for 3200 years.

As their stories braid together toward a final reckoning they take us through a subversive retelling of the Odysseus story, the resistance of pagan Lithuania against Papal crusaders, the decline of Friedrich Nietzsche in a German clinic, the arts scene in belle epoque Paris, and the descent of Europe into the horrors of the Great War.

Strap in.

Stan On Guard is the follow-up to K. R. Wilson’s tragical-comical-historical novel Call Me Stan: A Tragedy in Three Millennia, which was long-listed for the 2022 Leacock Medal for Humour.

01/11/2026

How does Dr. Conor Mc Donnell’s experience with opioid misuse and abuse as a physician feed into his work as a poet?

“In 1998 I witnessed a fatal medication error that significantly impacted all involved. In 2011, I set up the first Medication Safety Program at SickKids hospital with a particular focus on reducing harm caused by opioid errors and accidental tenfold overdosing.”

Read the full interview on our blog:

http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2025/12/19/power-q-and-a-with-conor-mc-donnell

ABOUT WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR IS…:

The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.

In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.

About Conor Mc Donnel:

Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers.

01/10/2026

Seldom Seen Road (Latitude 46 Publishing) is the first in John Degen’s Burnt River series of murder mysteries featuring the Roth family detective trio—and it’s now available to read on NetGalley! 🌕

https://www.netgalley.com/catalog/book/781569

When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggest it was murder. Mark Roth is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the case. He has the least solid claim on the art of solving murders, but he is driven by the insistent busybody nature of the recently retired. Profoundly hard-of-hearing after a career in musical performance, and equally disappointed with finding himself alone in his world after the death of his beloved wife, Mark stubbornly and clumsily puts himself in harm’s way to draw out the truth. Constable Jeremy Roth, Mark’s long-lost cousin, is the muscle of the group, patrolling the northern highways for the local police detachment and investigating on the ground. Mark’s beloved daughter, Stephanie, building her name as a criminologist at the university in Thunder Bay, gets to the details of the matter using her academic credentials and her innate puzzle-solving instincts.

Who dumped Robichaud into the frigid spring run-off? Is there a connection between his death and both the largest uranium refinery in the world and the local small-time pot trade? How do Robichaud’s wife, Kim Keranen, daughter Algoma, local real estate developer Gillian Larch, and her pot-head son Bobby fit into the puzzle? And who is The Albanian? Mark ignores all official advice and his own precarious health as he digs deep into the secrets of his new town. But the town is looking back at him—observing, plotting—and it may prove more than a match for Mark’s loved ones, and deadly to him.

John Degen is a poet and novelist with three published books. His debut novel, The Uninvited Guest, was shortlisted for the 2006 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and given feature reviews in the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire.

01/09/2026

How do the practices of swimming and poetics intersect?

British Columbia poet Mallory Tater answers this question on our blog. 🩷

http://www.riverstreetwriting.com/blog/2025/12/12/power-q-amp-a-with-mallory-tater

“Poetry lives in community, but also in the solitary urge to create-like a public pool where we are alone together.”
—Mallory Tater, author of Lockers Are For Bearcats Only

Lockers are for Bearcats Only by Mallory Tater is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press on February 15, 2026. This is poetry that traces the complexities of grief, the importance of destigmatizing dialogue around su***de, and the beauty and complicated core of girlhood friendships while improving our collective understanding of mental health awareness and su***de prevention in an approachable, concrete, and empathetic way.

These poems spill out from the confluence of grief and water. After losing one of her closest friends, the poet began swimming laps—part meditation, part therapy, part escapism—immersed in the depths of the public pool. There, she found herself haunted by the strange tension between fitness / surrender and memory / motion where ghosts of girlhood, catholicism, and addiction rose to the surface.
These themes haunt Lockers Are for Bearcats Only – a tender, unguarded exploration of loss, embodiment, and the currents that carry us through life with and without those who shaped us.

About Mallory Tater:
Mallory Tater is the author of This Will Be Good: Poems (Book*Hug Press, 2018), The Birth Yard: A Novel (HarperCollins, 2020), and Soft Tissue: A Novel (forthcoming, ECW Press, 2027). She was the publisher of Rahila’s Ghost Press, a now-retired chapbook press. Mallory currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches at the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing. Lockers are for Bearcats Only is her second poetry collection.