Soaring Into Fall

I hope you have had a wonderful summer of reading, writing, swimming, boating, or whatever excites you most about our all-too-short summer season.

And I hope you have much to look forward to as we launch into fall — as I do.

• Orca Books releases The Rock and the Butterfly by me and Brooke Kerrigan, a picture book Kirkus calls “a moving, thoughtful meditation on life and loss [that] will soothe children grappling with grief.” (Why wait till October 15 when you can pre-order now?)
• As if that’s not exciting enough, two publishers will be making decisions about who will illustrate two more new picture books. (More on those later.)
• The New Quarterly publishes in their fall issue “At the CNE, August 1963,” a poem I built around a startling moment from my childhood. I’ve booked myself a little writing retreat to help me get more poetry ready to submit to journals. (It was a busy summer.)
• CANSCAIP’s Packaging Your Imagination conference wraps up a day of inspiring presentations for authors and illustrators with the Claire Mackay Memorial Lecture, delivered by yours truly, on the topic of “Staying Creative for the Long Haul.” You can register to attend in person or to receive links to recorded sessions.
• The Stratford Festival will find me in the audience for the staging of The Diviners, based on the novel by Margaret Laurence. Having read it and an article about the involvement of Indigenous and settler creatives in the production of the play, I’m eager to see how they honour the story in its new form.
• Waiting patiently on my bedside table are three newer Canadian novels: The Last Wave by Gillian Best, August Into Winter by Guy Vanderhaeghe, and The Hunter by Tana French.

What good things — book or work related or otherwise — are you looking forward to this fall?