Looking Back, Looking Forward
The Year That Was and the One That Will Be
I began this Substack in July without a particularly clear idea of what I wanted it to be. I knew I wanted to celebrate books and writers and publishers, my literary community and beyond. I imagined I’d write about the environment, climate change, and growing up in a small town in the mountains, none of which I’ve gotten to just yet. I knew I didn’t want to post so often that I cluttered people’s inboxes or that crafting a newsletter would eat into my fiction-writing time too much. I did want to be consistent, but I never defined that for myself. So here we are.
Thank you for opening my email anyway, and here’s to me figuring it out in 2026.
This past year has been, on a personal level, better than some recent ones—good, really—but for humanity, for democracy, for the planet: awful. I like what writer Jacob Wren recently posted on social media: “We don’t get to choose the world we live in, we only get to choose the world we fight for.”
I’m still figuring out how best to fight for the world I choose, but I know that some small, simple things matter. (I think of Pierre Rabhi’s story, quoted in Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s Baldwin, Styron and Me, about a hummingbird who sputters water from its beak to try to fight a forest fire. When told the drops won’t put out the fire, the bird says, “Could be, but I’m going to do my bit.” I aim to do my bit.) I will keep donating, whenever I can, to mutual aid and organizations doing good work, whether helping folks here in Toronto access food or shelter or operating on the other side of the world, bringing aid to people in Gaza, Sudan, and elsewhere. I will continue to write to and call my representatives, demanding more from my local, provincial, and federal government. I will show up for the people in my life as best I can. And I will march or join a mass bike ride, to be another body in the street, to feel connected to other people who care about things I do, to join my voice to theirs.
I guess these are kind of New Year’s resolutions: things to continue doing, things to do better and do more of to fight for the world I choose.
And now I’ll move on, ham-fistedly, with an incomplete stack of the books I read in 2025:
This year for the first time, I tried to keep track of the books I read, noting down titles in my planner as I finished them. But I realized just how inconsistent I’d been when I went back through to look at my list; I probably jotted down only about one in every three books I read.
I did my best to fill in the gaps by scanning my bookshelves and photos on my phone, but I’ve likely still missed a few books I read and enjoyed. In any case, I’m grateful for what all of these books gave me this past year, sometimes offering a refuge from the terrible news, sometimes a way to engage more meaningfully with it.
I’m grateful, as well, to the places that published my work this past year. I riffed off Jorge Luis Borges to speak about the soullessness of GenAI creations in “AI, Author of the Quixote,” which appeared in filling Station. Grain published my short story “Friendship Hiatus,” about a woman on a mushroom trip contemplating how her relationship with her best friend follows the phases of the moon. And “Milk and Milk Substitutes,” which features a series of sightings of odd pets, from pigeon to rat to squirrel, found a home in Soundings East. In all, three short stories and a book-recommendation trio, kind of a banner year for me.
Which will make 2026 even bannerier.
If you’re here, chances are you already know my debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, comes out April 21, 2026. But in case that’s news to you, please do check it out (and perhaps even pre-order a copy) here.
Have a happy new year!
Great reads. Look forward to reading what you place here and to get to chat with you about TFDE in the spring!!