Read Indies 2025: Six Books, Six Reading Moods

First up, Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (2018) published by Magabala Books, an Indigenous Aboriginal Press (situated in, in colonial language, Broome, Western Australia). These poems are arranged into fifteen parts, each containing just a handful of poems and many titled with a variation on —work. It begins with whitework and ends with blakwork; in between, we read heartwork and sovwork, among others. Like Jordan Abel and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Whittaker, a Gomeroi writer, plays with colonial narratives (pulling attention to phrases that repeat, for instance, reflecting the colonial powers’ true intent to weaken and eradicate) and arranges her own words in patterns that shift and resonate with changes, inside and outside, in the landscapes she inhabits (literal and figurative). Sometimes they are strikingly readable, sometimes simply striking.

Wishlist: Ruby Moonlight by Ali Cobby Eckermann
“A verse novel that centres around the impact of colonisation in mid-north South Australia around 1880.”

This took me to bpNichol’s some lines of poetry (2024) pulled from his notebooks to celebrate the year in which he would have turned 80 years old. Sometimes I finish one of these poems and wonder what I missed; I don’t think of myself as a “poetry person” to begin with, let alone an “experimental poetry person”. But sometimes I finish one and there’s such intense delight. Selections from a series which presents a handwritten alphabet, for instance, with little birds rising out of the handwritten ‘v’, like the birds you drew when you were a child. Or a companion piece “nothing emerging from alphabet” where little circles burst out of the ‘o’ like bubbles in fizzy pop. For those who crave context, there’s an introduction by Derek Beaulieu and Gregory Betts, as well as a transcription of a speech that Nichol gave, at a Banff workshop in 1985, which includes a Q&A that talks about craft and brings his voice off the page, talking about his “life dedicated to the little-press field”.

To sample: the bpNichol archive (thumbnail images which link to full PDFs)

Wishlist: All You Can Kill by Pasha Malla
“White Lotus meets Shaun of the Dead in this absurdist take on the wellness retreat.”

In 1970, bpNichol won the Governor General’s Award for his poetry and, in that same year, Cyril Dabydeen left Guyana to live in Canada. He spent his early years here in the Lake Superior region but is best known as part of the Ottawa literary community, where he would serve a term as Poet Laureate. The author of fifteen books of poetry and a dozen books of short stories, as well as a few novels and some anthology work, Dabydeen’s writing has a characteristic and insistent tone. His dialogue is striking, populated with fragments and pauses to represent the speakers’ cadences, fuelling quotidian exchanges that reflect different ideas about belonging and seeking, about losses and connections. Whether a teacher or a student, the underlying tone of a constant state of learning about one’s self and one’s surroundings invites readers to peer more closely at the world. I’ll have more to say about Forgotten Exiles (2024) in the next issue of World Literature Today.

Wishlist: Face Into the Wind by Rosalind Gill
“Rosalind Gill’s new collection of ten short stories mostly features women protagonists embroiled in situations of thought-provoking social conflict and explores their struggle to resolve their problems.”

Many of Dabydeen’s stories are set in liminal spaces, like an open-air market or transportation hub—bus or train stations. Jann Everard’s Blue Runaways (2024) opens with a young woman arriving in Iceland for an artist’s retreat, searching for wholeness in the wake of having lost one arm. These stories perfectly preserve personal epiphanies between meticulously layered scenes and images. Her characters often have an enviable security in their daily lives, but in their struggles with grief and loss, they spiral around moments in which understanding is hinged. For me, several of these stories are homages to the nagging thought, in the best possible way; the author’s clear-eyed prose and unsentimental evaluative gaze guides readers authoritatively through difficult emotional terrain. Somehow managing to offer a sense of companionship even when her characters are most sorrowful, most alone. “The soft pillow of her palm rests against mine and, in my core, I feel a sense of release.”

Wishlist: Conversations with a Dead Man by Mark Abley
“When he died in 1947, Duncan Campbell Scott was revered as one of his country’s finest poets and honoured as a devoted civil servant. Today, because of his work as head of the Department of Indian Affairs, he’s widely considered one of history’s worst Canadians.”

Nature plays a pivotal role in Everard’s stories and in Anik See’s Cabin Fever (2024), wherein Clea returns to the remote cabin which she has avoided since her parents died. A W.G. Sebald epigraph alerts readers to expect musings on landscape and memory, and just a few pages into the story—as Clea settles into that 194-acre piece of land, and readers settle into her character—we have the first of many photographs, inserted into the narrative without captions, in the same way that occasionally a memory flashes across consciousness. (A Sebaldian homage, the jacket cover declares: yes, indeed.) Quintessentially interior, somehow Cabin Fever became a page turner for me, following Clea as she moves between past and present, as she gets reacquainted with the idea of a future. As she flips between memories and experiences, the character of Max the bookbinder underscores the role that books and stories play in preserving and sustaining parts of our stories and our selves. Even though this is wholly Clea’s story, this passage from Max expresses something many of you will find relatable.

Wishlist: I’ve read all the novellas FGS has published (Winter Wren, Tower and Wanda, discussed in a previous #ReadIndies, as well as Susanna Hall, Her Book) but the publishers have assembled a Life List of Novellas, and from there, I’d like to read The Burial Ground by Pauline Holdstock.

See’s novel describes the “foothills in September” as a “beautiful place; pale yellow after the fierce sun of summer and the frost that sets the leaves to turning.” Just the energy that R.C. Sherriff’s The Fortnight in September (1931) is channelling.

Jacqui recommended this novel some time ago, and it was a fabulous read for a snowy weekend. It opens with a family preparing to leave for their annual vacation, when the two children are young adults (that whiff of “last time-ness) and it ends when they return home. Sherriff’s reputation was established with a novel about his WWI wartime experiences, and he described Fortnight as encapsulating the life that men fought to protect. Some of my favourite Persephones are wartime works: Molly Panter-Downes’ stories, Duff Cooper’s novel, Etty Hillesum’s and Mathilda Wolff-Monckeburg’s diaries. I was disappointed to read in their latest newsletter that they “are simply not looking at the news at the moment” when their courageous backlist writers demonstrate such resilience in the face of fascism; but, when rest is essential, novels like Sherriff’s remind us of the importance of taking action to protect what and whom we love. 

Wishlist: Maghanita Laski’s Little Boy Lost
“It’s extraordinarily gripping: it has the page-turning compulsion of a thriller while at the same time being written with perfect clarity and precision.”