Pilgrimages @ Can*Con 2025
Last weekend I brought Pilgrimages to Can*Con, and it was a success! I travelled to Ottawa with my best pal, Jerome Ramcharitar, who came to absorb the panels all weekend, in addition to doing a reading with Samara Garfinkle and I on Sunday.
On the first day of Can*Con, I got to hand-sell copies of my book to Kate Heartfield (whose Kaffeklatsch I attended), Matt More, and Geoff Gander. I gave three copies of Pilgrimages to Bakka-Phoenix on consignment, making Bakka the first bookstore to stock one of my books! While none sold, it was still a step in an exciting direction.
Saturday, I sat at a signing table alongside David Demchuk, Julie Czerneda, and J.F. Garrard. No one came by to buy my book or sign, but I was kind of expecting it, and J.F. filled me in on the riveting story of a Chinese actor who was gruesomely and suspiciously murdered. It was all worth the story. Julie also suggested I speak with Y.M. Pang, who published a collection of short stories with a few poems. I bought her book, and she later attended our Sunday event.
Halfway through Saturday, Jerome and I took a de-stressing walk through the nearby conservation forest, enjoyed the fall colours, and listened to the birds near the wetlands.
Sunday, I pitched my novel to Wolsak & Wynn and participated on a panel on the use of metaphor in fantasy. We discussed how metaphor can be used to worldbuild by suggesting what characters view as strange or unusual. We also discussed how metaphor can be used to demonstrate emotion. I pointed out that many weird tales contain a charged image that serves as a metaphor for the theme, which is often about death, fate, or inevitability. Many reading recommendations were shared. My co-panelists were Terese Mason Pierre and Rachel A. Rosen with the moderator being my Odyssey 2016 classmate and middle-grade author Michael Stewart.
To close the weekend, Jerome, Samara, and held a Cactus Press poetry reading at Can*Con. We were visited by a few friends of Jerome and Samara and by Rich Larson and Y.M. Pang. We were briefly worried that no one but Jerome and Samara’s friends would show up, though we had been mentioning our event to people all weekend. However, when Rich and Y.M. showed up, it felt very validating—a Montreal gathering far away from home.
My book haul was legendary even before I set one foot at Can*Con. I walked into Black Squirrel Books in the Glebe and walked out with almost $200 in books, including these:
Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
The Borgia Testament by Nigel Balchin
The Bewitched Bourgeois by Dino Buzzati
On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger
The Secret History of the Mongol Queens by Jack Weatherford
Knife by Salman Rushdie
My Can*Con haul includes:
All the Broken Blades by Y.M Pang
The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (The Books of Cross 1) by Peter Darbyshire
The Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction, Vol. III, edited by Stephen Kotowych
Nemesis Spawned (Reflections of Shadow 1) by James W. Lackie
You might notice Dino Buzzati is one of the authors I wrote about in my weird fiction blog. His story “The Colomber” is included in The Bewitched Bourgeois, whose title is derived from a story in which a middle-class man applies such vivid imagination to a war game a few boys are playing that he dies of an arrow wound through the chest, even though no actual arrows were ever shot.
Jerome and I both agree the weekend was a success. He learned a lot attending Michael Stewart’s panel on writing emotional journeys as well as the panels on slow fiction and crone lit. Stephen Kotowych’s open invitation to submit to the next Year’s Best Canadian Fantasy & Science Fiction anthology was also a great opportunity. Now that both of us are becoming serious about what we do, the weekend clarified how the Can*Con community can support us as we become more fully fledged authors.
Archaeology of Weird Fiction Challenge
Every Monday I post a new reflection on a weird tale in Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Next week, I’m celebrating Halloween by publishing a new blog post every day until the 31st!
You can follow me on my journey through weird fiction by reading along to the free texts linked below. I also advise buying the anthology from a local bookstore if you can!
Last week’s story was Kelly Link’s “The Specialist’s Hat,” about two children who play “Dead.” They could be the creepy twins in The Shinning or the Diane Arbus photograph of the twins that inspired Kubrick. Link skillfully keeps the reader uneasy about whether the game is real or not as the children begin spending time with a mysterious babysitter who may not be a alive at all.
This week’s story is Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Redress for Andromeda,” in which a woman must pay a toll to hold back the infinitely hungry ocean from eroding the California coastline. Wet and luminous, Kiernan’s story revolves around the luminous figure of the chained goddess, Andromeda.
And just like that, my weird fiction blog enters the world of twenty-first-century fiction.
Writing Prompt
Find an emotional moment in your story, or a moment you could make more emotionally impactful. Ideally, choose a moment where the character is dealing with something difficult to explain, like death or trauma. What does it feel like to be your character in this moment? Convey the emotion by using a metaphor. Find a concrete image to compare it to.
Does using metaphor to convey the character’s emotions help make their complex feelings more concrete?