Tada!!!

COMING APRIL, 2022

After years of desk and travel research, writing, editing and editing again, I’m thrilled to share the cover and release date of my new novel! Thanks to my publisher ECW Press, my wonderful editor, Susan Renouf, for helping to make the book the best it can be, Caroline Suzuki for the beautiful cover design, and everyone at ECW for all your work to date. I’m so looking forward to seeing where this book takes us!

Its release is still a winter away, but you can find the synopsis and more information through ECW at https://ecwpress.com/collections/literary/products/what-is-written-on-the-tongue, where you can pre-order. Also available for pre-order at Amazon, Indigo and, preferably, your independent bookstore.

I’ll share launch details when that day arrives!

The Beauty of Sylvie

“As she danced, the image of a river came to her. A river branching into multiples of itself, no longer a single stream but a delta. And if her life were such a delta she might let the flow take her in a direction far from the current she was in now.”

So begins our adventures with Sylvie, the wildly engaging, funny and flawed protagonist of the award- winning If Sylive Had Nine Lives, a novel by Saskatoon’s Leona Theis, published by Freehand Books.

Playing with structure, plot and voice, Theis takes us on a raft ride down the what-if streams of a life. At times hilarious, in others poignant, each chapter of this novel is a reflection on the choices a person could have made, should have made, forgot to make or fell into. From an almost-cancelled marriage to falling for an old flame; a sister she mocks to an aunt who picks her up at each failed turn, these stories haunt with the notion that one moment, one decision can affect a lifetime.

Sylvie is fervently human as are the characters surrounding her and the world they act upon and which impacts upon them. A master of language, Theis renders these stories in prose that makes you catch your breath, makes you want to read that sentence or paragraph one more time, the beauty of word choice and image filling the reader with longing, joy or laughter.

I should have written this review long ago, but better late than never. Read Sylvie!

I was so happy to have my poem, Is It Wrong? published in the anthology ‘apart, a year of pandemic poetry and prose’. The online launch is below, my reading at about the 22 minute mark. But watch them all. So great. Thanks to the SWG and editors Courtney Bates-Hardy and Dave Margoshes.