When author and journalist Charlie Porter told someone in publishing he was thinking about writing a queer novel, he was told that there wasn’t a market for it. That was, admittedly, several years ago, but as the accolades for Nova Scotia House, the debut novel he released earlier this spring attest, times have changed - or perhaps its authors such as Charlie who have changed them. His beautiful and complex novel, narrated from the memories and mind of a middle-aged name named Johnny, offer an insight on what it was to live through the Aids crisis that evades the granular detail of the scant histories of that time but delivers all of the gut-punch. As Charlie explains on this episode of In Haste, when a huge proportion of a community of writers, thinkers, artists, musicians, makers, rebels and lovers die, sometimes the only way to retell their stories is by making them up. Fiction can become something history never existed to serve.

Also in this episode: how to keep sane on book tour, and why gardening really is the cure all to the weirdness of bringing out a book.

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