NBN host and CanLit fangirl extraordinaire Hollay Ghadery speaks with rob mclennan about his collection of stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press, 2024).

This contains a provocative collection of moments, confessions, overheard conversations, and memories, both fleeting and crystalized, revolving around the small chasms and large craters of everyday life. Situated at the crossroads of prose and poetry, these 33 vignettes explore the rhythm, textures, and micro-moments of lives in motion. Composed with a poet’s eye for detail and ear for rhythm, rob mclennan’s brief stories play with form and language, capturing the act of record-keeping while in the process of living those records, creating a Polaroid-like effect. Throughout the collection, the worlds of literature and art infuse into intimate fragments of the everyday. A welcome chronicle of human connection and belonging, On Beauty will leave readers grappling with questions of how stories are produced and passed through generations.

About rob mclennan:

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collection Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025), A river runs through it: a writing diary , collaborating with Julie Carr (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025),On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). This fall, University of Calgary Press will be publishing his poetry collection the book of sentences, a follow-up to the book of smaller(2022). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta.

About Hollay Ghadery:

Hollay Ghadery is an Iranian-Canadian multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. She has her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was released with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of the 105.5 FM Bookclub, as well as a co-host on HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist, the Regional Chair of the League of Canadian Poets and a co-chair of the League’s BIPOC committee, as well as the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com.

Contemporary Vulnerabilities: Reflections on Social Justice Methodologies (U Alberta Press, 2024) centres on critical reflections about vulnerable moments in research committed to social change. Exploring the many vulnerabilities within social science research, this interdisciplinary collection gathers critical stories, reflections, and analyses about innovative methodologies that engage with unconventional and unexpected spaces of research that scholars inhabit and share. The authors encourage us to collaborate within, reflect on, and confront the frictions of inquiry around social change. Towards an aim of contesting the dominance of Eurocentric epistemologies, the collection includes modes of storytelling and examples of knowledge gathering that are often excluded from academic texts in general and methodological texts in particular - such as queer, crip, and indigenous ways of being and knowing. Scholars and students across all disciplines will find provocation and recognition in this volume.

See the full Table of Contents here.

Claire Carter is Associate Professor in the Department of Gender, Religion, and Critical Studies at the University of Regina

Chelsea Temple Jones is Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies at Brock University

Caitlin Janzen is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at York University and also works at the Postdoc Office of the University of Calgary.

Tatiana Klepikova is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Regensburg, where she leads a research group on queer literatures and cultures under socialism.

Astrid Blodgett is the author of the short story collections This Is How You Start to Disappear (U Alberta Press, 2023) and You Haven’t Changed a Bit (U Alberta Press, 2013). Her stories have appeared in many Canadian literary magazines, and in translation in Inostrannaya Literatura, a Russian journal that publishes foreign writers. One of her stories is part of the Danish Royal Ministry of Education’s English exams and now the educational textbook Connect (in the chapter on "Puzzle Plots"!). Her work has been short- or long-listed for the Writers’ Guild of Alberta Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Story, a ReLit Award*, the Danuta Gleed Literary Award*, and the High Plains Book Award* for Short Stories. She is also a co-author of Recipes for Roaming: Adventure Food for the Canadian Rockies. For many years she co-hosted a literary salon in her home. Astrid also loves multi-day river trips and very long walks. She lives in Edmonton / amiskwaciwâskahikan.

Judith Tanen is an LP candidate at the Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy.

For eighteen months during the Second World War, the Canadian military interned 1,145 prisoners of war in Red Rock, Ontario (about 100 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay). Camp R interned friend and foe alike: Nazis, anti-Nazis, Jews, soldiers, merchant seamen, and refugees whom Britain feared might comprise Hitler's rumoured "fifth column" of alien enemies residing within the Commonwealth. For the first time and in riveting detail, the author illuminates the conditions in one of Canada's forgotten POW camps. Backed by interviews and meticulous archival research, Zimmermann fleshes out this rich history in an accessible, lively manner. Ernest R. Zimmermann's The Little Third Reich on Lake Superior: A History of Canadian Internment Camp R (U Alberta Press, 2015) will captivate military and political historians as well as non-specialists interested in the history of POWs and internment in Canada.

This is an interview with the book's editors, David Ratz and Michel Beaulieu.

Juliane Okot Bitek, of the Emily Carr University of Art and Design and writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University, has written a terrific book of poetry on the 1994 Genocide of Tutsi in Rwanda. Published in 2016 by the University of Alberta, and simply titled, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016), Okot Bitek’s poetry is a form of witnessing violence that records the senseless loss of life in a way that reminds us violence is human and universal.

Susan Thomson is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. I like to interview pretenure scholars about their research. I am particularly keen on their method and methodology, as well as the process of (white, foreign) producing academic knowledge about African places and people.

In the early 20th-century Muslims, primarily with roots in Lebanon, began to settle in Canada’s interior plains. In 1938, the small community in Edmonton opened the first mosque in the country, which would come to play a key role in shaping Islam's development in the Canada. Earle H. Waugh, Professor Emeritus at University of Alberta, narrates the history of this community and the place of this institution in Al Rashid Mosque: Building Canadian Muslim Communities (University of Alberta Press, 2018). The micro-history of Edmonton’s Muslim community opens up vistas on the broader Canadian history and the role of Muslims in forming national projects and identities. Waugh outlines shifts in Islamic educational programs and community leadership, as well as the political terrains Muslims needed to traverse. Overall, the book offers a readable and robust history that adds a unique story to the history of Canada. In our conversation we discuss the Muslim population in Canada during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the mosque’s original building and the funding efforts to build it, the role of women in the community, Islamic education, religious leadership, the new mosque building in 1982, the effects of local and global politics, the Palestinian question in Canada, and 9/11 and its aftermath on Canadian Muslims. We also discuss Waugh’s training in Religious and Islamic Studies at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 70s with scholars like Fazlur Rahman and Mircea Eliade.

Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at [email protected].