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24 articles
The general store, the hardware counter, and the corner antique shop are already half a step into the Otherworld — we just haven't been reading them that way. A case for sourcing fantasy's enchanted objects and quest provisions from the ordinary retail life of small-town Canada.
Epic fantasy sends its heroes over mountains; Canadian fantasy sends them to the bus stop. An argument for why the school run, the ferry crossing, and the lonely highway at dusk do more mythic work in our fiction than any drawn-out quest.
Every Canadian family keeps its strangest inheritance at the lake: a guest book in three hands, a locked trunk in the boathouse, lore that passes between generations like a spell. It is little wonder our fantasy fiction keeps returning to the cottage when it wants to unsettle us.
From the white stag of Celtic tradition to the owl that greets a child by name, Canadian fantasy has long used boreal wildlife as the signal that the veil is thinning. This piece surveys the animal messengers of the genre — and asks why the moose, our most imposing neighbour, rarely earns an invitation.
Canadian fantasy is surrounded by lakes, rivers, and portals across the water — yet the humble realities of domestic water remain strangely absent from the page. A wry argument for frozen pipes, wells, and hydro bills as untapped material for the otherworldly.
Epic fantasy sends its heroes to thrones and battlefields, but Canadian writers have long understood that a quiet crescent in Mississauga can be just as enchanted. This opinion piece argues that the subdivision, not the citadel, is the true proving ground of northern wonder.
Magic that behaves like a garden — seasonal, labour-intensive, occasionally failing — tends to feel truer than magic that behaves like software. We speak with farming and gardening authors in Ontario and British Columbia about how soil, weather, and livestock quietly shape the rules of their imagined worlds.
Forests may hide wonders, but in Canadian fantasy it is water — the lake at dusk, the river's bend, the canoe's silent glide — that most often carries characters across into other worlds. This essay considers why a country of shorelines dreams in crossings.
Fog rolling off an Ontario lake, a thaw that arrives too early, snow that falls upward — in Canadian fantasy, the forecast is rarely just the forecast. This opinion piece argues that weather is our national literature's most trusted emotional instrument, and offers readers a practical guide to spotting when a change in the sky signals a crossing between worlds.
From fogged-over greenhouse glass to enchanted boreal flora, Canadian fantasy has long located its magic in the garden. We consider why northern writers so often turn to botany for their doorways — and what real gardeners see when they read.
As the days shorten and the first frost settles over the maples, many Canadian fantasy readers reach for the same well-worn spines year after year. We spoke with readers across the country about why rereading has become a seasonal ritual — and how to build a comfort shelf of your own.
Toronto's buried network of green corridors — some 160 kilometres of them — has quietly become one of Canadian fantasy's most persistent settings. We speak with urban naturalists and writers about why the ravines, neither city nor wilderness, make such persuasive doorways to elsewhere.
The shopkeeper, the ferryman, the neighbour who notices too much — these background figures carry more of a story's truth than we often admit. An argument for why Canadian fantasy's restraint in casting its margins is its greatest strength.
Baird's gateways rarely announce themselves with thunder. They wait in garden sheds, on the edges of familiar lakes, at the end of ordinary streets — and that restraint may be her greatest legacy to Canadian fantasy.
When a Canadian fantasy novel is translated into German or shelved in a Tokyo bookshop, what survives the journey — and what quietly changes? Translators, foreign publishers, and expatriate readers weigh in on how the 'Canadian-ness' of our fantasy travels.
Many of Canada's finest fantasy writers find their largest readerships in the United States and abroad long before — if ever — earning recognition at home. This opinion piece asks what our modest embrace of homegrown genre fiction says about us, and what readers can do about it.
Canadian fantasy has rarely been comfortable with the siege or the battlefield. Instead, our finest novels stage their most consequential moments at garden gates, kitchen tables, and thresholds barely wider than a door. This piece considers what that restraint reveals about us.
From Toronto to Vancouver to Halifax, independent booksellers report a quiet surge in requests for homegrown fantasy this December. We asked them what readers are wrapping, giving, and recommending — and what their choices reveal about the genre's growing Canadian confidence.
Before a reader meets a single character, the map has already made a promise. This essay considers why paper geography endures in the digital age, and what the cartography of Canadian fantasy reveals about the worlds it charts.
Every fantasy novelist began as a child with a library card. This feature explores the formative books — from Narnia to Anne of Green Gables — that quietly shape the Canadian imagination, and why our winters, lakes, and long roads make especially fertile ground for myth.
As audiobooks become the fastest-growing format in Canadian publishing, fantasy readers face a new question: how should an invented world sound? A listening guide to notable Canadian-authored fantasy audiobooks, and a reflection on what narration gives us — and what it takes away.
From the dragon-haunted realms of The Hidden Dragon to the shifting shores of the Trellis novels, Alison Baird's settings form a quiet cartography of the imagination. This reader's guide maps the connections, suggests a reading order, and considers what her recurring landscapes reveal.
Long before a reader meets a hero or turns the opening page, an author has spent years drawing coastlines, naming rivers, and sketching histories no one may ever read. A look at the patient craft of worldbuilding, from the workshop of a Canadian fantasy novelist.
From the mist-shrouded lakes of the Canadian Shield to the silence of the far northern tundra, this land has always invited the fantastic. We explore how Canada's wilderness fuels fantasy world-building, with a close look at the settings that shape our own novels.