Valerie Fox's books of include "The Rorschach Factory" (Straw Gate Books), "The Glass Book" (Texture Press), and "Insomniatic" (PS Books). Recently, Valerie created "The Real Sky," an art and poetry book, with Jacklynn Niemiec, in an edition of 26, handmade copies. Her twitter handle is @valeriepftw.

She contributed to "The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings," edited by Karen Schauber and now available through Amazon.

Originally from central Pennsylvania, she has travelled and lived throughout the world, and has taught writing and literature at numerous universities including Sophia University (Tokyo) and currently at Drexel University (Philadelphia). She has published work (poetry, micro fiction) in many journals, including Reflex, Across the Margin, The Cafe Irreal, Okay Donkey, Blink Ink, New Flash Fiction Review, New World Writing, Hanging Loose, Literary Orphans, Thrush, Painted Bride Quarterly, Arsenic Lobster, Juked, Apiary, Cordite Review, Ping Pong, West Branch, 5_Trope, Feminist Studies, and qarrtsiluni.

The craft-book "Poems for the Writing: Prompts for Poets" was co-written with Lynn Levin. It was chosen as a finalist for the 2014 Next Generation Indie Book Awards (Education/academic category). A second, expanded edition was published in 2019.

Much interested in collaboration, she has published numerous poems and stories co-written with Arlene Ang. With Ang she published "Bundles of Letters Including A, V and Epsilon," a compilation of poems.

Robert Runté, PhD, is currently Senior Editor with EssentialEdits.ca and SFeditor.ca; before that he was Senior Editor at Five Rivers Publishing. He has provided developmental editing on over 30 traditionally published books, primarily speculative fiction. He also spent over 30 years as a professor at the University of Lethbridge. As an academic, editor, reviewer, and organizer, Robert has been actively promoting Canadian SF for nearly 40 years. He was a founding Director of NonCon, Context89, and SFCanada; and has served on the Boards of the Edmonton Science Fiction and Comic Arts Society, On Spec Magazine, Tesseract Books, The Writers Guild of Alberta, and the WordBridge conference. In addition to dozens of conference papers, journal articles, book chapters, and a half dozen entries in the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada, Robert edited 149 issues of various SF zines.

His own fiction has been published over 80 times in a variety of venues and five were reprinted in 'Best of' collections, such as Canadian Shorts II, The Chorochronos Archives, and the Best of Metastellar.

Robert was the Editor Guest at When Words Collide / Canvention 36 and the Scholar Keynote Speaker at the Academic Conference on Canadian SF&F. His ACCSFF talk was subsequently awarded a 2014 Aurora Award, and published in The Canadian Fantastic in Focus: New Perspectives (Allan Weiss, ed.) In 1996 he co-edited (with Yves Meyard) the Tesseracts5 SF anthology. In 1994 he was honored as Fan Guest at the 52nd WorldCon held in Winnipeg. In 1989, his Guide to Canadian Science Fiction won an Aurora Award; he won his second Aurora in 1990 for his promotion of Canadian SF.

Dr. Runté was also the co-editor of the popular textbook, Thinking About Teaching, and one of the articles from it has been downloaded more than 30,000 times. Two of the novels by first-time authors he edited were shortlisted for Aurora Awards. In 2019 he inherited 10+ incomplete manuscripts from the late, great fantasy author, Dave Duncan, to finish and publish. The first two of these are The Traitor's Son and Corridore to Nightmare, due out from Shadowpaw Press in 2024.

Words, words, words—I love them! I love words and I love writing.

I published my first book in 1979 and my fifth will be coming out in 2020, with Heritage House of Victoria. This latest book is a history of the trees of Stanley Park, "Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver's Stanley Park." At 405 hectares, this large urban park, "Vancouver's jewel," was voted the best park in the world by TripAdvisor in 2014. The book is going to be gorgeous, 8.5 inches by 9 inches with french flaps, and in full colour with hundreds of historic and current photos of the park's trees.

Let me tell you about the first four books I wrote.

It took me a very long time to write that first book, because I had to research it first. Of course, that's often the way with nonfiction books. The researching, writing, and publishing took me about eight years. That book became the best-selling history of Canada’s largest ranch, "Cattle Ranch: The Story of the Douglas Lake Cattle Company." I lived at Douglas Lake Ranch in British Columbia's Interior at the time.

Douglas & McIntyre in North Vancouver published "Cattle Ranch" (by Nina Woolliams—I had a different surname then) in 1979, just as I was heading off to live on a sheep and cattle property in Australia. While I lived on that far continent, "Cattle Ranch" was listed as a finalist in Eaton's 6th Annual BC Book Award. "Cattle Ranch" came out in at least four editions—a limited edition bound in Douglas Lake cowhide and printed on archival quality paper; a hardcover book with gold lettering on the cover; a hardcover book with black lettering on the cover, and several paperback editions.

That was my first taste of writing a book. I always knew I would write another one; I just didn’t know when or what it would be about.

Thirty years after Douglas & McIntyre published "Cattle Ranch," I was caught by the writing bug again, in 2009, just before getting really caught up in healing myself physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, and working as a healer. The writing bug caught me gently at first, but then more strongly.

That second book is "Trust the Mystery: Questions, Quotes and Quantum Wisdom," initially hybrid-published in 2015 by Influence Publishing of North Vancouver. It took me only six years from idea to printed book, two years less than the first book!

"Trust the Mystery" is now available in a second edition as both paperback and ebook published by Wrasma Marketing (my own imprint) with a new subtitle: "Trust the Mystery: Choosing to Engage with Life with Wonder, Awe, and Joy." The new paperback has everything the first edition had, plus a new cover and a really thorough index. I hope you're able to check it out.

Another book idea came to me in December 2016 and I wrote out the first draft (about 15,000 words) in one week! Of course, it took me another month to revise it and to fix the html files of the ePub. But even so, five weeks is a different story from six years! That book is "Spiraling Self-Awareness: Personal Mission Revealed in 27 Days through Pythagorean Numerology's Partnership with the 9-Chakra System." In May 2019, I designed it as a print book.

Later in 2019 I was thrilled to have my flash fiction piece, "Sombreness Sunlit," accepted in the anthology edited by Karen Schauber, "The Group of Seven Reimagined: Contemporary Stories Inspired by Historic Canadian Paintings."

I self-published "You've Written Your Book: Next Steps" as a small ebook (45 pages) on Amazon and one other publishing platform in February 2020. It is a companion piece to a bigger ebook and paperback, "EMPOWER Your Inner Author: You Can Write a Book," which is still going through its final stages. I have written these two because I work with many first-time authors as their book editor and I want to help writers reach authorship sooner.

Are you intrigued? I hope so. Look for "EMPOWER Your Inner Author: You Can Write a Book" in Spring 2020, around the time Heritage House publishes "Legacy of Trees: Purposeful Wandering in Vancouver's Stanley Park."

Yael Maree has lived in many places and often struggles to answer the seemingly simple question, "Where are you from?"

A lost soul, she seeks others who love strange places and stranger stories. Due to her disjointed past, Yael loves anything fictional. Her bookshelves are lined with books and she spends hours immersed in their pages.

When she is not writing or reading, she loves to spend the remainder of her time with her husband, three young children, feline companion and fishies.

Yael is best knows for her magical realism and speculative fiction with splashes of romance, but has also dabbled in other genres, enjoying particularly thrillers, suspense and flash fiction.

For more about Yael Maree, visit her website at www.yaelmaree.com

or https://www.facebook.com/Yael-M-writing-and-musings-1751073261631168/

Born in Angola, and raised in Portugal, paulo da costa is a writer, editor and translator living in Canada. He is twice the recipient of the James H. Gray Award for Short Nonfiction (2023 and 2020), the 2003 Commonwealth First Book Prize for the Canada-Caribbean Region, the W. O. Mitchell City of Calgary Book Prize and the Canongate Prize for short-fiction. His poetry, fiction and non-fiction have been published widely in literary magazines around the world and translated into Italian, Spanish, Serbian, Slovenian and Portuguese. The Midwife of Torment is his latest book of fiction.

Trust the Bluer Skies: Meditations on Fatherhood, a book of creative non-fiction, was released in 2024.

Isabella Mori is a grandmother, mother, wife, sister, friend. She also writes. Her first attempt was a newsletter in Grade 3 with a circulation of 9, each copy handwritten. Then there were 3 ¼ chapters of a romance novel two years later, on an old, old manual typewriter. Lorca translations in Paraguay, scripts in Berlin, poetry in the bush in Ontario, an environmental column in Vancouver. Then she ditched her abusive husband and slowly realized she could actually call herself a writer. Apart from A Bagful of Haiku – 87 Imperfections, there is another book with and about poetry - isabella mori's teatable book - and a third book in the making that combines fiction, poetry, interviews and research on mental health and addiction.

the light

of a dusty lamp on the keyboard –

12:30, she still writes

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