Month: April 2026

Ottawa, Saturday, April 18, 2026 — Who says fantasy and science fiction are merely escapist entertainment?

If you’re in Toronto (I wish I could be!), join *Cascade* and *Blight* author Rachel A. Rosen and Su J Soko, as they discuss discuss the role of art — and speculative fiction in particular — as a tool of community organizing and social justice imagining, and fighting fascism. Megan Kinch will be moderating the talk.

7:00 PM, Thursday, April 23, at Church of St. Stephen in-the-Fields, 103 Bellevue Avenue in the heart of downtown Toronto.

The event page is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/938052088984656/?acontext=%7B%22event_action_history%22%3A[%7B%22mechanism%22%3A%22attachment%22%2C%22surface%22%3A%22newsfeed%22%7D]%2C%22ref_notif_type%22%3Anull%7D .

In other Rosen news, her Aurora Awads-nominated podcast (co-hosted with David A. Clink) Wizards and Spaceships, dropped its season finale on April 15th.

In the last episode before the summer, Rachel and David talk with the queen of messy, complicated, and antiheroic female protagonists Silvia Moreno-Garcia (author of The Intrigue) about how genre fiction is full of strong, independent women, badass heroines, brave Final Girls, and virginal princesses, and wonder, are we getting a little sick of it?

Honestly, I have a hard time keeping up with everything Rachel’s up to. Subscribe to her newsletter to keep yourself up-to-date!

OTTAWA, April 3, 2026 — Yet again, my intentions to post regular updates have fallen victim to the reality that the BumblePuppy Press is still a one-man operation, and that being a dad takes pride of place on my list of priorities. (Indeed, she is working on a project of her own behind me as I type, but has already started to wonder, “When can you play with me?”)

Not that I am complaining; being a papa is the great joy of my life, and this year has been incredible. Within a month and a half of starting grade one, my brilliant daughter (no doubt with considerable help from her remarkable little school, which bases its pedagogy on the no-homework Finnish educational system) was writing in cursive and reading! Since then, she has written and illustrate a 40-page story, L’histoire du pomme (see above), among many other accomplishments.

As any number of mothers and grandmothers told me in the early days, “Enjoy it while you can — it goes so fast!”

•     •     •

All that said, it’s National Poetry month, and what better way to celebrate than to explore Adrienne Stevenson and Marie-Andrée Auclair’s marvellous collaboration, Skipping Stones?

That is what we do, throw our poems on the page
of a common lake, what sinks quickly is culled
what uncoils its energy in many rebounds stays,
a blended poem for our venture, another bird in the sky

— From the titular poem in Skipping Stones

Of course, that’s not all …

If verse just isn’t your thing, we do have a lot of prose on offer as well, from Rachel A. Rosen’s all-too plausible near-future Sleep of Reason series to Zilla Novikov’s very funny time-travel romance, Reprise, Carl Dow’s eclectic collection of stories, The Old Man’s Last Sauna and his historical adventure-romance, Black Grass, to our most recent offering, The Inclusive Winnie-the-Pooh.

Our books are available at the usual online vendors and, of course, in our own shop – if you want the books in paper, dare I suggest you order your copies now, rather than wait for the inevitable price increases?

Happy Easter egg hunting to those who celebrate that remarkable bunny!

Geoffrey Dow, publisher