Themes and Trends We Are Seeing

Are you struggling to imagine your book out in the world?

Let’s say you’re struggling to imagine your book out in the world, let alone the notion that anyone would read it. Would it help to know what we notice in our grassroots work with writers? With a couple of exceptions, all titles are from notable small presses or self-published by the author. In other words, if these folks can do it, so can you.

Social and Climate Justice

• A chance encounter between a clerk (Seth) and a customer (Clarence) in a second-hand furniture store evolved into a rich collaboration that became North Wind Man. Co-authored with Seth Ratzlaff, a young Mennonite settler, the biography tells the story of Clarence Cachagee, who surmounted heartbreaking odds to become a community leader and the founder of Crow Shield Lodge, a place for “reconciliation, land-based teaching, and healing.”

• Concerning environmental justice, we’re seeing beautiful titles that reckon with our responsibility to heal the Earth and to take climate action. Love is a word that’s natural in spiritual life writing. Recent poetry collections by Jannie Edwards (River, River, Slow Dance and Learning Their Names: Letters from the Home Place), Sheniz Janmohamed (Reminders on the Path), Jónína Kirton (Standing in a River of Time), and Betsy Warland (Lost Lagoon) show us why.

• Carolina Echeverria’s memoir-in-progress celebrates her groundbreaking artistic collaborations with First Nations, immigrants, and settlers. To learn about her immersive story-collecting practice, follow the @nativeimmigrantdresses documentary on TikTok.

Legacy

Some of the most consequential family sagas are colored by faith — but while one author is honoring tradition, another author might be calling out the impact of religion on a complicated family history. Here are empathetic works by authors who either find the support they need in their home tradition — or who find that the path to integrity lies in questioning the forces of convention.

• In Henry Blumberg’s Sean Left Quietly, a son’s suicide takes the author back in time and history, across continents, to where he finally lands in a place of loving determination with his entire family, trying to offer hope to others who are facing irreversible tragedy, either now, or in their family history.

• Eufemia Fantetti’s My Father, Fortune-tellers and Me is a moving daughter’s antidote to the “lifetime of sickness and sadness” that her ill-matched Italian-Catholic immigrant parents endured, battling untreated mental illness.

• Claudia Putnam’s firstborn died in infancy. It took her 30 years to explore the astounding meaning — medical and spiritual — of his untimely death, in what became her award winning, Double Negative.

• Tamara Jong’s Worldly Girls explores the mixed blessings of her Chinese Scottish ancestry and the challenges of growing up a faithful Jehovah’s Witness in 1980s Montreal.

Identity and Belonging

• Saga Boy, Antonio Michael Downing’s breakout memoir, captures “the upheaval of cultural dislocation” and the possibility of reinvention suggested by the subtitle: My Life of Blackness and Becoming.

• Gloria Fern’s Saved by Love recalls her struggle as a rural Mennonite mother-of-three, trying to live authentically, then coming out in the 1980s and going on to become the first gay counselor to serve her community.

• One vital role of small presses is introducing new voices that help the public come to terms with controversial topics. In Hollay Ghadery’s propulsive memoir, Fuse, gender, race, sexuality, and trauma color her depiction of the pressures facing bi-racial women in conforming to social norms and expectations.

• Caroline Topperman’s Your Roots Cast a Shadow: One Family’s Search Across History for Belonging sweeps across 20th Century Europe and beyond with her Polish family of communists, Catholics, and diasporic Jews to answer the question, where is home — and once we land, will we be allowed to rest?

• Linda Trinh’s Seeking Spirit: A (Non)Buddhist Memoir, debuts in 2025, but you may already know her as the beloved author of the award-winning children’s series, The Nguyen Kids, in which she explores faith issues with curiosity, empathy, and care.

• Works-in-progress: Montreal writer and rabbi Kitty Hoffman and Southern Ontario writers Lori Sebastianutti (Italian-Catholic) and Laura Sergeant are all building their literary street cred by releasing essays based on their forthcoming books. Look for these emerging writers in award-winning magazines and journals.

Mind, Body, Spirit

• Donna Costa published her mother’s draft autobiography under the title, Transformation, to suggest what it meant for a 1940s city girl to become a rural newspaper columnist. Donna’s own writings explore lasting mother-daughter bonds, and the “voices in her head” that have become her trusted guides.

• In Two Voices, by Linda E. Clarke and Michael Cusimano, MD, brings a writer and her neurosurgeon into a revealing conversation about her life-altering surgery in his hands. • Joy Thierry Llewellyn is a B.C.-based pilgrim-par-excellence whose YA novels introduce young people to the Camino de Santiago, ashrams, and other numinous sites around the globe.

• Vickie MacArthur’s A Lotus on Fire: How a Buddhist Monk Ignited My Heart is an epistolary (written in letters) memoir and an intimate account of grieving and awakening that opens to the power of love beyond boundaries.

• Works-in-progress: Penny Allport’s uncommon journey to becoming a life cycle celebrant and minister informs the luminous stories within her future memoir, Moving Ceremonies. Poet Meharoona Ghani isn’t waiting until her book comes out either. She’s taken excerpts from Letters to Rumi to the stage, collaborating with musicians and other artists to bring her hybrid (poetry and prose) epistolary memoir to life.

Here’s to you, new author. You can do it!

[This piece is an excerpt from Susan Scott’s introduction to The Spiritual Life Workbook: from Concept to Bookshelf.]