They Have to Take You In

About this Author

Editor Bio:

Ursula Pflug was born in Tunis, Tunisia, on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa but grew up in Toronto, Ontario. She is author of the novels Green Music, The Alphabet Stones and Motion Sickness, as well as the story collections After the Fires and Harvesting the Moon. She has been nominated or short-listed for the 3 Day Novel Prize, the Pushcart Prize, the Descant Novella contest, the MK Hunter, the Aurora, Sunburst, and others. Her work has been funded by The Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Arts Council, and The Laidlaw Foundation. She is also a teacher, editor, reviewer, essayist, community organizer and produced playwright. http://ursulapflug.ca

Author Bios:

Colleen Anderson writes fiction and poetry with works having been published in such diverse places as Descant, Amazing, ON Spec, Star*line, Polu Texni, ReadShortFiction.com, Vestal Review, Mammoth Book of On the Road, and. Her checkered past includes one-time foreign author editor at Twilighttales.com, senior editor for Technocopia.com, column writer for Fearsmag.com and co-editor of Tesseracts 17. She has received honorable mentions in the Year's Best Science Fiction, and the Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, been twice nominated for the Aurora Award and has made it onto the long ballot for the Bram Stoker Award. She can be found at www.colleenanderson.wordpress.com

Tim Beckett grew up in Western Canada, primarily in Uranium City, Saskatchewan and Edmonton, Alberta. When he was 21, he ran away from Canada to London and has been running away from Canada ever since. He has published short fiction in The Evergreen Review, Sensitive Skin, Obsolete, and essays in newspapers, including The Ottawa Citizen and The London Guardian. He is currently working on a novel, Uranium City Return. For a time he worked in documentary TV but now works as a web developer at The New York Times. He lives in the former rust-belt borough of Brooklyn, New York. http://timbeckett-writing.com/

Michelle Berry is the author of three books of short stories, How to Get There from Here, Margaret Lives in the Basement, and I Still Don't Even Know You, as well as four novels, What We All Want, Blur, Blind Crescent and This Book Will Not Save Your Life. She is also co-editor with Natalee Caple of The Notebooks: Interviews and New Fiction from Contemporary Writers, and has collaborated on an art book with Winnipeg artist, Andrew Valko, called, Postcard Fictions. Her new novel, Interference, is coming out Fall, 2014.

Mela Brown is inspired by trees. She has written short prose and poetry for thirty years and published rarely. The story in this anthology was written in 2007 when Mela lived in Ontario. Since then, she moved to the west coast where she now lives in a one-bedroom walk-up with a lot of plants. Her favourite activity is long hikes in the forest with friends.

Gord Bruyere is Anishnabe from Couchiching First Nation. His creative writing appears most recently in Struggle and Strength: Perspectives from First Nations, Inuit and Metis Peoples in Canada, FACE: Aboriginal Life and Culture, Native Literatures: Generations and Yellow Medicine Review. His blog is "The World According to Trixterboy". www.worldoftrixterboy.blogspot.ca

Ron Chase has been writing poetry off and on for twenty-five years, but this is his first publication. As a student at Queen's, he had humorous articles published in The Lictor, a now defunct weekly Arts and Science publication, and his undergrad thesis was published in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Ruth Clarke is author of five non-fiction books: Before the Silence fictionalizes the indigenous migration from the historical Methodist mission at Grape Island, Bay of Quinte to Alderville FN. What We Hold Dear collects Alderville lore and photographs. To Know This Place, a field guide (second revised edition), locates flora and fauna in Alderville's Black Oak Savanna, with partner artist/wildlife biologist Rick Beaver. Buffers, Boundaries & Barricades: County Fences is a coffee table book of black and white photographs and colourful musings. Her short stories, memoirs and journalism have been published widely. She lives in Alderville with Rick.

Joe Davies' fiction has appeared in magazines in Canada, the UK and the US, including Queen's Quarterly, Descant, Stand Magazine, Rampike, subTerrain, The Missouri Review, Exile, Grain, Planet - The Welsh Internationalist and The New Quarterly.  He lives in Peterborough, Ontario with his wife and three kids.

Margaret Slavin Dyment has a collection of fiction, Drawing the Spaces (Orca) and two chapbooks of poetry: I Didn't Get Used To It (Ouroboros), and Tracing A Line (Ekstasis). Also published is a volume of journal essays from two years' bus travel (2004-2006) among Canadian Quakers. She founded the Victoria School of Writing, and in 2000-2001 was a writer-in-residence at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. She continues to write poetry and fiction, and articles for Transition Town and Quaker publications. She is completing a second collection of fiction.

Georgia Fischer is a writer, student and bartender living in Nanton, Alberta.

Debbie Okun Hill is the past president of The Ontario Poetry Society and an OAC Writers' Reserve grant recipient. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications including Descant, Existere, The Windsor Review, Vallum in Canada and The Binnacle in the US. Black Moss Press will publish her first poetry book Tarnished Trophies in the Spring 2014.

Sandra Kasturi is a poet, writer, book reviewer and Bram Stoker Award-winning editor. She is the co-publisher of the World Fantasy Award-nominated and British Fantasy Award-winning press, ChiZine Publications. Her work has appeared in various venues, including ON SPEC, Prairie Fire, Shadows & Tall Trees, several Tesseracts anthologies, Evolve, Evolve 2, Chilling Tales, A Verdant Green, Star*Line, and 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin, and the upcoming Vamps, Tramps and Stamps. Sandra's two poetry collections were released by Tightrope Books: The Animal Bridegroom (with an intro by Neil Gaiman) and Come Late to the Love of Birds. She likes red lipstick, gin & tonics and Michael Fassbender.

Tapanga Koe lives and writes in Northumberland County. Her short stories have been published in such places as The Link, That Not Forgotten and Eunoia Review.

Ariel David Skelly Langen was born in Toronto. Attracted by gangsta rap and its associated lifestyle, he dropped out of school early and entered "the life." Fellow inmates nicknamed him Shady. He is an ongoing survivor of street-level, drug-and-violence mayhem in Toronto, Moncton, and Liverpool, England.

Donna Langevin is the author of The Second Language of Birds and In the Café du Monde, (Hidden Brook Press), 2005 and 2008. She was short-listed for the Descant Best Poem of the Year 2010 Winston Collins prize, and in 2011 she was short-listed twice for the GritLIT Poetry Competition. She won first prize in Cyclamens and Swords poetry contest in 2009 and her short play, The Man With The Butterfly Hat was produced by the Alumnae Theatre in Toronto in 2012. Her chapbook about Sandhill Cranes, Looking for Yesterday was published by Lyricalmyrical Press in 2014.

Gordon Langill grew up in the middle of seven children and became a counsellor to all and sundry, bringing mental health recovery work into the wilderness, the street, group homes, hospitals, community mental health programs, his own family, his own soul, and his counselling practice.  His team at the Lynx Early Psychosis Intervention Program was honoured to support Dana Tkachenko and her loving family, including her wonderful husband, for five years.  After Dana's death in 2010, a memorial fund was established at the Canadian Mental Health Association in Peterborough, to support young people and families in transition.

Andrew MacDonald won the Western Magazine Award for Fiction and The Journey Prize. His stories appear all over Canada and the US. He lives in Toronto and New England, where he's writing a novel and more stories.

Michael Matheson is a Toronto writer, editor and book reviewer. An editorial assistant with ChiZine Publications, and a submissions editor with Apex Magazine, his fiction is published or forthcoming in a handful of venues, including the anthologies Chilling Tales 2, Dead North, Future Lovecraft, and One Buck Horror Vol. 6.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia: Mexican by birth, Canadian by inclination. Silvia Moreno-Garcia's short stories have appeared in places such as The Book of Cthulhu, Imaginarium 2013: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing and Shine: An Anthology of Optimistic Science Fiction. Her first collection, This Strange Way of Dying, was released by Exile in 2013. She has edited several anthologies, including Dead North and Fungi. Expect her debut novel, Sound Fidelity, in 2014. "The Doppelgängers" was short-listed for The Manchester Prize in 2011. Also in 2011, she won the Carter V. Cooper Memorial Prize in the Emerging Writer category.

Barbara Ponomareff is a retired child psychotherapist, writer and visual artist. She has published short stories in Descant, (Ex)CITE and PRECIPICe amongst others. Her poetry has appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. She has also published two novellas: A Minor Genre (Artichoke Publishing, 2003) and In the Mind's Eye (Quattro Books, 2011). Her recent book of poetry, Voices from the Playroom (Stone's Throw Publications, 2012), arose out of her work with children.

Robert Priest is the author of fourteen books of poetry, 3 plays, 2 novels, lots of musical CDS, one hit song and many columns for Now Magazine. His words have been debated in the legislature, posted in the Transit system, quoted in the Farmer's Almanac, and sung on Sesame Street. His 2008 book: Reading the Bible Backwards peaked at number two on the Globe and Mail's poetry list. Rosa Rose, a book of children's verse in praise of inspirational figures, has just been published by Wolsak & Wynn and recently won a Silver Moonbeam award in the U.S. A new book of poems for adults, Previously Feared Darkness, was published in 2013 by ECW.

Linda Rogers is a poet, novelist, journalist, song writer and teacher who has been president of the League of Canadian Poets and Federation of BC Writers, Poet Laureate for Victoria BC, and Canadian People's Poet. She has been given national and international awards and is widely translated. The focus of her work is human rights, particularly those of children. She is married to blues mandolinist Rick van Krugel, and is the mother of four and grandmother of four stellar individuals. Don't argue.

Robert Runté is Senior Editor with Five River Publishing, a freelance development editor at SFEditor.ca, an academic, critic and reviewer. He has won two Aurora Awards for his criticism and championing of Canadian speculative fiction. 

Darryl Salach resides in St. Catharines, Ontario. He is the creator and editor of the literary journal The Toronto Quarterly. His articles, interviews, and poetry have been published in literary journals, anthologies, and newspapers including the Globe and Mail, The New York Quarterly, ditch, The Puritan, Open Book Toronto, Misunderstandings Magazine, GULCH: An Assemblage of Poetry and Prose (Tightrope Books), and Jack Layton: Art in Action (Quattro Books).

Leanne Simpson : Writer, storyteller, spoken word artist and scholar of Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg ancestry, with roots in Alderville First Nation, Leanne Simpson holds a PhD from the University of Manitoba, and is an instructor at the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge, Athabasca University. Her edited books include Lighting the Eighth Fire and This is An Honour Song, both from Arbeiter Ring. In 2011 she launched Dancing on our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence. Leanne also writes poetry and fiction and is currently touring her first book of short stories, Islands of Decolonial Love. (ARP, 2013)

Dana Tchatenko was a world traveller who educated many people about mental health through her activism and lived experience of recovery. Dana began reading at age three, wrote her first piece of fiction at age eight and continued as a natural scholar, having received her Bachelor of Arts in Indigenous Studies from Trent University.  Dana was near completion of her Master of Arts in Canadian Studies & Indigenous Studies at Trent University when she died in 2010 at the age of thirty. Dana continues to inspire and educate through our memories and here, through her autobiographical literary fiction.

P.J. Thomas is a small town writer who hails from Toronto and was educated there at SEED School and then Trent University. She became editor of her university newspaper and went on to edit several local publications. Before becoming seriously mentally ill she was a concert promoter, band manager and executive director of a theatre company. She spent many years in and out of psychiatric hospitals. She now writes novels including, Almost Up and Down, (Ordinary Press 2004), and, Gert's Book of Knowledge, (Self-published 2011). Ms. Thomas is currently working on her third novel, The Corner of Crack and Ho'.

Jan Thornhill's science books for children have been widely translated and have garnered major national and international awards. Drought, her collection of short fiction for adults, (Cormorant, 2000) was shortlisted for the Upper Canada Brewery and Relit Awards. "Life Skills" was awarded an honourable mention in the Prism International Contest for short fiction in 2000. She spends a lot of time in the woods looking for birds, fungi, slime molds, and animal skulls.

Cover Artist Bio:

Christiane Pflug, painter (b Berlin, Germany, 20 June 1936; d Toronto, Canada, April 1972). War forced her mother, a knit designer, to put her young daughter in foster homes, where she was forced to stay until she was 12. In 1953 Christiane went to Paris to study fashion design, but she soon became uninterested in this. However, there she encountered Michael Pflug, a young medical student who had art training, and he suggested that she paint outside. In the spring of 1954 she painted her first heavy gouaches depicting Parisian cityscapes, a self-portrait and a few still lifes. In 1956 Christiane and Michael were married and moved to Tunis, where Christiane produced arresting still lifes. Working in tempera, she painted strong and simple works which reflected a new inward vision. In 1959 Christiane moved to Canada, where her mother lived. Living in downtown Toronto, she painted her first landscapes...In 1967 the Pflugs moved to Birch Avenue, opposite the Cottingham school. By 1970 in Cottingham School with Yellow Flag, found on the front cover, of this book, They Have to Take You In, unreal clarity predominates. Pflug defined her aim as an attempt "to reach a certain clarity which does not exist in life."