Cary Fagan

My guest on this episode is Cary Fagan. Cary is the author of many novels and collections of short stories. He has won the Toronto Book Award and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction, and has been nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. He is also an acclaimed writer of books for children, having won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award, the IODE Jean Throop Book Award, a Mr. Christie Silver Medal, the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People, and the Joan Betty Stuchner—Oy Vey!—Funniest Children’s Book Award.

Cary’s most recent books are Boney, a picture book for children, published in 2022 by Groundwood Books, and The Animals, also published in 2022, by Book*hug press. The Vancouver Sun called The Animals “Funny, provocative, magical, and warmly engaging.” Publishers Weekly, in a starred review of Boney, called it “a poetic volume that raises keen questions about ephemerality, connection, and regard across the natural world.”

 

Cary and I talk about his dual role as a writer for children and a writer for adults, about how his feelings about his own career has shifted over the years, including a period in which he contemplated giving up writing for adults altogether, about the chapbook press he runs with Bernard Kelly and his wife, Rebecca Comay, and why he feels publishing chapbooks is something maybe a lot of writers ought to do.

 

Cary Fagan: caryfagan.com

Music: "simple-hearted thing" by Alex Lukashevsky. Used with permission.

Contact Nathan Whitlock at nathanwhitlock.ca/contact