Today on the site I’m delighted to offer a peek inside As the Earth Dreams ed. by Terese Mason Pierre, a speculative anthology out this week with House of Anansi Press! Here’s the gist:
A ground-breaking anthology of haunting speculative stories by contemporary Black Canadian writers that explore growth, futurity, and joy.
This bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A woman attends her mother’s latest resurrection, only to encounter family she’s never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After social collapse, a former sex worker leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. In lyrical fragments, a young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice. These breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire—all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures.
And here’s a peek at four of the stories, thanks to its contributors!
“Hallelujah Here and Elsewhere” by Francesca ekwuyasi
Hallelujah Here and Elsewhere is based on a dream I had way back in 2017. I wrote out a longer version of the story and spent years chipping away at it until it became clear who Hallelujah is, what she wants, and why she would venture through a rip in the space-time continuum — a rupture she had summoned in a desperate moment during her childhood. Illustrating the first line, “Hallelujah is a ravenous woman,” became my focus, from a craft perspective — i.e showing not telling, even though I enjoy doing quite a bit of telling — this ravenousness for truth, for food, for connection, is expressed in her relationship with Fata, in her curiosity in the Elsewhere. I wrote the story in a non-traditional plot structure that focuses on the character’s experiences and discoveries rather than the expected beats of a short story.
“Deh Ah Market” by Whitney French
Cousins to me feel like kinship that lack the intimacy of siblings but have the bloodties that friendships don’t possess — and as a writer who grapples with my textured version of diasporic anxiety, cousins are also a portal. A big reason, the reason that I am born on this land called Canada is because my mom was the first-born. Opportunities to immigrate are arbitrary. What if I was my auntie’s kid, a fifth-born? My uncle’s kid, a second-born? Walking through a portal felt like literalizing the idea of stepping into the alternate universe of my cousins’ lives. “Deh Ah Market” is also a love letter to market culture. When I’m in Jamaica, I visit the market often and cultivate connections with the people who are part of that significant informal economy. In a book called, “The Jamaican Reader,” I stumbled on a quote that inspired me to think about the origins of Caribbean marketplaces during slavery-plantation era. The piece is also a space to play with teenage obligations that Black youth have when a family member makes them do labour on the weekend. If you know, you know.
“The Hole in the Middle of the World” by Chinelo Onwalu
My story started, as many of my stories do, as a dream. A dream of a young woman in a coldly modern apartment which she is forced to share with a bunch of other women. Her only claim to the place was the top bunk of a bunk bed – and that she shared with her child.
In the dream, the mother, an immigrant sex worker, tells her child that one day they will own a place like this for themselves.
The character was already fully formed, her story at the tip of my tongue. But I was a new mom myself, struggling with my mental health, and the story demanded something I’d never done before: writing outside of linear time. What resulted is my most ambitious work to date. I think it worked out – what say you?
“Mother, Father, Baby” by Lue Palmer
Lonely and gay—that’s where I was at when I wrote, Mother, Father, Baby ten years ago. In many ways, it was the story that started my career, but remained unappreciated in a dusty drawer with many other fictions of being young, queer in the city and processing my early life. I was living in a strange and creepy old building, in the middle of my most free and debaucherous summer. But I was also having night terrors, and bouts of sleep paralysis. On one strange evening, I woke to the sound of a baby crying and ran out onto the side-walk. Good memories. So I began to write about the strange revelations that come to us in our dreams. And in-walked the characters of Abi-gaye and her religious Caribbean mother — the strange shadows that follow them around over several nights, and even stranger, the nighttime wailing of some vengeful, disembodied child, only known to them as “Baby.”
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francesca ekwuyasi is a learner, storyteller, and multidisciplinary artist born in Lagos, Nigeria. Her debut novel, Butter Honey Pig Bread (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020), won the Writers’ Trust Dayne Ogilvie Prize for lgbtq2s+ Emerging Writers. It was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, and was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Dublin Literary Award. Butter Honey Pig Bread was also a contender for cbc’s Canada Reads. Her short fiction, essays, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications. Her story “Fuck You, Money” appeared in the anthology Be Gay, Do Crime (Dzanc Books, 2025).
Whitney French (she/her) is a writer, educator, and publisher. She is the editor of the award-winning anthology Black Writers Matter (University of Regina, 2019) and Griot: Six Writers’ Sojourn into the Dark (Penguin Random House, 2022). Her novel-in-verse, Syncopation, is forthcoming from Wolsak & Wynn Press in 2025. A certified arts educator and assistant professor in creative writing at the University of British Colombia, Whitney is also the co-founder and publisher of Hush Harbour, the only Black queer feminist press in Canada.
Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. She co-hosts Griots and Galaxies, a podcast about African speculative fiction and the people who write it. A graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, she studied journalism at Syracuse University. Ex Marginalia, her collection of essays by writers of colour, is available now.
Lue Palmer is a journalist and writer of environmental and speculative fiction. A recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship, they have been published in Canada, the US, and the Caribbean. Their first novel, The Hungry River, is forthcoming.
