News and Notes from the Field

For a long time, scholars were obsessed with straight lines, hierarchies, and the idea of "progress." That sort of linear (and often racist) thinking led them to describe magic as a thing only "primitive" people believed in. As civilizations ... Read More  

Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guest: Amanda West Lewis. Take it away, Amanda! I work in a number of different genres and media. My background is in theatre and ... Read More  

It’s here, it’s here, it’s finally (almost) here! After SIX YEARS of research and writing and fact checking (and rage and tears and more fact checking), I am thrilled to introduce my 24th nonfiction book for children: THE MATILDA ... Read More  

While I do love Jurassic Park (the first one - seriously, movie scientists, learn from your mistakes already), I'm regularly infuriated by real-life de-extinction programs. First, for a lot of complex science reasons I won't go into, it's not ... Read More  

Be yourself. But dress how we say to dress. Your school clothes must cover up your shoulders, cleavage, and knees. Your sports uniform is a skimpy little number, but it’s no big deal. A teenage girl’s instructions for how ... Read More  

Happy International Day of Forests! Looking for ways to learn about forests, or raise awareness about all the amazing things they do for the planet? Allow me to suggest some resources: Bimaadiziwin Mitigoog – Trees of Life This set ... Read More  

When the internet first exploded, lo these many moons ago, there was a whole lot of hand-wringing over the death of nonfiction books. Who’d bother reading a book when they could just google the answer? A lot of us, ... Read More  

Because sometimes, laughing is the only way to keep from screaming. Read More  

Freedom to Read Week is a time to remember and preserve our intellectual right to read any book we wish to. But if the book doesn’t exist, how do we know what we don’t know? Since Russia launched its attacks on ... Read More  

Book banning has been accelerating in the USA for several years now, and their National Coalition Against Censorship has some excellent resources that can help Canadians fight for the freedom to read.  Read More  

In July 2025, Alberta’s education minister, Demetrios Nicolaides, issued a ministerial order that threatened to ban hundreds of books from the shelves of school libraries here in Canada. For Julie and I, the alarm bells went off immediately—we had ... Read More  

Ignorance gets a bad rap, because most of us assume there's only one kind. But I have a theory: there are three kinds of ignorance, and one of them is worth cultivating. Read More  

Learning to read is a rite of passage. Achieving this skill lets a child decipher a code that only bigger kids and grownups seem to know, and it opens a door to new worlds of fantasy, adventure, cultures, and ... Read More  

I attended junior high in Yellowknife, which is not the most isolated place in Canada, but definitely felt like it sometimes. Fortunately, the school library was huge, and offered a portal to endless worlds I could visit in my ... Read More  

These days, we’re seeing increasing polarization—it’s becoming hard to even have a discussion with someone who doesn’t share your opinions or values. I wanted to help kids become aware of algorithms and “burst” their information bubble, to broaden their ... Read More  

One reason Antarctica is so unique is because it's been isolated from the rest of the planet for about 20 million years: ever since the Antarctic Circumpolar Current formed. The ACC - you guessed it - is an ocean ... Read More  

Here's a fun thing I just learned: barnacle geese are so named because Medieval scholars believed they hatched from... goose barnacles! Read More  

“Why rats?” The man’s voice was thick with scorn, like he’d just stepped in something disgusting. It was 2017, and the first edition of my young adult novel, The Great & the Small, had just come out. Using dual narratives, ... Read More