Lisa Fishman, Write Back Now! : A Novel

The time of year that I’ve arrived is not the time of year when anyone arrives. This storm is an example of why no one comes here at this time of year. Tomorrow the neighbour, an uncle of the woman whose house this is, will say: “That was the biggest weather event in twenty years.” I know what the neighbour will say because it’s already tomorrow, after the storm.

I was intrigued to see Write Back Now! : A Novel (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2026), not only the latest title by American-Canadian writer Lisa Fishman, but the latest in 1366Books, the prose imprint edited and curated by writer, editor and small press impresario Stuart Ross. Write Back Now! follows other Fishman titles such as the compact and Covid-era poetry title One Big Time (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2025) and her debut short story collection, World Naked Bike Ride: Stories (Kentville NS: Gaspereau Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], as well as a handful of prior poetry titles including Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020) [see my review of such here]. I’m fascinated by the long, narrative thread that Fishman composes across this novel, one that harkens back to the most recent prior title in the same imprint, Northern Ontario writer sophie anne edwards’ A Mouth of Vowels (Guernica Editions, 2025) [see my review of such here]. There is such fluidity to Fishman’s prose, a very different stretch and tone and even music to that of her short story collection, a book that seems much more straightforward in comparison (and I wouldn’t call that collection of stories straightforward, certainly).

Composed as a sequence of moments within immediate and intimate space, Write Back Now! unfolds into a story of a narrator with a husband, living on a remote shoreline with an ocean, and living in a house owned by a woman “I met once and whose mother and father, aunt and uncle, and other aunt and uncle live in the three surrounding houses. I am the one not related, the one who clips clothes to the line when it’s -17 Celsius and they simply freeze. Well, then they thaw.”

There’s a fluidity and an intimacy in Fishman’s accumulated, occasionally disjointed, prose sections, and an attention to detail to this novel, akin to edwards’ own, that stretches back through Canadian writing (through early Michael Ondaatje novels, perhaps) to Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook (1959), offering accumulations of lyric passages that require attention, otherwise one might simply slip between the music of the lines, and miss something important. “On the landlocked farm where my husband and I planted an orchard,” Fishman writes, later on in the book, “all four seasons come and go in turn. Its calendar, if calendars were site-specific and varied in scope accordingly, would be the longest.”

Part of the delight in catching books such as these is in knowing that, for the longest time, such lyric novels, such narratives of lyric prose haven’t been easily published in Canada (our publishing leaning more conservative than the scope of our writing)—and this book, so clearly crafted and precise and lush, offers some of the best of what the small press can provide. Seeing that Ross, through Guernica, is providing an ongoing home for such works is hopeful, indeed.