The Factory Reading Series pre-small press book fair reading, November 13, 2026: Andrews, Fishman, Moran, Stepanic + Thomas,

span-o (the small press action network - ottawa) presents:

The Factory Reading Series
the pre-small press book fair reading

featuring readings by:

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews (Ottawa ON)
Lisa Fishman (Canada/US)
James K. Moran (Ottawa ON)
Matthew Stepanic (Edmonton AB)
+
Rob Thomas (Ottawa ON)

lovingly hosted by rob mclennan
Friday, November 13, 2026
doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm
Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way

[And don’t forget the ottawa small press book fair, held the following day at the Tom Brown Arena]

author biographies:

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews [pictured] is an American poet and literary critic. She is the author of A Brief History of Fruit, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize, and two chapbooks, most recently Animals I Never Saw, winner of the Flume Press Prize. She teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Ottawa. 

Lisa Fishman’s newest books are the novel, Write Back Now! (1366 Books, Guernica Editions, 2026) and the chapbook What? (above/ground press, 2026). She’s also the author  of the fiction collection, World Naked Bike Ride (Gaspereau Press, 2022) and eight books of poetry, most recently One Big Time (Wave Books, 2025). Several earlier chapbooks include Deer 1 (Oxeye Press, 2015, 2017).

James K. Moran writes across the genres about grief, love, nomadic superheroes and drag-queen warlocks. His poetry and speculative fiction have appeared in Another Dysfunctional Cancer Poem Anthology, Burly Tales: Fairy Tales for the Hirsute and Hefty Gay Man, Bywords, Glitterwolf, On Spec, and elsewhere. Moran’s fiction collection Fear Itself and horror novel Town & Train were published by Lethe Press. His reviews appear in Arc Poetry Magazine, Plenitude and Strange Horizons. In 2012, Moran founded the Little Workshop of Horrors, an Ottawa writers’ group that carves speculative and literary work into the shape it is meant to be. He also runs Queer Speculations, which workshops LGBTQIA+ or queer-themed stories from far and wide. His debut chapbook is Identities (above/ground press, 2026). Findable at jameskmoran.blogspot.ca, jamestheballadeer.bsky.social on Bluesky and jamestheballadeer on Instagram. 

Matthew Stepanic is a queer writer who lives and works on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. They are a co-author of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books, 2017) and the author of Relying on that Body (Glass Buffalo, 2018), a poetry chapbook about the queens of season 10 of RuPaul's Drag Race. They edit and design chapbooks for Agatha Press, and they host and co-organize VERS/E, a monthly queer poetry open mic. 

Rob Thomas used to do a decent impression of Stuart McLean. He won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2013 and lives, works, and writes in Ottawa. 

Ongoing notes: mid-May, 2025 : Carlos A. Pittella + Su Croll,

You are keeping track of the above/ground press substack, yes? I mean, I’m not attempting to post there too often, but I am running a new series of author spotlights once a month or so. Who might be number three? And the ottawa small press book fair is but weeks away! And I’m going to keep pushing the above/ground press postal increase sale until you order something(or the sale ends; whichever comes first).

Montreal QC: I was very excited to see Montreal-based poet Carlos A. Pittella’s second poetry chapbook in English, PROPERSITIONS (Montreal QC: Cactus Press, 2025), following his English-language above/ground press debut last summer. I’m appreciating Pittella’s play and sense of line break and rhythm, such as the poem “BETWEEN / IN CASE THEY RUN / YOUR LICENCE PLATE” that begins: “Once I broke my front          tooth / out of a poem & still have the chip / to show—not a great poem but it tasted / like bone it was real I remember / the pain           & the scar-tissue / of writing it that became my face.” There’s such a lovely propulsion to Pittella’s lyrics, one with a stagger and staccato very nicely employed through those line breaks and spaces. Held as a kind of call-and-response, or Greek chorus, there are five “properstitions” poems, numbered via Roman numerals, each with a kind of aside or counterpoint follow-up poem. As the poem “PROPER / SITIONS 1” reads: “I wanted to carve my home mine / with a physical word on the wall & beyond / hope of getting a deposit back / but I wanted my own alphabet since / neither landlord nor family / would understand it anyway. Would you?,” the second poem, “FROM / LATIN, / BIBER,” begins: “beer this verb to be an aftertaste / bitterness my father said / you gotta learn how to love / same as coffee no one likes / at first he thus expounded [.]”

Edmonton AB: It is interesting to see titles by a new Canadian chapbook publisher, Edmonton’s Agatha Press, run by Matthew Stepanic, a press with exquisitely-designed titles in limited edition. The eighth title through the press is Edmonton poet Su Croll’s Fairy-tale logic (2025), an assemblage of poems produced in a numbered edition of one hundred copies. The poems in Fairy-tale logic are composed across familiar fairy tale narratives, but across very different perspectives. “Imagine you are a bad mother.” she offers, to open the poem “Imagine the poison,” “You are an evil step-mother. // Imagine the face in your magic / mirror announces you can grow // younger if you eat your beautiful / step-daughter’s heart // boiled and sprinkled with salt.”

Boast

It was a boast that began this
whole bouleversé world.
The boastful father’s false
claim of his daughter’s skill,
the lie that she could spin
gold from grass or leaves
or straw. The yellow of it
transformed. Transformed.
Yet it was the father
who disappears so completely.
In the end, he was not even
at church to give this golden
package of a bride away
to her new master.

They say old stories take on the purpose and character of the times they are told, the speaker of those stories, and Croll offers her unique take on a history of variations that might never be exhausted. There are multiple examples one can cite over the years through contemporary poetry—from British Columbia poet Ruth Daniell’s The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019), to Louisiana poet Lara Glenum’s SNOW (Notre Dame IN: Action Books, 2024) [see my review of such here], Jessica Q. Stark’s Buffalo Girl (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2023) [see my review of such here], Katie Fowley’s The Supposed Huntsman (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) [see my review of such here] or even Montreal poet Stephanie Bolster’s Three Bloody Words (above/ground press, 1996; 2006)—most of which engage with elements of female agency or lack thereof, throughout so many of at least those European-originated tales (such as popularized by the Brothers Grimm). There’s a curious way that Croll’s narratives bob and weave in and around and through well-familiar narratives, her own perspective providing either highlight unexplored moments or simply question the narratives we’ve all taken for granted. “Why does the king need straw / spun into gold?” the poem “Questions for Rumpelstiltskin” begins, “He’s the king. / Doesn’t the king have all the gold / in the kingdom? Doesn’t the king / have more gold than he knows / what to do with?”