Books that offer emotional, conceptual and/or intellectual company, with suggestions for when they might best be read. 

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The Breaks, by Julietta Singh

A stunning, tender and sweeping offering to the next generation and a meditation on race and mothering at the end of the world. Read best when you are unsure of how to imagine the future otherwise, and need guidance and inspiration. 

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Histories of the Transgender Child, by Jules Gill-Peterson

An urgent, incisive and expansive reckoning with transgender childhood which shatters the notion of newness attached to emerging articulations of trans life. Read best when you are ready to get fired up about the state of the world and seek intellectual tools for intervention.

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God Loves Hair, by Vivek Shraya

An inspiring self-published first book that models the required tenacity and faith in one's own work to create context for a vibrant artistic career. Read best when you are wondering how you might take the first step toward creating something—a pathway or project—that you have long desired or considered.

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A History of My Brief Body, by Billy-Ray Belcourt 

A vivid, intimate and intertextual collection which manifests writing as a mechanism for connection and survival. Read best when you are ready to encounter waves of joy and contradiction, beautifully rendered in stories of personal becoming.  

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Scarborough, by Catherine Hernandez

A vibrant, polyvocal portrait of a neighborhood which inspired an equally extraordinary film. Read (or screened) best when you desire to encounter the beauty, tenacity and resilience of children.  

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The Best Kind of People, by Zoe Whittall

A bold and unwavering family portrait that empathetically excavates tender and conflicted attachments. Read best when you think you know how you would feel—or what you might do—in the given situation, and want to be challenged otherwise.    

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Until We Are Free: Reflections on Black Lives Matter in Canada, edited by Rodney Diverlus, Sandy Hudson, Syrus Marcus Ware 

A necessary and invaluable collection and contribution to ongoing socio-political issues and debates. Read best when you desire to be dropped into the center of an ongoing conversation, and seek a guidebook for meaningful participation. 

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Learn more about Vantage Points:

Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction

A provocative book by an acclaimed writer-filmmaker that combines memoir and media as seen through a trans lens

Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. To do so, Joynt stages a series of vignettes that place memoir in the context of other sources, media, and stories to create a tapestry—a montage-like experience of reading with surprising and revealing juxtapositions.

Joynt writes about difficult pasts and connects them to contemporary politics and ways of being, employing McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media as an inciting framework. Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, a unique and highly visual approach to trans life writing, and an experimental move between gender and genre.