the 2025 roll of nickels year in review

2025 was a very quiet year here at Roll of Nickels, as life and work demands derailed my grand ambitions. I only managed to post five quotes on writing, and archive three of my favourite pieces of critical prose that I've written in recent years: an essay on poetry and companionship; my companion piece to my book Weather, "Some Notes on Writing Haiku"; and my recent interview with Ben Robinson for the Hamilton Review of Books (which, in the months that followed, shut its doors - more motivation to archive old material!).

The aforementioned Weather had a very nice year, being named a finalist for both the Raymond Souster Award and the Fred Cogswell Award. A new poem of mine, "Harrison River, November" was also a finalist for the Arc Magazine Poem of the Year competition. In addition, I published nine interviews with authors, which appeared in Read Local BC, The New Quarterly, and EVENT. I will (god willing) post those here over the coming year.

2025 was also exciting for me as, for part of an upper level Creative Writing course I was teaching at the University of the Fraser Valley, my students each conducted an interview with a Canadian author. Look for those interviews (25 in total!) in lit mags and reviews in 2026. (Here's the first student interview - Xavier Ibraheem interviewing John Terpstra for The Woodlot - to give you a sense of what's to come.)

I will be publishing seven or eight of my own interviews this year, too. I'm very happy to help get more of what I think of as the supreme form of both poetics and literary criticism out into the world! 

As I posted so little this year, I won't be listing the "highlights" of the year at the end of this post, but I will share this article I gathered of writing in praise of Sandy Shreve and this photo of some of my favourite books I read in the past two years:

The books:

the berry takes the shape of the bloom, andrea bennett 

Entre Rive and Shore, Dominique Bernier-Cormier

After That, Lorna Crozier

Midway, Kayla Czaga

Hello, Horse, Richard Kelly Kemick

Devotional Forensics, Joseph Kidney

Shadow Blight, Annick MacAskill

We, the Kindling, Otoniya J Okot Bitek (read my little essay on it here)

Fine, Matt Rader

People You Know, Places You've Been, Hana Shafi

The Work, Bren Simmers

Wellwater, Karen Solie

Existing Music, Nick Thran

I highly recommend giving them all a read, at least while you wait for me to get my act together and post more content here!