BOOKS

Green Glass Ghosts (2021)

A rollicking yet introspective young adult adventure about screwing up, finding yourself, and forging a new life on your own.

At age nineteen in the year 2000, the queer narrator of Green Glass Ghosts steps off a bus on Granville Street in downtown Vancouver, a city where the faceless condo towers of the wealthy loom over the streets to of the east side where folks are just trying to get by, against the deceptively beautiful backdrop of snow-capped mountains and sparkling ocean.

Armed with only their guitar and their voice, our hopeful hero arrives on the West Coast at the beginning of the new millennium and on the cusp of adulthood, fleeing a traumatic childhood in an unsafe family plagued by religious extremism, mental health crises, and abuse in a conservative city not known for accepting difference. They’re eager to build a better life among like-minded folks, and before they know it, they’ve got a job, an apartment, openly non-binary friends, and a new queer love, dancing, busking, and making out in bars, parks, art spaces, and apartments. But their search for belonging and stability is disrupted by excessive drinking, jealousy, and painful memories of the past, distracting the protagonist from their ultimate goal of playing live music and spurring them to an emotional crisis. If they can’t learn to care for themselves, how will they ever find true connection and community?

The haunting illustrations by Gem Hall conjure the moody, misty urban landscape and represent a deep collaboration with the author based on their shared experience of seeking safety, authenticity, and acceptance on the West Coast. Green Glass Ghosts is an evocation of that delicate, aching moment between youth and adulthood when we are trying, and often failing, to become the person we dream ourselves to be.

Order from: Arsenal Pulp Press

How To (Hide) Be(hind) You Songs (2017)

Part of the Kolakovsky Press of Canada “How to Be…” series.

Nobody can live a life completely away from songs. Even without hearing them, they are a part of our daily lives. This easy-to-use manual is based on thirty-six years of experience of escaping uncomfortable identity issues using music. If you have to be yourself and you have to live with music, why not be the music yourself?

This difficult-to-live-without booklet contains many engaging chapters. Some are entitled:

The Songs Will Change You

Down The Gear Hole

Testing Your Songs

And much more!

The Author, a true hider of self behind song, takes the reader on a journey of creation and discovery of the time-honoured method of composing music to hide the less desirable parts of one’s self. Good songs always triumph in the end, and wouldn’t you like to, too?

Order from: Kolakovsky Press

Gender Failure (2014)

Ivan E. Coyote and Rae Spoon are accomplished, award-winning writers, musicians, and performers; they are also both admitted “gender failures.” In their first collaborative book, Ivan and Rae explore and expose their failed attempts at fitting into the gender binary, and how ultimately our expectations and assumptions around traditional gender roles fail us all.

Based on their acclaimed 2012 live show that toured across the US and in Europe, Gender Failure is a poignant collection of autobiographical essays, lyrics, and images documenting Ivan and Rae’s personal journeys from gender failure to gender enlightenment. Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, it’s a book that will touch LGBTQ readers and others, revealing, with candor and insight, that gender comes in more than two sizes.

Order from: Arsenal Pulp Press

First Spring Grass Fire (2012)

Rae’s first book. A collection of short fiction pieces heavily inspired by the Canadian prairies. A finalist for the Trans Fiction Category of the 2012 Lambda Awards.

Order from: Arsenal Pulp Press

First Spring Grass Fire Book Trailer