Daniel Perry's Blog

Finally–finally!–a story I first imagined in 2017, on a bus in Andalusia while my wife napped on my shoulder, will see the light of day. It’s a long piece, meaning it’s proven a bit hard to place, but it’s finally been accepted by a magazine I’ve wanted to publish with for a literal decade (longer, actually) and has been in edits for a few weeks now. I’m really looking forward to sharing the ultimate version soon–

AND, in the meantime, I’m excited to read from it in its as yet unfinished form! Wednesday, May 7, at Noonan’s Pub, the indomitable Draft Reading Series brings its rapid-fire, many-writered format back to the in-person stage. The action kicks off at 7pm, and I’m in the last set, scheduled to begin at 9:20. I’ll have Modern Folklore as well as my first two books with me, if you’re still looking to buy copies. I hope to see you there!

Thing Two: I had the awesome pleasure this past weekend of interviewing Mark Sampson and emceeing the launch celebration for his new horror novel, Lowfield, at Little Ghosts Books. It’s a terrifying page turner, but also a firmly grounded and human story of trying to bounce back from trauma while confronting forces larger than oneself. I absolutely loved it. Big thanks to Mark for having me out, and to the many friends and fine Toronto writers who joined. Launch day coincided with the first sunny patio day of 2025, and we joyfully took our camaraderie to College Street afterward.

Photo by Lisa de Nikolits, we think.

And, lastly, I got up to my old amateur historian tricks in March, visiting my hometown of Glencoe, Ontario, to talk to the local historical society about a pretty average guy named Thomas Gardiner. He seems to have died around 1840–aged around 70, and probably destitute–in the woods of Mosa Township between the Thames River and the Longwoods Road (later known as Ontario Highway #2).

Gardiner, in my opinion, lived a rather ordinary life for his time, by which I mean one that seems extraordinary now. For example, he appears to have served faithfully for Britain during the War of 1812 and been arrested for something like desertion, as well as worked for the Church of England and spent the last years of his life railing against its representative in the London District. He seems also to have taken part, again on the side of the Crown, in the Irish Rebellion(s) of the late eighteenth century, and maybe contracted cholera in the 1830s, and before that taught school in no less than three townships in Upper Canada, the last of which he was run out of due to, as he tells it, loyalty to his Church and King in the face of rising Methodism and Reform movements. He thankfully documented much of this in petitions from Mosa to Upper Canada’s government, dated 1834-1839, most of which were begging for financial relief as he stared down another harsh winter with inadequate food and clothing.

I’ve taken this project out on the road twice now, and both times I’ve been amazed at the interest it manages to generate. Plus, quickly after the event, I was trading emails with interested locals and finding more breadcrumbs that, somehow, I hadn’t yet turned up in the four-year odyssey this non-fiction book has now become. I’ve just embarked on a full rewrite, and it’s a story I’m really looking forward to telling in full. The photos are too big to share here, but there’s a nice write-up on the Glencoe & District Historical Society’s website.

For now, I hope to see you on the 7th!

It’s here! Modern Folklore, a horror novella I spent most of the past decade learning how to write, has arrived on Planet Earth in both physical and electronic format. Published by Toronto’s Canada’s hottest new indie horror press and bookshop, Little Ghosts Books, it’s already on the festival circuit, gracing Toronto’s Word on the Street and the Mississauga Literary Festival in the last half of September.

What’s more, the cool kids seem to dig the new book. Naben Ruthnum, who’s work I’ve always admired, kindly called Modern Folklore

“a creepingly mysterious story that comes on deceptively familiar before it tips from discomfiting into truly horrifying”.

And J.R. McConvey, whose stories in Different Beasts got under my skin and stayed there for years, is launching his first novel, False Bodies, and asked me to join the bill with him and longtime pal Andrew F. Sullivan, who was pretty nice to Hamburger back in the day and has some new, terrifying books of his own out right now, The Marigold and The Handyman Method, the latter co-written with Nick Cutter.

Do you have your copy yet? If you’re in Toronto, catch up with me in-person soon at one of the events below–and if you’re not: I hope to bring the book outside of the city soon! If you can’t make, or can’t wait, you can of course get Modern Folklore any time from Little Ghosts, in-store at 930 Dundas St. W. or by ordering online. Chris and the gang have been nothing short of awesome with the design, editing and promo, and I’m so happy with the work we’ve done together. I really hope you’ll like it, too. See you soon!

Modern Folkore – Toronto Events!

Sat., 19 October, 7-10pm: J.R. McConvey’s False Bodies Launch Party. Mascot Brewery & Restaurant Etobicoke, 37 Advance Rd..

Mon., 21 October, 8-11pm: Modern Folklore x Metal Monday. Borrel, 1333 Danforth Ave.

Thu., 14 November, evening: Little Ghosts Autumn Launch Party. Little Ghosts Books, 930 Dundas Ave. W.

Sun., 17 November, 3-4pm: Meet The Presses Indie Lit Market: Cecil Community Centre, 58 Cecil St.

Sun., 1 December, 5-7pm (tentative): Bright Lit, Big City Reading Series. Hirut Café, 2050 Danforth Ave.

Hi! It’s been a minute (ed: three-and-a-half years). Since I last posted a few more things happened; most recently I retrained to become an ESL teacher, and Pauline and I had another baby. The “haunted apartment” novella I was on about last time has been picked up as well (hooray!), and will be published this fall with Little Ghosts Books, a new horror press from the indie bookstore of the same name in Toronto. But more about that another time. This post is about a different book, which I’ll be talking about in-person in Chatham on the evening of Tuesday, May 21, at 7:30pm.

The story of this new book goes something like this. In the summer of 2021, it became clear to me what I wanted to write next: a sprawling, multi-generational novel set in the Thames River country where I grew up, a sort of East of Eden for my Southwestern Ontario home. I was particularly interested in Cashmere, a village near the border between the counties of Middlesex and Kent that vanished after a devastating flood in the 1870s which, if there’s anything left of it, lies under land my father worked as a farm labourer when I was a kid. The idea was to carry a theme of economic struggle through the whole story, from clearing land in the early 1800s through the coming of the railway, the (very brief) oil boom, the late twentieth century manufacturing bust and the many licit and illicit ways livings have been scratched out in this part of the world. I was pretty sure the final act would include a trucker busted for smuggling at the Windsor-Detroit border and/or a well-liked pot grower losing his livelihood when cannabis was legalized.

I may yet write that book–however, before long, my trips to the Local History and Genealogy section of the Toronto Reference Library had changed from “background research” to just regular research, and the novel was shelved in favour of an actual history book. I discovered a book about Cashmere–Suckertown, by Guy St-Denis–that became a portal into the eventual project.

Suckertown begins with the story of a man named Singleton Gardiner, who in 1834 dammed the Thames for a sawmill at the site that would become Cashmere–and, it turns out, wrote one of the first accounts of life in the Talbot Settlement along Lake Erie, a letter to his brother-in-law in New York State about a harrowing journey across the water to Buffalo to buy flour, which was necessary because of the lack of mills in the area following the settlement’s devastation in the latter half of the War of 1812.

Singleton left Belfast in the fall of 1804, travelling with his wife, first daughter, and older brother, Thomas, this last being the person I immediately set out to learn more about when, in an endnote in Suckertown, St-Denis pointed out that a section related to Thomas’s military service had been omitted from all publications of Singleton’s letter. The original’s in the Talman Collection at my alma mater, Western University, and when things finally got back to normal after the pandemic I got a look at it.

Thomas, Singleton said, was arrested for leaving Canada during the War of 1812. But: late in his life, Thomas wrote a series of letters to government referring to his loyalty to church and king, his militia duty in 1813 when the Americans captured Fort George on the Niagara Frontier, and other parts of his life including military service in Ireland during the Rebellion of 1798, a protracted disagreement with the eventual Bishop of Quebec, Benjamin Cronyn, over land in London Township, and a spell teaching school in Howard Township, Kent County, that ended with him being essentially run out of town over religious differences. These same religious differences may also be the reason he fell out with his brother in the early 1820s, though he appears to have ended his life on land adjacent to Singleton’s, from which he pled annually to government for relief when, with another brutal winter coming, he was without provisions. He had probably had cholera in one or more of the epidemics of the 1830s, and no longer a young man, he almost certainly died between his last letter in 1839 and, given that he doesn’t appear in it, the first census of Upper Canada in 1842; if he’s buried beside his brother, on the Longwoods Road up the hill from the Thames, there’s no stone for him, so we don’t know.

I think it’s at once a spectacular and an ordinary life, and what happened next was, I began trying to corroborate Thomas’s accounts. Of course his life, life so many others in history, was not well documented, but there were some crumbs: militia lists, land petitions, one note in Elgin County history about his time teaching school there, a church record. In the last of these, we find his sponsorship of an 1824 baptism in Howard of four grandchildren of a man named John Parker Jr., who it appears lived in the same place as Thomas on three separate occasions–and, was also imprisoned during the War of 1812, on “suspicion of disaffection”, which I thought was a pretty good title for the project. Parker spent 10 months in jail at York before being released, seemingly without trial or even an actual charge, and after his move to Howard, he would be again imprisoned for a similar length of time for his role in the 1832 murder of his neighbour, Samuel Craford. So now I had two lives to corroborate, told very differently: while Thomas’s life is recounted in first person prose, probably about 60 pages of letters in all, Parker’s own words are almost never heard–there’s better record of him, but it’s almost exclusively found in the kinds of documents Bill Bryson called “bloodless” in his biography of William Shakespeare, which is to say land records, receipts, and the like.

My last three years have therefore included a handful of visits to the Archives of Ontario; dozens of emails to local historical societies, archivists and librarians,; a couple thousand kilometres travelled between Grimsby and Windsor (all from my Toronto homebase), and about ten times as many pages of online Library and Archives Canada microfilm. The story that emerged stretches along the Lake Erie shore, from the Niagara District to Elgin County to Howard before it ends in Mosa Township, Middlesex County, under that cornfield I walked with my dad when I was about ten.

If you’re in Chatham-Kent or able to get there, I hope you’ll join me Tuesday at the Chatham Cultural Centre to hear the whole thing. Here’s a link to the event details:

In the spring of 2014, I moved into an apartment and, within a month, began work on a novella–or, I’ve joked since then, a novel if it goes well–about a guy who moves into an apartment… and starts seeing things, or just one thing: a ghost or some other supernatural being, a woman who assaults him in the night.

That fall, a few things started happening for me. A publisher accepted Nobody Looks That Young Here in September. A different publisher accepted Hamburger in November. In between the two, I met my wife, Pauline. I bought a different apartment, and sold it again when we bought a house. We got married. The two books came out, but needed editing and promotion when they did. The house needed work (and still does). I got promoted at work. Our daughter was born and, just after starting her in daycare and regaining something like our previous routine, an actual, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me global pandemic threw us into a nineteen-week gauntlet of caring for her every day, full time, while both trying to also work full time from home.

Most of these interruptions were good things, and the bad ones weren’t as bad as what others have been through. What they meant, though, was that I put this manuscript down again and again, for weeks or months at a time, three times for so long that restarting actually meant starting over, junking anywhere from twenty to thirty-five thousand words each go-round.

There were periods where it felt stupid to carry on, to try again, to get this thing finished and right before letting myself try anything else, even a new short story. I didn’t start any new fiction for five years.

If confinement was previously just an occasional feeling about this project, the feeling’s been much more literal at times these last seven months–and it may have helped, because I finally got the damned thing done.

There were so many stops and starts, and total restarts, that until two weeks ago, I still couldn’t show a word of it to Pauline. But it’s as done as I can make it, now, and its title seems to be Modern Folklore. In the end its word count came out near the upper limit for a novella, but however it’s categorized, it feels both as short and as long as it needs to be, and I’m happy with it right now.

One challenge met, though, the next one begins, one that’s been in the back of my mind from the beginning: where do I submit this book?

There are a couple of literary and specialized presses I expect I’ll send it to, and a couple of contests, too, so here’s hoping. I’d love to see it published as a standalone.

But on the other hand, have you noticed novellas tend to get published in bunches?

And wouldn’t you know it, I recently had an idea for another, one I don’t think will take six years–in fact, I’ve signed up for National Novel Writing Month (#NaNoWriMo) for the first time. With thanks to my sister, Dawna, who reminded me just in time, as well as Pauline for her encouragement, I’m charging forward with the momentum and curious to see how far I get. Officially, the goal’s 50,000 words by the end of the month–the minimum length for a novel, apparently–and I feel pretty good about the 5,000 I have so far… William Faulkner claimed to have written As I Lay Dying in six weeks, so who knows, right?

If you’re also participating in #NaNoWriMo, good luck, and come find me here:

https://nanowrimo.org/participants/danielperry

And no matter who you are, you can follow my updates on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, too:

https://twitter.com/danielperrysays
https://www.facebook.com/danielperryfiction
https://www.instagram.com/danielperrysays

I hope to have more news to post soon.

Capping off an exciting 2018, I had the privilege of being interviewed by Christine Cowley for Storylines on Hunter’s Bay Radio, 88.7 FM in Muskoka. Hear the program below!

Nobody Looks That Young Here is in bookstores, and this weekend, so am I! If you’re in Toronto, come by Coles in the Beaches this Saturday between noon and 3pm to pick up your signed copy. Event details are here, hope you can make it!

Also, this month, I’m honored to be Open Book’s Writer in Residence! I’ll be posting on their blog all month long, and four posts are already there. Swing by and take a look, and if you see one you like and want to pass on, by all means please do tweet it or share it on Facebook. (They also did this fun interview with me at the start of the month.)

Third thing: I read at Word Up in Barrie on the 12th, and holy crap, we made the papers. Plus, here’s a photo from the organizers Linda Laforge and Aaron Reynolds!

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Thanks to so many of you who’ve come out to events so far or otherwise supported the new book!

My new collection of stories, Nobody Looks That Young Here, is coming to your town, to help you party it down… I look forward to seeing you on one (or more!) of the following dates!

Sunday, April 22, 4pm

Oakville, ON

Oakville Literary Café

Joshua Creek Heritage Art Centre

1086 Burnhamthorpe Rd. E.

Monday, May 7, 8pm

Toronto, ON

Words at the Wise Reading Series

Wise Bar

1007 Bloor St. W.

Sunday, May 27, 3:30pm

Toronto

Guernica Editions Spring Party

Supermarket

268 Augusta Ave.

Sunday, June 3, 7:30pm

Hamilton, ON

Lit Live Reading Series

The Staircase Theatre

27 Dundurn St. N.

Thursday, June 7, 8pm

Vancouver, BC

The Writer’s Studio Reading Series

Cottage Bistro

4470 Main St.

Tuesday, June 19, 7pm

Toronto

Toronto Lit Up presents: The Nobody Looks That Young Here Launch Party

Dora Keogh Irish Pub

141 Danforth Ave.

Thursday, July 12, 7pm

Barrie, ON

Word Up

Unity Market Café & Studios

25 Toronto St.

Tuesday, September 11, 7pm

Toronto

Boneshaker Reading Series

Bloor/Gladstone Branch, Toronto Public Library

1101 Bloor St. W.

 Check back here often, more dates will be added!

PRE-ORDER TODAY!

Amazon (U.S.) (Canada) (Other countries)

Indigo (Canada) / Barnes & Noble (U.S.)

or at an independent bookseller near you!

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This is Currie Township, Southwestern Ontario, where roads crumble, barns rot, jobs erode, marriages suffocate, and kids like Mike Carrion find themselves adrift in it all, scratching their way to adolescence before they either knuckle down or get out of here and never look back. Beginning with the Friday night car crash years before Mike was born, the 17 stories in Nobody Looks That Young Here follow the Carrion family and Currie Township in Mike’s words and those of his parents, friends, and others who’ve already left for the city well aware of what becomes of the people who don’t.

Nobody Looks That Young Here is a book that counts Lives of Girls and Women, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Winesburg, Ohio and the novels of S.E. Hinton as ancestors, and it includes stories published in Exile: The Literary Quarterly (2012 Carter V. Cooper Prize finalist, “Mercy”), The Dalhousie Review, The Prairie Journal of Canadian Literature, Great Lakes Review, echolocation, White Wall Review and elsewhere.

What people are saying about Nobody Looks That Young Here:

Nobody Looks That Young Here hooks the reader from page one. Perry deftly shows us the beauty and frailty of human connection through ordinary lives and struggles with poverty, village claustrophobia, and dreams of escape. This book of poignant linked stories made me want to get into the car, travel along Highway 402, and find Perry’s small town.

—Farzana Doctor, author of All Inclusive

Happy new year! I started my 2017 in-studio at CJRU 1280 AM in downtown Toronto, where Jacky Tuinstra Harrison hosted me for an interview on All My Books about all things Hamburger, short story, CanLit and more. Listen in below!

If you've been waiting to sink your teeth into Hamburger, now's a great time! The publisher, Thistledown Press, is offering a 30% discount all week long. Details here!

Hamburger
Daniel Perry