Amal El-Mohtar's Blog

Dear Readers,

One month and two letters ago, I wrote,

Just one more bout of travel in two weeks, for two weeks, and then I'll let winter settle over me and put me to bed.

I hadn't intend to prophesy my return so literally. After wending a warm and wonderful way through Britain, France and Spain, I returned to Canada on November 9 to find the season's first snowfall blanketing everything, and wreaking havoc on the last leg home, the less of which is said the better.

But the trip itself was utterly be...

I'm sitting at a hotel room desk in Barcelona, with 52 minutes before I need to head downstairs and hail a taxi to the airport. 18 minutes ago this seemed like an abundance of time, but now I write in haste, already feeling light and memory slipping away from me, and I want to pin them in place with what words I can while my mind teems with language and awe.

Dear Friends,

It's the kind of autumn day I associate with September more than October: warm in the sun but brisk in the shade, trees still green and leafy with some vivid exceptions in scarlet and gold. There's a strong breeze that scatters the petal-like leaves of honey locust through the air like a bright rain of coins, and everything smells good and dry, but without the twist of smoke and snow that heralds Halloween for me.

The year's running away from me. (I nearly wrote running away with me...

Dear Friends,

I've been trying to send a newsletter about What I've Done This Summer for... The entirety of the summer. It's now past summer! Labour Day is in the rearview mirror! And because one of the things that happened during the summer was a lot of dry weather, the neighbours' maple has been dropping bright red leaves into our yard for a couple of weeks now, so that when I sit in the garden to write – a thing I've been doing, blessedly, miraculously, for about a month – it already smells of...

Dear Friends,

I'm so excited to share the cover of my upcoming short story collection! It's called Seasons of Glass and Iron, after my 2016 short story that went on to win the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards. Here she is!

It's designed by Spencer Fuller at Faceout Studio, who also did the cover for The River Has Roots. It's due out on March 24, 2026, and you can pre-order it now!

This will collect the stories I'm proudest of from the last fifteen years or so, which have been scattered across anthol...

Dear Friends,

I got back to Ottawa from the UK last night, having spent a wonderful couple of weeks doing events and catching up with family. A more fulsome recap of those things is forthcoming. For now, though, I just wanted to remind folks of imminent The River Has Roots events in Canada!

OTTAWA
May 3, 2025
8:30 PM
Library and Archives Canada, 395 Wellington Street
with Suyi Davies Okungbowa

I'm really excited to be part of the Ottawa International Writers Festival, and to chat with Suyi here at hom...

Dear Friends,

A curiosity about Ghost, this newsletter software I use, is that every time I log in to write something in it I'm haunted by past selves.

From my dashboard, I click on "posts," and there appears a list of posts begun but not finished; I've just counted and there are 27 drafts, the earliest going back to 2013 (an artifact of having merged my website blog with the newsletter). If I click on any of them, I somewhat collapse the wave-form; the draft will be freshly dated to the moment I ...

Apologies if you're getting this newsletter twice – it seems to have had a lot of delivery issues, from turning up in spam to being delivered hours late to simply not being delivered at all. We've tweaked some settings to hopefully avoid this happening in future; to be extra safe and never miss a letter, you could add newsletter@amalelmohtar.com to your contacts list.

Last night I slept in my own bed for the first time in a month.

I keep repeating the tour stops like a s...

From where I'm sitting – on a dear friend's couch in Colorado – I both can and can't see a mountain. Thick, flurrying snow obscures it from view every few minutes, catching on tall, sturdy pines, sleeving their sharp green fingers in white. But the snow paused long enough for a Steller's Jay to come up to the window, chuck-chuck-chucking at us. I've wanted to see one for years; to have one come to me like this, meeting me halfway after all the travel I've done to come to it, feels precious.

Yest...

Friends, readers, fellow travellers,

I'm writing from a dear friend's dining room table in St Louis, where I'm listening to sparrows, petting a perfect orange cat, and catching my breath. From March 4 to March 8 I was in a different city every day: New York, Portland (Maine), Chapel Hill, Cincinnati, and finally here, meeting booksellers and readers, reconnecting with friends and colleagues, some of whom I hadn't seen since before the pandemic. The years dissolved between us like sugar. On Friday...