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The Word On The Street has been renowned for the quality and diversity of its event programming and our 2026 festival promises to offer the best so far. Check out our schedule for Saturday, September 19, 2026!
The Boys meets Assistant to the Villain in the electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench. Filled with a queer and neurodiverse cast, Villain asks the question: what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse.
The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.
But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.
Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.
The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she’ll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.
Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the Author of Hench (William Morrow, 2020), a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains. The direct sequel, Villian (William Morrow, May 2026) continues the story of the Auditor as she fights institutionalized superheroism and goes on the exact opposite of a redemption arc. Hench was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. Natalie is the Narrative Director at Double Rex Studios, currently at work on their debut title, Thumbsplitter. Her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award for Innovation in Experience Design, and her work with Digital Howard as part of the social media team for the television show Wynonna Earp won Best Cross-Platform Project – Fiction at the 2017 Canadian Screen Awards. Natalie’s work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game story bibles, and weirder things classified as “interactive experiences.” She is (unfortunately) the author of two books of experimental poetry: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry; and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie plays a lot of TTRPGs, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four morally bankrupt cats.
Building a Sustainable Kitchen is the thoroughly researched and realistic step-by-step guide every climate-conscious cook needs to make the heart of their home more planet-friendly.
When Canadian food writer Naomi Hansen first started a “sustainability” blog, she was overwhelmed by conflicting advice, shiny advertisements, unrealistic recommendations, and a culture of shame. Building a Sustainable Kitchen is her antidote: a solutions-focused, no-nonsense guide designed to help you cut through disinformation and greenwashing to make your kitchen truly sustainable, one step at a time.
In each chapter, Naomi invites you on her journey to build a planet-friendly kitchen, with help from her husband Paul and their dog Rue. Drawing on wisdom from hundreds of expert interviews, academic studies, books, and more, as well as on the author’s own experience as a regular Canadian in her humble kitchen, Building a Sustainable Kitchen demystifies the science behind how what we do in the kitchen every day affects our Earth, and most importantly, shows you what you can do about it.
Each chapter contains a wealth of flexible recommendations for achievable, evidence-based changes that make a real impact for the planet. Chapters on reducing food waste, understanding plant-based, local, seasonal, and organic eating, and gardening teach us about the food on our plates. Chapters on the potential and pitfalls of composting and recycling, learning what it really means to send waste to a landfill, and navigating the nitty gritty of disposable and reusable items help us reduce garbage and grow toward a circular economy. From water use, to cleaning, to choosing appliances, to our beloved coffees and teas, Building a Sustainable Kitchen leaves no stone unturned. This heartfelt, practical guide proves that building a sustainable kitchen is not just possible, but that it can also be joyful and transformative.
Naomi Hansen is an award-winning author. Her debut book, Only in Saskatchewan: Recipes & Stories from the Province’s Best-Loved Eateries, was published by TouchWood Editions in 2022. Naomi is the recipient of two 2023 Saskatchewan Book Awards for Only in Saskatchewan: the First Book Award and the Book of the Year Award. She has contributed to many publications, including Chatelaine and Canadian Living, and is currently the Saskatoon Bites food columnist for CBC Saskatchewan. Her second book, Building a Sustainable Kitchen: A Practical Guide to Prioritizing the Planet from the Heart of Your Home, was published by TouchWood Editions in April 2026. She lives on Treaty 6 Territory in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with her partner, Paul, and their dog, Rue.
For fans of The Last Bookstore on Earth and Compound Fracture, a heart-pounding rural horror following a genderqueer teen who survives a near-apocalypse, only to be hunted by a mysterious monster whose very existence is entwined with their own.
From a breathtaking new voice in YA, this story is for anyone haunted by the sins of past generations—and fighting to right them.
When Cedar was a child, fragmented, tortured souls woke up in the world’s most complex machines, destroying them and pushing technology back decades. A fall. The Fall, some said, and they called it Autumn.
Ten years later, following a family tragedy, Cedar moves to the nowhere town of Sawblade Lake only to find something hunting them. A long, bent shadow that reeks like rot and has the mouth of a deep crevice. It’s after Cedar, and it’s willing to go to any lengths to break them, including preying on Cedar’s new queer family.
The closer it circles, the more it seems to weave through Cedar’s whole life. It might stretch back to their mother’s gruesome, inexplicable death, to the murk of their missing family, to the house they grew up in. Back and back and back to the first day of Autumn.
Cedar thought they understood how their world had changed, but they’re far from dredging the bottom.
CALE PLETT is a nonbinary, genderfluid writer who lives on Treaty One Territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba. They grew up on a dead-end gravel road and used to get lost in the woods for fun, scary, abandoned cabin and all. Now they write YA novels that span everything from high school rock bands to nightmares in the woods to reality TV gone wrong. They are the author of the queer YA romance Wavelength, an Indie Next pick, and YA horror novel The Saw Mouth, with another standalone YA horror novel, Stranglehold, coming in fall 2027.
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In this unique and captivating new book, a curious stone age hunter-gatherer child follows Grandmother on an unusual hunting expedition into a deep cave. Overcoming fear of being swallowed by the dark, the child experiences the painted animals that spring to life on the cave walls and takes part in painting a new family story, leaving his marks in the form of handprints. Inspired by this magical experience, the child chooses to become a story hunter, carrying the community’s stories as they move on.
Using her signature Plasticine artwork, award-winning author and artist Barbara Reid delivers a beautiful tale of discovery and the roots of creativity.
As a child, Barbara Reid found herself recreating pictures from books she was reading when the illustrations in those books didn’t match what she had envisioned. She also hated parting with the characters she had gotten to know, so she would keep them alive by illustrating them in her own stories.
She had never thought about illustration as a career, but as fate would have it, one day while she was in high school she passed a room that had information about the Ontario College of Art. It inspired her, and she went on to study at the college.
When Barbara illustrated her first picture book, Mustard by Betty Waterton, she was her own harshest critic. She enjoyed illustrating the book but thought there was room for improvement. It wasn’t long before she had the opportunity to work on The New Baby Calf by Edith Newlin Chase, the first book to feature her Plasticine sculpture illustrations. Now, more than twenty titles later, her work in such picture books as The Party, The Subway Mouse, Read Me a Book, Perfect Snow, Picture a Tree, Sing a Song of Mother Goose and Welcome, Baby is immediately recognizable to children and parents across the country. Be sure to check out her latest book, a collaboration with author Emil Sher, entitled I Love You More. Barbara has received every major Canadian children’s book award, and in 2013 she received two more outstanding honours: she was named a member of the Order of Canada and received the Vicky Metcalf Award for Literature for Young People. In 2015, Barbara became the Honorary Chair of Family Literacy Day, held every year on January 27.
Each Barbara Reid illustration starts as a pencil drawing. Then Barbara moulds out her drawing using Plasticine. You might think that her illustrations would be delicate, but they’re actually rather heavy. Some of her final pictures weigh up to three kilograms! And how does she make sure the illustrations aren’t damaged? She stores each one in its own pizza box. (Which makes you wonder how much pizza she actually eats!).
Barbara even describes her artwork as being “like a pizza” because her images are created by adding layer upon layer of Plasticine and detail after detail to construct the completed work. She uses her fingers and fingernails as well as sticks, pins, combs, wires, cloth and other items to help shape and build each part of the picture. If she makes a mistake, she just peels off the offending piece and starts again! She also mixes her own colours and adds materials such as silver paint or glitter to create special effects.
Each image takes a long time to complete — large two-page spreads can take more than seven intense days to finish. Then Barbara’s husband, Ian Crysler, photographs the illustrations. It’s these photographs that appear in the finished book.
When she is not busy writing or illustrating books, Barbara visits schools and libraries, where she is thrilled to meet young students and see the wonderful artwork they create. Many children and classes send her letters and photos of their art — a selection of which are featured on her website, www.barbarareid.ca.
Barbara Reid is married and has two daughters. She lives in Toronto, Ontario.
Finnian Burnett is a Canadian author and speaker whose work explores intersection of identity, mental health, and queer joy. Their work has appeared on CBC Books, Writer’s Digest, Geist, Blank Spaces Magazine, Pulp Literature, and more. Finnian is a 2023 and 2026 recipient of Canada Council for the Arts grants and a finalist in the 2023 CBC nonfiction prize. Their latest flash fiction collection, Redshirts Sometimes Survive is a love letter to the Trek fandom, stories of collective healing and found family. When not teaching or writing, Finnian can usually be found planning their next trip to Scotland or boldly going to writing conferences and festivals with an ever-present cup of tea.
