I’ll be participating at the second annual Chilliwack Book Festival taking place on Saturday, May. 23.
It looks like a fun event and I’ll have lots of books and other little treasures for sale!
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Poet Laureate for Chilliwack
I have the honour of being the inaugural Poet Laureate for the Chilliwack Arts Council. The announcement took place last week.
Here is an excerpt:
The Chilliwack Arts Council is proud to announce the appointment of Taryn Hubbard as Chilliwack’s inaugural Poet Laureate. This milestone marks the launch of the Chilliwack Arts Council’s new Poet Laureate program, a dedicated initiative to raise awareness of the city’s vibrant literary arts community and celebrate the writers who call Chilliwack home.
As part of the role, I will be responsible for writing 4 to 6 poems:
As Poet Laureate, Hubbard will compose four original poems between April 2026 and April 2027, each offering a thoughtful reflection on the issues and observations of her environment and the wider world. The poems will be published and shared through the Chilliwack Arts Council’s website, newsletter, and social media channels, bringing literary art directly to the community.
I am looking forward to this! More to come on the experience…
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Poetry in the library
A few years ago, two of my poems were selected for an ongoing Public Art project by the City of Surrey. One of those poems, “This Place,” has been installed at the beautiful Clayton Library.
I had the chance to check it out and did a quiet reading of the poem. Check it out.
Video performance
Close up of the text
This Place
A streetlight to see
a road to travel
a bike lane to ride
a crosswalk to stroll
a plot to plant
a hand to hold
a friend to meet
a bird to hear
a dog to walk
this place to call home.
– Taryn Hubbard
About the poem
This Place, conjures a connection to place through its description of pathways, growth, and creaturely encounters. Installed within a small study nook at Clayton Library, it offers an invitation to sit and contemplate what makes a place a home.
Learn more about Clayton Library.
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New book has arrived!
A wonderful moment happened last week – my box containing Beautiful Unknown Future arrived in the mail! It was a hefty box, one that felt so good to see. Thank you to Talonbooks for everything they did to get these poems into the world.
Unboxing video
With the books here, that means this book is available to order now and it will show up at your home ready-to-read promptly.
Check out these links or get in touch with your favourite bookstore to order a copy today:
The launch event is coming up on May 1. Can’t wait!
Yay! The day is almost here.
Talonbooks Spring 2026 Launch
Martha Lou Henley Rehearsal Hall
1955 McLean Drive
Vancouver, BC
May 1, 2026
Doors open at 7:00 p.m.; readings begin at 7:30 p.m.
About the book
Beautiful Unknown Future by Taryn Hubbard is a fresh collection of ecopoetry that reflects with candour and wit on the precarious moment we share with the nonhuman world. Haunted by the looming shadows of our compounding crises, Beautiful Unknown Future layers the chaos of domestic life with the detachment of the corporate environment to examine the joys and complexities of these competing spaces, looking critically to a future centred around tenderness, resilience, and love. Order your copy here.
My latest book, Beautiful Unknown Future, came from an interest to document parts of my everyday life and thinking while I was in the early days of raising my children. While these poems aren’t completely autobiographical in a traditional sense, they bring together aspects of my daily life from 2021 to 2025.
As a global pandemic and record-breaking heat and rain not only made the headlines but were experienced on an individual and personal level day after day, the unprecedented began to slowly feel familiar and I wanted to explore those early feelings.
The book came together quickly, but quietly.
A poems here and there, and then I realized I was working on something that could be book length. When Talonbooks editor Catriona Strang emailed me to check in one day, I mentioned the work in progress and we set a deadline when I’d send her a draft. This deadline helped me start to develop the poems further and to start shaping them into a collection. I was lucky to get that email.
After I published Desire Path, I wasn’t sure if I’d ever write a poetry book again. That book took so many years to write and took on many different phases of my life and craft, that I didn’t think I could do it again.
What a surprise when the pieces in Beautiful Unknown Future just started to be. I enjoyed writing it and the process flowed really well, through all parts of editing. The first notes from Catriona that shaped a better first draft, and then substantive edits with Stephen Collis and then copyedits and final tinkering with ryan fitzpatrick.
The book is now available for pre-order and is one of the many lovely books in the spring line-up. While it has been a journey to get to this point, it also feels like it has come fast.
Ordering can take place now.
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Reflecting on the year
2025 was the year I discovered I really like to explore castles, and read about history and local lore. I loved these types of activities when I was younger, but over the years I didn’t make time for it. Luckily, this year brought it all back.
It was also the year I published my first novel, and edited and shaped my second poetry collection that will be out in the spring. I was able to stick to a writing routine that worked for me, and arranged my office so it really was a room of my own that I enjoyed working in. I call it my “everything room.” It has my stationary bike, my guest bed, my desk, and a wall of books.
I took a floatplane for the first time to Salt Spring Island in April. When I took it again in November, I felt like a pro! There was something special about stepping down from a small floatplane onto a dock and being right in the harbour of quaint Ganges.
But let’s start from the beginning…
Writing
Once I became a mother all those years ago, I felt a large shift within me. I was responsible for someone so small, so young. Minutes old, days old, months old. It was then I felt that life wasn’t this long journey, but something that was finite. It was with the thought of finiteness that I started to take my own routines and ambitions as a writer seriously. This could have also been that as a new mother, my focus areas changed and I didn’t have as much time to work on my writing. That made a sustainable writing routine all the more important.
This is to say that I am happy to report that I kept my writing routine going in 2025, well pretty much. I engaged in both the substantive and copy edit of my next book, Beautiful Unknown Future and worked away on the draft of my next novel. The substantive and copyedit of Beautiful Unknown Future was a great experience. I worked with poets Stephen Collis and ryan fitzpatrick. They both read my manuscript with care and gave me valuable feedback.
The publishing of my first novel took happened in April 2025, and it was quite surreal. I did some readings and book signings, and took part in a panel at the Fraser Valley Writers’ Festival (hosted by the University of the Fraser Valley). It was so much fun!
Travel
Travel began in 2024 and continued into 2025, with a dream trip to Scotland, England, and Ireland in the spring. We took trains, planes, and Ubers. It was so much fun. I soaked up the history and enjoyed trying new food and explored so many amazing shops and bookstores.
Closer to home, the travel experiences continued with a family trip to Victoria where we had a great time enjoying the ferry, the views, and quaintness of downtown Victoria.
I also ended up on Salt Spring Island not one but twice. It’s a beautiful little spot.
Next year
With a new year just around the corner, I’m looking forward to bringing much of what worked well from 2025 forward. This means keep a writing schedule and being gentle with myself if I can’t keep it up sometimes. There are seasons for generating and there are seasons for rest and reflection, this I’ve learned all too well over the years.
I’ll be happy to launch my new book in the spring, and hopefully finish up my novel project. Perhaps there will be a few special travel experiences as well. Oh, and I’m sure I’ll read a bunch of great books.
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Fraser Valley Writers Festival
The Fraser Valley Writers Festival is an annual two-day literary festival featuring keynote addresses, readings, panel discussions, writing workshops, live podcast recordings, and more, hosted at the Abbotsford campus of the University of the Fraser Valley. It’s free and open to all.
I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been invited to participate this year! I have been commissioned to produce a new piece on the theme “Sound” in the afternoon, and I’ll be chairing a panel on the theme “Silence” in the morning.
Here’s my schedule:
Saturday, November 8 at the University of the Fraser Valley’s Abbotsford campus:
11:15 AM – Panel 1 – “Silence”
Joseph Dandurand
Daniela Elza
Jen Sookfong Lee
Christina Myers
Chair: Taryn Hubbard
2:45 PM – Panel 2 – “Sound”
Kayla Czaga
Taryn Hubbard
Heather Ramsay
Nick Thran
Chair: Jen Sookfong Lee
There’s more
There’s a lot of great things happening at the festival this year, with a keynote speech by Charles Demers and Evelyn Lau scheduled for Friday, November 7. There are also workshops and a live podcast recording! There will also be books and conversation. It’s definitely my kind of event, and I’m looking forward to it.
Now to write my piece on “sound”…
Categories
Everyday Gothic
The following essay appeared in the summer 2025 edition of WRITE magazine.
When my daughter and I visited an eerily empty mall when she was a toddler, she did something wonderful: she started joyfully running. Suddenly, the cavernous corridors of the empty mall became a much-needed playground on a rainy day.
Once I caught up with her, we walked hand-in-hand through the hallways of the mall, past the shops and food court restaurants, and alongside the thick maintenance doors that remained firmly shut to the outside world. Many of the stores in this mall sat vacant with yellowing paper covering their windows, so it was no wonder few people were there that day. We were drawn to the indoor space, but as we walked along more and more empty storefronts, I couldn’t shake the feeling that dead malls were creepy.
My first jobs as a teenager, then later as a university student, were in malls and they’re spine-tingling places after hours. Loading bays with janky doors, dark and windy maintenance routes, shadowy corridors, and, yes, small furry creatures scurrying about. I worked at sporting goods stores and home stores, and I remember the chill that ran down my spine as I walked alone through the parking lot each night to toss the garbage in the dumpster and how the rattle of the heavy lid slamming down echoed through the darkness.
While my daughter and I wandered, the dead mall as a mysterious setting got my imagination going. Was the fading mall with a high vacancy rate kind of gothic?
An old castle or a crumbling mansion. A woman in distress. A paranormal vision (or two), and the dangerous secret shrouding the mystery behind it all. The elements of a gothic story have haunted the pages of novels for hundreds of years.
Could a mall become one of those elements too?
When I set out to write my debut novel, The Very Good Best Friend, the dead mall became more than just the chilling contemporary gothic setting for Carolyn’s journey from uptown New Westminster to an imagined town in the East Kootenays called Valley Falls. I began to see how the mall was not only a setting I found engaging but a vehicle to explore themes of generational wealth, grief, family history, and friendship. The abandoned mall Carolyn is searching for has been reborn as a mysterious intentional community run by a billionaire where all community members have the gift of student loan forgiveness. The catch is, they must work at this hidden mall under mysterious circumstances and go no-contact with all outsiders.
Along the way, Carolyn is confronted by ghosts of her own that she must face to make way for her growth. When she begins seeing something important from her past, she presses through the vision to focus on finding her friend. However, she can’t run from what she’s seeing, no matter how many crumbling mall corridors she passes through.
It wasn’t until the second or third draft that I even realized I was writing a contemporary gothic novel. Those first drafts were about getting the journey down on paper and the traces of a story arc. My more tactile memories of the mall all added to the atmosphere of the setting as I wrote: windy maintenance routes that were easy to get lost in, huge, wrap-around parking lots that went on and on, and the tacky mall décor that was always covered in dust. These details added the texture and nuance I needed to make Carolyn’s exploration of the mall authentic and spooky. Animals lurk in the rafters and decades old food court menus untouched by inflation litter the floors.
Even though I found old dead malls creepy, remembering the joy of my daughter running and using the empty space of the mall stayed with me as I wrote. If an empty mall could be a modern day stand in for a haunted castle in a contemporary gothic, then maybe it could also be something else, something more, and that “something” is what I set out to discover in The Very Good Best Friend.
When I published my first book, Desire Path, in late 2020, we were well into the pandemic, so in-person events were rare if not non-existent. In fact, I don’t recall if I had the chance to do anything in-person. All my readings were online, which I was grateful for because I really wanted to read from my first book!
Fast forward to this past spring with a debut novel set to publish, I started to think about author visits at bookstores. I’d seen other writers do this and I wondered if this could be a path for me as well.
First a few things to set the stage. One thing that may be surprising for people who aren’t published writers is how beyond the joy and torture of writing, editing and publishing books, authors are often also their own publicists and business managers. At least that’s how it’s been for me. In fact, once you receive a contract from a publisher, there is often a document that the writer must fill out called something innocuous like “author questionaire.” In this questionaire, among many other things, are questions related to your so-called marketing platform. In this section, the questions seek to understand if you have any networks, channels or special opportunities that may help connect your books to readers.
Well, let’s just say, when I got to this section of the questionaire, I felt a sense of overwhelm and a cold dose of reality trickling over me. What became clear was that between the pandemic, having two kids, changing jobs, moving up the highway to the edge of the Lower Mainland that I was a bit…alone and without many marketing opportunities.
I was able to skirt around this fact until one day in the new year an email came from my publisher asking me for a list of the book activities I planned to do, so it was time to roll up my sleeves and get serious.
This is what I did:
#1. Set some goals for myself
Once I got over the mortification that I lacked anything near a marketing platform, I got down to work to create one. As a communications and public engagement pro by day, I knew I needed to start by creating a basic strategy for myself. I’ve found that when faced with the feeling of being overwhelmed, it’s best to think about what I do have. In this case, it was communications, engagement and marketing skills.
A central part of my strategy were my goals. What did I want from this book? What did I want to do? Once I took time to think about this, I was able to create five goals that felt authentic to me and ones that I felt driven to accomplish.
Taking the time to set goals is time well spent before diving into the strategies and tactics of how you’re going to get there.
#2. Drafted my pitch
“Author bookstore visits” was one of the tactics outlined in my marketing strategy. One of the first things I did was make a list of all the bookstores that I might like to visit, starting with my favourites first. Once I had the list, I drafted a pitch email. While most of the emails took somewhat of the same form, I personalized each of them and that ended up being a good strategy.
In my email, I introduced myself, I shared a link to my book in their catalogue, and shared that I’d love to visit their store sometime in the spring. I also attached a poster that outlined a few more highlights about the book (see a sample in this post).
I heard back from most of the bookstores I contacted and pretty much all except one was a good fit. The one I decided not to work with wanted me to consign my book in her shop, which I wasn’t into because The Very Good Best Friend is distributed by the lovely people at Literary Press Group of Canada. Oh well!
The other stores were a go…and then I was onto promotion.
#3. Promotion, promotion, promotion
Once I had the visits booked, the self-doubt sank in. What if no one came? What if people just walked by without engaging with me? I didn’t think anyone would be making a viral video of me sitting lonely in a bookstore…so it was back to work for me. Just like writing, editing and publishing, getting the visits booked was only half the job, the next thing I needed to turn my attention to was promotion.
While the bookstore will use their channels to get the word out about the event, such as the events page on their website, in-store posters, newsletters and social media, an author should extend the efforts by using their own channels as well. If you have friends or family in the community where the bookstore resides, this is a good time to reach out to them and invite them to the event.
Here’s what I did:
- Added the events to my website
- Shared them on my social media
- Visited the bookstore beforehand to capture content for an authentic promo (see video below)
- Reached out to friends and family near by inviting them to the event
#4. Prepared for the day
The bookstores I worked with would set up the table, chairs, and tablecloth. They would also have the books there–this is a big one. I checked in with both of my contacts a few days before the event to make sure we had everything in order.
When it comes to curating your table, keep in mind the size. At one of my events, the table was a luxurious 6 feet, and at another one it was a small garden table. They both had my books on them and that’s what mattered to me most.
A few things I had with me:
- Pens! I had a couple of nice pens to use to sign the books
- Water bottle, coffee, and treats for the readers and the booksellers
- Book displays to prop up the book so it’s easy to see
- Small posters with easy-to-read features about the book
- A cute “Reading Room” sign (you can see it in the very first photo in this post)
- My journal (to keep myself busy during down times)
- A plan to share Stories on my meta accounts to keep the promotion going
#5. Created speaking notes
While I wasn’t speaking from a script, it helped to have a few things in mind when people came by the table. Remember, most of them didn’t know me and didn’t know my book. I had less than 30 seconds to engage them. Having a few conversation starters really helped!
Of course one of the main things you need to rehearse is what your book is about – what’s the hook!
For The Very Good Best Friend, it was a variation of this:
The Very Good Best Friend is psychological thriller about a woman who sets out on a journey to rescue her best friend who has dropped everything to join a secret intentional community run out of an abandoned, desolate mall in the countryside. As she gets closer, the she uncovers deeper and darker secrets hidden within its decaying walls.
It worked!
#6. Enjoyed the moment
Once the visits got into full swing, I enjoyed myself. It’s a wonderful thing to be able to visit a bookstore with your very own book. I have to say, it was pretty cool!
#7. Thank you’s and wrap ups
My author visits to date have taken place in independent bookstores. This are places I love and am happy to support. I always made sure to thank the hosts and to share a few parting shots on my social as an expression of my gratitude.
A final word
I enjoyed doing this round of author visits, but I will say that they do take time. As a writer who works full time and has a young family, I had to be selective about how many I booked for myself as I had to factor in the travel, the time, and the preparation & promotional work. All in all it was a good experience.
As I get ready to promote my next book, I look forward to organizing a few more author visits then!