This 2019 memoir by author, advocate, and storyteller Maia Kobabe (e/em/eir) is a tender journey through childhood to adolescence, exploring gender expression and the anxieties of growing up. It’s a beautiful walk with time and acceptance of oneself—a teacher, a guide, and at times, a friend.

We see it time and time again in our studio. The kids who come to see us often have this perception that music is magic, that it can’t be understood. Learning about melody and harmony, chord progressions, and just how simple the construction of their favourite music is, a lot of the time, helps to break down that mysticism, making learning the language of music more accessible.

The brilliance of Justene Dion-Glowa’s poem shines through their use of white space on the page, which is one of my favourite craft tools in poetry. In “half-blood”, space—including caesuras, stanza breaks, line breaks, and indents, for example—works as hard as words, enacting the feeling of being ‘halved’ alongside a sort of sinister whiteness.