On the evening of October 1st, local author Andrew Forbes celebrated the release of his latest novel, The Diapause with a launch event at Take Cover Books healthily attended by students and community members. Forbes was joined alongside American poet Maria Williams and Trent University’s own Professor Rob Winger, all reading excerpts inspired by Forbes’ latest.

From Invisible Books, The Diapause is Forbes’ first foray into speculative fiction. The novel details ten-year-old Gabe and his family’s cabin retreat during the COVID-19 pandemic, and imagines episodically his life for over forty years thereafter. The novel stems from an idea that “sat dormant” in Forbes’ mind for a couple of years, initially writing the first section as a stand-alone project before being urged by his editor to venture further into Gabe’s life. 

The Diapause is Forbes’ second release of this year following McCurdle’s Arm in July. The latter is a historical fiction entry in the Peterborough-based author’s bibliography of sports writing, which also boasts acclaimed essay collections The Only Way is The Steady Way and The Utility of Boredom. 

Having come, having eaten, the launch kicked off with a brief introduction from Take Cover co-owner Andrew Fitzpatrick, thanking all attendees and authors present before welcoming Professor Rob Winger from the English Department of Trent University. 

Winger opened the gathering with a selection of poems, two of which were taken from his 2021 collection It Doesn’t Matter What We Meant. Winger is the author of three poetry collections, with his poems frequently grappling with modernity–he not only explores our juxtaposition with the natural world, but interrogates that relationship with images of “dirty cobalt” and “ancient fluids.”

After sharing published and unpublished works with attendees, Winger deferred to poet Maria Williams, who thanked Winger and expressed gratitude to Forbes, her host in Canada while both Forbes and Williams tour select Ontario bookstores.

Williams shared excerpts from her forthcoming collection White Doe, which follows her father’s slow descent into dementia. The collections’ poems blur perspective and unify the characters of the book as one voice, describing the trauma of losing one’s identity. Williams expertly rendered the grotesqueness of her family’s shared reality through her selections, finishing with her imagining of “my father as carcass, my mother as fly.” 

Following Williams’ conclusion, Andrew Forbes began his reading by thanking the poets before him and Andrew and Sean Fitzpatrick of Take Cover Books, as he impressed the importance of a space like the bookstore, which Peterborough had been “sorely lacking.”

Forbes introduced The Diapause as a “weird book,” alluding to the partitioned process of writing the novel. 

“I regret to inform you that this is a pandemic novel,” Forbes chuckled as he described the book’s structure to attendees. 

The first half details Gabe’s familial retreat to a dilapidated cabin, having escaped Peterborough in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the second half follows Gabe well into late adulthood, a future marred by the effects of climate change and humanity’s adaptation. 

Fiction is not new for Forbes, having published two story collections as well as McCurdle’s Arm, but the speculative nature of The Diapause is.

“The future is a really freaking hard moving target to hit,” he explained. 

Forbes recalled having taken a course in university devoted to the history of science, in which the professor proclaimed how the course was “entirely about the ideas that were wrong.”

“And that's what the history of exploration is. That's what the history of science fiction is,” Forbes remarked. 

Before reading selected sections from The Diapause, Forbes shed light on the process of writing and creating the novel, and how it carried the emotional task of reassuring himself that there would indeed be a future in the midst of a global pandemic, where people would “continue to be in community and strive to make happy lives.”

“I needed that,” he said. “The book was an act of making that happen, in my mind.”

Forbes then proceeded to share his first section, a memory of young Gabe sharing a nightly moment with his father under a vast starry sky, immersed in the remoteness of the cabin they waited out the pandemic in. Through Forbes, Gabe’s astute observations allow this passage to become a tangible summertime memory, with its moon “shimmered bright and lewd, and the air throned with stale warmth.”

The second section Forbes shared jumped thirty years in future, head-first into a episode of Gabe’s forties where a prospective reunion between himself and an estranged relative’s widow looms all too large, happening amid a future Toronto consumed by a permanent torrential downpour. Gabe’s future is wet, imposing, and sleek, with its uncertain futurity characterised by a disaster-ready CN Tower.

“I could see the top of one tower, a warning light flashing rhythmically from its highest point, and in the screenless surface of another I could just make out the reflection of the CN Tower and its dancing coloured lights. The red strobe atop its spire had long ago been surpassed on the skyline, but despite the recent completion of its years-long tornado-proofing retrofit, the building's iconic shape remained.”

The Diapause continues Forbes’ fascinating throughline of utilising certain Canadian locales—especially Peterborough—to situate his stories in a grounded, real-world location for readers that “get it.” 

“It's what I know best at this point,” Forbes told Arthur after the reading. “It just seems to me a really good, slightly quirky, but also in some ways slightly generic Ontario town.”

“It’s also very plastic in that sense. You can invent and change a lot, and it is a sturdy stand-in for a certain segment of Canadian life,” he added.

Forbes also wanted to explore a certain thematic through the progression of Gabe’s life, especially the unknowable interiority of family life, all on the backdrop of a future world drastically affected by the climate crisis. 

“I wanted to draw out themes of climate change and the inescapable shifts that are going to happen in our lives,” Forbes told Arthur. “I don't want to overuse the word trauma, but the ways in which the experience of the pandemic and lockdown seemed likely to me to reverberate in people’s lives for decades.” 

“I think that gave me licence to throw myself into stuff I hadn’t done before, which was terrifying and very exciting,” he told Arthur. “It was like giving myself permission to range freely in fields I’d never before visited, and it was a blast!”

Forbes added that despite the nature of this speculative experiment, he was very comfortable in writing this kind of fiction as a result of the support system surrounding this project, comforted by the knowledge that those within it would tell him “the truthful merit of something.” 

“It didn’t feel like a risk because I knew that I had people,” he said. “I had a series of checks and balances that wouldn’t let me put out something that was absolutely horrible.”

Forbes expressed gratitude for Invisible Publishing’s willingness to release two of his fictions within the same year, feeling “lucky to have people willing to take that risk and put things out in succession.” 

After a successful year of acclaimed releases, Andrew Forbes continues to impress readers with his breadth and approach to not only fiction, but to everything he writes, all while maintaining his deep connection to Peterborough and the Canadiana beyond it. 

Forbes’ next non-fiction, Field Work, comes out from Assembly Press in April of 2025. A collection of essays investigating the intimate relationship between baseball and its beleaguered workforce. He is “currently feverishly working to finish that.” 

The Diapause is now available at Take Cover Books. For more events at Take Cover, visit their Events page on their website or follow their Instagram @takecoverbooks for more updates. Andrew Forbes can be found on his website or his Instagram @utilityofboredom.