Award-winning author Murgatroyd Monaghan talks about her poetry collection. Hosted by Trent Lewin, with readings by other Toronto writers!
she don’t bite, my father said about me as a child.
what he meant was
it ain’t her fault if your skin reacts to her saliva. it was, though
partially, see, if you think we’re all in this together, but i wasn’t the one with
black-and-white thinking.
- from “ you think autistic people cannot be journalists because we suffer from black-and-white thinking “
Award-winning author Murgatroyd Monaghan is launching her hard-hitting poetry collection white spaces where we learn to breathe (Off Topic Publishing, 2025). She'd love for you to be there!
Hosted by Trent Lewin (CBC Short Story Prize finalist and shortlister for the Commonwealth Prize).
You'll also get to enjoy readings and performances by Connie Chen, Fareh Malik, and Yasaman Jalali-Kushki.
You can preorder white spaces where we learn to breathe at www.offtopicpublishing.com/shop or wherever books are sold. Of course, we will also have copies on hand at the launch!
Free entry! Pre-registration is welcome, but not required.
*Free Times has a policy that each guest needs to buy one drink OR one food item, so please do keep that in mind. If you make dinner reservations with them for that evening, you can get preferred seating.*
This event is IN PERSON at Free Times Cafe in Toronto, ON, Canada. Come early! We will be starting at 8:30 SHARP! Yay!
Who is Murgatroyd?
Murgatroyd Monaghan is an Autistic mother, writer, spoken work artist and poet of mixed descent. Her spoken word won first place at the Wordstock Sudbury Literary Festival and Myths and Mirrors.
Her piece "Thumbs" won the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize. She has been a finalist for dozens of national literary prizes including the Room Poetry Contest and the CBC Nonfiction Prize. Other writing has been published in
Chapter House Review, PRISM, and the Humber Literary Review, among many others.
Murgatroyd has devoted her adult life to motherhood and is pursuing writing now that her children are older. She is working on several book-length projects. A former asylum-seeker, Monaghan was raised in Ontario, Canada.
Find her at www.murgatroydmonaghan.com or in person at this event.
What are people saying about white spaces where we learn to breathe ?
white spaces where we learn to breathe precisely and compassionately unearths the humanity of experiences long denied the agency of a storytelling voice in the mainstream. Murgatroyd Monaghan has crafted a gripping collection of works that are both tender and fierce, making space for lives and stories that deserve every medium of expression. This book is a comforting embrace and a rallying cry.
— Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow ,
recipient of the Debwewin Citation for excellence in First Nations Storytelling
This collection left me gutted, moved, and deeply grateful. These poems don’t just tell stories. They insist on being witnessed. Each one reaches back into history and forward into the present, refusing separation between the personal and the political, the intimate and the inherited. They mourn lives stolen and shortened, hold space for mothers who bleed and daughters who breathe through fear, and call out injustice with a voice that is clear, unsparing, and necessary.
What struck me most is how these poems carry their grief and their fire side by side. The writing is fierce, yes, but it’s also deeply tender. There’s a kind of love here — for community, for truth, for the act of surviving — that runs beneath every line.
Reading this work, I felt anger, sorrow, recognition, and a quiet sense of responsibility. These are poems that won’t let you look away. They ask something of you. And they stay with you long after the final word. This is the kind of poet whose voice doesn’t just linger, it transforms you.
— Chanel Sutherland, winner of the 2025 Commonwealth Short Story Prize, the CBC Short Story Prize and the CBC Nonfiction Prize
This collection is a deeply-felt, deeply moving reflection on the colonial project and its impact upon Black and Indigenous peoples (as well as the Scots.) Like all the best poets, Monaghan makes incisive observations with a few devastating and memorable words. In dedicating many of the poems to individuals who were murdered by police and/or mistreated by the justice system, the reader is invited to do further research, thus increasing the impact and importance of these poems beyond their pages. The inventive use of language, punctuation and space introduces a playful quality that reminds us to seek joy even in the face of suffering; in this way, Monaghan’s poems beautifully affirm our common humanity and connectedness.
As I read, I found myself not so much forgetting to breathe as exhaling in recognition. There is a picture of lungs on the cover, but this book is about our hearts.
— Zilla Jones, The World So Wide , winner of the Journey Prize
white spaces where we learn to breathe' s political assertiveness, and its desire to mirror back colonialism's linguistic debt, offer coverage for a text that—at its heart—is really about care. Care for others, care for words, care built into the formation of the life that serves as background (and occasional subject) for its poems. Murgatroyd Monaghan's experimentalist ethic is really a best-case scenario for contemporary poetry: it is there to make you see the invisible. She is there to make you care for the invisible.
— Jacob McArthur Mooney, Folk , Trillium Book Award shortlist
Exquisite in their resistance and playfully irreverent, these poems from Murgatroyd Monaghan breathe beautiful, complicated, and messy life.”
— Hollay Ghadery, award-winning author of FUSE
A forceful rhythmic collection of poems full of heart and hunger—for space, justice, respect, love, recognition, and tenderness. It is an invitation to dwell in spaces that Murgatroyd has carved out for us so we can listen to the multilayered, polyvocal score sung by the voices she has, as if by magic and with deep abiding tenderness, brought to the page, her own included. Her poems enfold and uphold—through language and form—those who have been erased and buried by colonial, ableist, misogynist, racist, market, and circumstantial pressures. They push against the edges both literally and figuratively, deftly playing with and subverting literary and language conventions as an intentional act of resistance, using the page as a weapon against oppression and erasure. The white spaces in the title and in the collection act as both breath and knee, leading us the readers, right to the brink—forcing us to leap past our willful insistence on rules to risk awakening. And it is a risk well worth it. An invitation to listen to English without the red tape—"a lang-a-wichdatmaiks / kommunsents!” to “keep looking together togethertogether” so “we can melt it with our tears.”
— Nancy Huggett, winner of the 2024 RBC PEN Canada New Voices Award
A visually stunning work of art both poignant and relevant [that] reminds me of the beauty and strength that exists within the human spirit. It was a pleasure to read.
— Joseph Kakwinokanasum, My Indian Summer , winner of the First Nations Communities READ Award
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