After many years of research, writing, and editing, my debut novel, Oil People, is now ready for preorder! I’m very grateful to my editor, Joe Lee, as well as M&S Publisher Stephanie Sinclair, and all the other love labourers at McClelland & Stewart. The book’s beautiful cover (below) was designed by Dylan Browne. I can’t wait for August, when book meets world.

I’m available for classroom visits and other public appearances, so please do drop me a line (davidhuebert1@gmail.com) if you’re interested in a talk on oil in literature, a workshop on Dirty Nature Writing, or a good old fashioned reading and Q&A.

I’m thrilled to have two new publications out this fall. First, I’ve had my essay “Flesh Made Burn: A Vasectomy Revenant” included in Best Canadian Essays 2024, published by Biblioasis and edited by Marcello Di Cintio. The essay is a reflection on family, procreation, masculinity, and voluntary self-sterilization. When this piece was first published in The New Quarterly, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Pamela Mulloy told me it was the first vasectomy memoir she’d ever read. I’m grateful to have my essay selected by such an intelligent writer and included in such wonderful company. You can buy the collection from the publisher.

Secondly, my new story “The Business of Salvation” appears in Geist 124. The story is about dams, damnation, dislocation, the hypocrisies of academia, the salvationist strain in ecological thinking, and the curious work of living in the climate spasm. It’s my debut in Geist, a magazine I’ve long admired, and I’ve found myself in very good company alongside writers like Nick Thran, Jen Sookfong Lee, and Margaret Nowaczyk. I’m particularly excited about this story, as well, because I see it as the anchor story for a future collection. You can buy the issue online or on news stands at great shops like Book City and Atlantic News.

In December of 1861, Scientific American wrote that, “There is nothing in the industrial world at the present time more remarkable than the production of petroleum.” That such a sentence could be uttered suggests a starry-eyed optimism around the new, dazzling technology of petroleum. This optimism might be difficult to compute for those of us living in the blackened ruins. It’s hard to think without judgement of a world when petroleum was novel and exciting, a source of wonder, particularly in a time of rapid scientific growth and advancement. This was just a few years before Darwin published On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The fossil record was being uncovered and people were digging up the bones of huge, curious lizards. There were so many other things to be excited about, and yet. Oil was already in the water, in the air, thickening the batter of our dreams.

Chemical Valley, my new collection of short stories including a Journey Prize Finalist (“Chemical Valley”) and a National Magazine Award nominee (“Six Six Two Fifty”) is now available at your local independent book store. You can also buy online through the usual suspects or directly from the publisher, Biblioasis.

Media

The book has received some lovely media from The Miramichi Reader and The Dalhousie Gazette. Madison Scanlan at The Gazette positions the book as a piece of “dirty nature writing” and asks if that might be your new favourite genre. For the Miramichi reader, Ian Colford notes that “Throughout the book, Huebert’s prose shines, frequently catching the reader off guard with startling but memorable turns of phrase and delirious imaginative leaps. And while the manic energy, eccentric humour and wry observations on life and love keep us entertained, the book’s rich emotional core draws us in, touching us at the most profound level.”

Events

I’ve been doing events for the book throughout the fall, and am pleased to have a few more upcoming. I’m particularly excited about the panel with two much-admired luminaries, Catherine Bush and Shaena Lambert. Please do share/attend!

Saturday Oct 30 (4 p.m. EST; 5 p.m. ATL): Hamilton Reads Panel on Climate Fiction with Catherine Bush and Shaena Lambert.

Nov 2021 (Date TBA): Wordsfest, London, ON

December 2021 (Details TBA): In-person Halifax book launch

I am deeply grateful to Asha Jeffers, Shannon Webb-Campbell, and Virginia Konchan, the jurors for this year’s J.M. Abraham Atlantic Poetry Award, awarded annually to the best poetry collection written by an Atlantic Canadian Author. Though I didn’t win the award, I’m deeply honoured to be among such company (Afua Cooper and shalan joudry were the other nominees). Congrats to Afua Cooper for a well-deserved win for her new collection, Black Matters.

Prizes aside, the jury citation is simply one of the most sophisticated and insightful statements ever written about my work. We get into this not for the prizes, but because we dream to connect to readers in this way, to have our work vivisected in all its bruised difficulty and slanted truth. So, here, in full, is the jury citation:

“Equal parts a lyric history of Canada’s petroculture and a necropastoral with wings, David Huebert’s Humanimus offers its reader a brilliant, learned, exquisitely crafted, and ingenious toxicology report on our contemporary landscape, both literary and ecological, and yet the tone is less doomsday prophecy than it is barbed with wit and song. Female personages ranging from Sigmund Freud’s mother, Beethoven’s lover, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s wife, and “Miss Trans-Canada” abound, and the sheer inventiveness of Huebert’s verse (which invokes and reimagines such poets as Milton, Whitman, Stevens, Eliot, Donne, and Dickinson) is encapsulated in his title and epigraph (the ‘humanimalchine’), suggesting that language play and clever neologisms such as these point us toward a ‘phonemevolution’ between texts, and human and non-human ontologies, that is already well underway. Unparalleled in its brio, deft and muscular in its canonical revisionings, Humanimus carries us from Newfoundland winters and the “belligerent Atlantic” to the otherness of animals—owls, scorpions, bears, wild horses—before leaving us, dazzled and unsettled, on the steep ridge where language and perception meet, ‘spinning back to origin,’ and ‘soaring . . . on the roar of the world.”