co-authors

ALEX TURNER was born in Vancouver in 1940, his parents having met the previous year at Locarno Beach, where his father worked as a lifeguard. In 1953, Alex and his family relocated to a small house in Harrison Hot Springs, where, after graduating from Agassiz High School, he spent his summers for the next fifty-seven years. With degrees from the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and the University of British Columbia, Alex taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of the Central Technical School. Until his death in 2019, he maintained his artistic practice, exhibiting work in Ontario and British Columbia. Encouraged from young adulthood to write short stories by a favourite aunt—the author and publicist Marjorie Gow—after his retirement from teaching Alex turned his attention to fiction. His short fiction has appeared in the Canadian literary journals The New Quarterly and Prairie Fire. Confluence is his debut novel. For more about his work, please visit www.alexjturner.ca.

LUCIAN CHILDS is a fiction writer whose debut, the novel-in-stories Dreaming Home (Biblioasis, 2023), won the Fred Kerner Book Award and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize in literary fiction. With his late husband, Alex Turner, he authored the novel-in-stories Confluence (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2026). He is a contributing editor of Building Fires in the Snow: a collection of Alaska LGBTQ short fiction and poetry (University of Alaska Press, 2016), a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared on WritersDigest.com and in the literary journals Grain, The Ex-Puritan, Plenitude, and Prairie Fire, among others. Originally from Dallas, Texas, he now lives in Toronto.