Recommended Reading
The selections here are not meant to be a road map to literature–just authors to whom you can turn, works you can depend on, if you’re new to writing. You’ll notice it skews female or LGBTQIA+, but so does my life.
Canadian Women of Colour: 50 Books
A few memorable queer/non-binary/trans authors (far from complete):
Gwen Benaway
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Ali Blythe
Rebecca Brown
Nicole Brossard
Alec Butler
Patrick Califia
Ivan Coyote
Chrystos
Nancy Jo Cullen
Michael Cunningham
Amber Dawn
Farzana Doctor
Emma Donoghue
Leslie Feinberg
Sky Gilbert
Leah Horlick
Lydia Kwa
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Sarah Leavitt
Alex Leslie
Daphne Marlatt
Shani Mootoo
Erin Mouré
Nayomi Munaweera
Ma-Nee Chacaby
Casey Plett
Arleen Paré
Minnie Bruce Pratt
Bill Richardson
Jane Rule
Trish Salah
Shyam Selvadurai
Vivek Shraya
Michael V Smith
Mariko Temaki
Kai Cheng Thom
Colm Tóibin
Betsy Warland
Jeanette Winterson
Zoe Whittall
Monique Wittig
Marnie Woodrow
A few memorable short stories:
Generally, I recommend reading from Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Prizes, Best Non-Required Reading, Pushcart Prize, Best Canadian Short Stories, the yearly anthologies of Latina, Asian or Black American or Canadian, LGBTQIA+ writers.
For a few specific stories:
Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story, Russell Banks
Interpreter of Maladies, Jumpa Lahiri
The Day I Sat with Jesus on the Sundeck and a Wind Came Up and Blew My Kimono Open and He Saw My Breasts, Gloria Sawai
People Like That are the Only People Here, Lorrie Moore
Whose Upward Flight I Love, Nalo Hopkinson
Not Bleak, Casey Plett
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor
A Worn Path, Eudora Welty
The Year of Getting to Know Us, David Leavitt
A Small, Good Thing, Raymond Carver
Book of Martha, Octavia Butler
The Middleman, Bharati Mukherjee
Meneseteung, by Alice Munro
Edison, NJ, by Junot Díaz
Hills Like White Elephants, Earnest Hemingway
The Pura Principle, Junot Diaz
The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, Ursula Le Guin
Selway, Pam Houston
My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn, Sandra Cisneros
Nashville Gone to Ashes, Amy Hemple
We Walked on Water, Eliza Robertson
No One Belongs Here More Than You, Miranda July
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Z.Z. Packer
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
What Safety Is, Thisbe Nissen
Father, Lover, Deadman, Dreamer, Melanie Rae Thon
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Joyce Carol Oates
White Angel, Michael Cunningham
Why I Live at the P.O., Eudora Welty
Gold Star, Siobhan Fallon
The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
Semplica Girls, George Saunders
A few memorable short fiction collections:
The Collection Stories of Lydia Davis, Lydia Davis
People Who Disappear, Alex Leslie
Yours, Helen Oyeyemi
Tenth of December, George Saunders
Black Tickets, Jayne Anne Phillips
Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
Bad Behaviour, Mary Gaitskill
Daydreams of Angels, Heather O’Neill
A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom
Rare and Endangered Species, Richard Bausch
A few memorable novels:
The Orchid Thief, Susan Orleans
What Lies Between Us, Nayomi Munaweera
The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews
State of Wonder, Ann Patchett
The Blood of Flowers, Anita Amirrezvani
Flight Behaviour, Barbara Kingsolver
Obasan/The Rain Ascends, Joy Kogawa
The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
The Vegetarian, Han King
Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Enchanted, Rene Denfield
Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Monkey Beach, Eden Robinson
The Last Nude, Ellis Avery
The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
Fall on Your Knees, Anne-Marie MacDonald
Bastard Out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
The Break, Katherena Vermette
A few memorable essays:
For essays, Best American Essays is a good consult.
Debbie Weingarten, The Mule Deer
No Name Woman, Maxine Hong Kingston
Jo Ann Beard, The Fourth State of Matter
Melissa Febos, Kettle Holes
Karrie Higgins, Strange Flowers
Michael Paternit, The Last Meal
Sonya Huber, The Lava Lamp of Pain
Kelly Sundberg, It Will Look Like a Sunset
Jo Ann Beard, The Fourth State of Matter
Ruthann Robson, Notes from a Difficult Case
Leslie Jamison,The Empathy Exams
Ten Great Essays That Should Be Made Into Films
17 Essays by Female Writers That Everyone Should Read
A few memorable non-fiction books:
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, Anne Fadiman
Abandon Me:Melissa Febos
Bluets, Maggie Nelson
The Boy in the Moon: A Father’s Search for His Disabled Son, Ian Brown
Two Lives, Gertrude and Alice , Janet Malcolm
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo
Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit
Pilgraim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard
A few memorable poets:
Adrienne Rich
Gwen Benaway
Anne Sexton
Sharon Olds
Maureen Hynes
Lucille Clifton
Ali Blythe
Tanis McDonald
Margaret Atwood
Eileen Myles
Rita Dove
Patrick Lane
Rachel Rose
Kai Cheng Thom
Dionne Brand
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Gwen MacEwan
bill bissett
Anne Michaels
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Maya Angelou
Olga Broumas
Books/essays on writing:
What Writers Really Do When They Write, George Saunders
The Half Known World by Robert Boswell
Plot Whisperer by Martha Alderson
Still Writing by Dani Shapiro
On Writing by Stephen King
Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg
The Eleventh Draft, by the Iowa Writer’s Workshop
Make a Scene Crafing A Powerful Story One Scene at a TIme, by Jordan Rosenfeld
How Fiction Works by James Wood
The Writing Warrior by Laraine Herring
The Fiction Writers Workshop by Josip Novakovich
Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern
The Art of Subtext, by Charles Baxter
From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler
The Eleventh Draft, ed: Frank Conroy (Iowa Writer’s Workshop)
Half Known World by Robert Boswell
Negotiating With The Dead by Margaret Atwood
The Added Dimension by Flannery O’Connor
Attack of the Copula Spiders by Doug Glover
Wonderbook by Jeff Vandermeer
Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont
Building Fiction by Jesse Lee Kercheval
The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel by Jane Smiley
Burning Down the House by Charles Baxter
Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See
Eaton Hamilton 
Great recommendations here and Janet Malcom’s book about Gertrude and Alice sounds awesome! Love reading about lesbians in history. Have you read The Book of Salt by Monique Truong? It’s an amazing historical fiction novel about Gertrude and Alice’s relationship through the eyes of their queer immigrant Vietnamese cook! I highly recommend it!