Published Works
Small Courage
Rarely do we know what life will hold. When starting the adoption process, Jane Byers and her wife could not have predicted the illuminating and challenging experience of living for two weeks with the Evangelical Christian foster parents of their soon-to-be adopted twins. Parenthood becomes even more daunting when homophobia threatens their beginnings as a family, seeping in from places both unexpected and familiar. But Jane and Amy are up for the challenge.
In this moving and poetic memoir, Byers draws readers into her own tumultuous beginnings: her coming out years, finding love, and the start of her parenting journey. Love imprints itself where loneliness lived, but sometimes love, alone, is not enough to overcome trauma. Little did Byers know that her experiences when coming out was merely training for becoming an adoptive parent of racialized twins. Small Courage: A Queer Memoir of Finding Love and Conceiving Family is a thoughtful and heart-warming examination of love, queerness and what it means to be a family.
Published by Caitlin Press.
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Acquired Community
Jane Byers’ Acquired Community is both a collection of narrative poems about seminal moments in North American lesbian and gay history, mostly post-World War II, and a series of first person poems that act as a touchstone to compare the narrator’s coming out experience within the larger context of the gay liberation movement.
In this second book by Byers her poems go beyond the historical perspective of LGBT rights and are living examples of progress. Acquired Community examines and celebrates community resilience.
Published by Caitlin Press.
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Steeling Effects
In her first full collection of poetry, Jane Byers explores her personal experience with resilience, beginning with her own difficult birth, which she describes as “inoculation against despair.” As a young adult, the writer moves from complicity and its illusion of power to building a pliant self. Byers turns an unflinching eye to parenthood, as the mother of adopted twins, and examines the workplace through the eyes of a female safety specialist working alongside firefighters, transportation crews and heavy equipment purchasers. The author draws on the steeling effects of being queer to imbue her children and injured workers with suppleness.
STEELING EFFECTS asks whether what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and lives its way into the pliant beauty that gratitude affords.
Published by Caitlin Press.
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Anthologies
Best Canadian Poetry 2014
Poem: “Scrape”
Out Proud: Stories of Pride, Courage and Social Justice Summer 2014
Essay: “Conceiving Family”
Somebody’s Child: Essays on Adoption September 2011
Essay: “Becoming Real”
Close To Quitting Time, Ascent Aspirations Publishing Spring 2011
Poem: “Coming Out”
Seasonings: A Year in Local Flavour and Words Fall 2010
Poem: “Raspberry Pancakes”
Very Short Stories – Off Cut Press 2003
Short Story: “Lime Green Popsicle”
Literary Journals
Plentitude Magazine 2016
Plenitude, Spring 2014
“Where the Women Went”
Our Times, Volume 33 # 2
“Blind Spot”
Grain Magazine, Summer 2013
“A Body Is Seduced By Damages”
The Antigonish Review, Spring 2013
“Precision Tool and Die”
Descant, Spring 2013
“Scrape”
“ Transportation Department-City of Toronto”
“The Adaptable Shall Inherit The Earth”
“To A Politician”
Adanna: Women and War Issue, Spring 2013
“Stabgrass, Ubuntu”
Between The Lines-Canadian Journal of Hockey Literature, Winter 2012
“Pond Hockey”
Rattle, #35 Spring 2011
“Baseball”
New Orphic Review, Spring 2011
“Populist”
“Inaugural Flight”
“Women At Forty”
“13430 Religion”
“Independence Day”
Ars Medica, Fall 2010
“Intensive Care”
Horsefly, Fall 2010
“Emptiness in the Night Sky”
“Solstice”
“Redemption”
Horsefly 2008
“Beauty Cast Off In Advancing Autumn”
“Fever of Gratitude”
“Not Distracted By Gravity”
“The Wild in Me”
Poets Against War, 2007
“Third Generation”
“Five Star Generals”
Our Times 2006
“Chop The Day”
“Trinket”
Fireweed Literary Journal 1999
“Yellow”