ABOUT US
Metonymy Press was launched in August 2014, at a reading event following that year’s Queer Between the Covers book fair, part of the Pervers/Cité (the underside of Pride) program. Featuring a number of readers who would later be published by Metonymy, this event and its broader context remain at the root of what Metonymy does as a small press. Slow, community-based, and largely DIY, Metonymy Press has published one to four books a year starting in 2015.
With a plan to publish queer, feminist literary fiction and nonfiction, we have assembled a catalogue that includes these forms and formats as well as poetry, a guidebook, and a children’s picture book. Metonymy’s critically recognized, award-winning catalogue of daring and unconventional genres is, as one author put it, replete with “authors and books that reframe power and affirm life.”
Metonymy’s choices of authors and genres arise from our commitment to aesthetic and editorial excellence, and we seek work that transgresses boundaries, undermines the status quo, and sustains those on the margins. We put significant thought and resources into acquisitions, design, editorial, and promotion.
Metonymy was founded by old friends Ashley Fortier and Oliver Fugler, who have remained the owner-operators for the first 10 years. The press has no permanent staff, but many important tasks at the press have been done on contract with designers, editors, and artists, as well as an editorial and acquisitions committee from 2021 to 2024.
Meet the Team || Meet the team || MEET THE TEAM
Oliver Fugler is a founding member of Metonymy Press and is currently a co-publisher. Oliver is, more generally, a Montreal-based, trans writer, publisher, and editor. Their work has appeared in
Lambda Award–winning The Collection: Short Fiction from the Transgender Vanguard (Topside Press, 2012) and make/shift magazine, among other publications. Oliver released Gays in the Workplace in 2011, She Is Sitting In the Night: Re-visioning Thea’s Tarot in 2015, and is one of the editors for Sharp Pink Claws: A Metonymy Press anthology published in 2025.
They’re interested in grief and illness narratives, sex but keep it visceral over romantic, non-linearity, poets trying out prose, experimental prose with emotional weight, writing about work and labour, science writing that’s accurate and also stylistically interesting, interiority and long sentences (!), and they’re in awe of good criticism.
Eli Tareq El Bechelany-Lynch is a mixed-Arab writer, and translator, and newest co-publisher at Metonymy Press living in Tio’tia:ke. Their book, knot body, was published by Metatron Press in 2020. Their second book, The Good Arabs, published by Metonymy Press in 2022, was granted the honorary mention for poetry by the Arab American Book Awards, the Khayrallah Prize honorary mention, and won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal. Their translation of Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay’s La fille d’elle-même from the French, Dandelion Daughter, was published in Spring 2023 and was longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award. With co-editor Samia Marshy, they edited El Ghourabaa, an anthology of queer and trans writing by Arab and Arabophone writers, published by Metonymy Press in June 2024. In October and November 2024, they were the writer-in-residence at the Arab American National Museum. You can find out more about them on their website, elitareqwrites.com or you can sign up for their newsletter, https://softsyrup.substack.com/
They are interested in literary fiction, non-fiction, and will be specializing in poetry, which they’re also interested in (duh!). They want to read about all sorts of subjects: “if you can write it in an interesting way”. More specifically, they are interested in writing that is about: illness/disability, political histories and presents, queer drama, good sex writing, fun stories, hard stories that aren’t didactic, and humour as coping mechanism. They like fun gossipy novels, lyric poetry, poetry books with a strong through line, and experimental work.
Some writers whose work they admire include Canisia Lubrin, Trish Salah, Rabih Alamedinne, Natalie Diaz, Andrea Lawlor, Etel Adnan, Joanna Hedva, Mohammed el-Kurd, Dionne Brand, Kiese Laymon, Jeanne Thornton, and Hanif Abdurraqib.
Cason Sharpe is part of the editorial team at Metonymy Press. He is a writer and artist based in Toronto with a practice that includes fiction, criticism, creative nonfiction, installation, and performance.
His work has been published in C Magazine, Public Parking, and BRICK Literary Journal, among others, and he has presented work in collaboration with the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Vancouver Art Book Fair. He holds a Master’s of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto and his first collection of stories, Our Lady of Perpetual Realness, was published by Metatron Press in 2017.
Cason is interested in fiction, memoir, and creative nonfiction, specifically from writers with distinct, confident, and unexpected voices. He gravitates toward precise and grounded language over the purely conceptual or atmospheric, but he can be charmed by the right flowery prose. Writers he admires and returns to regularly include Jamaica Kincaid, Brontez Purnell, Joanna Hedva, Tamara Faith Berger, and Gary Indiana. Send him, your complicated characters, your sexy scenarios, or your caustic takes on everyday life.
H Felix Chau Bradley is part of the editorial team at Metonymy Press. They are a writer and editor living in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), and the author of Personal Attention Roleplay (Metonymy Press, 2021). Felix is the fiction editor at This Magazine, and a books columnist at Xtra. They write a monthly newsletter about books and perfume at filletchaubradley.substack.com and are working on a novel.
They are interested in literary fiction for adults, both novels and short story collections, that are expansive, challenging, and subversive in their approach to portraying queer and trans lives. They’re just as receptive to literary realism as they are to the surreal and the weird. Humour is important to them, as are compelling portrayals of sex and relationships; workplaces, organizing spaces, and social/party spaces; complex family dynamics; and migration and diaspora. Of course, these are just some ideas and guidelines and should not be taken as finite— they am always open to surprise!
Some writers they love: Renee Gladman, Dodie Bellamy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Myriam Gurba, Elif Batuman, Jackie Ess.
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