A lot of readers have asked me why we didn’t include family photos in What Remains other than the one image on the cover. Truthfully my publisher and I did originally consider it, but since the book isn’t really a biography or family history but more of a literary memoir, we ultimately decided against it. The other issue for me was that I didn’t want to end using images in the book that weren’t truly stellar.

This was until I had the opportunity to collaborate with the extremely gifted photographer and filmmaker Katherine Knight. After reading the book, Katherine came up with her own short list of items that she wanted me to bring over to her studio–items that made an impression on her that she wanted to capture in response to her reading of the book.

The result, which she showed to an eager audience at the Textile Museum of Canada, were a series of very evocative images of objects, including this page from my mother’s famously hideous and eccentrically organized address book.