Loghan Paylor
In conversation with Matthew Stepanic
Friday, October 16 | 7 PM
Forsyth Hall, Downtown Library | $10
The Cure for Drowning:
In Loghan Paylor’s award-winning novel The Cure for Drowning, four young people navigate love, rigid gender roles, and family expectations across rural Ontario and the WWII military effort.
The book follows a sweeping romance where characters discover their authentic selves amidst tragedy and war.
#1 National Bestseller
Winner of Canada Reads 2026
Finalist for the 2026 KOBO Emerging Writer Prize
Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize
A Globe and Mail Best Book
About Loghan Paylor
Loghan Paylor is a queer, trans writer who lives in Chilliwack, BC.
The Cure for Drowning won the 2026 CBC Canada Reads competition and was shortlisted for the 2026 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Speculative Fiction. Loghan is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and they hold an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. They divide their time between teaching, writing, and co-owning a game company.
The Cure for Drowning
Evocative, magical and luminously written, The Cure for Drowning is not only a brilliant, boundary-pushing love story but a Canadian historical novel that boldly centres queer and non-binary characters in unprecedented ways.
Born Kathleen to an immigrant Irish farming family in southern Ontario, Kit McNair has been a troublesome changeling since, at ten, they fell through the river ice and drowned—only to be nursed back to life by their mother's Celtic magic. A daredevil in boy's clothes, Kit chafes at every aspect of a farmgirl's life, driving that same mother to distraction with worry about where Kit will ever fit in. When Rebekah Kromer, an elegant German-Canadian doctor's daughter, moves to town with her parents in April 1939, Rebekah has no doubt as to who 19-year-old Kit is. Soon she and Kit, and Kit's older brother, Landon, are drawn tight in a love triangle that will tear them and their families apart, and send each of them off on a separate path to war.
Landon signs up for the Navy. Kit, now known as Christopher, joins the Royal Air Force, becoming a bomber navigator relied on for his luck and courage. Rebekah serves with naval intelligence in Halifax, until one more collision with Landon changes the course of her life and draws her back to the McNair farm—a place where she'd once known love. Fallen on even harder times, the McNairs welcome all the help she is able to give, and she believes she has found peace at last. Until, with the war over, Kit and Landon return home.
Told in the vivid, unforgettable voices of Kit and Rebekah, The Cure for Drowning is a powerfully engrossing novel that imagines a history that is truer than true.
Matthew Stepanic is a queer writer who lives and works on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton. They are a co-author of the collaborative novel Project Compass (Monto Books, 2017) and the author of Relying on that Body (Glass Buffalo, 2018), a poetry chapbook about the queens of season 10 of RuPaul’s Drag Race. They edit and design chapbooks for Agatha Press, and they host and co-organize VERS/E, a monthly queer poetry open mic.
