Francine Cunningham
Published Books
What If Bedtime Didn't Exist?
Picture Book
Annick Press
2024
JOINT WINNER: TD Summer Reads Program 2024
HONORABLE MENTION: Purple Dragon Fly Book Award 2024
"A whimsical and lyrical celebration of imagination and exploration if we simply asked, “What if . . .”
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Follow two siblings through their day as they let their imaginations run wild in this joyful story about all the possibilities a simple “what if” can conjure up: What if the monsters in your closet wanted to be your friend? What if all of the dinosaurs were shrunk to be teeny-tiny when the comet hit the earth? And what if bedtime didn’t exist and we could imagine anything we wanted?
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What If Bedtime Didn’t Exist? places an Urban Indigenous family at the heart of a fun and fantastical celebration of daydreaming, adventure, and play while living in the city. The tenderness and care in this intergenerational home is seen through relationships with all members in the family.
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Mathias Ball’s vibrant illustrations bring each page of acclaimed author Francine Cunningham’s debut picture book to life. What If Bedtime Didn’t Exist? opens up new spaces for creativity and endless possibilities into our everyday world.
Praise for What if Bedtime Didn't Exist?
“A tenderly written, beautifully illustrated story that taps into our creative selves. I can already hear the oohs and awes and giggles, and see little fingers circling around the drawings discovering each “what if” and imagining the imaginings. A wonderful story that’s going to kick off so many conversations between readers about all of the “what ifs!”. So much fun!”
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-- Julie Flett, author of We All Play and Birdsong
“What if the imagination of kids created the world? Then every day would be filled with the rollicking, bright and sparkling, fantastical, astronomical adventures Francine Cunningham and Mathias Ball give us here. Sign me up!”
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-- Caroline Adderson, author of more than twenty books for children including It Happened on Sweet Street and Norman, Speak!
“Francine Cunningham has gifted us a story for readers in search of adventure in the everyday. What if Bedtime Didn’t Exist showcases Cunningham’s writing as expansive as riding with dragons and as intimate as confiding hard feels with ladybugs. For the adventurous and sensitive kid alike, What If Bedtime Didn’t Exist is guided by two Indigenous siblings with boundless curiosity, who remind us that the true source of our magic is embedded in our own imaginations.”
-- Whitney French, editor of Black Writers Matter
“What if Bedtime Didn’t Exist? is a day dream that sings and celebrates the innocence of imagination. Every page is pure cozy magic! I want to live in this book! I love it!”
-- Richard Van Camp, author of What’s the Most Beautiful Thing You Know About Horses?
Featured on:
CBC Spring 2022 66 works of fiction to look out for
Amazing Books by Indigenous Authors
AllLit Up Off/Kilter's Most Anticipated Reads
Quill and Quire: Carol Shields Prize Long-list
Interview: Watch: Shelf Life Books
Reading: Watch: For Spooky Season from Invisible
Interview: Listen: Can't Lit 107
God Isn't Here Today
Short Fiction
Invisible Publishing
LONG-LIST, 2023 Carol Shields Award for Fiction
FINALIST, 2023 Indigenous Voices Award
WINNER, 2023 ReLit award for Short Fiction
2022
"Even as they flirt with the fantastic, Cunningham’s stories unfold with the innate elegance of a spring fern, reminding us of the inherent dualities in human nature—and that redemption can arise where we least expect it."
The stories in Francine Cunningham’s debut collection God Isn’t Here Today ricochet between form and genre, taking readers on a dark, irreverent, yet poignant journey led by a unique and powerful new voice.
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Driven by desperation into moments of transformation, Cunningham’s characters are presented with moments of choice—some for the better and some for the worse. A young man goes to God’s office downtown for advice; a woman discovers she is the last human on Earth; an ice cream vendor is driven insane by his truck’s song; an ageing stripper uses undergarments to enact her escape plan; an incubus tires of his professional grind; and a young woman inherits a power that has survived genocide, but comes with a burden of its own.
Praise for God Isn't Here Today
“This is a fierce collection: fiercely smart, fiercely funny, fiercely inventive. Francine Cunningham takes the reader from strip clubs to God’s waiting room, from a tormented ice cream truck driver to a bored ghost with career aspirations. This collection almost reads like a novel, as the characters move in and out of each other’s stories—sometimes solo, sometimes in chorus—spilling out their tormented, glorious, messy lives to the lucky, greedy reader.”
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—Annabel Lyon, author of Consent
“Cunningham is uniquely funny even through homophobia, whorephobia, death and aching loneliness… Opening this collection feels like stepping into a lively discussion between friends you’ve known since kindergarten when someone is already mid-rant, in a good way.”
—Sarah Ratchford, Maisonneuve
“The stories in God Isn’t Here Today reveal Francine Cunningham as a gimlet eye observer of humanity, with boundless empathy and a searing sense of humour. The prose is intimate and direct, like an honest best friend breathlessly telling all, while embarking on formal experimentation that guides the reader through the grand possibilities of fiction.”
—Doretta Lau, author of How Does a Single Blade of Grass Thank the Sun?
“God Isn’t Here Today is a collection, I feel, that is whispered in the calligraphy of ghosts. Cunningham continues to both astound and haunt all who discover her. Wow!”
—Richard Van Camp, author of The Lesser Blessed
“‘Pornorama,’ ‘Spectre Sex,’ ‘Mickey’s Bar’: these Francine Cunningham stories pop and pull my heart out. In her first collection, God Isn’t Here Today, the Goddess is most definitely here. An essential new voice.”
—Linda Svendsen, author of Sussex Drive: a novel
“Cunningham’s characters find light in darkness, music in silence, and moments of transformation when they least expect it.”
—The Quarantine Review
The stories in Cunningham’s God Isn’t Here Today are so deeply imaginative they do the work of a novel in under 20 pages. And by “the work” I mean they pushed my mind’s eye to its fullest extent—building mental movies full of sound and colour and scent that felt beautifully nightmarish at times, and uncomfortably expressionist at others. The probing proximity of Cunningham’s narrative camera makes it impossible to ignore the visceral capabilities of storytelling. Her writing is absorbed cerebrally and physically.
In a literary landscape of sameness, and particularly the choking sameness of our CanLit cul-de-sac, a wild deployment of imagination refusal of realism is an exploratory feat. Cunningham’s writing is powerful, transformative, and elegant.
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— Carleigh Baker, author of Bad Endings and Last Woman
ON/Me
Poetry
2019
Caitlin Press
Finalist:
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BC & Yukon Book Prize 2020
for The Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes.
Indigenous Voices Award 2020
for a poetry book in English
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The City of Vancouver Book Award 2021
In her debut poetry collection ON/Me, Cunningham explores, with keen attention and poise, what it means to be forced to exist within the margins.
Francine Cunningham lives with constant reminders that she doesn’t fit the desired expectations of the world: she is a white-passing, city-raised Indigenous woman with mental illness who has lost her mother. Cunningham does not hold back: she holds a lens to residential schools, intergenerational trauma, Indigenous Peoples forcibly sent to sanatoriums, systemic racism and mental illness, and translates these topics into lived experiences that are nuanced, emotional, funny and heartbreaking all at once. ON/Me is an encyclopedia of Cunningham, who shares some of her most sacred moments with the hope to spark a conversation that needs to be had.