Koom Kankesan Writers in Residence Archives

Get Thee to a Library

You might be forgiven for thinking that Chester Brown immigrated to Toronto from J. R. R. Tolkien's Lothlórien. There is an enigmatic, ethereal quality to his presence. A deep and patient thinker, Chester ...

Canadian Melancholy

During the nineties, barely out of teenagehood, I walked up to the run-down apartment building in Cabbagetown where Seth lived. I rang the bell and when he answered, in shirt sleeves and suspenders naturally, ...

A Writer's Purpose

John Higgs' Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century is probably my favourite non-fiction book that I read last year. Taking an alternate route through the twentieth century ...

Valentine's Shadow

The terrible weight of Valentine's Day is exactly one month away. What better way to celebrate its inexorable gravity than to discuss one of those topics rarely discussed in relation to the writing ...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Writer

Terri Favro is a literary gadabout in the best sense of the word. Whenever I turn around, she's doing something new: a Broken Pencil short story challenge, contributing to CBC's contest, putting out a ...

levarT emiT

Picture it: 1999. The last months of the last year of an infernal century. David Fiore had completed requirements for his History degree. He took our Romantic Literature class for fun. A gumshoe intellectual, ...

Hearing the Muse

I was always fond of my teachers but one couldn’t help but love Mary di Michele. I realize that my impressions and recollections are fifteen years old but so what? Of all my professors at Concordia, ...

Found in Translation

Kumar Sivasubramanian has lived stretches of his life on at least three different continents. We met through a closed Facebook group (before I was kicked off by a sour-faced Dubliner) that effectively ...

Dispatches From Berlin

This is a departure for the series. Lutz Göllner lives in Berlin, Germany. We met online due to our mutual appreciation of Frank Miller's work. Lutz has met Miller and translated some of his writing ...

Writing Through Pain

Carlyn Zwarenstein, in Opium Eater: The New Confessions, fuses memoir, reflective inquiry, cultural journalism, and literary investigation to look at opiates and what they have done for her. She is a ...