In Character InterviewTag

"I Need to be Deep Inside Their Hearts and Minds" Fran Kimmel on Building the Fascinating Characters in No Good Asking

Moving with family to an idyllic farmhouse sounds like a charming idea, but in practice, behind the scenes, Ellie and Eric Nyland's family is unravelling.Fran Kimmel's No Good Asking (ECW Press) opens ...

Robin Blackburn McBride on the Child Protagonist of Her Novel: "He Said Take My Hand, Which I Did, and He Led Me"

Robin Blackburn McBride's debut novel The Shining Fragments (Guernica Editions) explores late 19th century and turn of the century Toronto through the eyes of Joseph Conlon, a young orphan abandoned ...

"Characters Come to Me Already Having Lives of Their Own" Kagiso Lesego Molope on her Poignant South African LGBT Novel

In Kagiso Lesego Molope's Such a Lonely, Lovely Road (Mawenzi House), Kabelo Mosala is the perfect child. His parents love to show him off, from his early school achievements to when he brings home ...

SK Dyment on Crafting Characters in Steel Animals, a Smart, Hilarious New Book of Queer Magic Realism

Jackie is a quiet loner who happens to secretly be a badass bank robber. Vespa is a artist who rides motorbikes and obsessively plans her revenge on an ex-partner. Together, they find love and a heap ...

"I Know My Characters Very Intimately" October Writer-in-Residence Waubgeshig Rice on Crafting His Powerful New Novel

Waubgeshig Rice's hotly anticipated second novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press), plunges the reader into a small northern Anishinaabe community suddenly cut off from the outside world. Panic ...

"In Fiction There is Always a Tension Between What’s Said and What’s Unsaid" Sarah Ellis on her Draft Dodger Novel for Young Readers

Best friends Charlotte and Dawn are 13 in 1970 and not happy about it, longing to skip past the awkwardness of their early teen years and join the larger world - including the excitement of the hippie ...

Scott Thornley Introduces Your New Favourite Detective Series

Lovers of mystery and detective fiction have a new a favourite to discover in Detective Superintendent MacNeice, the protagonist of Scott Thornley's Erasing Memory (House of Anansi Press). The story ...

Aaron Tucker on Writing the Complex Man Who Fathered the Atomic Bomb

J. Robert Oppenheimer is known for his reluctant but irreversible legacy as the father of the atomic bomb and director of the infamous Manhattan Project. But there was more to the man than the bomb, and ...

"They Like to Wander at Night": Valerie Mills-Milde on Crafting Unforgettable Characters

For the women and children at home during the First World War, life was an unpredictable, anxious, and terrifying existence, as they waited for news of their sons, fathers, and husbands and worked to ...

Mark Frutkin on Describing Characters and Writing a Literal Devil's Advocate

In Mark Frutkin's The Rising Tide (Porcupine's Quill), it's 1769 in Venice and things are getting pretty strange. From a man with a skeleton strapped to his back to a courtesan with odd stigmata marks, ...