Columnists

Welcome to the Great White North

A lifelong Torontonian, I left my hometown several years ago for the Far North. I watched Toronto transform from a big city with the heart of a small town to an enormous city that seemed heartless. I ...

6 Marketing Tips for Debut Authors

Publishers are great partners, but they don’t usually do the heavy lifting in terms of marketing—especially for debut authors. In a partnership both parties have to pull their weight, which requires ...

Publishing the Unpublished

A closer look at an instigating moment in Canadian booksThe evening of June 22, Harbourfront Centre hosted a special International Festival of Authors event. Though the series is best known for presenting ...

Considering the Incomplete

I love to buy something then cut it in half. I did this recently with a product called the World’s Best Dishcloth and felt like a genius. Now I had two dishcloths and they were both the best dishcloth ...

“Considering the Book as Bi(bli)osphere,” an Interview with Gary Barwin

The writing of poet, composer, and recently Giller nominated novelist Gary Barwin has music to it that sounds like a gathering of organic materials, processed and released over and over until they sound ...

On Productivity

A few months ago I quit my safe, reliable customer service job at Starbucks to focus on writing. I’d just received a grant and I was ready to go full-throttle towards finally writing a book. Those last ...

Gwaandak

This started off as a straightforward article about Gwaandak Theatre, Yukon’s only Indigenous theatre company. But something went wrong. Or right.I wanted to feature Gwaandak’s production, Map of ...

An Interview with David O’Meara, organizer of the Plan 99 Reading Series

In the Manx Pub, a basement bar on Ottawa’s Elgin St., there’s a slim shelf of books – lots of poetry, but also some prose. The books are often browsed, often borrowed, and often returned. They’re ...

An Interview With Catriona Wright

“You start to realize just how culturally constructed ideas of the edible vs. inedible are."Among the themes poets tend to shy away from, gastronomy lives somewhere at the top alongside rent and debt. ...

Fifth Business; First-Person Shooter - Whither the Great Video Game Adaptation?

When an author mentions a book adaptation, the next question the author fields is invariably about casting. The book adaptation is assumed to be a film or television series. After all, books have provided ...