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October 10, 2018Lisa Moore on Mavis Gallant, Literary Tropes, and Red Ribbon Sentences
CanLit short story queen, Newfoundland-based author Lisa Moore needs little introduction. Her honours keep stacking up (most recently, Moore scooped her third Giller nomination on this year's longlist, ...
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July 25, 2018Get to Know Children's Literature Star Tim Wynne-Jones on Food, Happiness, & Favourites
Tim Wynne-Jones is the author of more than 30 beloved books for young readers, from picture books to YA adventures. His latest is The Ruinous Sweep (Candlewick Press), a young adult story that opens ...
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November 05, 2018
The Writing Process (For Me, Anyway)
I mentioned in my first post that most people feel they have at least one or two good novels in them. This is something you hear all the time, even more so if you've put out a book and talk to people ...
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July 10, 2018
Did You Really Go Through All That?
I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...
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October 09, 2018Aparna Kaji Shah on Writing Strong Women, the Importance of Writer Friends, & the Timeless Value of Middlemarch
The title of Aparna Kaji Shah's The Scent of Mogra (Inanna Publications) refers to species of flowering jasmine, a beautiful and fragrant plant cultivated in South and Southeast Asia. It gives a nod ...
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December 05, 2018Robin 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 ...
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July 31, 2018Tanis MacDonald on How We Can Expand Our Idea of the Writing Life to Include Smaller Communities
The stereotype of the artist and writer tends to be an urban one - tiny apartments; cigarettes and whisky; gritty, loud, and busy streets outside the window. But where do these pictures come from and, ...
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February 06, 2019"From the First Word, it Flowed" Debut Novelist David Albertyn on his Gritty Las Vegas Pageturner, Undercard
When three childhood friends are unexpectedly reunited in David Albertyn's debut novel Undercard (House of Anansi), the wild consequences are far beyond what any of them could have foreseen. Tyron Shaw ...
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January 02, 2019Best Canadian Stories Editor Russell Smith on Short Fiction & the Importance of Variety
For more than 45 years, the most interesting, innovative, and memorable short stories of the year have been collected in Best Canadian Stories, with a list of past contributors that includes the likes ...
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February 16, 2019Poetry School: Denise Levertov on form as a revelation
After reading poet Denise Levertov’s 1965 essay “Some Notes on Organic Form,” I had a revelation: I write poetry mainly in organic form. Given that the notion of the work of art as a self-germinating ...