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January 24, 2019"You Can Live Whole Other Lives" H.B. Hogan on Discovering the Most Important Books in Her Life
H. B. Hogan's debut collection of stories, This Keeps Happening (Invisible Publishing), is sit-up-and-take-notice short fiction. Assured, wonderfully strange, deftly funny, and totally fresh in both ...
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April 25, 2018On respectable narratives and why diversity on the page matters
Growing up, I was very particular kind of Chinese girl. I attended Chinese school on Saturdays. I took piano lessons. My report cards were always the best in my class. I played first clarinet in my school ...
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September 27, 2017How I Learned to Write What Scares Me
Three years ago, I wrote a poem.Back then, a few very big things happened in my life. My marriage died. I found a new publisher. And, perhaps most importantly, I started teaching.For my entire publishing ...
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October 27, 2017How My Version of the Canlit Community Sustains Me
Two months ago, one of my best friends was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia. She is a mother. She is a prolific, brilliant writer. And she was my very first writer friend.We first met working ...
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December 29, 2017The Canlit Year in Review: 2017 Can Suck It
I remember the moment when I realized that 2017 was going to irrevocably change Canlit. It was early in June, and I was sitting on a stage, speaking at a panel on diversity and the appropriation of voice. ...
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February 16, 2018On reading politically, or why the good old days are a flat out lie
It’s a funny time in the world of words. Every morning, when I log into Twitter, people are debating freedom of expression and the politics of how we read. Some of this is just nonsense, really just ...
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November 29, 2017So You Want to Write About Race
Somehow I have become on expert on writing race.This was not something I planned for. When I started publishing, I was writing fiction about Chinese Canadian characters, about families who had been invisible ...
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March 21, 2018On writing politically, or how not to make your fiction sound like a lecture
When I started writing my most recent novel, The Conjoined, I began with the idea of subverting classic crime fiction, something that I thought would be a fun bookish game. What if I could write a literary ...
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July 31, 2018On writers, politics, and when to just stop talking
Once upon a time, before the age of social media, Canlit was inclusive and kind, and political differences were settled amicably over whisky in private festival hospitality suites and the kind of dark ...
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May 21, 2018On racialized motherhood, writing, and sleep deprivation
The day before my son’s due date, I sent what I thought was the final draft of The Better Mother to my editor. The baby’s bedroom was finished: yellow walls, penguin stencil, gingham curtains. My ...
