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April 26, 2023Read an Excerpt from Rocco de Giacomo's Casting Out, a Poetic Memoir of Leaving Evangelical Life
Rocco de Giacomo's childhood was filled with TV faith healers, tense and frequent predictions of the rapture, and the dramatic and sometimes problematic practices of the extreme Pentecostal religious ...
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January 20, 2022"Are You Sick or Not?" Read an Excerpt from Shayne McGreal's Tense and Honest Debut, Anthony: A Composite Novel
Shayne McGreal's debut novel, Anthony: A Composite Novel (Guernica Editions) takes readers deep into the experience of the titular character and all his complications, weaving in and out of the various ...
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September 27, 2018Coming to Voice
I worked on this piece while at a residency for BIPOC writers in the fall of 2017. I did not pick it up again when I returned. While workshopping it there, I was not convinced it captured what I was trying ...
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October 14, 2015
Should You Hire a Book Publicist?
In my last post, I wrote about some of the questions authors might want to get clear on when it comes to publicising their books, especially when it comes to understand a publisher’s commitment to promoting ...
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June 30, 2019Behind the Title: "Frying Plantain"
This is my last post for Open Book and I’ve been thinking about how I should end my June tenure as Writer in Residence. I landed on writing about the title of my book. I’ve been asked a few times ...
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January 24, 2017The Fraught Finish Line: Writers talk about the end of the book
The act of finally finishing a book comes with its own unique set of emotions. Some, of course, are fairly obvious—you spend weeks, months, and years of your life on a single project, writing and rewriting, ...
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December 12, 2019Book Therapy: Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark
“It can always be worse.”-Christy Ann Conlin, Watermark When my grandmother’s memory started to go, she would occasionally become belligerent. The sweet woman I had grown up knowing, the one ...
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May 09, 2016Where We Do What We Do
The first stories of any quality that I produced were written at an old white melamine desk in the windowless furnace room of my future in-laws' house in suburban Ottawa. The hot water tank clicked and ...
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April 12, 2016Why Don’t We Take Sports Writing Seriously?
In February of last year, Canadian Notes and Queries publisher Dan Wells kindly approached me with a question. “Brainstorming a games issue of CNQ,” he wrote in an email. “Wondered if you might ...
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March 01, 2021
Writing violence (again)
On violence and trauma and repetition...When I was nineteen, I went to dinner at a friend’s, and afterwards, her father invited us all upstairs to see his attic art studio.There were so many canvasses ...
