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May 30, 2016Lat & Long
It's a rare thing for me to find myself somewhere new – or even somewhere I know but haven't been in a while – and not be visited by an urge to set a story there. I'm not exactly sure why this is, ...
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May 26, 2016Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...
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May 24, 2016Bobcaygeon
This is a damned weird country. Culturally and geographically, it has some peculiarities which rest not off to the side but squarely in the middle of our shared national consciousness. There is a rib ...
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May 20, 2016The Long Odds
I used to keep a Word document detailing where I'd sent what. Now it's a Google spreadsheet, colour coded, sortable. It lists the titles of completed stories and their word counts, tells me where I sent ...
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May 19, 2016Work
In January the flu raced through our house. It hitched a ride home from school on one child – one of the senior kindergarteners or the fourth grader, who can say which? – and in turn each of them ...
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May 18, 2016Faking It
Writers' early careers are characterized by a sort of inconsistent confidence, a herky-jerky belief in themselves and their divinely appointed mission interspersed with paralyzing instances of clarity ...
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August 31, 2016The Lower Reaches of Pulp
It’s rare for me to be disturbed by a book: usually, I enjoy being scared or pushed to an extreme emotion within the safety of a page. But I was badly bothered by a pulp novel from the 1980s that I ...
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May 06, 2016Comics in Parkdale - the Draw of a Good Comic Book Store
My interest in superhero movies has plunged to zero in the past couple of years, but I’ve found myself steadily reading more comic books. Thinking about this just after the recent Authors for Indies ...
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July 04, 2018
Stepping Twice into the Same City
On a recent trip to read from my new book in Vancouver—my second trip there, the last being more than 12 years ago—I found myself in conversation with Heraclitus.Best known, according to Plato, for ...
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April 01, 2016Writing in Public
Harlan Ellison would occasionally set up a typewriter in the front window of a bookshop and crank out a story on public display for anyone who cared to watch him. The point he was making (other than the ...
