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March 09, 2021
A love letter (to books)
The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...
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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...
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March 16, 2021
A love letter (to libraries)
(—and other public places I once wrote to escape violence.)My life is very different from what it was when I began writing. While working on my latest novel, Girl Minus X, I often wrote in public ...
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March 23, 2021
Decoder ring
In Girl Minus X, there are choices made by the main character, Dany, that seem more legible and logical to people who’ve experienced trauma and understand the way, afterwards, a person is forever scanning ...
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March 26, 2021
Monster
When I walked in, the four of them were seated at a folding card table. Behind a cardboard screen, the Dungeon Master sat shuffling his stack of wrinkled maps and notes. I pulled up a chair, though the ...
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March 29, 2021
Writing/Not Writing
Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...
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May 29, 2023
Bringing It All Back Home
As I write this, I am sitting outside in the backyard of a rowhouse in Toronto’s East End. The wind is stirring the leaves of a big maple tree spreading its branches high above me, and stirring the ...
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May 01, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1
It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...
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February 01, 2018David Johnson Shows Us the Desk Where He Wrote Battle Royal: Monarchists vs. Republicans and the Crown of Canada
One easy way to get Canadians talking - and perhaps even arguing - is to bring up the British monarchy. What is the role of the monarchy in modern Canada? is a question that continues to be hotly debated, ...
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February 27, 2017The Dirty Dozen, with our March writer-in-residence, Zoe Whittall!
Zoe Whittall was already an acclaimed novelist, poet, and television writer in Canada and beyond before her latest novel, The Best Kind of People (House of Anansi Press) exploded onto the literary scene, ...
