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February 09, 2021Read an Excerpt from Russell Banks' Stunning New Novel of Confession and Secrets, Foregone
Russell Banks is one of American letters' most treasured writers, exploring themes of violence, alienation, luck, and justice, often set against the backdrop of seemingly peaceful small towns in novels ...
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May 03, 2016Some of the Best Books I Ever Read Weren't Books at All
I am on the record—somewhere, or perhaps multiple somewheres—as having said that one of the stories in my first collection, What You Need, represented an effort on my part to capture the feel of a ...
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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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September 03, 2019
On Beginning and Emerging
This is the first of my posts as September’s Writer-in-Residence for Open Book, and I’m thrilled to have been given this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on writing and the writing life. I ...
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April 30, 2020Poets in Profile: Catherine Owen on Accepting the Muse, Tennyson's "The Eagle", and the Politics of Poetry
After addiction claimed the life of her spouse in 2010, poet Catherine Owen packed up and moved into an apartment on Vancouver's Fraser River. During her morning walks along the shore, she found in its ...
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August 15, 2016You Pays Your Money & You Takes Your Chances
A ticker-tape parade broke out in my home the other day, when my basement excavations revealed a box of old paperbacks that contained my treasured copy of Robert Sheckley’s 1975 science-fiction novel ...
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June 18, 2015On Buttery Butter, Compress to Impress, Less Is More, Etc.
To indicate her displeasure with overwritten sentences, my grandmother used the phrase "buttery butter." What she meant by it was this: if you write "butter" it’s clear already what you’re talking ...
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May 19, 2009
Sugar Belly's Bamboo Sax
We were teenagers, older teens.On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously ...
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March 18, 2014
Writing Sex
"And Panhuyzen really gives good sex.” ~National Post, August 1999 Sex! Did you hear that, sex! We’re talking about sex today. Oh, what’s that, you don’t want to talk about sex? Well, too bad, ...
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December 20, 2023The Transition to Short Stories (as a poet)
I’ve spent years now honing my craft as a poet. I know how to edit individual poems, as well as to approach and rewrite entire manuscripts. Why did the need to do the same in fiction seem so daunting ...
