Ontario book news, interviews and more

Weird is the New Normal

“People are strange,” Jim Morrison of The Doors famously sang, “when you’re a stranger.” He would know. This is the man who, despite his reputation for wild antics on stage, sang some of his ...

Reminders on the Path - Sheniz Janmohamed in Conversation with Natasha Ramoutar

When my first poetry collection Bittersweet was released in 2020, my mentor Sheniz Janmohamed published our conversation about full circles and first books with Open Book.Sheniz has been so instrumental ...

Reminders on the Path - Sheniz Janmohamed in Conversation with Natasha Ramoutar

When my first poetry collection Bittersweet was released in 2020, my mentor Sheniz Janmohamed published our conversation about full circles and first books with Open Book.Sheniz has been so instrumental ...

Nonfiction "Explores Things Much Larger than the Individual Self" Michael Trussler on His Memoir of a Neuro-Atypical Life

From modern parenting to living with anxiety and more, photographer and award winning author Michael Trussler's memoir-in-essays The Sunday Book (Palimpsest Press) is a relatable, poignant, and moving ...

The Soul of Story: Authenticity

My first car was a 1980 Toyota Tercel hatchback, payment for which I had earned working 60 hours a week at two jobs all summer. It was a gutless four-speed manual with a top speed of eighty km/hour. But ...

"My Life Happened and Then the Stories Followed" Dayle Furlong on Writing Her Gritty, Gripping New Story Collection

The yearning hope and baffled rage of those characters who haven't been lucky in life is a palpable presence in Dayle Furlong's gritty new linked story collection, Lake Effect (Cormorant Books). With ...

"You Will Start Writing Again When You're Ready" Dan K. Woo Shares His Inspiring Writing Journey

If Amazon has changed modern life in the West, Taobao, China's massive online marketplace (which is owned by e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group), may have changed the Chinese experience even more. So ...

The Reasons I Write

I can think of many reasons why I should not write. The pay is terrible. The hours, though flexible, are insufferably long (i.e., even when I stop doing writing, I am thinking about writing). It can be ...

Frances Koncan on How Playwrighting Gets Her "Closest to the Truth"

Frances Koncan's play, Women of the Fur Trade (Playwrights Canada Press) is the antidote to dull historical renditions of early Canada. Set in "eighteen hundred and something something", it follows three ...

The Stories I Shelve, Part II

In Part I of this blog post, I looked at the importance of physical books in my life, how the books represent more than just the stories within them, that they also hold the stories of their acquisition, ...