House of Anansi PressTag

EMWF: Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on Festival Memories, Pre-Event Rituals, and Her New Book

By Graham ChristianWhile this year's physical edition of the Eden Mills Writer's Festival may be cancelled, fans and creators alike were thrilled to hear that organizers had decided to make the experience ...

A note to future book creators from a friendly book publicist

It has recently come to my attention that not everybody is familiar with what a book publicist does. On paper, a book publicist’s main responsibilities include, but are not limited to securing earned ...

A Literary Love Story: Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson Explore Toronto's Lit. Scene of the 60s and 70s in New Podcast

For those interested in discovering (or re-living) Toronto's vibrant literary community of the 1960s and 70s, the newest installment of House of Anansi's 128 Sterling podcast ought to be required listening.In ...

Fiction, Memory, and Family

I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...

Workspace

1. Desk: the desk belongs to my partner, Bradford Werner. He covered it in plastic during his university years. I poke fun of him for it, but the wood is pristine. I cleaned for this photo, but if you ...

Getting Over Getting Stuck

That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...

Revision Part Two, Long Projects

Short stories, essays, or poems are wonderful to revise—I say this while I’m revising a longer project, but story length does make a difference. You can reading through a short draft in an afternoon, ...

Revision Part One

Revision, where the piled fragments of a draft shift and reassemble, is my favourite part of writing. It’s where the most substantial changes happen, and a story is overhauled in ways that are surprising ...

Keeping Momentum

After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...

Where Ideas Begin

Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...