Short StoriesTag

What I Talk About When I Talk About Talking Points

When a publisher agrees to publish your book—or at least, when both of my publishers agreed to publish my two books—the author is presented with a questionnaire. If you don’t overthink it, the questions ...

Make It New (Again)!

I was shocked a few years ago when, in a workshop I attended, a thirty-something writer who had already published a book (and has since gone on to publish two much more successful ones) dismissed the ...

Writing What You "Know"

I’m one of countless writers who found his way thanks to this old standby, and having just published a book of stories set in small Southwestern Ontario towns a lot like the ones where I grew up, it’s ...

Did You Really Go Through All That?

I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...

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 ...

Talking Short Fiction with the 2018 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Finalists

There is short list of literary awards in Canada that serve as reliable prognosticators of future CanLit heavy hitters. One of them is the $10,000 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, awarded to fiction and poetry ...

"Lipstick Day" by Toronto's Leah Mol Wins CBC Short Story Prize

Today CBC BOOKS announced the winner of the 2018 CBC Short Story Prize. The $6,000 award goes to Leah Mol of Toronto for her story "Lipstick Day", which beat out 2200 submissions from across Canada. ...