Daniel PerryTag

The Part of It You Don't See

If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...

On Staying Hungry

One night after a reading years ago, before any of us had published a book, I and another writer I know gave a third writer friend a pretty hard time about not wanting to submit stories to magazines. ...

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 ...

You Just Need to Write a Bestseller

If you’re a writer and you’re not rich and famous—so what I mean is, if you’re a writer—you’ve heard this one, often enough from someone who doesn’t write fiction or maybe even read it.Have ...

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 ...

July 2018 WIR Daniel Perry on Favourite Reads & Biggest Literary Influences, from O'Brien to du Maurier

You can almost feel the dusty air of Currie Township in Daniel Perry's stories. The desire to escape the rotting barns and crumbling roadways is palpable, and captured viscerally in the character of ...