FictionTag

When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence

A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...

Contest! Get the Best of Both Worlds with The Word on the Street's Facts and Fiction Prize Pack!

Are you a nonfiction lover? Or someone who adores curling up with a novel? Why not both?If you're more into fabulous writing that genre divides, we've got the contest for you! Courtesy of The Word on ...

September 2019 Writer-in-Residence Nancy Jo Cullen on Library Love, Recommended Reads, and Bronwen Wallace

Fans of Nancy Jo Cullen know that she is the rare writer who can do it all; her writing is smart, sharp, and memorable in poetry, short fiction, and now, in a novel: Western Alienation Merit Badge (Wolsak ...

Go Back to School with CanLit: 10 "School Books" to Take You into September

There's nothing like back to school season - warm days, cool nights, crisp new school supplies ready to get dog-eared with use. Even long after we're past school age, the start of September can still ...

"Like a Marilynne Robinson Book in a Spangly Jumpsuit" Missy Marston on Her Fabulous New Daredevil Novel, Bad Ideas

Ottawa-based author Missy Marston's second novel Bad Ideas (ECW Presss), is all heart, packed with humour, vivid and memorable writing, and unforgettable characters. Not to mention it has a rocket ...

When All Your Faves Are Problematic

 Recently, at a dinner with several writer friends, I learned that a writer I’ve long admired has been known to behave rather smarmily around young women. This writer is now on the list of names that ...

"I Put My Faith in Those Three Main Characters" Oakland Ross on His Intriguing New Novel Swimming with Horses

Sometimes the people who leave the biggest impression on you are the most surprising. In Oakland Ross's Swimming with Horses (Dundurn Press), Sam Mitchell is an average teen when he meets Hilary Anson, ...

"You Can Live Whole Other Lives" H.B. Hogan on Discovering the Most Important Books in Her Life

H. B. Hogan's debut collection of stories, This Keeps Happening (Invisible Publishing), is sit-up-and-take-notice short fiction. Assured, wonderfully strange, deftly funny, and totally fresh in both ...

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 writing politically, or how not to make your fiction sound like a lecture

When I started writing my most recent novel, The Conjoined, I began with the idea of subverting classic crime fiction, something that I thought would be a fun bookish game. What if I could write a literary ...