In Character InterviewTag

"I Know My Characters Very Intimately" October Writer-in-Residence Waubgeshig Rice on Crafting His Powerful New Novel

Waubgeshig Rice's hotly anticipated second novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press), plunges the reader into a small northern Anishinaabe community suddenly cut off from the outside world. Panic ...

"In Fiction There is Always a Tension Between What’s Said and What’s Unsaid" Sarah Ellis on her Draft Dodger Novel for Young Readers

Best friends Charlotte and Dawn are 13 in 1970 and not happy about it, longing to skip past the awkwardness of their early teen years and join the larger world - including the excitement of the hippie ...

Scott Thornley Introduces Your New Favourite Detective Series

Lovers of mystery and detective fiction have a new a favourite to discover in Detective Superintendent MacNeice, the protagonist of Scott Thornley's Erasing Memory (House of Anansi Press). The story ...

Aaron Tucker on Writing the Complex Man Who Fathered the Atomic Bomb

J. Robert Oppenheimer is known for his reluctant but irreversible legacy as the father of the atomic bomb and director of the infamous Manhattan Project. But there was more to the man than the bomb, and ...

"They Like to Wander at Night": Valerie Mills-Milde on Crafting Unforgettable Characters

For the women and children at home during the First World War, life was an unpredictable, anxious, and terrifying existence, as they waited for news of their sons, fathers, and husbands and worked to ...

Mark Frutkin on Describing Characters and Writing a Literal Devil's Advocate

In Mark Frutkin's The Rising Tide (Porcupine's Quill), it's 1769 in Venice and things are getting pretty strange. From a man with a skeleton strapped to his back to a courtesan with odd stigmata marks, ...

Debut Novelist Christine Higdon on Character, Synaesthesia, & the Importance of Names

Christine Higdon's debut novel, The Very Marrow of Our Bones (ECW Press), opens in 1967, with a tough town on the Fraser River descending into panic. Two women - Bette and Alice - have disappeared without ...

"My favourite Writing Moments Happen When a Character Surprises Me" Talking with Debut Middle Grade Author Sylv Chiang

Tournament Trouble (Annick Press) is the first book in the Cross Ups series from teacher and author Sylv Chiang (illustrations by Connie Choi). Perfect for video game obsessed middle grade readers, ...

"There are Two Kinds of Characters": Innovative Short Story Author Paige Cooper on Character

If you think a short story collection packed full of police horses with talons, were-deer, and time machine-building nine-year-olds can't be relatable, you clearly haven't read Paige Cooper's Zolitude ...

Jessica Scott Kerrin Tells Us About the Little Boy on a Bus Who Inspired Her First Picture Book

When Russell's family moves to a new house, he has a great idea: The big tree in the backyard is just crying out for an amazing tree fort. Russell's dad gamely gives it his best, and soon Russell has ...