MemoirTag

Read an Excerpt from Grace Vanderzande's Story of Life and Love as an Ontario Farmer

Grace Vanderzande didn't set out to be a farmer or a writer, but falling in love led her to become both. When she met her husband and he shared his dream of owning and farming land in eastern Ontario, ...

The Trouble With Memoirs

A recent development in academic creative writing programs is the rise of “Creative Non-Fiction,” a genre supposed to be fundamentally journalistic but using the techniques of fiction. At its best, ...

Nonfiction "Explores Things Much Larger than the Individual Self" Michael Trussler on His Memoir of a Neuro-Atypical Life

From modern parenting to living with anxiety and more, photographer and award winning author Michael Trussler's memoir-in-essays The Sunday Book (Palimpsest Press) is a relatable, poignant, and moving ...

"Any Good Writing Involves Risk" Stuart Ross on Writing The Reality of Grief & Loss in His Striking New Memoir

One of CanLit's longest serving, most prolific, and most beloved poets, Stuart Ross has also published award winning fiction and creative nonfiction and served as a mainstay of the small press community ...

Excerpt Month: Battle the Darkness with Maude Barlow's Still Hopeful, a Memoir of Activism & Inspiration

If asked to find a word to describe our current point in history, few would immediately land on "hopeful". But for Maude Barlow, former senior water advisor to the UN General Assembly, lifelong activist, ...

Robert Earl Stewart on the Power of Nonfiction to Turn Our Most Broken Parts into Connection and Comfort

Blaise Pascal once wrote that humans were born with an "infinite abyss" that can only be filled by "God himself", originating a theory that spawned the idea of "a God-shaped hole" in the human psyche. With ...

"Ubuntu Has Gone From a Reminder to an Urgency" Chidiogo Akunyili-Parr on Inhabiting Her Revolutionary Mother's Voice & Philosophy

Dr. Dora Akunyili was a Nigerian pharmacologist who spent her life crusading against a scourge of counterfeit drugs in her country—drugs that were responsible for the deaths of millions, including Akunyili's ...

"Human Justice Still Demands It" Read an Excerpt from Die Walking by Obadiah M, an Raw, Anonymous Account of the Rwandan Genocide

Die Walking: A Child's Journey Through Genocide (House of Anansi Press) by Obadiah M. tells the story of the Rwandan genocide through the perspective of one incredibly brave man who experienced its horrors ...

Betsy Warland on Memoir as "the Mother Genre" & What She Loves about the Fluidity of Creative Nonfiction

It's been more than twenty years since Betsy Warland's Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Inanna Publications) was first published, and the revolutionary, genre-bending memoir is still ...

Read an Excerpt from The Shaytan Bride, Sumaiya Matin's Powerful True Story of Escaping Forced Marriage

As a small child, Sumaiya Matin had heard about the Shaytan Bride. A woman with something wrong with her. Maybe she was crazy, or defiant. Or maybe she was possessed, trapped or seduced by an evil spirit ...