Writers as ReadersTag

The Collected Essays in Work to be Done Share Remarkable Insights Into Fifty-Years of Literary Criticism and Analysis

Bruce Whiteman is an accomplished poet, translator, and scholar who has shown a vast scope of knowledge over his literary career. His essays have been published far and wide, and have provided valuable ...

Mike Barnes on the Big Books in His Life, Including One Important "Thundering Masterpiece"

Mike Barnes is one of those rare writers who can do it all – in poetry, short fiction, novels, and memoir, he takes readers on nuanced, brainy, powerfully moving journeys. Fiercely intelligent yet consistently ...

6 Books That Impacted Adriana Chartrand, Author of the Acclaimed Debut An Ordinary Violence

Try as she might, nothing is quite right in Dawn's life. A young Indigenous woman eager to leave a city full of bad memories, she's moved to a new place to start over, but she's haunted by messages from ...

"Suddenly All the Stories in My Head Made Sense" Heather Camlot on the Books that Guide Her Life and Her Writing

What would you risk to go to school? In Secret Schools: True Stories of the Determination to Learn (Owlkids, illustrated by Erin Taniguchi), Heather Camlot shares the amazing, and at times astonishing, ...

Hannah McGregor on the Books That Shaped Her Writing and the One That Helped Her Break Genre Barriers

You can tell a lot about Hannah McGregor from the titles of her acclaimed podcasts, including Witch, Please and Secret Feminist Agenda. A writer and creator unafraid of a bit of cheeky fun with a serious ...

Cut Road Author Brent van Staalduinen on the Books That Became His "Masterclasses" in Writing

Hamilton author and writing coach Brent van Staalduinen has a long list of honours for his writing, with three novels under his belt and more than a decade of publishing short fiction in some of the ...

"I’ve Read What I’ve Wanted... No Regrets" Ayaz Pirani on the Books That Shaped Him, from S.E. Hinton to Kabir

Ayaz Pirani's third poetry collection, How Beautiful People Are (Gordon Hill Press) builds on his reputation as a meditative, skillful, and wise writer rooted in the Indian ginan poetic tradition. Capturing ...

Robert Rotenberg on His Family's Lost Story of Heroism, A Memorable Opening Line, & Going Back to Chandler

Bestselling crime writer Robert Rotenberg, who is also a prominent criminal lawyer, knows how to craft a good story. But he got a serious surprise when two distant relatives wrote a story he'd never heard ...

On Synchronicity, or: a Set of Emergent/Entangled Influences

Moments of liberation—such as those of revolutionary rupture, or personal “peak experiences”—matter enormously, insofar as they remind us that conditions that once seemed fixed are not, and create ...

On Anabiosis and Mosses Helping with Sleep

On Wednesday, on the way to the river, I stopped in my tracks, struck by the moss habitat on a birch tree on the bank. It is a twinned paper birch — with one dead trunk snapped off about two meters ...