Writers as ReadersTag

"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 ...

Decoder ring

In Girl Minus X, there are choices made by the main character, Dany, that seem more legible and logical to people who’ve experienced trauma and understand the way, afterwards, a person is forever scanning ...

A love letter (to books)

The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...

Fired Up About Consent Author Sarah Ratchford on the Books That Brought Them Tears, Lessons, & Laughter

The rallying cry often heard in conversations about consent is the simple truth: consent isn't just sexy—it's mandatory.And it's a topic that we're finally discussing with young people, with the hope ...