Jennifer Manuel: Out of a Jar (on Writing with Honesty)

I’ve been on a reading blitz lately about residential schools. I’ve read a couple novels that address this atrocious time in Canadian history, and I’m deep into volume one of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, a text that every Canadian should read, and which many will read, thanks to […]

Where There’s Smoke

  My husband is reading The Road. You know, the post-apocalyptic Cormac McCarthy novel where the world is blanketed in ash and everything is burnt or burning. It’s a fitting setting for the situation in Western Canada this summer. To the south of us, 30-some kilometres away, a fire is burning, which a friend of […]

Firelight Interview Series: Julie Paul

This month’s Firelight Interview is with author Julie Paul. Her second collection of short stories, The Pull of the Moon, was chosen by the Globe and Mail as one of the best 100 books of 2014. “This is writing of emotional veracity with an edge, of humour alongside gravity, of darkness tempered with blithe optimism,” wrote Rover […]

Firelight Interview Series: Marguerite Pigeon

Who are you? I’m a Franco-Ontarian, former catholic, former journalist from Blind River, Ontario. I learned Spanish in my 20s and used it to live in Mexico City and rural Honduras before coming to Vancouver to do a Creative Writing MFA. I planned to flee this city upon graduation because I’ve never felt at home […]

Earth For Sale

What I thought about yesterday morning, as I opened up the new package of dental floss with a special weave so it won’t break, is how so much of our human ingenuity and our diminishing energy supplies goes towards making new stuff that will appeal to the discriminating consumer. It was an echo of an […]