A Mixed Tape for Swarm

Despite the fact that my mother studied to be an opera singer in the 1960s, I’m not a very musical person. I mean, I make up silly songs about everything, especially our growing collection of animals, but I don’t listen to a lot of music. I write in silence because I find any sound pulls […]

Canada Reads Deadline Day

It turns out I’m the only writer in Manitoba who made it onto the Top 40 for Canada Reads, so yesterday I chatted with Terry MacLeod on the CBC Manitoba Morning Show about Swarm. Here’s the interview:   They also asked me to write an article about my top five concerns of our current oil-hungry […]

We Need To Talk

Swarm is set during times of peak oil. Well, post peak oil, actually. Deeply post peak oil. Very simply, peak oil is the theory that there is a peak at which we’ve tapped all the easily available oil reserves in the world. After that, petroleum becomes harder to find and more expensive to extract. You […]

Swarm for Canada Reads

Over the course of my Ontario book tour, I’ve had lots of people ask me what inspired me to write Swarm. One part of that answer is simply that I wanted to talk about the eventual disintegration of an economic system that’s come to rely on a cheap and accessible energy source that is shrinking […]