Tough Love

This week, I’ve been practicing some tough love. My motto has been: Stop snivelling. I’ve been getting up early, hauling chunks of my draft back to bed and editing, re-writing, deepening. No checking my [fill in the Internet blank] first, no opting out. Because, as I said last week, the only way out is through. […]

Learning the Language

Last night I had a dream that I was holding the advance reading copy of my next novel. It had a gorgeous cover in reds and browns, and it was a big fat book. The only problem: part of it was in Italian. I don’t quite know it yet, is what I think this means. […]

Firelight Interview Series: Trevor Corkum

I can’t quite remember how I met Trevor Corkum, but it was online and shortly after we began communicating we discovered a bunch of connections: we both went to Trent U., in Peterborough, Ontario, at the same time, and we had a mutual friend unrelated to our work or our schooling. Plus, there’s the writing […]

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 […]

On Finding the Real in Realism

I love Ian McEwan. Among other works, his short novel On Chesil Beach absolutely blew my mind with its delicious description, compassion, and nearly telepathic internal narrative of a young couple engaged in the young-couple drama and anxiety of their wedding night. He schools me, does Mr. McEwan. So I was pleased to come across […]