Book related writing
Giller Prize winner Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air is almost too good So I have a problem this week. Late Nights on Air landed in my lap about three weeks ago. And it sat on my desk, waiting patiently with a tinge of desperation, like someone rendezvousing with a new lover. I no sooner…
Ottawa International Writers Festival’s growing rep lands it a prize catch The simple and powerful idea that fuels good writing is that language is more than the uncomplicated vehicle by which information is delivered. Words act in concordance with each other to actually shape meaning, to give it structure. Words are formative things. They don’t…
Latest issue of Arc Poetry Magazine resurrects the “forgotten and neglected” The unseen wisdom of the world tells us that life is sometimes awful. Man is always subject to the ultimate vicissitudes of death and decay; it is the single constant star in our often carefully navigated lives. We feel this most keenly when it…
Some of Decalogue 2’s authors break wood effortlessly, others use brute force I have no idea what good writing is. But in my limited experience, I usually liken it in a very particular way to martial arts. In the correlation of joints, sinews and mind there are a thousand different ways to throw a punch.…
Rob McLennan and Nicholas Lea lead Ottawa’s literary rise As an amateur cynic, I always hesitate to trumpet things. So often they arc up like a rocket and plunge elliptically, falling below my expectations. This is almost certainly due to some immense and unforeseen flaw in my own makeup. My point: Whenever I witness something…
The return of the Ottawa International Writers Festival As I write, I can’t escape from a story in M.A.C. Farrant’s absurd and beautifully melancholic collection The Breakdown So Far. A shape-changing baby delights a mother and her girlfriend with constant novelty of form, surprising them in a beautiful variety of shapes until one day he…