Jesus in Montana Fringe is often an exercise in getting weird and outlandish fictional propositions to ring true. Of course, this exercise often fails. This play happily, magically and marvellously succeeds. Jesus in Montana is the successful culmination of an effort to transform an absolutely true and hugely entertaining story into a work of fiction.…
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…
Mostly positive for the city’s new literary quarterly As a particle floating at the edges of Ottawa’s literary bloodstream, I’ve been extremely pleased to see our fair city blossom in letters lately. Along with Paul Glennon’s recent fame, the inception of Chaudiere Books and the winter birth of The Puritan comes the city’s latest addition:…
The Winter edition of The Puritan – out now! Ottawa has a new quarterly literary journal devoted to prose fiction. The Puritan is the product of the labour of three Ottawa University undergraduate students, Omid Amidi, Spencer Gordon and Tyler Willis, and features the prose of a sampling of regional authors. The writers run the…
Lisey must suffer Stephen King’s latest almost a theological treatise Stephen King is probably the most religious writer I can think of right now. Don’t misunderstand – I don’t mean religious in the sense of an organized and ritualized church, but simply that his writing embodies many of the most clear and pertinent aspects of…