Peacock-feathered butterfly wings on the back of a perfectly spotlit gown. Blade Runner leather body suits. Kick-ass boots with red flames, a red-eyed skull and a gold TM logo: all this at the Thierry Mugler haute couture exhibition at the Musée des beaux-artes in Montreal. I like ducking into art museums, finding a moment outside the crowded […]
I’m just finishing off decent drafts of two new novels: a thriller and a literary manuscript. Going back and forth between the two doing rewrites, I’ve been thinking about the steps I ask screenwriters to consider when I’m story editing their scripts. Lately, the heightening draft. As a story editor, I tend to start off […]
Last night, I took a glass of wine and a book into the garden on a beautiful evening in Toronto, thinking I’d stay outside until the mosquitoes got bad. There weren’t any, and I stayed out until sunset. I repeat: No mosquitoes in Toronto in mid-July. I’ve been noticing all spring that there aren’t many […]
I didn’t know what to expect, so when we walked into the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, I was sucker-punched by the sight of Nick Cave’s soundsuits, extraordinary costumes constructed from everyday objects, everything from Grandma’s doilies to washboards to mid-century toy tops. They were wonderful, but what was the artist up to? I’m speaking […]
He was about as pumped as you could get, a dark spade beard above a thick neck that sloped down to enormous shoulders, his muscled arms looking oiled even outside the ring. Beside him was his wife, a very pretty Angelina Jolie-lookalike with puffed lips and the most astonishingly poreless skin, completely flawless under camera-ready […]
I wonder if anyone knew a man named Stan Johnson from Keewatin or Kenora, Ontario, a trainee pilot who worked for Starratt Airways in 1939. Because in going through my mother’s papers, I just found a proposal of marriage from him to her. More or less. It’s in a Starratt Airways envelope addressed to my […]
The phone rang yesterday when I was expecting a call, so I picked up. “Hello, this is Windows technical department.” The usual scam, to which I gave my usual answer. “No, it’s not. This is a scam. You take money from old people and confused people. Don’t you have any grandparents?” That’s usually enough to […]
I’ve fallen into a new routine lately of getting up very early and reading poetry. Darkness, a cup of tea, a quiet house and a thin book. Reading three or four poems concentrates the mind wonderfully. Most recently, I’ve finished a lovely collection, Roo Borson’s Cardinal in the Eastern White Cedar,a meditation on mortality. Borson […]
Here it is Valentine’s Day, and we’re celebrating with the release of an audiobook of my novel, Mad Richard. Read by Pascal Langdale, the book is available starting today on all major audiobook sites, including Audible, audiobooks.com, Libro.fm and probably others I don’t know about. Check your favourites and see if it’s there. It should […]
I learned a new word the other day: paralipomena. It means things left out, usually from a piece of writing, which are used in something else later on. Recycled outtakes, more or less. Of which I have a few. Playwright Alan Bennett introduced me to the word in one of the essays collected in Writing […]
Researching a novel means reading and travelling, amassing material and then cutting, cutting, cutting for focus and flow. This leaves outtakes, like the cloth left over after you’ve cut out the pieces of a garment. Not that I’ve done any sewing for years. One piece of cloth left over after writing my latest novel, Mad […]
“Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.” I’ve been writing lately about the long-gone British critic Cyril Connolly, having started to read him when I remembered his famous quote about the pram in the hall being the enemy […]