Of all the things to find in the family boxes this weekend, as my novel Mad Richard launches: this pooch, whose photo was taken in the 1870s or 80s. Turns out it was the dog of someone mentioned in the novel: Henry Verrall. Uncle Henry Verrall, it says on the back of the photo, the […]
When I said it was a vile and racist book, I meant extraordinarily vile and deeply racist. I tried to read it: The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, nestled so innocently in the box of inherited books. What had my husband’s grandfather been thinking, not just in buying it, but keeping it for long enough that […]
What do you do when you discover a vile and racist book in your boxes of inherited stuff? Burn it? Compost the pages on the principle of beating swords into ploughshares? Throw it in the garbage where it belongs? I’m speaking of The Clansman, a novel written in 1905 by Thomas Dixon, the basis of […]
Appropriately enough for a book by a musician–a wandering minstrel–I read Patti Smith’s memoir, M Train, on planes and in a hotel room. I was attending the American Booksellers Association convention, flying to and from Minneapolis to promote my novel, Mad Richard. Since the flight home was hours late, I finished Smith’s book about the […]
So there I was following a Tibetan monk around the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Nosy of me, but I was wondering what would interest a Tibetan monk in a Midwestern art museum. He was an older man in a saffron robe with a mustard-yellow toque and fetching mustard-and-crimson striped socks emerging from big sneakers. Huge […]
That exciting moment when the box of your new book arrives. Only a few weeks remain until Mad Richard is released on March 14 by ECW Press. I love the cover image, a detail from a painting by Richard Dadd, the main character in my novel and a distant relation of my husband’s, which gives […]
I’m just back from England, bringing home a UK cold and a lovely piece of news, having won a prize in the Bridport Prize short story contest. My story is called Steroid Dreams, and it took third place out of 4,512 entries from around the world. Last Saturday, my friend Frances and I travelled from […]
I’ve been doing a Marie Kondo lately with our overflow of books, holding various volumes in my hand to see if they sparked joy, or at least decide if they were useful. If not, maybe I should get rid of them–mainly to make room for more books. Yet a writer can’t help agonizing over whether […]
As a writer, I spend hours a day inside my fantasies. Staring at my laptop screen—or more often at the floor—I’m fantasizing 19th century Egypt, Charles Dickens walking the streets of London, an Ontario commune in the 1970s or mayhem in a Mississauga chop shop during a police raid. (Novel, novel, short story, film script that’s […]
Las Vegas announced itself as I stood in the check-in line at our hotel. The man in front of me was on his phone, dictating to Siri. He seemed to be texting his wife, and said he was looking forward to getting busy as soon as he checked in, going all graphic about what they […]
The non-ancestral Verrall turns out to have been an eccentric. This was Jacob Verrall, who owned Monk’s House in Sussex before Virginia and Leonard Woolf bought it from his estate. (That’s a photo of the sitting room above.) As I wrote last time, my husband is descended from a long line of Verralls living in […]
Let’s start with an anti-climax. The Jacob Verrall I wrote about last time, the man who owned Monk’s House in Sussex before Virginia and Leonard Woolf, probably wasn’t a close relation to our family. Looking through the genealogical research done by my mother-in-law, Mary Knox, I found no Verrall by the name of Jacob, and […]