What do we do when learning that Alice Munro’s second husband, Gerry Fremlin, sexually assaulted her daughter Andrea Robin Skinner when she was a child? Also that Munro knew exactly what happened and did nothing about it, not even consoling her daughter, but taking the abuse as an affront to herself. Yesterday’s Toronto Sunday Star ran two […]
My latest novel is set in the suburbs of Vancouver, where I grew up. Far Creek Road is like many first novels in being the story of childhood, a bildungsroman–except that it’s my sixth novel and ninth book. As I wrote last time, I started trying to write my real first novel when I was 17. I’d […]
I wrote my first novel between the time I was 17 and 22. It was dreadful, as you might expect. The story was set in a veteran’s hospital in Vancouver, and all of the characters had symbolic names. My parents had met in a veteran’s hospital where my mother was a nurse and my father […]
When writer Ian Williams was recently announced as the 2024 Massey lecturer, I pulled his Giller award-winning novel, Reproduction, off my bookshelves. I’d picked it up the previous fall at our neighbourhood street sale. A woman had put a blanket on the ground in front of her house to display several dozen books, many of which […]
In a Toronto courtroom today, Robert Robin Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of our friend, journalist Michael Finlay. His sentencing hearing will be held on July 15 before Justice David Porter, who will ultimately hand down the sentence. Michael died on January 31, 2023, a week after he was shoved to the […]
I’d forgotten about the moss. When I was out on for walk in Vancouver earlier this month, I nearly stumbled over a tree’s moss-covered roots knuckling out of the sidewalk. I looked up to see more moss growing on a wall and around the rocks in a garden. I’d had been years since I’d visited […]
It seems obvious, but it isn’t. I often find myself suggesting to emerging writers that they keep their eyes open as they go about their day, not spend it bent over their phones. Frankly, I think that’s important for everyone, if we’re going to live our best lives. Later, I think it’s just as important […]
Rebecca Rosenblum’s memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic, These Days Are Numbered, Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown, had an unusual genesis. As the virus arrived in Toronto, Rosenblum began writing numbered Facebook posts, one every day, about the life she and her husband were living in Toronto’s St. James Town neighborhood. With its forest of high […]
In a recent Economist book review, the reviewer asked a question I’ve been thinking about ever since. How soon is it too soon to write history? The book under review is 2020 by Eric Klinenberg. There’s no subtitle, but we don’t need one to understand that Klinenberg has written a history of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
People have been asking me lately why I periodically give away free copies of my backlist titles. I did it yesterday with my short story collection The Necessary Havoc of Love. Mainly I want people to read books that would otherwise disappear. There’s also that magic term advertisers use: name recognition. Does it giving away […]
Reviewer Alison Manley looks at my new novel from an angle I couldn’t have predicted. I’m reprinting part of it here. A starred review! February 5, 2024 by Alison Manley The first thought I had about Far Creek Road by Lesley Krueger was that it was made so perfectly for me, an adult who had fallen in love with […]
Piles of books. Piles and piles of books. Cases and shelves of books, books, books, and a table in my office stacked with them. I bring this up not just to share the burden, although I’m happy if you’d like to. Instead, I want to mention a plan. There are very few book reviews in […]