I paused on the second-to-last page of Philippa Gregory’s magisterial Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History. In her afterward, Gregory sums up the story she’s just told over 676 pages, a meticulously-researched look at the way opportunity and oppression have ebbed and flowed through the lives of women in England for almost a millennium. And by […]
I came early to the big concrete room, and as I watched, something magical happened. Dozens of women filtered in, filling the space the way people do in a film dissolve. They came alone or in small groups, women of every age and background, most of them smiling, laughing, vibrating with anticipation. Also two men: […]
**This is an older post. You can read the latest news about Robert Cropearedwolf’s sentencing here.** I can’t forget a strange moment after Robert Robin Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of our friend, CBC journalist Michael Finlay. This was last May following his plea hearing. The judge had left the courtroom, the […]
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. […]