“What can I tell you about my people?” The great Duke Ellington was echoing a question from a long-ago interviewer. “Well, I’m glad you’re recording. Of course, I had such an influence from the people. Because that’s the better word. The people, not my people. The people are my people. That is—people.” And what about his work? “It’s strongly American Negro music. There’s a […]
I was working in a small and windowless CBC Radio studio in the old red brick building on Jarvis Street in Toronto. On the other end of the phone line was a man about the same age as the building named Russell Procope, a musician, one of the sidemen from the Big Band era of […]
I’ve heard people say life is getting back to normal, but I’m not sure that’s true, even a year and a half into the pandemic. We all have to cope with big losses, family and friends gone or disabled. We also face so many small daily changes that it’s disorienting. I’ve taken my spavined right […]
We launched Time Squared this week, and during a Q&A, Elizabeth Renzetti asked a challenging question. She asked a series of them—Liz being, of course, an award-winning Globe and Mail columnist as well as an author herself. Check out her wonderful essay collection, Shrewed. But I’m thinking of one question in particular. Why is Robert Denholm always a […]
Technical stuff. This is for writers with backlist books they want to put up online. Also for people who want to self-publish a book they’ve written. Same process, at least at the start. As I wrote last time, I’ve re-published older titles for several years. I can’t emphasize enough that for published writers, the first […]
I just checked one sales site. In the past three months, five copies of my backlist e-books were downloaded in Ethiopia, I have no idea why. The National Library of Malaysia bought my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences. Other titles on this particular site—I use three of them—were sold in the U.S., the U.K. the Netherlands, Australia […]
It’s out: the e-book of my first novel, Poor Player, which I’ve published with a lovely, flashy new cover. The book is a noirish literary thriller set in Mexico. Human rights, drug trafficking and foreigners: the action occurs at a heady nexus. Jack Hall is an actor who comes to Mexico, quitting his hot career in L.A. […]
Bringing out the e-book of my short story collection, Hard Travel, sent me back to the journals I kept while writing it. We were living in Mexico at the time, my husband posted there as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Globe and Mail. These days, being a foreign correspondent sounds romantic and a little bygone. It was pretty […]
Now out: the e-book of Hard Travel, a short story collection and my first book. The seven stories are set in Guatemala, the Copper Canyon of Mexico, and at a bluegrass festival in North Carolina. Also in the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street in Toronto, where rumour had it, the pair of pants […]
I opened my closet this morning and decided that I hate all my clothes. I’m tired of the ones I’ve been wearing around the house for a year and a half, and they’re shabby, faded, washed too many times. The ones I haven’t been wearing belong to a previous life, and they look strange. Is […]
On Canada Day, I decided with a degree of irony to write about Waubgeshig Rice’s award-winning novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. “Chilling in the best way possible,” says the cover quote from novelist Eden Robinson. I would say chilling and warm and distressing, although that’s a bit of a mouthful to put on a cover, […]
Research. People keep asking me about it. What’s the first thing you do when researching a new novel? Especially now that you’ve learned not to over-research–something I wrote about last time. My books usually start with a scribble. I write down story ideas in my journal all the time, and most of them don’t have traction. […]