Stories
Book Review: Ghosts of Ortona by Ian Cosh
Main character energy. It’s a new term for an old urge: the need to feel that you’re a good person who matters. You’re at the centre of the action, the protagonist, a hero. You’re not a little person tossed around by a big bored universe. Instead, you have agency. (And 10,000 followers on TikTok.)[1] I […]
Writing Tip: Notice what you notice. (Thoughts for readers, too.)
If you teach creative writing, you may have faced it. A student stalks through the door before class, chin forward like Reese Witherspoon motoring through the hallways in Election. We might as well call the student Reese. After slinging into a chair, Reese tells you that someone in the class is going to steal the essence […]
Book Review: After Covid by Jason Gale
Remember the start of the Covid-19 pandemic? Six years ago, most of us were in lockdown. No school. Working from home. A mysterious new virus was killing tens of thousands around the world, one spread by… infected people touching fruits and vegetables in the supermarket? So you had to scrub your fruit and veg when […]
Book Review: Gitwaałtk by Crystal AJ Smith (and some words from her publicist about reaching readers)
The story opens with the narrator driving home along the highway from vancouver, the so-called highway of tears where her Twin and so many other Indigenous women have disappeared. Her Twin went missing four years before, and now her body has been found. “vancouver” and “Twin” aren’t typos, but represent writer Crystal AJ Smith’s decision […]
Returned damaged: Review of David Nasaw’s The Wounded Generation (part two)
I always pause when a new section in a non-fiction book begins, “Five years later.” Five years is a long time in our short human lives, and even if those five years pass without historic conflicts, we still experience a series of fascinating, traumatic and often life-changing events as we ricochet through our allotted three […]
Book Review: The Wounded Generation by David Nasaw
My first novel was called Aftermath. I started writing it when I was 17 and finished it when I was 22. Luckily it wasn’t published, but I mention it because it’s set in a veterans’ hospital after World War II. Its main characters are men who’ve been so badly injured they aren’t going to make it […]
Crowdsourced tips for a house purge (plus a few weird extras)
1. I heard a story about friends of friends who decided to downsize into a condo. They’d raised their family in the same house without ever moving, so the place was packed with all manner of everything, including boxes they hadn’t opened in years. It took them five or six months to sort through it, […]
Hamnet reviewed: a book, a movie and the plague, ancient and modern
Exactly six years ago, in late March of 2020, I was finally starting to feel better after what they said was a bad case of the flu. I’d gone to the doctor for the first time three weeks earlier feeling sicker than I had in years. My own doctor wasn’t in the clinic when I […]
Please allow your characters moments of happiness. (A how-to post)
Late last fall, the forecast called for one last day of sun and warmish temperatures. It was time to take down the garden for winter. After plotting out my work, I started with the small garden in the front yard. First I cut down the yellowed lilies, daisies and hostas, the coral bells and violets, […]
Book Review: Jhumpa Lahiri’s Roman Stories and the art of translation
I was asked one time to read one of my short stories at a literary evening. Nothing unusual, except that the organizers wanted me to read a Spanish translation of the story, which was about a magazine photographer working in Central America. The event was held in Santiago, Chile. I was living in Latin America […]
Book Review: The Feeling of Iron by Giaime Alonge
The rave review must have delighted the author, but I wonder how readers felt after finishing the book. The New York Times calls Italian writer Giaime Alonge’s new novel, The Feeling of Iron, “stunning” and his prose “as cinematic as the finest classic thrillers.” [1] For me, the praise wasn’t the draw. Instead, I picked up Alonge’s novel after reading […]
Does anyone else see their life in cat epochs?
This is the second part of a story about the cats we’ve had in our lives. Last time, I left our family living in Rio de Janeiro, where my husband Paul was posted while working as the South America correspondent for Toronto’s Globe and Mail. Our grey cat Pica had begun his life on a […]
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