Stories
Racism in the Attic: The Family Boxes
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 […]
Book Review: M Train by Patti Smith
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 […]
Minneapolis and Tibetans and Booksellers
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 […]
Mad Richard Arrives – Boxed
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 […]
Steroid Dreams – 3
Third of three parts of my Bridport Prize-winning story. That night, birds exploded from the swamp, the beat of their wings sounding like struck paper. A glossy purple bird. A tiny vermilion bird like a flung bindi. Black bird with white beak. Green bird, blue bird. A kaleidoscope of birds under the richest of skies. […]
Steroid Dreams – 2
Second of three parts of my Bridport-Prize winning story. The actress clicked quickly out of the studio on her red-soled high heels. She had rather sweetly crossed her legs so he would see her expensive soles, but he’d been not-nice to her, asking left-field questions of someone contractually bound to promote a film she might […]
Steroid Dreams
This is my prizewinning story from the 2016 Bridport Prize, judged by novelist Tessa Hadley. It’s now included in my latest story collection, The Necessary Havoc of Love. Phil heard the specialist say cancer. The words probably and cancer. She was temporizing, saying something like, It probably isn’t cancer, but Phil knew they led you […]
The 2016 Bridport Prize
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 […]
Book Review: Murder in the Mews. Or, When Does a Novel Become Research Material?
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 […]
Notebook Download: Las Vegas
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 […]
Hockey in Las Vegas
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 […]
Virginia Woolf, Ancestors and Things That Survive – 3
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 […]