Stories

Mad Richard: The ancestral dog

April 11, 2017

Of all the things to find in the family boxes this weekend, as my novel Mad Richard launches: this pooch, whose photo was taken in the 1870s or 80s. Turns out it was the dog of someone mentioned in the novel: Henry Verrall. Uncle Henry Verrall, it says on the back of the photo, the […]

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Racism in the Attic: The Family Boxes – 2

March 22, 2017

When I said it was a vile and racist book, I meant extraordinarily vile and deeply racist. I tried to read it: The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, nestled so innocently in the box of inherited books. What had my husband’s grandfather been thinking, not just in buying it, but keeping it for long enough that […]

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Racism in the Attic: The Family Boxes

March 13, 2017

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 […]

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Book Review: M Train by Patti Smith

February 22, 2017

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 […]

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Minneapolis and Tibetans and Booksellers

February 2, 2017

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 […]

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Mad Richard Arrives – Boxed

January 27, 2017

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 […]

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Steroid Dreams – 3

October 27, 2016

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. […]

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Steroid Dreams – 2

October 24, 2016

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 […]

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Steroid Dreams

October 20, 2016

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 […]

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The 2016 Bridport Prize

October 18, 2016

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 […]

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Notebook Download: Las Vegas

February 25, 2016

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 […]

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