Stories
Mad Richard: How Do You Know What It Was Like to Live in the 19th Century? – 2
In my last post, I wrote about researching a historical novel like Mad Richard. My serendipitious decision to pull Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy off the shelves provided a start. Barker was writing about a period closer to ours, the time of the First World War. Having been born in 1943, she knew a great many […]
Mad Richard: How Do You Know What It Was Like To Live in the 19th Century?
I was scanning the shelves for a book I needed to research a script I’m writing, and my eye fell on Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. I must have read the trilogy almost twenty years ago, not long after it was collected in one volume in 1998. And for some reason, seeing it on the shelf, […]
Mad Richard: The ancestral dog
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 […]
Racism in the Attic: The Family Boxes – 2
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]