Stories
How to Use Your Journals to Write a Story
It seems obvious, but it isn’t. I often find myself suggesting to emerging writers that they keep their eyes open as they go about their day, not spend it bent over their phones. Frankly, I think that’s important for everyone, if we’re going to live our best lives. Later, I think it’s just as important […]
Book Review: These Days Are Numbered by Rebecca Rosenblum
Rebecca Rosenblum’s memoir of the Covid-19 pandemic, These Days Are Numbered, Diary of a High-Rise Lockdown, had an unusual genesis. As the virus arrived in Toronto, Rosenblum began writing numbered Facebook posts, one every day, about the life she and her husband were living in Toronto’s St. James Town neighborhood. With its forest of high […]
Book Review: Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
In a recent Economist book review, the reviewer asked a question I’ve been thinking about ever since. How soon is it too soon to write history? The book under review is 2020 by Eric Klinenberg. There’s no subtitle, but we don’t need one to understand that Klinenberg has written a history of the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. […]
How to Market Your Backlist
People have been asking me lately why I periodically give away free copies of my backlist titles. I did it yesterday with my short story collection The Necessary Havoc of Love. Mainly I want people to read books that would otherwise disappear. There’s also that magic term advertisers use: name recognition. Does it giving away […]
Far Creek Road Review: The Miramichi Reader
Reviewer Alison Manley looks at my new novel from an angle I couldn’t have predicted. I’m reprinting part of it here. A starred review! February 5, 2024 by Alison Manley The first thought I had about Far Creek Road by Lesley Krueger was that it was made so perfectly for me, an adult who had fallen in love with […]
Book Review: Asking for a Friend by Kerry Clare
Piles of books. Piles and piles of books. Cases and shelves of books, books, books, and a table in my office stacked with them. I bring this up not just to share the burden, although I’m happy if you’d like to. Instead, I want to mention a plan. There are very few book reviews in […]
Joy to All
Happy holidays to everyone, and a wish that the sun will rise on peace throughout the world in 2024.
The Red Scare: Researching the Cold War
“The menace of the Communists to our Canadian way of life is vividly evident. In a Communist Canada, every surviving citizen would be subject to a rigidly tyrannical control of every detail of his existence. He could not choose his job, or change his job. For grousing he could be ejected from his home. For […]
Rando Notebook(s) Download
On the subway, a father is doing exercises in a workbook with his six- or seven-year-old son. I’m sitting kittycorner to them, and I can see that the book open to a story with blanks left so kids can fill in the words. The v. attentive father is asking his son for a verb or […]
Creating a Character. Say, Tink.
I went to the Toronto Old Book and Paper Show a couple of weeks ago planning to buy nothing. Instead, I wanted to pick up business cards from merchants who might be interested in the old maps, magazines and other ephemera filling boxes and shelves and attic space in our house. I’m still trying to […]
How to Cook a Ham Slice
When writing my latest novel, which is set during the early 1960s, I had fun cooking recipes from the Cold War years. Many were awful, which means I had to remind myself not to condescend to the past. We like to believe we’ve progressed beyond our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, which can strike us as […]
1960s Home Cooking (Not Recommended)
Mid-Century Modern furniture is one thing, but I’m afraid the dinners originally laid on those enviable teak tables were seldom up to the decor. My new novel, Far Creek Road, is set in suburban Vancouver in 1962, around the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Research—I love doing research—often had me wading through tomes about Cold […]
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