Stories
Book Review: The Diary Keepers by Nina Siegal
More than a year before the Second World War ended, the Dutch government in exile did a very smart thing. The minister of arts and sciences went on the clandestine Radio Oranje to ask people throughout the country to preserve their diaries and papers about everyday life during the war, documents that detailed their struggle […]
Tilling The Corner Garden
That’s Jessie Barfoot looking away from us on the new cover of my third novel, The Corner Garden. I love the designer’s portrayal of Jesse, and I’m launching the revamped cover today with a story about what inspired the book. Jesse narrates the novel, and she introduces herself by saying, “I think I’ll call myself Gretel […]
ChatGPT and my novels (in the style of Drake)
I was bored, and actually had some questions, so I logged onto the AI model ChatGPT. Here’s our conversation, edited for length. My novel Time Squared from 2021 is being pirated. Can you find any pirate sites, including Reddits and sub-Reddits, where the novel is being offered for free download? I’m sorry to hear that […]
Book Review: Spare by Prince Harry
The Vikings were mostly younger sons, footloose men whose older brothers were heir to the family farms in Scandinavia, and whose poverty left them with a tendency to pillage. The first Vikings banded together in about the year 900 to man speedy boats built by prosperous local chieftains who gave them a cut of the […]
A Travel Book — and Travel Questions
Today I’m celebrating the lovely new cover on my travel memoir, Foreign Correspondences: A Traveller’s Tales—and reflecting on the increasingly fraught idea of travel in a climate-changed world. I’ve got a new novel out this fall. Far Creek Road is set in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and will be marketed as historical fiction. Apparently […]
Book Review: Out of Africa Re-examined
She was born Karen Dinesen in 1885, although she used different names and lived in vastly different places throughout her life. Tanne, Tania, Isak Dinesen was brought up on her family’s estate in Denmark, went to Switzerland and France for her education, then moved to a coffee farm in British East Africa with her aristocratic […]
Book Reviews: Isak Dinesen and Her Family
I wrote recently about falling down a Scandinavian rabbit hole. In fact, I’ve been reading my way into multiple burrows, picking up old books and thinking about once-famous lives and adventures, some of them wounded and raw. Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, a Swedish Canadian ornithologist and writer. Her cousin Karen Blixen—pen name, Isak Dinesen, the […]
Book Review: Woman, Watching by Merilyn Simonds
I fell down a rabbit hole after reading Merilyn Simonds’ excellent biography, Woman, Watching: Louise de Kiriline Lawrence and the Songbirds of Pimisi Bay. It tells the story of a Swedish Canadian woman, an aristocrat who led a life of unprecedented twists and turns. She married her White Russian husband while working as a Red Cross nurse […]
Book Review: Natural History by Andrea Barrett
Andrea Barrett’s new collection of short stories opens, “The cover is faded olive, not flashy; not the first thing you’d pull from a bookshelf.” Maybe Barrett and the book’s designer had a bit of fun, since the cover of her collection, Natural History, features a fine selection of greens, browns and purples against a slightly faded […]
Random Eavesdropping Download — 2
I’m still spending a few minutes every few days going through old notebooks, the ones I always carry with me, transferring phone numbers and email addresses. This one contains an entry from the waiting room of a medical office. A neurology unit, the note says, so we would have gone there for one of my […]
Random Eavesdropping Download
I’ve been going through old notebooks so I can harvest phone numbers. These are the notebooks I keep in my bag and toss in a drawer when they’re scribbled full. In one, I wrote down a conversation between two men in a restaurant. True story. “How’s Gillian?” “She’s fine. She’s busy. Daycare. Lessons…” “Do you […]
Arrest Made in Michael Finlay’s Death
The suspect in the death of long-time CBC journalist Michael Finlay turned himself in to police this morning at Toronto’s downtown 52 Division. Robert Robin Cropearedwolf, 43, later appeared via video conference at College Park Court. He has been charged with manslaughter. I haven’t written a paragraph like that since Michael and I were both […]
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