writing life

Power Q & A with Paola Ferrante

Power Q & A with Paola Ferrante

It’s easy to lose yourself in the dark and dreamy world of Paola Ferrante’s Her Body Among Animals (Book*hug Press). This collection of short fiction absorbs and unsettles. It explores the pressure of the patriarchy with playful and twisted stories that have dazzled readers since the book’s release in 2023. Paola’s book has been a finalist for the 2024 Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, a runner-up for the 2023 Danuta Gleed Literary Award, the Silver Winner of the 2023 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award for Short Stories, and a finalist for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards.

We are delighted to have Paola here with us today to talk about how her stories pitch darkness into light.

Power Q & A with Ian Colford

Power Q & A with Ian Colford

Books have long lives, but if it’s possible to be late to the party celebrating an amazing book, we are definitely late to this one. Ian Colford’s 2023 Guernica Prize-winning novel, The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard, is a mesmerizing read that runs a dazzling gamut of human emotion: love, greed, grief, jealousy, rage. You name it: the characters in this novel—particularly our protagonist, Joseph—sing with range that would make Mariah Carey weak with envy.

Power Q & A with Karen Green

Power Q & A with Karen Green

Karen Green’s debut novel Yellow Birds (Re:Books Publishing) is being hailed as a beautiful and textured exploration of love, community, and learning to accept ourselves and each other.

In the Toronto Star, Nancy Wigston writes that Yellow Birds, “carries readers into the heart of a vanished musical era, and does it with style and panache.” If you’re looking for a singular and stunning coming-of-age novel to lose yourself in this season, be sure to put this on your reading list.

Power Q & A with Rod Carley

Power Q & A with Rod Carley

RuFF is Rod Carley’s highly-anticipated fourth novel. This historical fiction, which is published by Northern Ontario’s Latitude 46 Press, transports us to Elizabethan England, where we witness Shakespeare struggling through a midlife crisis while trying to win a national play competition to secure the King’s business. Hilarious hijinks ensue, with whip-smart dialogue and a captivating tale that touches on salient social issues that persist today, including equality, justice, and censorship.

Humour and incisive wit combine to create a compulsively readable and thought-provoking novel from this Leacock Award long-listed author. We know RuFF will be a favourite book of the year for many and we are tickled to have Rod Carley here with us to talk about humour writing.

Embracing the Random: Various Writing Tips

Embracing the Random: Various Writing Tips

I usually pride myself on the organization of my writing. My mind typically flies all over the place, and writing is where I sort out those thoughts into coherency. But for this blog, I wanted to share a sort of messy array of various writing tips. They all pertain to writing and they are all (in my opinion) very useful, though other than that they share no unifying quality to make an articulate blog post.

So, How Do You Qualify Good Writing?

So, How Do You Qualify Good Writing?

Good writing is extremely hard to define as there’s a level of subjectivity to it. It’s easy to know what good math is, because you either get the right answer or you get a wrong one. But writing is different. I could read a book and think it’s the best thing I’ve ever read, and you could read the exact same book and think it’s the worst thing you’ve ever read. So, was the book good or bad?

No Writer is an Island: The Competitive Nature of Writing

No Writer is an Island: The Competitive Nature of Writing

 I am an insanely competitive person. I blame it on my older brother. He’s two years my senior, which was just young enough to play games with me but still old enough to be better than me at them all. This, of course, annoyed me to no end. To this day, I am constantly grappling with a desire to be the best at whatever I do and when I am not, I hate it.