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Michelle Berry is an acclaimed author of literary thrillers. Her newest novel, Satellite Image (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024) follows the story of Ginny and Matt, a young married couple from the city who decide to buy a house in a small town and move after Ginny is assaulted.
On the night before the move, however, Ginny and Matt, while looking at a satellite image of their new home, see what is undeniably a body in their backyard. Thus the stage is set for this eerie story.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I think it’s safe to say that all writers began as avid readers. Just as all painters look at other pieces before painting their own piece, all writers read the works of others before crafting their own work. You’d be hard-pressed to find a writer who has never enjoyed reading. From a young age I always loved to read. However, recently I have found myself not desiring to read as much as I used to. Fortunately, in my university program I am forced to read anyways, but without this imperative I know wouldn’t be reading nearly as much as I should be.
If you say that putting yourself out there doesn’t scare you at all, I’m sorry, but you’re lying. Whether you’re asking someone on a date, applying for a job, or submitting drafts to a journal, the possibility of rejection is always imminent and always terrifying. Keep reading to see what River Street’s Margaret Huntley has to say about putting yourself out there as a writer.
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.
