Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I bought Grimmish at Word On The Street, recommended by one of the people manning the Coach House booth. Glad I followed the recommendation as the novel, by Michael Winkler, is well written, funny, with a self-deprecating humour that I found personally affecting. The premise is straight-forward. Set in the early years of the 20th…
This is a curated collection of letters both from Martha Gellhorn and addressed to her from a variety of correspondents, most notably H. G. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt, interpolated with Janet Somerville’s contextual notes. The overall effect is much like a tragic epistolary novel of grand dimensions.
Whenever I embrace the future, there inevitably follows a feeling of disappointment as I discover that the future is just the past wrapped in a shiny new package.
A question that people like to ask of the writing life is: at what age do writers produce their best work? What I find remarkable about the question is that people try to answer it. Most answers favour youth.
More than 500 authors from around the globe have signed a petition demanding the creation of an international bill of digital rights. This is a response to the revelations of whistleblower, Edward Snowden, about the extent to which US and UK intelligence organizations engage in online surveillance.
I’m writing a novel (tentatively titled Life In The Margins). It’s about sex, murder and systematic theology. Seriously. I’m offering a romp through the world of systematic theology, presenting it unto others as I wish it had been presented unto me.
Let’s say you like to write noir or bizarre or absurd. Let’s say you like to craft tales that plumb the psycho-sexual depths, that skirt along the limits of human behaviour. But let’s say you’ve run out of ideas.
At least once a week, I resolve to be a more disciplined blogger. It’s a weaker version of the New Year’s resolution. So, for example, I felt a twinge of it at the end of December and created a reading list: I would read a whack of books and blog about each of them.
When Canadians do the hokey-pokey, that’s what it”s all aboot. Can someone please tell me what it’s all aboot-er-about that there’s a proliferation of (American) TV shows that invent and then ridicule their invented version of the way Canadians speak? As a Canadian, I’ve never once said aboot.
Do you ever worry there are too many ebooks? The internet has made publishing almost costless, which means that anybody with a thought in mind can plunk away at a keyboard and send it out to all the world. Not everybody is enthused by this state of affairs.
It’s easy to come up with a list of great writers whose writing is drenched in alcohol. Malcolm Lowry’s Under The Volcano is an extended conversation with the inebriated brain. F. Scott Fitzgerald was, in his day, renowned as much for his alcoholism as for his writing. Closer to home, we have Morley Callaghan…
This is a piece about the dangers of writing book reviews. But if you want to hop onto that boxcar, you’ll have to ride with me for a while on a different track. My monkey brain can’t leap to book reviewing without first crouching beside a different bunch of bananas.
Almost two years ago, The Guardian published 10 Rules of Writing from Elmore Leonard. Leonard is famous for his allergy to adverbs and his advice in The Guardian includes the usual harangue. But Leonard goes further …
When Oliver was a boy, he used to wander with a stick through the family orchard, whacking at the high branches to knock down the best fruit. This is the image that came to mind whenever people asked about his writing. With pen in hand, he meandered through his thoughts, taking swipes at the best ideas, and if they were ripe, they dropped fresh to the page.
No, this post is not about the T.S. Eliot play, but about an episode I’m writing as my excuse to participate in NaNoWriMo – the discovery of a body in a church and subsequent revelation that the priest had been having sex with the victim (when she was still alive).