Penning This Place
Penning This Place: Writing Whistler’s Literary Landscape Workshop November 3, 2018 | 10am-4pm | Maury Young Arts Centre, Whistler GET TICKETS Participants will engage in a variety of writing exercises which will creatively explore different ways of relating to and writing our relationships to place…this unique place. Open to and incorporating a wide variety of styles, […]
Honesty and Vulnerability Key Components in Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age
A Book Review of Darrel J. McLeod’s Mamaskatch: A Cree Coming of Age Reviewed by Katherine Fawcett While immersed in Darrel J. McLeod’s Governor General’s prize-nominated memoir Mamaskatch, I found myself flipping frequently to a picture on the front cover. The adorable Cree boy in the photo, probably about eight or nine years old, had […]
Poetry and Thin Places
Poetry reading event explores boldness, loss and the power of women at Whistler Writers Festival on Oct. 13 A Review by Mary MacDonald The autumn rains have arrived hard, lashing the trees. Fog is making the mornings muted, shadowy and inward. Evening arrives earlier and earlier. The coming dark is a time for shifting, for […]
I’m drawn to the stories where a person takes a dark journey that irrevocably changes them
Written by Maureen Medved | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Over the years I’ve been influenced by the writers who’d come before me. I’m thinking of writers in every form and from every time, the archetypal stories that have been told through the centuries, to the contemporary writers in every genre who have inspired me over the years. I’ve […]
Collaborative writing is not about who wrote what and how much each of us are responsible for.
Written by Simon Groth | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Infinite Blue is a collaboration between me and my brother, Darren. We are separated by an ocean: he lives in Vancouver; I live in Brisbane. Maybe that’s why we can work together. People often ask us how it’s possible to write collaboratively, especially with a sibling. The rules we settled on go something like this: · […]
Sam Wiebe’s take on this year’s festival theme: No one succeeds alone
Written by Sam Wiebe | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Vancouver Noir was the first anthology I’ve edited, and the process was a lot different than writing a novel like Cut You Down. For the first time I was on the opposite end, giving suggestions to writers to hopefully improve their work. I learned a lot about collaboration and revision working with […]
My mother said, “You should give credit where it’s due.”
Written by Maureen Medved | #NoOneSucceedsAlone For some reason, I’ve always loved to tell stories at parties. Friends have called out to me, “Can you tell the one about…,” so over the years I would tell the same stories repeatedly, often acting out the parts. Eventually, I turned story telling into story writing. My father […]
Behind each carefully-crafted sentence and paragraph lurk the ghosts of other words
Written by Sharon Bala | #NoOneSucceedsAlone There is only one name on the spine of my novel but my book benefitted from several ghost writers. Before agents and editors and publishing houses, there was my writing group, Melissa, Jamie, Susan, Gary, Morgan, Matthew, and Carrie, scrawling notes in the margins, circling passages they liked and crossing […]
And then there are his poems, which inspired me before we met.
Written by Lorna Crozier | #NoOneSucceedsAlone From the desk where I write, I can roll back in my chair, stick my head out the door and ask, “How do you spell…?” Patrick, my companion for forty years, and who works at his desk in the room right next to mine, sometimes answers. Other times he tells […]
Book Review: Something for Everyone by Lisa Moore
by Karen McLeod In her third collection of short stories, Canadian author Lisa Moore takes you to familiar places—the shoe store, an insurance office, a night class—and introduces you to some regular people. There’s a librarian, a caretaker, a wifey-wife. But unexpected events, memorable characters, and a reverence for struggling make this collection anything but […]