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 […]
The glow of the laptop can be a lonely and desolate thing
Written by Charles Demers | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Sometimes long prose projects can be hard for me, since I’m used to the stand-up comedy world of instant feedback and jamming on ideas with other comics in the context of live shows — contrarily, the glow of the laptop can be a lonely and desolate thing. Happily, a few […]
No one succeeds alone
Written by Cornelia Hoogland | #NoOneSucceedsAlone My support for writing “Trailer Park Elegy” comes partly from my dog. When my brother died unexpectedly, I envisioned my dog as my driver who would ‘guide’ through grief’s ‘underworld;’ I’d be the passenger beside him in my red Toyota. My brother’s death had catapulted me into an otherness (underworld) […]
Since becoming a mom I have learned the secret of escape
Written by Dania Tomlinson | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Writing wouldn’t be possible for me without my writer friends, my husband, my mom, and a nearby coffee shop. Although my writer friends and I rarely discuss our work in much detail, we often rant and vent and work through broader aspects of our projects over beer. My husband is […]
Murder by Milkshake: Jeannine’s Story
Written by Eve Lazarus | #NoOneSucceedsAlone In 1965, CKNW personality Rene Castellani poisoned his wife Esther with arsenic flavoured milkshakes so that he could marry Lolly Miller, the 20-something receptionist. While the murder was horrific, so was the collateral damage caused to the Castellani’s 11-year-old daughter Jeannine. In 2011, I blogged about the murder, and […]
Longing for happiness, peace and a normal life
Written by Darrel J. McLeod | #NoOneSucceedsAlone Mamaskatch recounts the story of a Cree boy (me) growing up near Slave Lake. I am longing for happiness, peace and a normal life – something you might see in an indigenous version of Archie comics. Instead, I find myself immersed in situations of terror and tragedy – with […]
Book Review: A Long Way From Home by Peter Carey
Race Across Australia Takes An Unpredictable Turn In A Long Way From Home, Peter Carey’s latest novel, Titch and Irene Bobbs are a diminutive pair with a mighty dream—to win the 1953 Redex Trial. The brutal, car-destroying race circumnavigates Australia, and a win would give them the notoriety they need to start up their own […]