Gowdy’s Little Sister Weird and Wonderful
A book review by Katherine Fawcett Barbara Gowdy’s new book Little Sister is a tale of psychic leap-frog that explores identity, sanity, control, and the porous relationship between mind, spirit and body. The main character is Rose, a woman in her mid-thirties who runs a repertory theatre with her mother Fiona, and is in a […]
Shelley O’Callaghan on Risk
I am a 69 year-old retired lawyer and I am embarking on writing a memoir. I am a private person. I don’t share my innermost thoughts easily. But when writing my memoir, How Deep is the Lake: A Century at Chilliwack Lake, I find that when I open my heart, my writing comes alive. I […]
Claudia Casper on Risk
Researching my second novel I decided I needed to experience spelunking, and specifically, being in a squeeze. Vancouver Island has the largest concentration of caves in North America. I found a woman in Campbell River willing to take me spelunking in a spectacular limestone and marble cave system near Gold River. When I pulled up […]
Sheena Kamal on Risk
The very act of writing requires a leap of faith, a somewhat crazed belief that, with your words, you can create a story that another person—a living, breathing human being— will want to read. It’s the riskiest thing imaginable to sit and face a blank page armed with nothing but this belief and the germ […]
Putting it on the Line: Lenore Rowntree on Risk
So far as I know, no one has unfriended me on Facebook because of something I wrote. But I have landed in some unfriendly situations because of writing, including with myself. There were times I would have unfriended myself if I could have. I took a risk turning 50 and continuing to take myself seriously […]
Arctic Folly: Alisa Smith on Risk
The first camping trip I ever did alone, at the age of 22, was probably outside the norm: I chose the high Arctic. Polar bears, pooh! I only learned later in life that camping scientists take rifles with them on the tundra. Okay, I admit to a slight fear of polar bears. This is […]
Yvonne Blomer on Risk
I can’t think of a more superb topic for writers to mull than risk. For myself, there are so many moments of risk in my memoir Sugar Ride: Cycling from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur some people have asked me why I did the trip in the first place. My first answer is always that I […]
The Risk of being Japanese Canadian by Terry Watada
With the redress settlement and the rise of Japanese Canadian writing, I noticed a new stereotype has emerged in the Canadian public. Japanese Canadians are law-abiding, cooperative, timid, quiet, friendly, persevering and non-complaining (despite the redress campaign). No one thinks of them as angry, combative, corrupt, sexual and loud. That would be politically incorrect, that would be […]
Shari Ulrich on Risk
I can’t pretend I don’t have a complicated relationship with writing despite knowing that the essence of the process couldn’t be more simple: “Show up and it will come”. (A mantra plagiarized from Elizabeth Gilbert.) My sense is, it is all a risk – to show up and make oneself vulnerable to the muse; to tell one’s […]
Roo Borson on Risk
At a time when commentators on the nightly news talk almost calmly about the renewed threat of nuclear war, one of the necessary responses is to think again about what we hold dear, and about those things we would preserve. These include not only life itself, but those endeavours, including the sciences and the […]