Friday, October 14th, 2011
What an honour to find Pathologies on Charlotte Gill’s recommended reading list at Canadian Bookshelf. She calls it a “literary antidote” to the lately much-abused memoir. Can’t help but like that!
Charlotte’s most recent book is Eating Dirt: Deep Forests, Big Timber, and Life with the Tree-Planting Tribe, which was recently shortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize.
Saturday, July 9th, 2011
But You Have No Idea.
A Reading and Discussion with Sarah Leavitt at Novel Idea Books, Kingston
Wednesday, July 20, 6 pm
FREE.
Most readers will confess to mining the details of their favourite novels for evidence of the writer’s life. Switch out one gender for another, add ten years and relocate a character to another province or territory and we’re all but certain that the writer is talking about his or her first love, a parent, an old boss, maybe a child.
What, though, of the non-fiction writer and the memoirist? What of the people we’ve come to know only through a very focused view of their world? Do we take for granted that we know something about them? Do we as readers in a sense fictionalize non-fiction writers, creating heroes and, in some cases, villains? What do we really know of the non-fiction writer?
Please join Sarah and me as we read from our respective works and chat candidly about the figure of the nonfiction writer.
Monday, May 16th, 2011
The thoughtful and insightful Julija Sukys interviews me today on her blog. Thanks, Julija, for the opportunity to chat with you.
Friday, March 11th, 2011
….winner of the Edna Award for Creative Nonfiction from The New Quarterly. I was the judge. The award was presented last night in Toronto. I guarantee that Heather’s piece, “The Mr. Shredder Man,” will make you laugh even as it shreds your heart. It’s wry, wise, and beautifully wrought. You can find it in The New Quarterly Xtra.
My task was to pick just one winner from a selection of thirteen of the best nonfiction pieces published in the previous year. I had a hard time narrowing the field. So congratulations also to The New Quarterly’s many wonderful nonfiction contributors, and to editor Kim Jernigan, for consistently publishing such interesting work.
Monday, January 10th, 2011
Four memoirists weigh in on writing the personal essay, at the New York Times.
