Journey Prize winning author Yasuko Thanh’s debut collection captures the lives of characters on the fringe: 1940s Vancouver youth gangs, a woman unsure of her place who lives in a Mexican resort town, a young woman caught in a crime who finds herself on her way to the border. Thanh’s lived all over the world [...]

Daniel Zomparelli’s debut collection of poems, Davie Street Translations, has all the high-octane things we love in poetry: sex, booze, drugs, Beyoncé, gyms. There’s danger and excitement, fear and laughter, camp and heartbreak. In disarming ways he transitions from funny to sad to sweet to harsh to funny and sad again, sometimes within a single poem. He [...]

Stephen Gauer is no fly-by-night first time novelist. His work has been published in journals and magazines for years, and like many writers, he graduated from an MFA program with a novel under his arm and many years of rejection ahead of him. I interviewed Gauer about his lovely, sad, poignant first novel, Hold Me [...]

What’s it like to be a first-time novelist? Poet? Short story writer? Non-fiction newbie? Is it like being the new kid in school? Strange, exciting but also terrifying? The old guard are revered and widely publicized for a reason: they’ve written a whole lot of books and they’ve been around the biblio-block. But what does [...]

Just a few short weeks ago Claire Tacon had the pleasure of doing what so many writers dream, and stay up nights singing into their hairbrushes, about: she held her first novel in her hands. In the Field (Biblioasis, September 2011) centers on Ellie Lucan, a soil scientist who’s at a strained place in her [...]

This past Sunday was the Emmy awards, the American equivalent of Canada’s Gemini awards (see how I made Canada the primary focus? Huh?), and as any avid television lover would do, I watched the telecast. I don’t say this lightly: I love television. I’d watched ninety percent of the programs nominated for Emmys, including the [...]

Nestled next to Vancouver art stalwart Access Gallery (in their new home at 222 E. Georgia St.) in Vancouver’s Chinatown is the newly opened Project Space. On opening night, as part of culture hopping event Swarm, the thoughtful selection of publications were already flying off the sliced and whitewashed palette shelves. Guests gathered to swig [...]

The feathery escape of summer is over and children are back at school. Fighting through textbooks, learning new things and forging lifelong friendships. They also embattled in a social status war they can’t escape until graduation day. Or in the case of  Pascal Girard himself in his new graphic memoir, Reunion, never. The Quebec City [...]

Writing involves a lot of discipline and hard work, but also procrastination and often a deficit of human interaction. Online communities, social media and instant messaging all provide an outlet for human contact, a tool for bouncing ideas off of others and a very common procrastination technique. I took a writer’s best friend/worst enemy, gchat, [...]

CBC is upping their literary game. In addition to regaining the broadcast rights to the Scotiabank Giller Prize (please have a televised red carpet with Joan Rivers this year. Please!) and creating the debate-ridden Reader’s Choice contest that will contribute one nominee to said prize longlist this week they launched a new CBC Canada Writes [...]