Here’s my most recent review for Quill and Quire. I have also done a few interviews for Profile Kingston, which won’t be available online, but you can pick up Profile all over town for free. Here’s an excerpt. 

I have recently started writing reviews for Quill and Quire. Here’s the most recent, a review of Late Nights on Air by Elizabeth Hay.

Upcoming reviews for Q&Q include The Frozen Thames by Helen Humphreys and Cloud of Bone by Bernice Morgan. Another review for Shameless will be out soon—a graphic biography of Emma Goldman.

This review appeared in Shameless Magazine (Fall 2005)

Nelcott is My Darling
Golda Fried, Coach House Books, $17.95

Golda Fried gets so much of leaving home just right. Alice of Nelcott Is My Darling arrives in Montreal for her first semester of university feeling like “a little teacup full of fear.” The city, the university, the people she meets—all are exotic, a little strange, and a million miles away from her parents and her pink and green bedroom back home.  There is Allegra, Alice’s coffee-addicted neighbour who is moody, mysterious and, somehow, dates older men who own underground clubs. And there is Nelcott, nothing like anyone Alice has ever known before. He works in a basement record store (“Do you even own a record player?” quips Alice’s high school friend) and lives in a neighbourhood known for muggings. Montreal features as a character as much as the people do, and Fried filters it through the eyes of the outsider, new to the city and to life itself, fascinated by its eccentricities and bohemian delights.  Alice can’t get enough poutine, smoked meat, and potato pancakes. Everyone is smoking, kissing, and wandering home around dawn. Alice’s actions can be baffling sometimes. Why does she end up rooming with Cricket, a girl even more annoying than her name? What is so alluring about Nelcott? Alice’s emotions are dulled and detached. The reader is perplexed—as Alice is herself.  Thrust into a world so alive, so precarious, Alice’s emotions shut down. Alice isn’t sure who she is, what she likes, or even why. And that is why Fried has gotten it so right.  

This review appeared in Shameless Magazine (Fall 2006) 

All Sleek and Skimming: Stories
Edited by Lisa Heggum, Orca Book Publishers, $19.95

Lisa Heggum has collected stories that bridge the gap between young adult and adult fiction. These are stories for the literate and young, not interested in the goings-on at Sweet Valley High, ready to graduate to adult fiction, but not ready to be bored by it either. The best of these stories capture a moment in youth that transforms or epitomizes. An endless summer spent goofing off with a best friend. Cross-dressing for the first time and loving it … then being caught. The abortion never mentioned. And the mix and breadth of the stories is astonishing. From Anne Fleming’s “The Defining Moments of My Life”—detached, some things too painful too articulate, but there nonetheless—to Ivan E. Coyote’s “The Cat Came Back— folksy and warm, the “otherness” bringing together, rather than driving apart—to Sheila Heti’s “Mermaid in a Jar”—cunning, and ringing true despite its surrealism. Even when considering the two graphic stories, when it might be easy to assume they might be similar, the range of styles and moods asserts itself. “Paul in the Metro” is nostalgic and you might even find yourself longing for a not-too-distant Montreal, whether or not you ever knew it. “Giant Strawberry Funland,” on the other hand, is bitter, twisted, and delightfully gleeful in its schadenfreude. Not every story will be for every reader, but that is the beauty of a collection like this: every story has its own style, its own voice, and its own audience, and every reader will find herself within its pages.

Remember the bookmobile? Sure you do. Here’s a modern spin.

This isn’t vanity publishing. It isn’t scrapbooking. It’s your writing turned into a piece of art. Here’s what the Mobilivre/Bookmobile Collective has to say about itself:

The projet MOBILIVRE-BOOKMOBILE project explores the long held tradition of bookmobiles as traveling libraries that promote the distribution of information.The BOOKMOBILE travels across the United States and Canada in a vintage airstream trailer visiting a variety of communities. Our annual traveling collection of approximately 300 book works range from handmade and one-of-a-kind to photocopied and small press publications.

I’m about to start my own small press (Upstart Press), but it won’t look like these beauties. It’ll be sensible and business-like.

Sigh. Someday I’ll channel my energies into something worthy of Mobilivre.

What are you doing with your poetry, your short stories, your LitBits? Hmmm…?

When the world and I were still young, etc., I spent my summers in Murray Corner. There wasn’t, thank goodness, much to do. My sister, various cousins, and I swam lots, wrote to provincial governments asking for travel packages (I am not making that up), and even started a weekly newspaper, The Murray Corner Press. I was the cartoonist and columnist of “Christina’s Kitty Corner.” (How I managed to avoid calling it Kristina’s Kitty Korner, I’ll never know.) Each issue was hand-copied and cost five cents, which I, as delivery girl, got to keep, natch.

Swimming, surveying travel packages for the Yukon, and being a newspaper woman can only eat up so much time. Thank goodness for the bookmobile. It only came one summer, that I can recall, yet I haven’t forgotten it. It stopped just down the road from the cottage, at the intersection of Highway 955 and the Murray Road that officially constitutes Murray Corner. I remember climbing aboard a bus with books. That’s all. I don’t remember taking out a book. I certainly don’t remember returning a book. I still have a New Brunswick library card (imagine having a card good for any library in the entire province!) and no one’s ever asked me to cough up 30 years of fines for Richard Scarry’s Best Rainy Day Book Ever.

But I still remember that bus. It was hot that day. The Northumberland Strait was still; the grass was high and smothering. The road, chip/seal so it was sticky and melting, radiated heat. The bus was suffocating. What right-minded kid would step into a 1970s-era bus without a/c, packed with old paperbacks (reeking of cigarettes) and gnawed kids’ books, on a day like that? I did, and I’ve never forgotten it.

If you love books, I don’t need to explain this. How wonderful, how magical, to feel alone, adrift, forgotten, and then to wander down a road that instead of being empty, as it was yesterday and the day before and the day before, isn’t. Instead, sitting there, waiting, is a vessel with Nancy Drew and The Bobbsey Twins and Nurse Cherry Ames and Richard Scarry (for the tots), and more and more and more.

It’s like when David Bowie came to Moncton. Only better.

There are still bookmobiles out there, but how many of us have experienced one? And do they have the impact today they had back then? My friends down at the shore are only a mouse-click away. Their kids are chatting with buddies on the other side of the world real time. Can the bookmobile compete with a kid who can click her way to Karachi and Seoul and Seattle and home again? When the bookmobile came to me, I had to wait weeks for envelopes packed with tourist information to arrive from Calgary or Nanaimo. And when they did, I swooned.

When the bookmobile came to me, it was a messenger from a larger world. Remember when the world was that big?

There’s an amazing art/literary project called Mobilivre/Bookmobile out there. I’ll tell you about it next time.

Elizabeth Greene, a Kingston writer whose fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, has been involved in writing groups for over 25 years. She says that while she isn’t always in a writing group, writing groups have always been in her life and always will be. When she finds a group that works well she feels renewed. “It’s exciting to see writing grow.”

Each of Greene’s groups have had about six to eight members and had similarly informal atmospheres. Sometimes she acted as facilitator, but always the groups were non-hierarchical and strived to create an atmosphere of trust and openness.

And the support and encouragement Greene receives from fellow writers is exciting too. Speaking of a poem later published in the Queen’s Feminist Review, she says “I didn’t think I could write poetry.  If I hadn’t had the support of the writing group, I would have stuck it back under the bed.”

Greene participated in a group that met weekly for about a year, but found the schedule didn’t suit her style of writing or her needs. “I don’t write that quickly,” she says with a laugh. And she wants to work on the ‘big picture’ of her writing, a need that a group that meets weekly, examining a few pages at a time, may not be suited to address.

Most of the groups Greene has been involved with have met monthly. Like the Kingston Writer’s Guild, some have had more than just workshopping in mind. One was formed to facilitate the creation of a literary journal—Catalyst—that ran for about a year. A later group was formed to workshop members’ writing but quickly evolved into a publishing project: the anthology On the Threshold: Writing for the 21st Century was published by Beach Holme in 2001.

Maury Breslow has been teaching creative writing workshops with Later Life Learning for about 15 years. He too emphasizes the need to foster an atmosphere of trust in a writing group. The workshops last ten weeks, but most members continue to attend workshops, and a de facto writing group emerges. While he has never witnessed any personality conflicts, he has seen members react badly to criticism because they confused craft with content. “It’s very important to make it clear that the individual is not being criticized; the content is not being criticized.  You cannot criticize what a person is has chosen to write about, but you can suggest a better way to go about it or point out things that aren’t working.”

Breslow has advice for keeping a writing group’s meeting on track.  “If they want exercises, I give them some exercises. And they’ve come up with some really interesting solutions to these exercises. But I let them write at their pace, what they want.”

This is advice Deborah Blenkhorn, a Queen’s graduate now teaching writing in Vancouver, would have liked to have had when she started a writing group.  “We would begin with a potluck dinner and some wine. Lots of laughter, lots of conversation. Then we each read excerpts from our writing.” But the social atmosphere remained, and a working atmosphere never emerged. Blenkhorn laments, “You would read your work and everyone would say things like ‘Oh, that was nice’. But no more. We didn’t work on our writing.” Without the excitement of seeing each other’s work develop or the feedback from other writers, the group quickly faded.

Breslow warns against socializing before a meeting begins, explaining that it creates a mood that prevents people from saying things that might be perceived as critical. “If you’re going to eat, take a break after working for awhile or wait until after the meeting. Socializing kills the mood to work.”

And even though there are many networking and social benefits to belonging to a writing group, members belong primarily because they want to work on their writing.

Maureen Garvie, a novelist and member of the Ban Righ Writing Group, also belongs to a very different kind of writing group—one in which most of the meeting is spent actually writing.  It’s a small group—only two members—but they meet weekly and use “starters” from books on writing or simple writing exercises.  “It’s the same kind of thing I’ve done in teaching creative writing to kids,” Garvie explains.  “Once time is up, we read out what we’ve done and comment on what the other has written.”  The goal is not to produce a polished piece of work, as it often is in a more traditional writing group, but it is to write.  It can produce work very different than a writer is used to.  And it can be successful.  Garvie knows of a writer who won second prize in the CBC literary awards with a piece of writing begun in such an “active writing” group.

Denise Kenney wants a writing group that works—literally. She envisions a group of at least three compatible writers gathering on a regular basis to write together. Meetings would focus not on workshopping existing writing, but on creating new writing—on the spot. Her plan is simple: “If we have three, we can begin.”

How does a writing group begin? Some entrepreneurial writers put up notices at local libraries or in community newspapers. Many groups emerge from creative writing classes. Carolyn Smart has been teaching creative writing for 22 years, 15 of those at Queen’s.  She knows several writers to have chosen to continue meeting after their writing courses have ended. The most successful have been those with little, if any, focus on structure but with tremendous commitment to writing.  “A support system is very important, but you need a sounding board: someone to tell you the truth.”

Pat MacAulay recalls advice she received from Amy Friedman, a Kingston writer and editor now living in California, “Take a writing course and find someone who writes like you.  Someone you can be supportive with.  Then you’re all fired up to write!”

Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking. — Jessamyn West

Kingston is a city of writers: Merilyn Simonds, Steven Heighton, Wayne Grady, to name only a few.  Many more are lesser known.  They write novels and plays, poetry and stories, travel writing, humour, memoirs, mysteries.  Although we may catch a glimpse of someone scribbling furiously in a downtown café, for the most part these writers and their works are invisible to us.

Ask any of these writers if theirs is a lonely endeavour, and they will invariably say yes. A large circle of writing friends or hours spent sipping lattés in an artsy café may take the edge off the loneliness, but when it comes time to put pen to paper, the door to the rest of the world is closed, and the writer is simply alone. 

Writers know that writing is isolating, and many take this notion one step further: writing should be isolating.

Or should it?

For Kris Andrychuk, a Kingston novelist, isolation is “one of the loneliest and most discouraging aspects of writing.” She struggled with this isolation in the years before her work was published. “In my own case—raising children—I didn’t know any other women who wrote. I worked alone. I was writing alone. Yes—certainly isolating.”

Writers can find community with other writers. They can attend readings, take writing courses, and seek out friendships with other like-minded writers.  But, still, there is isolation.

Like many writers, Andrychuk has turned to a writing group for inspiration, feedback, information and support. Although she has since had many stories and two novels published, she still attends a weekly writing group at the Ban Righ Centre at Queen’s University. She explains, “If you are sending stuff out, you might wait six months for a reply. With a writing group, it is like having your reader right there. You get feedback immediately.”

Writers speak of being “lost” without their writing group and of leaving meetings “invigorate, inspired and excited.” Just what do these writing groups do for writers? Perhaps more to the point: what is it that these writing groups actually do?

There are many kinds of writing groups. Some exist only to workshop writing. Some serve as catalysts for writing, providing a forum for members to participate in group writing exercises. Some function as a writing community, a social network, and a place to exchange books, ideas, and words of encouragement. Still others are formed with ambitious plans to create literary journals, anthologies, to support writing contests, and to sponsor guest speakers. Many, of course, do more than one, or all, of these things at once.

The Ban Righ writing group focuses on workshopping members’ writing and has a deceptively informal and simple structure. It was founded about twenty years ago by Bronwen Wallace as an off-shoot of a writing course she was teaching at St Lawrence College.  As the years passed, the group evolved into a self-run, teacher-less collective.  The group is currently closed to new members, but over the years has fluctuated from about five to ten members, and genres range from poetry and prose to travel writing and memoir. Some members are published novelists; some are still working towards a goal of being published. All are serious about improving their work.

There is no agenda or facilitator, and still an astonishing amount of work is accomplished in a typical two-hour meeting. The atmosphere is casual and warm, yet the business of writing dominates and the focus remains on the work at hand. Members distribute copies of their writing (three pages at the most). Members take turns reading their work aloud and a critique follows. Notes are made on the copies which are then returned to the author. There is a natural flow from one piece of work to the next. No record is made of the meeting, and no work is carried forward to the next meeting.

At the other end of the spectrum are groups like the Kingston Writers’ Guild, which ran from 1980 until 2002. With a core of about 20 members and anywhere from 20 to 60 members at meetings, the Guild had an executive, collected annual dues, and followed an “unwritten” agenda. Its meetings included a call to order, discussion of ongoing business and guest speakers. Its focus, however, was its members’ writing. And yet it did much more. It sponsored a children’s writing contest for five years in the 1980s (with $500 prize money). From 1992 to 2002 it judged a prose and poetry contest at Frontenac Secondary School.

Pat MacAulay, vice-president of the guild for many years, says of its first meeting—which drew over one hundred writers—that “the adrenaline was running.” Like Andrychuk, she appreciates how a writing group can alleviate the loneliness of writing. “[Writing is] so solitary. If you have no feedback, you’re not sure you’re on the right track,” she says.

MacAulay stresses the atmosphere of trust that developed when discussing members’ writing. “We got used to each other’s writing and could suggest things freely. Every once in awhile, someone might get hot under the collar, but people were very diplomatic. It was a warm and trusting atmosphere.”

Turning 30 was so traumatic for me (I know it’s silly, but it was), that I visited a fortune teller. Not a tarot card reader or anything respectable like that, but a fortune teller with a crystal ball. I am sure some readers out there do not think tarot cards are respectable, and I am positive there are some readers out there that see nothing wrong with using a crystal ball, but then again, all this stems from me being positively wacky over turning 30, so I think all our judgments should just be swept aside for the moment.

This fortune teller gave me, perhaps, the best advice I have ever received in my life. She gazed deeply into her crystal ball (after taking my forty dollars, natch) and said, “You’ve just got to get yourself out there.”

Until that moment, I had barely whispered to my closest friends and confidantes (such as my cat) that I liked to write. I don’t think I had shown my writing to more than two or three people and, even then, only grudgingly and with enormous trepidation. I had certainly never dared to try to get my stories published.

Why are we shy about our writing? Other kinds of artists (amateur or professional) don’t seem to have this problem. In fact, amateur painters and singers proudly show off their talents and people admire them for it. The guy in the mail room who photographs mountains is sexy; the librarian who sings at weddings has super cool weekends. The waitress who writes poetry is … come on, face it … kidding herself. Or so we imagine non-writers think.

You see, the photograph and the painting is the finished product. The artist has produced, and there - on the wall - is the evidence. The singer has trained and then performed. Her performance is her finished product, witnessed by an appreciative audience, envying her innate talent and years of training. But for a writer, the work doesn’t seem done until it has been published. But publication is a difficult thing, and many deserving manuscripts never see the light of day.

How many writers feel like they don’t have the right to call themselves a writer because they haven’t yet been published? How fair does that seem? Not very, if you ask me. Other kinds of artists get to proclaim their sexy artiness, why not us?

I took the fortune teller’s advice: I told anyone who paused long enough to listen that I write. I write fiction. No, I haven’t been published, but I’m trying. Nope, you’ve never heard of me, and maybe you never will, but I write. I love it. I’m a writer.

And you know what? People thought that was amazing, cool, sexy, exciting, and awesome. They didn’t think I was a loser, or kidding myself, or had refused to grow up. They thought I was a writer. And so did I. It didn’t happen overnight, but in time, I was published. A story here, a story there. And then last fall, a chapbook of my short stories was published by Black Bile Press in Ottawa.

Get yourself out there. Send out your work to be published. It’s better than you think it is and you deserve to have other people read it.

How to do it? Well, it isn’t hard, but it is slow. Here’s what I wish I knew back then:

• Read books and articles about how to get published. Sounds simple, but lots of writers don’t do this. The Canadian Writer’s Guide is classic and indispensable.
• Connect with other writers. Join a writing group or a writers’ association. I belong to the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick even though I am in New Brunswick for only a few weeks in the summer.
• Read journals and magazines that publish writing like yours. This is a long-haul research project and needs to become more of a long-term habit than an afternoon activity. The more you read, the more you will become familiar with the literary community; the more familiar you are with it, the better targetted your submissions will be. Visit The Danforth Review and placesforwriters.com for links to literary magazines and journals.
• Check out the submission guidelines for your intended magazine or journal and submit, submit, submit.
• Wait. It takes time - up to six months or even a year. Be patient and know that you’re not alone. There is a world of writers out there, and I’m one of them, waiting to hear from a literary journal.

And the next time you’re feeling down about yourself as a writer, consider a fortune teller. You never know how good the advice will be.

What inspires you to write? Your childhood? Your town? Your crazy family that drives you up the wall (in the best possible way, of course)? A garden? Other writers? An event you never want to forget? Or an event that you wish you could forget but can’t?

Sometimes, it feels as though there is so much inspiration for our writing, that we are sure we’ll burst if we don’t get a chance to write it all down. When I was a waitress, I would write my ideas on napkins and stuff them in my pockets, craving a moment alone so I could fully explore and develop the ideas bubbling within me. There was never enough time and I never ran out of inspiration. When I was a waitress.

But sometimes we just can’t find that something that sparks our creative fire. We have lots of time. We feel rested. No one is making demands on our emotions or our minds or our time. The computer is not crashing. We can find a pen. The cat has stopped yowling maniacly. We want to write. In fact, many writers feel just “wrong” when they aren’t writing. When the creative well runs dry, you need to find a new one.

Time for a writing prompt! Here’s one of my favourites.

Once upon a time, I had a very boring job (no link to give this one away!). I kept this picture on the wall in front of my desk, and when I took the time to gaze at it, I was never bored. Can you imagine why?

Take some time to look at this picture. Rest your eyes; rest your mind. Let your thoughts wander.

What is happening in this picture? Does the man have a name? Does the rhino? Why are they in the boat together? Where are they going? Why is the rhino so disinterested? Are they in water? Or sand?

What is the story of this picture?

You have ten minutes.

The first time I used this exercise in a writing workshop, a participant brought in a story two weeks later inspired by it. When she finished reading it aloud, you could have heard a pin drop. I think many of us had even stopped breathing. It was that powerful.

Where will this picture take you?