While a degree in creative writing may not top your career counsellor’s advice for a quick professional turnaround, the formal study of writing was a North American growth industry even before the recession sent more people back to school (or kept them there longer). In an anguished and incredulous Harper’s article, American writer and professor […] More »

The July-August issue of This Magazine is now in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on better newsstands coast-to-coast this week. Two pieces from the issue are already online: Jenn Hardy‘s cover story on the new generation of farmers using the principles of permaculture […] More »

Professional book reviewing is dead in this country. The CBC could revive it. If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in […] More »

Gorgeous she was. Stunning. He followed her, followed her the way a down-and-outer, in raw weather, follows a dark-suited businessman smoking a cigarette. Not to pounce on the butt, which will almost certainly be crushed under a thin-soled Italian shoe, but simply for the nostalgic, soothing turbulence of smoke. She stumbled. He made a move, […] More »

Like many of the contributors to Girls Who Bite Back, I grew up on a steady diet of Saturday morning cartoons, Smurfs and Strawberry Shortcake. When it came to biting back, the only superheroes and ass-kicking role models I had were Wonder Woman, The Bionic Woman and Charlie’s Angels (the small-screen version). Thankfully, things have […] More »

I hadn’t been able to get hold of my regular dealer, a worldly earth-mother type I’d met through a friend of a friend. She was a grandmother, endlessly knowledgeable about all types of plants and flowers, and had no end of hilarious stories about chaotic rock concerts of the ’60s and other drug-culture fantasias, so […] More »

1. I have always been fortunate to exist in two worlds: the grey, maudlin one into which we are all born, and that place where names are spelled out in lights. Though my origins are unspectacular, fate has periodically placed me in the role of ambassador between these realms. The first such incident took place […] More »