From our education system to our literary community, why is CanLit so white? Nashwa Khan challenges the default narrative JUNOT DÍAZ UNLEASHED A BOMBSHELL on the writing world when he published his essay “MFA vs. PoC” in the New Yorker last spring. The Dominican American author is a creative writing professor, a fiction editor for […] More »

The first year we ran the contest was 1996 (that’s the issue cover at right). That year, Toronto writer John Burton won first place in This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt. Burton’s entry, “Sisters,” was his first-ever published story. It triumphed over some 1,000 other entries. Burton was a virtual nobody in the literary world, […] More »

Steven W. Beattie writes today on the Maisonneuve blog about “The Troubling Case of Roman Polanski,” arguing that the condemnations that have burst forth in the last couple of days following Polanski’s arrest is “a failure of one of the artist’s most significant attributes: empathy.” Polanski’s crime – and all its attendant issues of patriarchy, […] More »