Evan Munday

July 14, 2014 by

Munday-webInterviewed by Aaron Chan

Evan Munday is the author and illustrator of The Dead Kid Detective Agency, a finalist for the Sunburst Award for fantastical young adult literature and the Silver Birch Fiction Award. He sometimes makes comics and worked for eight years as book publicist for indie press Coach House Books. He lives in Toronto.

A few years ago, when I took a Children’s Lit class in college, The Dead Kid Detective Agency was the only book on the reading list written by a Canadian author. As the instructor told the class, “He’s not that much older than you guys, too.” Charmed by the snappy humour as well as the unabashed Canadiana of the novel and the sequel, Dial M for Morna, I had the opportunity to chat with Evan via email about his illustrating background, rejections, and The Postman.

When/how did you know you wanted to pursue writing as a career? 

I’m not sure it is my career yet! Really, I don’t do it full-time. But I think I knew something was up by third or fourth grade. At that point, I was already writing and drawing my own X-Men comics. (I was really into the X-Men then; still am.) I really enjoyed it – kept writing and drawing these comics – so I always hoped some kind of storytelling, whether written, drawn, or both, would be in my future. [Read more…]

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Jennifer Iacopelli

June 30, 2014 by

Jennifer IacopelliInterviewed by Beth Pond

Jennifer Iacopelli was born in New York and has no plans to leave…ever. Growing up, she read everything she could get her hands on, but her favourite authors were Laura Ingalls Wilder, L.M. Montgomery and Frances Hodgson Burnett, all of whom wrote about kick-ass girls before it was cool for girls to be kick-ass. She got a Bachelor’s degree in Adolescence Education and English Literature, quickly followed up by a Master’s in Library Science, which lets her frolic all day with her books and computers, leaving plenty of time in the evenings to write and yell at the Yankees, Giants and her favourite tennis players through the TV.

I am an admirer of Iacopelli’s debut Young Adult novel Game. Set. Match. and was delighted when she agreed to speak with me by email.

When did you first discover your love of writing?

Eighth grade, sitting in an Honors Earth Science classroom bored out of my mind, a friend, who shall remain nameless and I would pass a notebook back and forth writing stories starring our favorite celebrities and characters conveniently with our names as their love interests. I didn’t do nearly as well in Earth Science as I should have, but at least one thing stuck. [Read more…]

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Hiromi Goto

June 16, 2014 by

HGotoInterviewed by Haley Whishaw

Hiromi Goto is an award-winning Japanese-Canadian author whose novels include Chorus of Mushrooms, which received the 1995 Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Best First Book in the Canada/Caribbean region; The Kappa Child, which received the James Tiptree Memorial Award; and Hopeful Monsters, a collection of short stories. She has written two Young Adult novels: Half World, which received the 2010 Sunburst Award and the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award,and Darkest Light. She has also published the children’s book The Water of Possibility and a long poem, Wait Until Late-Afternoon, which was co-written with David Bateman.

Her work often straddles both reality and fantasy, weaving folklore with contemporary settings and issues. In keeping with this style, she suggested our interview mirror the Voight-Kampff tests that are employed in the film Blade Runner for detecting AI. There were no AI “retired” during the process of this interview.

After reading countless works of others, at what point did you realize that you yourself had a story to tell and that you were the only one who could tell it?

I was eight or nine or ten. I read the kind of book that makes you forget everyone else in the world, even yourself—you only feel the hopes and fears and despair of the character you’ve been living with for the past five hours. When I finished reading that book I came to the realization that the rich, saturated, intensely real life I had vicariously lived was one that was constructed out of words. Marks on paper. Written by a person. That was when I first felt the desire to write. My child self didn’t feel I had a specific story to tell—I only felt a strong desire to be able to make someone else feel the many intense feelings that I felt upon reading that book. I don’t remember the title of the book. It’s lost somewhere in the grey folds/ers of my soft drive…. [Read more…]

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Ron West

June 2, 2014 by

Ron WestInterviewed by Rachel Balko

Ron West has been a successful comedy writer for more than 30 years. His television writing credits include “Second City This Week” (2011-2012) and “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” (1999-2006). He was the head writer for the pilot of “The Second City’s 149 1/2 Edition” (1994), and has contributed to other syndicated TV shows. His musical comedy, The People vs. Friar Laurence, the Man Who Killed Romeo and Juliet, was published by Samuel French in 2010. Ron has written, directed, and performed more shows for Second City than he can count, collaborating with performers such as Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Scott Adsit, Jane Lynch, and Rose Abdoo. Ron was a contributing writer on the book, The Second City Almanac of Improvisation, and currently teaches comedy writing and improvisation at the Second City Training Center in Hollywood, California. Ron was generous with both his time and his talent in answering these questions about his life as a writer via email.

How did you become a writer?

I looked the part, so one day someone said, “You are going to write this,” so I did. I don’t remember the exact date and time. [Read more…]

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Joseph Boyden

May 18, 2014 by

boyden-newInterview by Rachel Jansen

Joseph Boyden is a Canadian novelist whose books on First Nations people have been internationally acclaimed. His first novel, Three Day Road, won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. Through Black Spruce, published in 2008, received the ScotiaBank Giller Prize. Most recently, Boyden published The Orenda; a thrilling epic that weaves together the lives of a Jesuit missionary, a captured Iroquois girl, and her captor, a great Huron Chief, in an unforgettable story of our past. On March 4th, The Orenda was announced the winner of CBC’s 2014 Canada Reads competition.

Boyden was born in Willowdale, Ontario. He completed his BFA in creative writing at York University, and then went on to earn his masters at the University of New Orleans. He currently splits his time between Louisiana and Northern Ontario, and teaches in the Optional Residency Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of British Columbia.

With his long list of credentials, and my deep admiration of his work, my hand shook as I dialed his number to conduct our interview over the phone. I soon found my anxiety dissipating; Boyden is humble, soft-spoken and quick-to-laugh.

What was your first publication?

I published a collection of poems in my undergrad. At the time there was something called Proem and they took a liking to a lot of the poetry that I was writing, the first time I tried to send out my work.
[Read more…]

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Tyee Bridge

May 5, 2014 by

Tyee BridgeInterviewed by Andrea Hoff

Over the past fifteen years, Tyee Bridge has been writing essays and features on ecology, religion and urban culture. His work is gutsy and deeply researched, often exploring polarizing issues and drawing together unexpected narrative threads: the need for mythic stories in an era of information overload; a voyage to Antarctica and the pending apocalypse of Western Culture; an exploration of the fate of residential garbage in Vancouver from bin to landfill; the causes, cultural effects and possible solutions to Vancouver’s lack of affordable housing, to name just a few of the themes in his work.

His writing has appeared in The Globe and Mail, Swerve magazine, Westworld, BC Business, and many other publications. He is the recipient of four National Magazine Awards and seven Western Magazine Awards since 2007.

He and fellow journalist Anne Casselman recently launched Nonvella, a publishing house dedicated to nonfiction novellas.

I caught up with Tyee Bridge via email at his home in Vancouver, BC to discuss the ideas behind Nonvella, his influences in writing, and what he envisions for the future of long-form journalism.

Can you chart the path you took into writing literary journalism?

I was physically inept and bookish from an early age. The first book that made an impression on me was D’Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, with the great illustrations, and I was always a fan of comic books—Carl Barks’ Uncle Scrooge, Spiderman, X-Men. I have an uncle who for some reason thought I would enjoy reading a box set of the collected essays and plays of Woody Allenat age 13 or so, which I did, and was permanently warped as a result. Fiction was sci-fi and fantasy: Tolkien, Herbert, Stephen King. I started to appreciate nonfiction and essays much later, mainly via the work of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry.

As ridiculous as it might sound to anyone who is married to or otherwise financially entangled with a writer, what got me into writing nonfiction was realizing I needed to earn a living. Having run up my credit card while living in Portland and trying to write the Great Work of Metafiction That Would Change Everything, I hit the wall in more ways than one. I needed money and couldn’t go back to working in hotels and restaurants without having a panic attack. So I got into magazine freelancing. [Read more…]

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Rob Byrnes

April 21, 2014 by

Rob ByrnesInterviewed by Jeffrey Ricker

Rob Byrnes has been making me laugh since I met him in 2009 at a writing conference in New Orleans. He also deserves credit for prodding me to submit an essay to an anthology that became my first published piece of creative writing. The author of six novels, he won a Lambda Literary Award for When the Stars Come Out (2006) and was a Lambda finalist in 2009 for his novel Straight Lies. His most recent novel, Strange Bedfellows, was published in 2012 by Bold Strokes Books. Originally from Rochester, New York, Byrnes is a graduate of Union College and lives in New Jersey with his partner.

Your first novel, The Night We Met, came out in 2002. What inspired you to become a writer, and what was the process that led to the novel’s publication?

I was encouraged to read a lot as a child, which no doubt was an influence, but I think the desire to write is innate – like the desire to create music, or even become an accountant. That said, I was in my early thirties before I tried to tie the desire to actual work. I failed at first, of course, but I kept writing, and sought out peer support through the CompuServe writing forums. (Remember – this was the early ’90s!)

The men and women I met online became mentors and taskmasters, and the forum served as a workshop for the novel that eventually became The Night We Met. And let me add that when you’re getting personal feedback from people like the writers Diana Gabaldon and John L. Myers – not to mention the artist who eventually became the noted novelist Rabih Alameddine – you’d be a fool not to take their advice.

That’s not to say that publication of The Night We Met was a slam-dunk after that. It took a few more years, a lot of rejection, and perhaps a bit of luck before the book was published in 2002. Still, my willingness to put my words out there and listen to some (occasionally raw) feedback was the most significant step I took on the path to becoming “A Writer.” [Read more…]

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Susin Nielsen

April 7, 2014 by

Susin NielsenInterviewed by Clara Kumagai

Susin Nielsen credits her big break to her time as a caterer for the cast and crew of Degrassi Junior High, though she had been writing long before that. It was Degrassi that began her career, though, after a spec script led to her writing sixteen episodes, as well as four books in the Degrassi novel series. After graduating from Degrassi—so to speak—Susin went on to write for and work on TV series, including Ready or Not, Madison, The Adventures of Shirley Holmes and Heartland.

Susin’s writing is not limited to the TV screen, however. She has written three children’s books: Mormor Moves In, The Magic Beads and Hank and Fergus, which won Mr. Christie’s Silver Medal award. In 2008, Susin published her first original young adult novel, Word Nerd, followed by Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom. In 2012, The Reluctant Journal of Henry K Larsen was published, and subsequently won the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Text.

Having read all of Susin’s young adult novels, I was struck by her ability to capture the hilarious highs and troubling lows of the teenage experience. Sensitive without sugar-coating and humorous without belittling, Susin is one of the most engaging young adult authors in Canada.

Did you want to write from a young age?

Yes. I found my first diary, written when I was 11 years old, in the garage a few years ago. It starts with this paragraph: “This is the first day I’ve really written in a diary. The reason I am is ‘cos I LOVE writing stories, and if I do grow up to be a famous writer, and later die, and they want to get a story of my life, I guess I should keep a diary.”!! Although I did have other ideas for a while, like “I’m going to be a famous actress” and “I’m going to be a TV news reporter.” [Read more…]

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Douglas Glover

March 31, 2014 by

gloverInterviewed by Jane Campbell

Douglas Glover is an itinerant Canadian, author of six story collections, four novels, two books of essays, and The Enamoured Knight, a book about Don Quixote and novel form. His bestselling novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General’s Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. In 2007 he won the Rogers-Writers’ Trust of Canada Timothy Findley Award. His most recent story collection Savage Love (Goose Lane, 2013) was a Quill & Quire Book of the Year and also named to the Globe Books 100: Best Canadian Fiction list. Steven W. Beattie in the National Post called it “hands down, the best book I read in 2013.”

Glover teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of the Fine Arts, and he is the 2013-2014 Writer-in-Residence at the University of New Brunswick. He is the publisher and editor of the online literary magazine Numéro Cinq.

In your essay “Nihilism and Hairspray,” in your collection Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, you argue that being a writer is a calling or vocation rather than a career one consciously chooses. I agree with this, yet in my experience, there are many people who feel called to be writers, but instead choose to be become doctors or engineers or farmers in Southern Ontario. How did you decide to make writing your career?

That’s an interesting question. “Nihilism and Hairspray” is a polemic; I was setting up an antithesis: vocation against the institution-based professionalization of writing. The larger argument of the essay is an attack on words, categories, and forms deployed to control and define behaviour. Words like “writer,” “Canadian,” and “career,” often represent a set of values and expectations, a box, as it were. I think words like this have much the same effect on everyone. Like commercials on television, they make you, at the very least, anxious because suddenly you have entered the field of someone else’s desire.

[Read more…]

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Marilynne Robinson

March 17, 2014 by

m_robinson_krwinter300Interviewed by Josiah Neufeld

In 1980 Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, astonished the American literary world with its beautifully wrought prose, eccentric characters, and elemental images. The novel has come to be regarded as a classic in American literature. Although she continued to write non-fiction after Housekeeping, Robinson didn’t publish another novel for more than twenty years. Her second novel, Gilead, written as a series of  meditative letters from a minister to his son, won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. Robinson has since written two more novels centred around characters first introduced in Gilead. Home was published in 2008, and LILA will be in bookstores later this year.

Robinson teaches writing at the Iowa Writers Workshop and has mentored writers such as Paul Harding (also a Pulitzer winner) and Justin Torres. U.S. president Barack Obama counts Gilead among his favourite novels. In 2013 he honoured Robinson with the National Humanities Medal.

Robinson is also known for non-fiction. She writes with elegance and authority about subjects such as nuclear pollution, theology, the history of western thought, and the roots of American liberalism. She has published three books of essays and Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution, an excoriation of the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in England.

I fell in love with Robinson’s contemplative prose several years ago while reading Gilead on a road trip across the American Midwest. Since then I’ve read everything of hers I can lay hands on. I was surprised and delighted when she agreed to answer the following questions by email.

How did you come to start writing?

I always liked books, and started writing poems when I was very young. Writing always seemed like something I would do, even when I was not doing it.

[Read more…]

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