It was Dec. 22, 1985, and my partner Bryan and I were about to embark on an epic Canadian experience – driving across the country in winter.

I am so pleased and excited to announce the upcoming launch (April, 2016 in Canada, May 2016 in the US) of my new novel, The Mercy Journals. I spent ten years of my life, five or six days a week, working on this very slim novel. To the best of my ability, I built it […]

It’s strange being a writer sometimes – well, strange a lot of the time. The borders between reality and words become as porous as I believe they are for philosophers. When in life I’m not getting the ending I want, I mean seriously not getting the ending I want, the impulse to rewrite and rewrite […]

HBO’s True Detective is the most exciting program on television right now. The spare elegance and sly existential humour of writer Nic Pizzolatto’s dialogue grabs the breath in your throat and arrests it mid-craw. And the structural complexity of the two-tiered timeline Pizzolatto uses to feed information to the audience, like a multi-hooked fishing line, […]

Betsy Warland read the following piece aloud at a literary dinner I attended recently. The room was struck dumb, a heretofore impossible achievement among this group of turbo-engaging writers. Writing has variously been described as an act of control and a letting go of the self, but I have never encountered Betsy’s invocation of writing […]

Here’s the link to our paired writings. http://ow.ly/mNdqG I am just now trying to articulate the links between Betsy’s piece and mine. Betsy’s explores the tension between the collective and the individual, a tension which embodies the life-threatening question of membership in the group. Life-threatening because for our thin-skinned, small-toothed, unclawed species, survival depends on membership […]

Driving up to Hornby Island, British Columbia past uniform forests created by the forest industries on the rolling hills of the east coast of Vancouver Island alone with the dog. My oldest son, Henry, was in Florida amid the angst of starting a professional golf career while plagued by yet another injury, my youngest son, […]

During an interview on CBC radio a geologist expressed that the hardest part of prospecting was maintaining the belief that what you were looking for was out there to be found. In the sleet and mud and cold, out on a limb, repeatedly coming up empty. In this way, writing is like prospecting. My friend […]

The Globe and Mail The Conflict By: Elisabeth Badinter From the halls of the École Polytechnique in Paris, in a country where women are still resolutely women first and mothers second, where breasts are a female sexual organ first and a mammalian gland for feeding newborns second, and where adult-oriented parenting goes hand in hand with […]