Tag Archives: writing

Thinking in Arabic, Writing in English: An Interview with Ahmad Danny Ramadan

Ahmad Danny Ramadan is a Syrian-born author, storyteller, and LGBTQ-refugees activist who calls Canada home. His debut novel is The Clothesline Swing (2017). He also translated Rafi Badawi’s 1000 Lashes: Because I Say What I Think, and published two collections of short stories in Arabic. His work in activism has supported the arrival of over 18 Syrian queer […]

Invisible Publishing x Chaudiere Books

The rumours are true: all your favourite Chaudiere Books are now available through Invisible Publishing. We’re giving the Chaudiere backlist a second home, and we’re thrilled to welcome Chaudiere authors into the Invisible Publishing family. And we want you to welcome them into your family, too: from now till the end of February, all Chaudiere […]

Reconciling Academia and Creative Writing: An Interview with Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student and 2018 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Scholar in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. THIS WOUND IS A WORLD (Frontenac 2017) is his first book, for which he won the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize. NDN COPING MECHANISMS […]

Closer Still: On Reading What I Could Not Understand by Isabella Wang

Some artists first learn to draw by tracing the work of others – sentence structure, tone, plot, word play, imagery. Until I found my own voice, I wrote in the voices of other writers that I read from and tried to mimic. If I were to name one most influential title in my early life, […]

Mistaken Longings: When I Write of Calcutta, I Don’t Write of “Home”

Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, India. Dec 25 2011.   “I have a question,” a middle aged man says, his bald pate shiny against the afternoon light filtering into the Lakeside Terrace room at Harbourfront Center. We are at “Safar: Journeys to South Asia” panel of Toronto International Festival of Authors. He addresses the authors, “Do you […]

Collecting/Telling/Writing Stories by Bilan Hashi

I was in transit at Dubai. People watching and collecting stories. There were women in saris, men in dashikis, the pilgrims for Ummrah wrapped in their white cloths: traditional clothing a backdrop against the modern lines of the terminal. The airport’s status as an international hub was evident as conversations in different languages overpowered the […]

On Pieces and My Pelvis by Jess Taylor

“The crack’s in me,” I said heroically. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”. I drew a picture of myself once as a blue alien figure, without form or face, looking out of a window. From the chest, a rod ran up through the page and down through the ground, piercing the figure in two. I […]

Creating Beauty through Poetry: An Interview with Shirley Camia

Shirley Camia is a Filipina-Canadian poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry: the forthcoming Mercy (Turnstone Press, 2019); Children Shouldn’t Use Knives (At Bay Press, 2017), 2018 winner of The Manuela Dias Book Design and Illustration Award (Book Design) at the Manitoba Book Awards, and an Honourable Mention in Poetry at The Alcuin Society Awards for Excellence […]

Poetry and its Preoccupations: An Interview with Annick MacAskill

Annick MacAskill’s debut collection of poetry, No Meeting Without Body, was published by Gaspereau Press in the spring of 2018. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Grain, Room, Canadian Notes & Queries, Prism, Versal, Arc, The Fiddlehead, and The Antigonish Review. She has also been selected as a finalist for prizes including the CBC Canada Writes Poetry Prize, the Edna Staebler Personal […]

What Stupefaction can do for Fiction: On Photography and Writing

Jatra, Poush Mela, Shantiniketan, India. Dec 23 2013. This photo forms the basis of the opening scene of a short story I am currently working on. The story is also set in Shantiniketan.   It is dusk. Kishmish lies on a patch of grass and stares upwards, attracted to the dragonfly whizzing around his head, […]