In a 1990 interview* MA talks about writing The Edible Woman in a chaotic Vancouver apartment: papers strewn everywhere, piles only she could decipher, and very little furniture (including a card table loaned by Jane Rule). Not how you’d imagine writers working (chair, desk), she says. It was a
When I requested Dear Writer, Dear Actress, a collection of letters exchanged between Anton Chekov and Olga Knipper, I expected them to arrive when Bill and Bron and I were reading “Gooseberries”. (Our project page is here.) If they had, my note-taking would have revolved around connections with their friendship and
There is just one more story left in our project—and it’s the shortest, only six pages, the second by Tolstoy. In the course of looking for a cover image, I learned that it was published after Tolstoy’s death, and that it was based on a real person. (Inadvertently, I
After I finally managed to finish the Toronto Public Library’s reading challenge last year, after so many years of leaving it half-done, some of you asked if I was planning to do the new challenge. Not likely, I said. But then the 2025 challenge was in the form of
May’s story is Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” (1895), the longest of the seven Russian stories that George Saunders contemplates in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which Bill and Bron and I will read in the next couple of weeks and discuss mid-month. (The project details
