In January 2020, “Here and Elsewhere” was inspired by my desk calendar, created by a Toronto artist (each month with a quotation from the work of an author associated with this city and printed on 100% recycled paper with VOC-free inks), Cuz we can be inspired to broaden our
Betty Smith gave simple advice to writers: “First: Be understanding always. Keep the understanding you have and add on to it.” As the author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943)—a best-selling novel that challenged the myth of poverty as a choice, and allowed low/no-wage characters to demonstrate courage
Here’s the part where I put aside Lauren Carter’s This Has Nothing to Do With You, this passage about Melony Barrett: “I couldn’t have known what would be waiting when I woke up, that I’d spent the night on the rapidly diminishing surface of my childhood, that last patch
If you think you don’t like poetry, Simina Banu’s Pop will surprise you. Having just stumbled through a reading of W.B. Yeats’ 1919 The Tower, I approached Pop with that swelling sense of inadequacy that haunted me as a student, that I do not understand poetry. But what a
From the opening lines of Five Little Indians, debut author Michelle Good prepares readers. There are snares and ghosts, silvery and summery glimmers, and there is also warmth. (There’s also the requisite discussion of semantics—‘Indian’ or ‘Aboriginal’—reminding readers that nomenclature and self-identification is not a matter of consensus in
