Kris Bertin is from Halifax. His stories have appeared in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, TNQ, and PRISM International. He has twice won the Jack Hodgin’s Founder’s Award for Fiction and has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology. His first collection of short stories Bad Things Happen (Biblioasis, 2016) has received very good reviews in the Toronto Star and Quill & Quire – good thing too, because it is it a gritty, funny, and memorably weird book. Brad de Roo avoided a lot of bad things on the internet to interview Kris Bertin for carte blanche this March. [read_more]

I had tapped into a vibrant community of punk writers who crafted great stories and then cut and pasted their work together, photocopied it, and released it with no thought of gaining attention from the world of mainstream literature. These were my first literary heroes. In a time before our current memoir boom, they wrote honest and true stories full of grit and heart. [read_more]

A few weeks ago I was watching Trevor Noah interview Lupita Nyong’o about her role in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, when she made an otherwise throwaway comment I found quite striking:"I grew up watching Star Wars. It was a part of my life. It came on TV on public holidays, so I thought of Star Wars as time off of school."

We're very happy to announce that Gregory McCormick is joining the carte blanche team. He'll be Co-Editor, alongside Laurence Miall, and will also be the Creative Nonfiction Editor. Greg brings over a decade of editing, writing and cultural programming experience.

carte blanche, the online magazine of the Quebec Writers' Federation, is accepting applications for the position of creative nonfiction editor. This is a volunteer position but pays a modest honorarium. Ideally, the successful candidate should reside in or near Montreal.

We are pleased to announce that Montreal author Guillaume Morissette will be joining us as guest editor of fiction for Issue 26, our first issue of 2016. You still have until December 31 to find your best short stories or novel excerpts and send them in. Submit online now if you haven't already. It's free! Successful contributors receive $50.

During her time as the 2015 Mordecai Richler Writer in Residence at Concordia University, Ann-Marie MacDonald has been chronicling her experiences in a series of 'dispatches.' In these brief videos the award-winning author reflects on and among the writerly-tools of the late author. Richler attended what is now the Sir-George Williams campus of the university from 1949-1951.

In Grade 12, at 17, my French teacher assigned us a new kind of homework: translation. I’d had plenty of experience with my little Harrap’s English-French dictionary – as an Anglophone kid in a French (not immersion, mind you) school, when things got tough on the assignment side of things, my teacher dad got me started getting my ideas down in English and make them happen in French. It had never occurred to me that I’d use the French-English side of the dictionary.

Every once in a while, I lose my ability to read. It's not that I can't make out the words on the page, or understand the sentences they form. It's a kind of restlessness that comes over me, a dissatisfaction with the books on my shelves, a not knowing what I want to read (perhaps there's too much choice?) and then, somehow, I can't read anything.

As a wispy reader of 9 or so I spied a copy on the shelf built into my mother’s headboard, tucked among several books by Iyanla Vanzant and a John Grisham paperback or two. Its location on that shelf alone made it seductive; one of a collection so very unsuitable for my self. But prying into Adult Things while unsupervised was a favourite pastime of mine so...

I remember my enthusiasm at decoding the black scratches that turned into words when my parents picked up books; I remember reading in a circle with my class, each of us sounding out a few lines. Especially I remember being confused when my turn came, because I had read on ahead and didn’t know what page the class was on.