THIS YEAR SHOULD HAVE been an auspicious one for CanLit. As Canada celebrates the sesquicentennial, it seems every newspaper, blog, and bookshop has a “top 150 Canadian books” list to push. Canada’s 150th also evokes fond memories of the 1967 centennial, when CanLit was just coming into its own. But for many, those 150 lists, chock full of CanLit luminaries like Michael Ondaatje and Margaret Atwood, are hard to stomach right now.
Read MoreI DON'T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, though I do remember the first time I lied to seem more impressive. I was six-years-old at the Jewish Public Library in Montréal, as was my childhood ritual. The library was a short walk away from the duplex I lived in facing a park. My older cousin was there—he was, very impressively, seven years old and a boy.
Read MoreEVERY COUPLE OF WEEKS, Robert Edison Sandiford calls me from Barbados. Robert is one of this year’s Quebec Writers' Federation mentors and I am his protégé. We’ve made arrangements to speak at 5 pm via Skype so this interview would feel more face-to-face. At 5:10, we still have no audio so he switches from his laptop to his desktop. At 5:25 the recording app on my phone stops working. At 5:37 we decide we’ll have to hobble back and forth between the computers, a phone, and another phone app to make it work. Afterwards, when it’s all sorted, he say: “Well, there’s a lesson about tenacity.”
Read MoreI WAS IN MY mid-to-late twenties when I decided to write in English. A few obvious obstacles stood out: I wasn’t a native speaker and I was working in a totally unrelated field: software engineering. However, I was an immigrant in Canada, and had been lectured more than once on how people in Canada could pursue what their heart desired (a female friend with a knack in operatic singing, unable to officially practice it in Iran, found her voice here in Canada; others in engineering backgrounds formed bands; etc.). The optimism of my age made me venture into uncharted territory. However, there was another less obvious challenge ahead of me: what to write about?
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Read More"The problem is that we’re living in a moment of cultural contraction and I don’t think there’s much we can do about that. That might seem like a strange thing to say given the billions of words and images published on the Internet every day, but my sense is that the Internet isn’t helping but is actually making things worse."
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Read MoreBeing asked to write about the status of Canadian Literature feels very similar to when an ex lover asks you out for coffee. You know nothing good will come from it and can anticipate the entire conversation, but you still show up looking cute and hoping that therapy has finally fixed them. At least, that’s how talking about Canadian Literature feels to me. I’ve been there, had the group therapy, learned to love myself for myself, and have deleted CanLit’s contact information from my phone.
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Read MoreMatthew Forsythe has worked as an animator, a children’s book illustrator, and a graphic novelist. He has two books coming out in the near future. The Gold Leaf (Enchanted Lion Books) with Kirsten Hall is out on May 26th. The Bad Mood & The Stick (Little Brown) with Lemony Snicket will be in stores this fall.Brad de Roo caught up by phone with Matthew just as he arrived in his hometown of Port Colborne for a library talk. They chatted about teaching, comics, visual culture, narrative structure, work, and the improbability of artistic satisfaction.
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Read MoreLast summer I pitched a small essay to carte blanche because I wanted to write about an out-of-print novel that I had discovered several years before. The author has long since passed away, and the book itself has been all but forgotten: with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of people, most of whom are outside of the literary community and who were interested in the life of the writer, who was a scientist. The novel received lukewarm reviews following its publication in the 1960s. After a small print run, it seems to have disappeared altogether, besides a handful of copies from online used bookstores, and one I found in a book saleroom tucked behind a torn Atlas and a Baby-Sitters Club boxed set.
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Read MoreStephen Henighan is a novelist, short-story writer, journalist, and professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Guelph. Most recently, he was written the novels The Path of the Jaguar (Thistledown Press, 2016) and Mr. Singh Among the Fugitives (Linda Leith Publishing), which is available on March 25. Brad de Roo chatted with Stephen about multiculturalism, literary nepotism, satire, Victorianism, performativity, and cultural appropriation.
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Read MoreI am shortly going to be leaving the team in my official capacity as editor. I do so with mixed feelings. Once upon a time, I honestly felt I could tackle any amount of work that was thrown at me. The days seemed elastic. I could stretch them at either end, conjuring up just enough minutes or hours to always get things done. But I don’t feel that way anymore. I am trying to figure out how big each relative part of me is, and how to accommodate them all within a finite body.
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Read More"One of the reasons I find Seth and his contemporaries’ works so interesting is because it and they ask the reader to use a very different rubric when they are experiencing – reading – the art. For me, the critical debates in the visual arts seemed to dead end when the voices of anti-skilling, self-reference demanded that analysis always trumped emotion and humanity when confronting a work of art to determine significance. For me, there was always a whiff of intolerance toward visual art that explored humanity as a wide-spectrum project."
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Read MoreThe first job I ever had in the Montreal region was at a company called Bath Fitter, aka Bain Magique, up beyond Laval in a town called Saint Eustache. As I listened to the explanation of the pension benefits that I was entitled to, a repeat of conversations I’d had with prior employers in Edmonton, it dawned on me: I’ve never cared about this conversation, I still don’t care, and I actually feel it’s OK to not care, because I have very little faith that, by the time my retirement rolls around, the world that we know – mortgages, insurance plans, “financial security” etc. – will exist.
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Read MoreAs part of our upcoming Issue 28, we are thrilled to present a commissioned interview between two of Canada’s best-loved writers of their generation, Madeleine Thien and Heather O’Neill. In this brief excerpt, Thien and O’Neill talk about their hometown, Montreal, O’Neill as a native and Thien as an adopted daughter of the city. Stay tuned to Issue 28 (which goes live on November 7) for the entire conversation.
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Read MoreJenny Ferguson is a Canadian writer, editor, and teacher from many places. Her debut book, Border Markers (NeWest Press), a collection of interrelated flash fictions, was released this September. Brad de Roo chatted with her about the ambiguity of genres, the ubiquity of ghosts, and the reorienting power of flash. "Flash-or-micro fiction, as genre," Jenny said, "likes to end on a turn, or a moment that asks the reader to re-evaluate what s/he has read."
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Read MoreI don’t know about you, but when I’m in a rough spot or running out of steam, looking back at a joyful moment helps.For me, one of those moments happened last November, when I learned I’d been selected to be the CBC/QWF’s first writer-in-residence. I still grin when I remember jumping up from my chair when my name was called during the QWF Literary Awards Gala.
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Read MoreWe're doing it again! carte blanche and the Creative Nonfiction Collective Society (CNFC) have teamed up to bring you a Canada-wide creative nonfiction contest sponsored by the University of King's College. The winner will receive $750 and her/his text will be published in carte blanche.
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Read MoreAvalon Moore is a comics artist based out of Nova Scotia that is releasing a few pages of her graphic novel, Between, online every week. Eve Nixen sat down with Avalon to talk about the creative process, relationships and finishing projects, no matter how challenging they become.
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Read MoreWriting about my experience of someone else’s death feels like a million acupuncture needles at once—I know it’s serving some mysterious purpose, but it feels strange, surreal, selfish. I’ve decided to trust that it will do some good, and frankly, I don’t know what else to do.
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Read MoreWe come bearing exciting news! Kirsten Fogg's powerful essay Nana Technology, which won the 2015 carte blanche/CNFC competition for creative nonfiction and appeared in Issue 24 of the magazine, has been adapted by ABC National Radio in Australia.
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Read MoreNew Zealander-Canadian author Alice Petersen’s first collection of short stories, All the Voices Cry (Biblioasis) won the 2012 Quebec Writer’s Federation Concordia University First Book Prize. Her newest collection Worldly Goods (Biblioasis) was released in May. Brad de Roo asked her about the object of books and the music of objects for carte blanche this July.
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