“Creation” by Sylvia Nickerson
One of the weird joys of my editing life is sometimes being hired by my friends and getting to see what they’ve been up to lately. Sometimes this means being given forty-eight hours to copyedit…
Messy Freelancing
I started this week fully intending to do what in the freelance self-help world is known as “niching down,” that is, settling once and for all on a specialty and advertising oneself accordingly. Fiction is…
“The Flower Can Always Be Changing” by Shawna Lemay
Bunches of tulips were $2.99 at my grocery store the other day and so, even though I was waiting on a cheque for some work and really shouldn’t have been splurging on any extras until…
That is, if I can dispose of the eggshells
As a sort of understory to my other reading, for about the past year and a half I’ve been working through the five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and then yesterday morning I got to the…
“The End of Music” reviewed in The Malahat
One of my favourite editing projects in recent memory, Jamie Fitzpatrick’s amazing second novel, The End of Music (Breakwater Books), launched a whole year ago and I was buried in other work at the time and…
My interview with Jenny Ferguson
My latest interview for The Malahat Review is up now on their site. I got to talk to Jenny Ferguson about her essay “Excavating Rias,” which will appear in the Malahat’s fall issue. Her essay…
Great first reviews for Nicola Davison’s “In the Wake”
So nice to see positive first reviews rolling in for Nicola Davison’s debut novel, In the Wake. I had the great pleasure of editing Niki’s manuscript earlier this year, for Nimbus Publishing, and the book…
Where Have You Been? by Michael Hofmann
I wrote last week about how languages are presented in other languages in novels and wandered into thinking about translation and philosophies of. As it turns out Michael Hofmann, the translator of some of Swiss…
Languages pretending to be other languages
I’ve been reading some fiction in translation lately and it’s got me thinking about how authors present and represent other languages in the language they’re writing in. I’m thinking in the vein of Cormac McCarthy…
Lillooet Library Book Sale Haul
Unlike the annual delivery of hay for my mother’s horse, which it took me years to realize was not coincidentally falling at the same (goddamn) time as my visit home every summer but in fact…