Stacey May Fowles

Illustration by Chloe Cushman

The Literary Life of RA Dickey
“I’ll never forget my first public book signing,” he says. “I’ll bet no less than 15 or 20 people in that line leaned across the table, people I’d never even seen before that day, to tell me they were abused at some point in their past, and […]

In the National Post:
…People asked me why I hadn’t taken my husband’s name. When we met with a mortgage broker he wouldn’t look me in the eye or address me directly. Mail came to the house addressed to “Mrs. His First Name His Last Name” and “The His Last Name Household.” […]

As writers feel more and more pressure to be 24/7, real-time public figures, we need to consider those who are disclosure-averse, who prefer to hide away and let their work stand as they have constructed it. We commonly celebrate living openly as a courageous act, being “thick-skinned” as a virtue, yet […]

Dick Wolf: The Entertainer (Illustration by Andrew Barr)
Over the years, the show’s plot twists have become increasingly complex and absurd, with rappers eaten by hyenas and serial impregnators blown up with pressurized diving knives. If a crime happened in the headlines it’s pretty much guaranteed to pop up on the show — […]

What can’t be published: A month-long effort to document a sexual assault led to a detailed, engaging piece too difficult to read
“Writing is risk, yet for me, personal protection is always superseded by the purpose of the craft; it is an act of figuring out a feeling, a way of lending structure to an […]

“Leanne Shapton asks the question so many of us are embarrassed to articulate — what is the implication of coming very close to greatness, of very nearly grasping it, yet falling short?” A review of Swimming Studies in The National Post.
“We have been fooling ourselves that narrative and plot, and the gleeful […]

“A major part of the appeal of Berger’s work for women is that the sex (and there is indeed a lot of it, on almost every page) is stripped so bare, flying in the face of so called ‘mommy porn’ and soft-core glossed erotica-lite like Fifty Shades of Grey. Gone are the layers of polish, […]

“In our hyper-consumptive culture we value volume, the word prolific a complimentary ideal attached to a bursting bio. We fetishize endless bibliographies — books are misguidedly rushed out, memoirs announced in the weeks after death, star writers pulling together a haphazard manuscript because of an award or scandal-induced media moment. Long-awaited […]

“Even those among us enamoured with the romance of printed word will find Ithaca a shameless glorification of gatekeepers and star-makers, packed with diatribes on how the book will conquer all despite a digital and corporate tide that consistently threatens it.” Read the full review at The Afterword.
“Ami McKay’s second novel, The […]

“I had to process what happened to Quintana. Considering it was the one thing on my mind, I managed to avoid it for a long while. It was difficult in every possible way because it was unlike anything I had ever written. Most things that I had written had a narrative. This […]