I first heard the buzz about Esi Edugyan’s novel Half-Blood Blues when it hit last year’s prize lists. When a book is nominated for the Giller Prize (which it won), the Governor General’s Award, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and the Man Booker Prize, you know something special is going on.
Half-Blood Blues straddles two [...]

When I was a kid, I was afraid of the dark. Now that I have kids of my own, I know this is a pretty common anxiety. I also know that it’s impossible to banish the demons. Turning on the lights, checking under the bed—our efforts to reassure our kids are more of an expression [...]

On a bike ride the other day, I whizzed past a man who was walking briskly—with his nose buried in a book. I grinned all the way down the block. Why don’t I do that any more?
A couple of years ago, my son was slogging through one of those junior high hell zones. He was [...]

Recently I had one of those great listening experiences with the Robert Glasper Trio—the kind where you are completely wrapped up in the sound, and absorbed in the musical language rather than those endless subtitles from your own life.
I suspect that shaking free of that internal racket is one of the reasons I am [...]

I was midway through a concert in the Berney Theatre when I had this revelation. Listening to jazz is like reading good poetry: you get better at it with practice, and the more you bring to it, the more you carry away.
Like poetry, jazz can be intimidating, bewildering, even unappealing. Many dismiss them both [...]

There is a writer I want you to know. He writes edgy, tough-minded, bitingly ironic novels about crime—serious crime like theft, kidnapping, extortion, murder. His novels are filtered through a sardonic anti-hero, Monty Haaviko, an ex-con who is determined to go straight.

Monty lives in Winnipeg, of all places. It’s not the city you’ll find in [...]

A faraway friend has shipped me a box that’s very large, very light, and (I’m told) very fragile. I’m dying of curiosity, and sometimes I’m tempted to give it a good shake, but I have another week to wait.
To be honest, I’m actually enjoying the waiting and wondering. Anticipation has a nice edge to it, [...]

I’ve been thinking about history lately. It started with a rousing conversation with my son as he worked out three reasons why history is never completed, a school assignment that certainly eclipses anything I did in history class. His ideas ghosted me when I was reading through the heated conversation about Ken Burns’ Jazz series [...]

This summer, I watched the wonderfully quirky documentary, Babies. The premise is simple. Director Thomas Balmès tracks the first year or so in the lives of four babies in four parts of the world. Two of them live in cities—San Francisco and Tokyo. One lives in the steppes of Mongolia, one in a mud hut [...]

Recently, I heard a First Nations philosopher muse that his people have a different understanding of time. You understand time as a river that runs past you, he said. For us, the river stands still and we walk up and down the riverbank.

It’s an intriguing concept, and it surfaced for me in June when Lawrence [...]

My nine-year-old daughter asked the other day what was in grass that made it alive. We were raking the winter road grit off the boulevard, and truly there wasn’t a trace of green yet. We stood and looked at last year’s tawny grass and pondered. What is it, anyway? I trotted out the science, but [...]

I first felt invited into the African-American narrative through Tony Morrison’s Beloved, a novel that continues to be on my Desert Island list. The chance to feel the lives of her characters, and to see how they coped with a history of brutal disenfranchisement, deepened the impact of the musicians I admired who shared that [...]

The first time I read a short-short story, I was stunned by how big and how small it was. These stories hardly have time to get heated up, yet they can still be smoldering in you years later.

I have been thinking lately about the arc of narrative, how it’s more like music than it might [...]

One of September’s THIN AIR Mainstages introduced audiences to new work by three high-powered science fiction writers: Nick DiChario read from Valley of Day-Glo, Robert Charles Wilson read from Julian Comstock, and Robert J Sawyer read from Wake. After the intermission, the four of us had a free-wheeling conversation about these books and this genre.
It’s [...]

In August, I squeezed into a packed house at The Hang to soak up the incredible musicianship of the Jazz Camp faculty band. At one point, Jimmy Greene was taking a solo, the band solid bedrock under him. His big tenor sax sound was rocketing around the room, muscular and searching and clear as honey. [...]

One of the joys of my life as the Director of a writers festival is discovering new books by new writers. This year, the sleeper for me has been a graphic novel called Tyranny, by a Toronto artist named Lesley Fairfield.
Tyranny is a book about a young woman who is wrestling with an acute eating [...]

I had the great fortune to host a reading and conversation recently with Don McKay, one of Canada’s most honoured poets. Don is a shy man—he would admit that he’s more at home on a riverbed or a rock outcropping than in a room full of people. At the same time, he’s playful, subtle, and [...]

In a recent issue of Canadian Children’s Book News, I came across an interview with celebrated Canadian children’s illustrator, Stéphane Jorisch. His characters, both human and animal, are quirky, expressive, intense, and full of intention. They catch the depth and seriousness of the worlds children inhabit, and are equally compelling for adults.
He makes some intriguing [...]

One of my discoveries on the run-up to this year’s THIN AIR writers festival was a quirky little book called A Voweller’s Bestiary by Toronto poet JonArno Lawson. The premise is a bit like a kids’ A-is-for-aardvaark, B-is-for-bumblebee book, but Lawson turns things inside out and trips on vowels instead of initial consonants.
Initially, the poems [...]

At least a couple of hundred new books crowd onto my desk each year, each of them in contention for a spot on the roster for THIN AIR, Winnipeg’s annual festival of writers at the end of September. There’s some of everything in those stacks: novels, short fiction, memoirs, mysteries, biographies, plays, poetry. Some are [...]