Craftwork S1E3: Magic Realism, Intertextuality, & Making it Beautiful w/ William Ping

Check out episode #3 of Craftwork, featuring William Ping. William talks with Mike Thorn and Miriam Richer about historical fiction, hauntology, Animal Crossing, and so much more.

William Ping is a novelist and journalist, born and raised in St. John’s. His debut novel Hollow Bamboo was published by HarperCollins in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award as well as being longlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. He has previously been published in ‘Us, Now,’ Hard Ticket and Riddle Fence. William is also known for his contributions to CBC News, where he can most often be heard reading the news.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • Waiting for Godot; Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable – Samuel Beckett
  • Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
  • Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914 – Cassie Brown and Harold Horwood
  • The King in Yellow – Robert W. Chambers
  • The Wapshot Chronicle – John Cheever 
  • Trust Exercise – Susan Choi
  • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
  • Less Than Zero; American Psycho; Imperial Bedrooms – Bret Easton Ellis
  • The Beautiful and Damned; The Great Gatsby; Tender is the Night – F. Scott Fitzgerald 
  • Open – Lisa Moore
  • Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov
  • Animal Farm – George Orwell
  • Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
  • Son of a Trickster – Eden Robinson 
  • The Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
  • Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – Pu Songling
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Craftwork S1E2: Agency, Microtensions, & Mythic Resonance w/ Randy Nikkel Schroeder

In this interview, Randy Nikkel Schroeder talks about noir, character possession, Biblical frisson, and so much more. Listen here.

Randy Nikkel Schroeder is the author of Arctic Smoke (NeWest), Crooked Timber: Seven Suburban Faerie Tales (Green Magpie), and over fifty published short stories. In his spare time, he is professor of English, Languages, and Cultures at Mount Royal University.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • Queenpin; The Turnout; You Will Know Me – Megan Abbott
  • Poetics – Aristotle
  • Book of Greek Myths – Ingri d’Aulaire & Edgar Parin d’Aulaire
  • Save the Cat! Writes a Novel – Jessica Brody
  • Dave Robicheaux novels – James Lee Burke
  • The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know – Shawn Coyne
  • Neuromancer – William Gibson
  • Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
  • Red Dragon – Thomas Harris
  • Winter’s Tale – Mark Helprin
  • The Lottery and Other Stories – Shirley Jackson
  • Rose Madder – Stephen King
  • Mystic River – Dennis Lehane
  • The Magician’s Nephew – C. S. Lewis
  • Dialogue: The Art of Verbal Action for Page, Stage, and Screen – Robert McKee
  • Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different – Chuck Palahniuk
  • Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon
  • Old Testament – Various authors

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Craftwork S1E1: Persona Poems, Metacognition, & Vancouver Island Marmots w/ Meghan Kemp-Gee

On the first episode of Craftwork, guest Meghan Kemp-Gee talks about poetry, screenwriting, comics, and so much more.

Meghan is the author of The Animal in the Room (Coach House Books, 2023), as well as three poetry chapbooks, What I Meant to Ask, Things to Buy in New Brunswick, and More. She also co-created the webcomic Contested Strip, recently adapted as a graphic novel, One More Year. She is a PhD candidate at UNB and currently lives in North Vancouver BC.

Listen here.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • The Writing Moment: A Practical Guide to Creating Poems – Daniel Scott Tysdal
  • Walden – Henry David Thoreau
  • The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron
  • Bird by Bird – Anne Lamott
  • 20th Century Men – Deniz Camp, Stipan Morian, & Aditya Bidikar
  • The Adversary – Michael Crummey
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“Digital Noir Prophecies in The Canyons and The Counselor” (In Review Online)

“The Canyons and The Counselor represent an America unmoored from its own self-aggrandizing mythologies — the capitalist dream as nightmare of anxiety and violence. The films are haunted by symbols rather than subjects, made nowhere clearer than in McCarthy’s naming The Counselor’s title protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) after his profession — he is a nameless intermediary, a metaphor.”

Read the full article.

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Best first viewings, 2023

Pre-2023 releases only, chronologically organized.

Top twenty

La Bête Humaine (Jean Renoir, 1938)
The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, 1946)
Margie (Henry King, 1946)
Daisy Kenyon (Otto Preminger, 1947)
They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948)
Caught (Max Ophüls, 1949)
Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956)
See No Evil (Richard Fleischer, 1971)
Trilogy of Terror (Dan Curtis, 1975)
Mikey and Nicky (Elaine May, 1976)
Pauline at the Beach (Éric Rohmer, 1983)
A Better Tomorrow (John Woo, 1986)
Patty Hearst (Paul Schrader, 1988)
Jade (William Friedkin, 1995)
Nixon (Oliver Stone, 1995)
Stealing Beauty (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1996)
Romance (Catherine Breillat, 1999)
Ju-On: The Curse (Takashi Shimizu, 2000)
Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (John Hyams, 2012)

Other standouts

After Death (Yevgeni Bauer, 1915)
Satan’s Rhapsody (Nino Oxilia, 1917)
Warning Shadows (Arthur Robison, 1923)
A House Divided (William Wyler, 1931)
Safe in Hell (William A. Wellman, 1931)
Night at the Crossroads (Jean Renoir, 1932)
A Night on Bald Mountain (Claire Parker & Alexandre Alexeieff, 1933)
From Mayerling to Sarajevo (Max Ophüls, 1940)
The Letter (William Wyler, 1940)
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
The Woman on the Beach (Jean Renoir, 1947)
The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949)
Stage Fright (Alfred Hitchcock, 1950)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953)
French Cancan (Jean Renoir, 1955)
A Kiss Before Dying (Gerd Oswald, 1956)
Interlude (Douglas Sirk, 1957)
The H-Man (Ishirô Honda, 1958)
I Bury the Living (Albert Band, 1958)
The Flesh and the Fiends (John Gilling, 1960)
Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961)
X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (Roger Corman, 1963)
The Collector (William Wyler, 1965)
The Birthday Party (William Friedkin, 1968)
Secret Ceremony (Joseph Losey, 1968)
Claire’s Knee (Éric Rohmer, 1970)
The Last Run (Richard Fleischer, 1971)
Super Fly (Gordon Parks Jr., 1972)
Legacy of Satan (Gerard Damiano, 1974)
Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975)
The Haunting of Julia (Richard Loncraine, 1977)
The Pied Piper (Jiří Barta, 1986)
The Comfort of Strangers (Paul Schrader, 1990)
Def by Temptation (James Bond III, 1990)
Deep Cover (Bill Duke, 1992)
The Tempest (Stanislav M. Sokolov, 1992)
Green Snake (Tsui Hark, 1993)
Affliction (Paul Schrader, 1997)
Forever Mine (Paul Schrader, 1999)
In the Bedroom (Todd Field, 2001)
Auto Focus (Paul Schrader, 2002)
Innocence (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, 2004)
Universal Soldier: Regeneration (John Hyams, 2009)
Nas: Time is Illmatic (One9, 2014)
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (Andrew Jarecki, 2015)
Beware the Slenderman (Irene Taylor Brodsky, 2016)
Sick (John Hyams, 2022)
Tár (Todd Field, 2022)

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