Tag: writers

Craftwork Episode 25: Braided Essays, Collective Solitude, & the Objective Correlative w/ Kasia Van Schaik

Listen to Craftwork Episode 25: Braided Essays, Collective Solitude, & the Objective Correlative w/ Kasia Van Schaik.

In this interview, we chat with Kasia Van Schaik about reverse outlining, asking “what if”, sublimating emotion through landscape, and so much more.  

Kasia Van Schaik is the author of the Giller Prize-nominated story collection We Have Never Lived on Earth and the forthcoming book of memoir and cultural criticism, Women Among Monuments. With Myra Bloom, she is the co-editor of the essay collection, Shelter in Text: Essays on Dwelling and Refuge. Kasia’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, the LA Review of Books, Room, The Rumpus, the Best Canadian Poetry, and the CBC. Kasia holds a PhD in literature from McGill University and is assistant professor of English and co-director of Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, Wolastoqiyik territory. 

Books mentioned in this episode:  

  • Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë 
  • The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett  
  • Autobiography of Red — Anne Carson 
  • Boyhood; Youth; Summertime — J. M. Coetzee 
  • Outline; Transit; Kudos — Rachel Cusk 
  • The Days of Abandonment; the Neapolitan Quartet — Elena Ferrante 
  • “The Robber Bridegroom” — Brothers Grimm 
  • Sweet Days of Discipline — Fleur Jaeggy 
  • Lucy — Jamaica Kincaid 
  • Her Body and Other Parties — Carmen Maria Machado 
  • Housekeeping — Marilynne Robinson 
  • Rings of Saturn — W. G. Sebald 
  • Flights — Olga Tokarczuk 
0

Craftwork Episode 23: Dreaming in Fire, Working in Clay, & Reaching for Awe w/ Ramsey Campbell

Listen to Craftwork Episode 23: Dreaming in Fire, Working in Clay, & Reaching for Awe w/ Ramsey Campbell.

In this interview, we chat with Ramsey Campbell about creative instincts, happy accidents, eerie children’s tales, and so much more.

The Oxford Companion to English Literature describes Ramsey Campbell as “Britain’s most respected living horror writer”, and the Washington Post sums up his work as “one of the monumental accomplishments of modern popular fiction”. His awards include the Grand Master Award of the World Horror Convention, the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Horror Writers Association, the Living Legend Award of the International Horror Guild and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2015 he was made an Honorary Fellow of Liverpool John Moores University for outstanding services to literature. His latest novels are Fellstones, The Lonely Lands, The Incubations and An Echo of Children. His Brichester Mythos trilogy consists of The Searching Dead, Born to the Dark and The Way of the Worm. His collections include Waking Nightmares, Ghosts and Grisly Things, Told by the Dead, Just Behind You, Holes for Faces, By the Light of My Skull, Fearful Implications, and a two-volume retrospective roundup (Phantasmagorical Stories) as well as The Village Killings and Other Novellas. His non-fiction is collected as Ramsey Campbell, Probably and Ramsey Campbell, Certainly, while Ramsey’s Rambles collects his video reviews, and Six Stooges and Counting is a book-length study of the Three Stooges. Limericks of the Alarming and Phantasmal is a history of horror fiction in the form of fifty limericks.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • The Atrocity Exhibition – J. G. Ballard 
  • Great Short Stories of the World – Barrett H. Clark and Maxim Lieber, eds. 
  • “A Dark-Brown Dog”; The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane 
  • The Man Within – Graham Greene 
  • “The Residence at Whitminster” – M. R. James 
  • Rosemary’s Baby; The Stepford Wives – Ira Levin 
  • Tales of Mean Streets – Arthur Morrison 
  • Lolita; Pale Fire – Vladimir Nabokov 
  • “The Telltale Heart” – Edgar Allan Poe 
  • At the Foot of the Story Tree: An Inquiry into the Fiction of Peter Straub – Bill Sheehan
  • Ghost Story – Peter Straub
  • The Rupert Bear series – Herbert Tourtel & Mary Tourtel
  • “Afterward” – Edith Wharton 
  • At Night, White Bracken; To Those from Below – Gareth Wood
0

Craftwork Episode 22: Tonal Registers, Byzantine Journeys, & Repurposing Research w/ Michael LaPointe

Listen to Craftwork Episode 22: Tonal Registers, Byzantine Journeys, & Repurposing Research w/ Michael LaPointe.

In this interview, we chat with Michael LaPointe about navigating the pipeline between impulse and expression, breaking the genteel picture of literature, finding liberation in failure, and so much more.

Michael LaPointe is the author of The Creep, a novel published by Random House Canada. He has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic, and he was a columnist with The Paris Review. His work has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays, and he lives in Toronto.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • Affliction; Continental Drift; Rule of the Bone; The Sweet Hereafter – Russell Banks 
  • Naked Lunch – William S. Burroughs 
  • The Adventures of Pinocchio – Carlo Collodi 
  • Bleak House – Charles Dickens 
  • Play it as it Lays – Joan Didion 
  • The Lover – Marguerite Duras 
  • Middlemarch – George Eliot 
  • American Psycho; Less Than Zero; The Shards – Bret Easton Ellis 
  • Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 
  • Bad Behavior; Two Girls, Fat and Thin – Mary Gaitskill 
  • In a Lonely Place – Dorothy B. Hughes 
  • Snow Country – Yasunari Kawabata 
  • Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination; Sula – Toni Morrison 
  • The Sorrow of War – Bảo Ninh 
  • Inherent Vice – Thomas Pynchon 
  • All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque 
  • Voyage in the Dark – Jean Rhys 
  • Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger 
  • Last Exit to Brooklyn – Hubert Selby Jr.  
  • Alice James: A Biography – Jean Strouse 
  • The Invisible Woman: The Story Of Nelly Ternan And Charles Dickens – Claire Tomalin 
  • Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte 
  • Ethan Frome – Edith Wharton 
0

Craftwork Episode 20: Girlhood, Defamiliarization, & Poetic Excavation w/ Emily Banks

Listen to Craftwork Episode 20: Girlhood, Defamiliarization, & Poetic Excavation w/ Emily Banks.

In this interview, we chat with Emily Banks about posthumous publications, linguistic allergies, the atomic nuts and bolts of imagery, and so much more. 

Emily Banks is the author of Mother Water (Lynx House Press, 2020). Her poems have appeared in Plume, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, CutBank, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She publishes scholarship on American gothic literature, runs The Shirley Jackson Society, and is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Shirley Jackson. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from Emory University. She lives in Indianapolis and teaches at Franklin College. 

Books, poems, and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • “Filling Station”; “In the Waiting Room” – Elizabeth Bishop
  • Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
  • Turn Up the Ocean – Tony Hoagland
  • “Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors”; Hangsaman; The Haunting of Hill House; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
  • Bliss Montage; Severance – Ling Ma
  • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy – Jenny Odell
  • Middle Distance – Stanley Plumly
  • Pamela – Samuel Richardson
  • Modern Poetry – Diane Seuss
0

Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum

Listen to Craftwork Episode 19: Ghost Stories, Market Pressures, & Tapping into the Subconscious w/ Naben Ruthnum.

In this interview, we chat with Naben Ruthnum about character development, avoiding TV-brained writing, making sense of first-reader notes, and so much more.

Naben Ruthnum is a Toronto-based writer of fiction, cultural criticism, film and TV. His novel A Hero of Our Time was released by Penguin Random House and was optioned for development by The Littlefield Company. His books include the YA novel The Grimmer, the World Fantasy Award-nominated horror novella Helpmeet and two thrillers penned as Nathan Ripley, both of which have been optioned for development and were published internationally. He has written for Canadian television series including Murdoch Mysteries and Cardinal. As a feature screenwriter, he’s collaborated with Kris Bertin for feature and TV projects in development at Oddfellows, BoulderLight Pictures, Automatik, Skybound, and Blink49. Kris and Naben’s script Road Test made the 2024 Black List.

Books mentioned in this episode:

  • A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
  • The Sorceress in Stained Glass & Other Ghost Stories – Richard Dalby, ed.
  • The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
  • The Black Dahlia; Killer on the Road; L.A. Confidential; My Dark Places – James Ellroy 
  • Black Flame – Gretchen Felker-Martin
  • The James Bond series – Ian Fleming
  • The Collector; The Magus – John Fowles
  • The Green Carnation – Robert Hichens
  • The Americans; The Tragic Muse; The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
  • Supernatural Horror in Literature – H. P. Lovecraft
  • The Beckoning Fair One – Oliver Onions
  • A Fatal Inversion; Master of the Moor – Ruth Rendell
  • Flicker – Theodore Roszak
  • The Tempest – William Shakespeare
  • Ghost Story; If You Could See Me Now; In the Night Room; Koko; The Throat – Peter Straub
  • The Secret History – Donna Tartt
  • A Dark-Adapted Eye; The House of Stairs – Barbara Vine
  • The October Film Haunt – Michael Wehunt
0

“The Pasteboard Masks of Text and Screen: On Writers in Gothic Cinema” (In Review Online featured article)

“Gothic cinema inherits an ongoing obsession with writers and writing from its literary ancestors, but how does it translate such text-based fixations into its own audiovisual grammar? How does it stage ‘objective’ diegeses in concert with the innately subjective representations of writers and the act of writing? This article approaches these questions, not by offering a comprehensive history of Gothic films depicting writers (that would require a long, book-length project), but by analyzing a trio of writer-focused Gothic films notable for their dealings with literary ancestry through negotiations between subjective interiority and diegetic objectivity.”

Read the full article here.

0

Craftwork Episode 18: Ekphrasis, Sinuous Sentences, & the Logic of Sound w/ Sarah Bernstein

Listen to Craftwork Episode 18: Ekphrasis, Sinuous Sentences, & the Logic of Sound w/ Sarah Bernstein.

In this interview, we chat with Sarah Bernstein about contemplation, finding time for writing, capturing the rush of language, and so much more.

Sarah Bernstein is the author of two novels, The Coming Bad Days and Study for Obedience, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. She is from Montreal and lives in the Scottish Highlands.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • Hysteric; Whore – Nelly Arcan
  • Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin
  • The Moonstone; The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
  • “A Mown Lawn” – Lydia Davis
  • Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life – Ruth Franklin
  • The Book of Questions – Edmond Jabès
  • The Haunting of Hill House; “The Lottery”; The Sundial; We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
  • The Melancholy of Resistance – László Krasznahorkai
  • The Place of Shells – Mai Ishizawa
  • In the Wake: On Blackness and Being – Christina Sharpe
  • The House Next Door – Anne Rivers Siddons
  • The Door – Magda Szabó
  • Clean – Alia Trabucco Zerán
0

Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker

Listen to Craftwork Episode 16: Dream Journals, Imaginary Conversations, & Work-Life Balance w/ Fawn Parker.

In this interview, we chat with Fawn Parker about showing the reader around the room, finding the right tense, protecting your writing time, and so much more.

Fawn Parker is the author of five books including novels What We Both Know (M&S), nominated for the Giller Prize and Hi, It’s Me (M&S), nominated for the Writer’s Trust Atwood Gibson Prize, and the poetry collection Soft Inheritance, which was awarded the JM Abraham Atlantic Book Award and the Fiddlehead Poetry Book Prize. Her work has been published in The Walrus, Hazlitt, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. Fawn is a PhD candidate at the University of New Brunswick and the Poet Laureate of Fredericton.

Books and stories mentioned in this episode:

  • The Edible Woman – Margaret Atwood
  • The Mountain and the Valley – Ernest Buckler
  • Libra – Don DeLillo
  • The Guest – Emma Cline
  • Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing – Douglas Glover
  • “Experience” – Tessa Hadley
  • Ulysses – James Joyce
  • Rejection – Tony Tulathimutte
  • This All Happened – Michael Winter
  • How Fiction Works – James Wood
  • Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
0

The Catch-Up Reading Series featuring Chuck Bowie, Alison Taylor, and Mike Thorn (January 26, 3 pm, Westminster Books)

Fredericton’s monthly reading series, ‘The Catch-Up,’ curated and hosted by acclaimed writer Fawn Parker, returns with readings by local authors Alison Taylor, Chuck Bowie & Mike Thorn!

The reading will take place here at the bookshop on Sunday, January 26th, 2025, @ 3pm.

Alison Taylor (they/them) is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Fredericton. Taylor’s short stories have appeared in various journals, and their debut novel Aftershock, published by HarperCollins Canada, received the Atlantic Book Awards John and Margaret Savage First Book Award (Fiction), and was shortlisted for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. They received the 2024 Douglas Adams Richards Prize for Fiction for their work-in-progress, Confessions of a Binge Drinker (working title). They have edited a hundred-plus hours of television and many award-winning short films and music videos, and their own experimental films have screened at festivals internationally. They currently work in the editorial department at Goose Lane Editions and as a freelance editor of both books and film and video, and are working to complete a draft while two cats yell at them and a 70-pound boxer whines in their face.

Mike Thorn is a SSHRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of English (Creative Writing) at the University of New Brunswick. He is the author of Shelter for the Damned, Darkest Hours, and Peel Back and See. His writing has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and podcasts, including NoSleep, Vastarien, In Review Online, and American Twilight: The Cinema of Tobe Hooper. He co-hosts Craftwork, a writing-themed podcast, with Miriam Richer. Website: mikethornwrites.com.

Chuck Bowie is both a writer and an author, with thirteen books/novels published and one just underway. While he enjoys writing mysteries: Suspense-Thrillers and Cozy Mysteries, he also writes short stories. All of his books are well-reviewed, and he has sat on the boards of the Writers’ Federation of NB, The Writers’ Union of Canada, is a Fellow of the Kingsbrae International Residency for the Arts, as well as being acknowledged as a member of the Miramichi Literary Trail. His thriller series chronicles the adventures of Donovan, an international thief for hire, while his cozy series (written as Alexa Bowie) follows the adventures of the owner of an arts centre as Emma solves the crimes that swirl around her centre: The Old Manse. http://www.chuckbowie.ca

0

Create a website or blog at WordPress.com

Up ↑