& Writing, of course

January 2, 2015

Happy New Year to all! I'm certainly happy to share the January issue of The Ottawa Review of Books, in which I review The Umbrella Mender, by Christine Fischer Guy (Wolsak & Wynn, 2014).

 The Umbrella Mender opens with a scene of a woman giving birth alone. Lying naked on the ground, sheltering in a roofless stone silo in the middle of a field, she labours, heeding animal instinct and medical training—she is a nurse. When the baby is born, she knows how to clamp and cut the cord, which she does “without fuss.” Yet her vision is wide enough to admit the mythical. She has just seen her shadow: “voluptuous and perched on the brink of creation, a sketch on a cave wall, a sculpture anointed with the oil of a million million fingertips in a remote clifftop shrine.” Before settling next to her baby for the night, she takes a moment to sketch a protective symbol on the silo wall ...


Find the rest of the review here.




November 13, 2014: Updates, finally.

My fiction has appeared in US, Canadian and Irish publications (with several stories winning prizes), including The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, and U of T Magazine (online), among others. Here's the latest, just out from Kindred:




Another story, awarded 2nd Place in the 2011 Sean O'Faolain Short Story Competition and published in Southword, was subseqently included in a ten-year contest anthology (Munster Literature Centre, 2013). This lovely title here:


Several of my essays have been published in The Globe & Mail. Another essay was included in the recent non-fiction anthology, How to Expect What You're Not Expecting (TouchWood Editions, 2013). You might have heard about it here. I love the cover. And the editors. And the other contributors.



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Here you'll find occasional posts about my stories and essays, whether published or in progress. Right here.

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