I’m in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island for the East Coast Music Awards. Atlantic Airwaves taped a great show here last night, which is why I wasn’t at the announcement for the Atlantic Book Awards shortlists in Halifax last night, though my heart was there. I am so excited to be nominated for the Dartmouth Book…

She’s harsh and angular and so very guilty. She thinks I’m frivolous, a fool, adorably naive. Or maybe just naive. She is coming into sharper focus, and I do mean sharper. I don’t know much more about her than what I’ve said here, but I am waking up in the middle of the night thinking…

That was the diagnosis last night, from Sue Goyette. You’re ankle deep in it, she said. Before you know it, you’ll be swimming.  Honestly, I’m not sure I’m totally ready to swim again, but hey, if the water’s rising, what choice do you have?  I have yet to make actual sentences. But all I think…

People keep asking me if I’ve started another novel and the truth is, I have. I have five hundred terrifying words I wrote in November and have been backing away slowly from ever since. I am bone tired, if you want to know. The last twelve months took everything I had to give. Between writing,…

Or just one, really. The infected one. Yes, the raw throat I developed on tour developed into a sneaky cold, then a hugely painful earache that was the harbinger of my current misery: an ear infection. What am I, four years old? Feels like it. Nothing like an earache to make you cry for your…

Voice is one of those things you have to find as a writer. Find your own voice, find the voice of your characters, the voice of your story. All that feels easy in comparison to preserving my voice on tour. The first night of my southern Ontario book tour was raucous and fun, and I…

I grew up in a part of Mississauga known broadly as Clarkson, Sheridan Homelands on a more granular level. (Now that I’m an adult with critical thinking skills and an awareness of Idle No More, I am mortified that those Homelands are rightly the homelands of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation, and…

We hit the road at seven in the morning yesterday and drove across the landscape Lansing and Evan and Dacey travelled in the pages of Fallsy Downsies. We pulled over between Sackville and Moncton, where Lansing developed a hate-on for journalists, to take a call from the radio station in Guelph about my launch there…

The other day I raced from the office home to pick up my reading copy of Fallsy Downsies and put on some mascara. Then I whipped over to my publisher’s house to pick up him and a box of books, and set out for the Keshen Goodman Library to make a seven pm event. “How…

Okay, so, my characters are very alive in my head. I see them clearly — the way they hold themselves, how they walk, the funny little verbal tics, the way their hair falls in their eyes or stands straight up or whatever it does. So the other night, when I was checking Twitter, my stomach…