From the category archives:

Notes & Queries

The Perfect Day (memoir)

This new piece, published in Carte Blanche, centres on a day out with two nonagenarians: one of the last excursions my parents and I took together. http://carte-blanche.org/the-perfect-day/

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This article about emigration, gardening and family, was first published in Aqua Magazine, p28 on. Click to read it in the turning pages magazine format with original illustrations. The text is below. What I am planting, how it grows In one of those windy, sunny days when the light and sound levels are in constant [...]

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Lost & Found

It’s with some trepidation that I stuff my suitcase with copies of my latest novel and set out for Lost and Found: In Search of Extinct Species, an Explora International Conference at the Toulouse Natural History Museum. The last time I attended an academic conference was during my research for The Find. The 2005 Symposium [...]

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Tallisomania

It’s a kind of love affair. I found him in a footnote in Donna Dickenson’s Body Shopping, scoured the province’s libraries and drew a blank, then ordered The Kingdom of Infinite Space and The Hand: A Philosophical Enquiry into Human Being, both by Raymond Tallis, from a well-known online bookstore. They did say they had [...]

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Coming Undone

It’s unsettling when life imitates art, and a story you have written starts to happen around you. For example, shortly after I finished the Story of My Face, I met the teenage version of my character, Natalie, in a motel swimming pool near Vancouver airport. She was called something else and she was in [...]

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Lifestory

Thinking ahead to an illustrated talk I’ll give in March, I was leafing through a box of research materials for The Find, and came across this image, a detail From The Story of Life by Lorraine Malach. The post card was pinned to my office wall for at least two years while I wrote the [...]

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Becoming Animal by David Abram

I saw this book in the window of one of our four independent bookstores. I’d not heard of David Abram, much less read his previous book, The Spell of the Sensuous; it was the dark beauty of the jacket, combined with the blend of militancy and intrigue in the title, that made me want to [...]

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Fate of the Book: Fear Not, Beware, Some Great Art & One Happy Man

Is the (paper) book dead? What is its fate? Will writers survive? Will the next generation read? And if so, which platform/reader will they use? These questions, along with related topics (blogging, how to promote your book using social media etc.) were hot panel topics at the book festivals I recently attended, rivalling [...]

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Vanished: a thousand words for my mum (memoir)

In the “bio” section of this site, written way-back-when, I begin by suggesting that that my desire to write springs from “my father’s love of books and my mother’s habit of exaggeration.” It’s true that these were both huge influences. I remember Dad, on his birthday, giving me Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit, [...]

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Seven Minutes

Here is a brief reading from The Find made for a book club site. I postponed making it because I expected, and dreaded, techno-trauma, but it turned out to be very easy – I simply talked to my laptop about my two main characters, read a little from the novel and and then saved the [...]

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