Welcome

….to my website!

Flannery O’Connor described fiction as both canny and uncanny. And I think that is my favorite adage for this most exacting, frustrating and satisfying art. It is a craft — but it is also a mystery, and the interweaving of these two aspects creates, at least for me, the fascination that keeps me going.

In this website you’ll find information on my books, reviews and interviews, and occasional thoughts on writing. Please feel free to join the discussion. Whether you’re a reader or a writer – or both – I look forward to hearing from you.

Thank you for visiting.

Featured News

Delighted by Walrus...

Great to see my story, “Oh, My Darling” in The Walrus — available in print form, and on-line. Many thanks to Nick Mount, Fiction Editor, for incisive suggestions and for seeing it into print — and to Erin McPhee for her illustration of Vanessa sitting in “Story World,” surrounded by minotaurs and heroes.

Oh, My Darling to be Published by HarperCollins this Fall

My book of stories has been bought by HarperCollins Canada, and will come out this fall, 2013. It will be part of Patrick Crean’s new list of Canadian fiction titles (he now has his own imprint at HC ). I am excited by the entire thing: to be working with Patrick, to be publishing this book with Harper Collins, and to have it be coming out this fall.

Here’s a picture of Patrick and me in the HarperCollins office in February.

News from Best Canadian Stories — and Best American Stories:

For the third year in a row one of my stories has been chosen for Best Canadian Stories anthology, published by Oberon Press. Their pick this year was “The War between the Men and the Women.” This story has also been listed as a ‘notable story’ of the year by Best American Stories series editor Heidi Pitlor. I am very pleased to be in Best Canadian with a slew of Canadian writers I admire, among them Steven Heighton, Caroline Adderson and Lynn Coady.

If you’d like to buy a copy, or just read more about the series, here is the link: http://www.oberonpress.ca/titles/

A Raid on the Inarticulate:

Thrilled that Colm Toibin — author of The Master — selected my story, “The War Between the Men and the Women,” for Ploughshares magazine. Ploughshares is routinely ranked as one of the U.S’s best literary magazines and has a new guest editor with each issue. “The War Between” is part of my new collection of stories.

From Colm Toibin’s introduction to his issue:

“From…such reticences — a second of silence, a syllable of speech, a memory from 1985 — poets and prose writers make a raid on the inarticulate; we take what we need when the time is right. What happens next is what matters.”