Quill and Quire

by Q&Q Staff

You can go home

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Americans don’t have a clue about curling. I was in a graduate fiction workshop at Columbia University, the only Canadian amidst a throng of Yanks, all of whom were prepared to cross out all the ... Read More »

April 4, 2008 | Filed under: Authors

Working with Al Purdy

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Al Purdy, who died of cancer in April at the age of 81, was one of the greatest poets this country has ever produced. Equally at home in the East or West, he published more ... Read More »

April 4, 2008

Where did my grant go?

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Last year, I applied to the Canada Council for the Arts for an Emerging Spoken Artist grant in the amount of $2,500, and received $1,500. I didn’t get all the money I asked for, but ... Read More »

April 4, 2008

What’s luck got to do with it?

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“You have a book?” My dentist asked, incredulous. (He was a closet poet, he’d told me previously. Very few get published in the closet, I replied.) “Yes.” “How old are you anyway?” “Twenty-seven.” He paused, ... Read More »

April 4, 2008

What took you so long?

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Twice I’ve lived in a country at war, although war was not being fought in that country. During the summer of 1982, I was in the north of England, reading jingoistic tabloid headlines about the ... Read More »

April 4, 2008

What have I done?

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Twenty years ago I put away my electric guitar and began to write fiction full-time. I’d been lucky in the music business, making bags of cash, travelling the world, and playing gigs at the Royal ... Read More »

April 4, 2008 | Filed under: Awards

Trading places

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A few years ago, while looking for someone who would shop around the second draft of my first novel to prospective publishers, I approached a Toronto literary agent. She read 50 pages of the manuscript ... Read More »

April 4, 2008