August 10th, 2008

A Week of Us

This week, everyone is talking about Canadian short stories–about writing them, reading them, liking and hating and utterly ignoring them, anthologizing and mythologizing them. If only it could be this way always!

If you’ve not already been reading Steven W. Beattie‘s amazing month of short stories for the past ten days, this week you can tune into 7 Canadian stories, with a bonus essay by me (though, it’s mainly on an American author’s [Donald Barthelme] story, sorry). Today you can read Alex Good take on the stories in the Toronto Star, you can pick up the new issues of Canadian Notes and Queries and The New Quarterly for some of the best of the story writers in the country, and you can hear an assortment of all these people Wednesday night at the Gladstone to talk about it all.

It’s fun to be immersed in the hot topic for once!

It could be fantasy / or maybe it’s because he needs me
RR