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Writing Light: An Interview with Sarah Selecky

Photo credit: Michelle Yee

Photo credit: Michelle Yee

Interview by Erin Steel, 

Sarah Selecky is a vegan, a Virgo, and a lover of dark chocolate. But she’s more well-known for her writing and her teaching. The New York Times called her first book, This Cake Is for the Party, “utterly fascinating.” This collection of short stories was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book in Canada and the Caribbean, and was longlisted for the Frank O’Connor Prize. Her writing has appeared in The Walrus, The New Quarterly, and The Journey Prize Anthology. Through Sarah Selecky Writing School, she runs online creative writing and mentorship programs, and an annual international writing contest. Her new novel Radiant Shimmering Light will be published by Harper Collins Canada in May 2018.

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Olga Holin read more

Get to Know: Marc Perez

Interview by Kyla Jamieson

Emerging writer Marc Perez’s story “Dog Food” appears in our “BAD” issue. Of his story, Perez says, “I once had a dog, and I named her Bruce. The story is a lament for her.” For this issue, we sought work that took us to true places along difficult or unexpected paths; “Dog Food” is one such story. In it, a boy witnesses violence he’s helpless against, and is denied understanding in the aftermath. His pain is real, but nobody sees or acknowledges it; where can it go but forwards, into his future?

Marc Perez immigrated to Canada from the Philippines and now lives on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. Perez has been working in the nonprofit industry for the past five years; in addition to this work he is currently participating in Writing Lives, a project in which writers collaborate with Holocaust survivors to write their memoirs. Read on for Perez’s thoughts on identity and home, privilege and marginalization, and the best time to write—while asleep and dreaming.

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Molly Cross-Blanchard read more

The Survival of Arrival: A Review of Sharon Bala’s The Boat People

The Boat People
Sharon Bala
Penguin Random House
Review by Anjalika Samarasekera

In the second half of The Boat People, a Sri Lankan immigrant—and former Tamil Tiger—poses a question to his Canadian-born niece: “What do you think happens when you terrorize a people, force them to flee, take away their options then put them in a cage all together?” (230).

The question is the ravaged heart of Sharon Bala’s remarkable debut novel, which chronicles the arrival of around 400 Tamil refugees on the coast of British Columbia in 2010. The refugees have fled persecution in Sri Lanka following the end of the twenty-six-year civil war and have come to Canada hoping for a warm welcome. These hopes are dashed when the Canadian government detains the refugees on the suspicion that some of them belong to the LTTE, also known as the Tamil Tigers, a listed terrorist organization. Eventually, some refugees are released and deemed “admissible” to Canada while others are deported back to Sri Lanka.

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Molly Cross-Blanchard read more

Despite the Odds: a Review of Project Compass

Project Compass
Lizzie Derksen, Matthew Stepanic, Kristina Vyskocil, Robert Strong
Monto Books, 2017
Review by Peter Takach

What do you get when you take four emerging Edmonton writers and give them each a quadrant of their city to explore? In Project Compass, publisher and editor Jason Lee Norman has assembled a crack crew to take readers on an odyssey through a city that, despite producing its fair share of writers, is rarely the explicit setting of their stories. The result is an engaging and emotionally-arresting collection of four concurrent novellas that all unwind on June 21, 2016. Starting from the north, south, east, and west, we follow four Edmontonians as they wander their way through the longest day of the year and reflect on the paths they have taken.

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Molly Cross-Blanchard read more

The Story Behind The Story: The Decedent by Yuly Restrepo Garcés

Yuly Restrepo photographed by David Wheeler

Our winter issue will be arriving soon, and includes a story by Yuly Restrepo Garcés, a writer and professor at the University of Tampa. A MacDowell Fellow, Yuly is also the recipient of a VONA/Voices Fellowship. Her fiction has appeared in Zone 3 and is forthcoming in Natural Bridge. Of her story, “The Decedent,” Yuly says:

I started to write “The Decedent” in May 2015, at the Ft. Lauderdale airport, during a seven-hour layover, though I had been thinking about it for at least a year before that. I wrote about twelve pages while I waited for my flight to Medellín, where I would spend the summer months visiting family and working on a rough draft of my novel-in-progress. The story itself is a convergence of several things I had been preoccupied with in the months before I started writing.
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Molly Cross-Blanchard read more