Caitlin Sweet
Blog Archive
For many years, I had a blog. I posted sporadically at best, initially, then almost never. I don’t intend to have another, here, but wanted to make the archive available. Ursula K. Le Guin, Top Gun, cats…Take a look.
Hopes Springs Infernal
I am really, really falling down on the blogging front. This disappoints me—though I have the very best reason for falling down: I'm writing with the kind of joy and focus I haven't felt since three books ago, with The Pattern Scars. I did a reading last week, as part...
Ode to a Cicada
When I was in Greece 30 years ago, my classics classmates and I stayed in double rooms in hotels and got up at the crack of dawn to pile onto tour buses. When I was in Greece last month, my family and I stayed here, at the Villa Calista on Crete. The...
Living Rooms
The other night, Grace, a friend and former neighbour, invited me over for an evening of writing talk with some friends of hers. They were an inspiring, inspired bunch: women navigating the intertwined drudgeries and joys of life and art. Some have known each other...
The Fraidy Fantasist
When I was 14, baking in summer sunshine on a friend's upper-floor balcony, I decided to begin writing a history of the relationship between Alexander the Great and his best friend/lover, Hephaestion. This wouldn't be a fictionalized trifle: it would be academic,...
Time’s Phalanx (or: Alexander, Amyntas, and Me)
Alexander of Macedon, you persistent, provocative ghost, you. A couple of days ago I did a guest Q&A at Alyx Dellamonica's University of Toronto creative writing class. One of the students asked me what my trajectory had been—how and when I'd started writing; what...
Full Force
Star Wars: The Force Awakens spoilers below. They're not big ones, but I would have been irritated if I'd read something like this before I'd seen the movie. So, to those who care: Consider yourselves warned. * I was once Luke Skywalker's wife. Yup: Luke's. Not...
Pictures, Words and Thanks
The Flame in the Maze is real. Here I am at its debut, on December 7th. Yes: it's in the world—and it's the end of the story I started writing years ago, in The Door in the Mountain. I'd be hazy on the precise number of those years, except that I remember writing a...
Train of Fraught
My boyfriend dumped me precisely two weeks into the first term of our first year of university. We were both at McGill. I'd been so excited—because Montreal. My boyfriend. An apartment with a roommate I'd just met, and really liked. But he dumped me, two weeks in, and...
De Burgh Delight
Sometime in 1984, my friend Katherine gave me a mixed tape. (I just can’t bring myself to use the current “mixtape” spelling. I am middle-aged and refuse to be taught this new trick.) Sides A and B were chock-a-block with songs by a Chris de Burgh, from Ireland. I...
Goodnight nobody; goodnight mush
I've only ever taken one creative writing course. When my stint as a creative writing instructor began at the University of Toronto, back in 2006, I was pretty sure this made me a fraud. I was terrified one of the students would ask me what I'd learned from creative...