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...

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...

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....

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...

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...