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Just look at that hair, you can tell he showered this morning. Drew currently resides in a quaint little corner of the Goose Lane office. Don’t worry; we’ve equipped his cage with a large water bottle to keep him hydrated and a wheel for exercise. Overall, he seems quite pleased with his new surroundings.

I am not a plot guy or a big planner. I tend to write more like a sculptor works: I amass huge piles of stuff then chip away until something emerges. It’s not a very efficient way of working, but in the end, I am usually very surprised. It might be a piece of crap, but its an unexpected piece of crap.

Imagine if you will, Pol Pot as an adolescent. Or Stalin for that matter or Idi Amin or Mao. That is precisely what Canadian playwright and author Anton Piatigorsky has done using historical fact to create the early lives of men notorious for taking lives. And along the way, he created profiles that paralleled the ones created by a man busy analyzing personality and political behaviour for the CIA. We bring you insights into spotting a tyrant or worse.
from CBC’s The Current

In photographs, or on television, Gore Vidal appears to be dark-haired and somewhat slight. He is neither. He stands six feet; his chest is broad and deep (a legacy of Alpine ancestors); despite constant attendance at a gymnasium, the once flat stomach is now reorganizing itself as a most definite paunch. He regards his own deterioration with fascination: “After all, in fifteen months I shall be fifty,” he declares, apparently pleased and disturbed in equal parts.
Gerald Clarke / The Paris Review archive interview

Clarice Beckett was an Australian landscape painter who lived from 1887 to 1935. She used to pull a homemade painting trolley around Melbourne, working on city streets and beaches. She lived with her parents until her death and chose to have relationships with men without marrying. She was passionately devoted to her art, despite cold treatment from critics and scarce earnings. She died shortly after getting caught out in a storm while painting, and was largely forgotten by art history.

Growing up in rural British Columbia, Deni Béchard believes his charismatic father is infallible. Wild, unpredictable, even dangerous, André is worshipped by his young son, who believes that his father can do no wrong.

Unlike The Sweet Fuels, her first collection of poetry, Chaser is more like one long poem inspired by a handful of texts. Her interest in other people’s mail propelled her to read the letters of John Keats and Katherine Mansfield, taking note that most writers from a certain time period suffered from tuberculosis simply because it was just something everyone seemed to have. But it was in Keats’s letters that she started to tap into the value of his words.

I think the first time I thought clearly that I wanted to be a writer was when I was in elementary school and I read a poem I’d written about war aloud at the Remembrance Day assembly and it made the school librarian cry.