Word has it...

...that White Wall Review #35 is out! Officially launching in November, this fine magazine - published by Ryerson University's English Department - turned up at a Word on the Street booth in Queen's Park (Toronto) this weekend, and it features lots of great poetry and fiction, plus my story "Bondo," on page 12. Ask your local (independent!) bookstore when it's coming in!

Two more new stories, from Projections!

My first short fiction collection, Projections, is on a roll - and it's not even finished yet.

First, two weeks ago, indie Toronto online Wooden Rocket Press accepted "Ode," to its Sunday Paper feature, in which a four-part story is serialized every Sunday morning for a month. Part One of "Ode" goes live Sunday, October 2

And then, this week, The Prairie Journal (Calgary) accepted "Big Man." More details to follow as to when this will hit your local (independent!) bookstore.

Six of Projections's 13 stories have now found homes in Canadian litmags, which leads to one question: when the hell will the whole book be done? I have my sights set on a manuscript contest that closes December 31 - my birthday - and I can't imagine a better gift than my first book, sealed and sent off. That'll be a party.

More info on my new publications - and with any luck, some more good news - will be along soon. Like my Facebook page for updates, as well as cool links and, at the start of next month, another round of my quarterly book reviews. Thanks again for reading!

"Comets" now available online!

Great news to come home from Lithuania to: my newest published short story, Comets, is live now, in super-cool Toronto online The Broken City. I'm on Page Four. Click here to read!

Also, I'm using my Facebook page more and more often, sharing not just my own writing updates but fun links, friends' work and more. You should join! Click here, and then, click Like, to stay in the loop!

Still to come this fall: new stories in The Nashwaak Review, White Wall Review and echolocation. A handful more are finished and circulating, which means my book, Projections, is almost done, too(!).

And finally: Vilnius, Lithuania is a place everyone should visit. It's expensive to get there but affordable to live in, and the young people are fantastic (and generally, speak English, to the detriment of my flailing attempts to learn Lithuanian). Thank you to all the new friends at SLS for a great program, including workshops and other literary/cultural events, and for the inspiration and encouragement that naturally comes from being surrounded by other writers, at all levels of their careers. I did my first public reading (still hunting for pictures), and I came home with that story finished (it's called "Hamburger"), another one on the brain (wrote it Saturday and Sunday, called "Chaser"), and a poem that's called "Spiders," for now. It's the first poem I've written since undergrad! For the moment, I'm e-workshopping it with peers, and hoping something great will come of it.

This and many more updates are on the way this fall, it's going to be a busy one! Thanks again for reading!

Two new publications, and a trip to Lithuania!

The hot, hot summer continues:

• "Comets," another short story from Projections, has been accepted by cool Toronto online The Broken City. A special thanks to Leo Furey at The Antigonish Review for the kind feedback on the story.


• Have you been keeping up with my quarterly reviews? At the beginning of July, I posted a new batch, and I'm happy to report that one of them - You Comma Idiot, by Doug Harris - has stretched to about a thousand words, and will soon appear in The Antigonish Review.


• Coming soon to the Facebook page: daily dispatches from the Summer Literary Seminars program in Vilnius, Lithuania, where I'll be workshopping with Joseph Kertes and Josip Novakovich, not to mention all the writerly types in the courses!


• And, coming soon to the blog: some thoughts on book reviewing. I'm yet to publish a book, but here I am critiquing other writers... publically. Three words: fear of reprisal.

Thanks again for following!

Tonight: Green Door Cabaret

My writing teacher, Richard Scarsbrook, is celebrating his 2011 White Pine Award win for The Monkeyface Chronicles tonight at the Lower Ossington Theatre with his amazing Featherless Bipeds Band, MC'ed by yours truly. The show gets underway at 9:30 - click here for tickets!

A Silly Little Bit of Encouragement, for the Downtime

Proof was recently found in a Book City store in The Annex, in Toronto, that people are (theoretically) exchanging money for a litmag featuring one of my short stories ("Osvaldo's Guitar"). Neato! Don't live in Toronto? Click here to find out where you can get a copy!

Don't worry, reader. The purpose of this photo, and this trip to the bookstore, was not to tell you yet again how to get my work; it, and to an extent, this whole post, are mostly for my own encouragement as I linger in this odd place where I find myself. I'm calling it downtime.

It's not like I have nothing to submit. I'm waiting on responses on two stories right now: "Comets," which features some of the same characters as "The Expiry Dates," and the very first thing I wrote in Richard Scarsbrook's creative writing course at George Brown College, an extremely short story called "Respect."

And it's not like I'm not working on anything. At the moment, I'm nearly finished "Ode," about a dead young man's oldest friend and new-ish girlfriend reluctantly collaborating on his eulogy, and I've long been working on "Projections," the frustratingly hard-to-finish title story of my collection, about a small-town guy who moves away for university but comes back to re-open the town's movie theatre. Plus, I recently added two new stories to the group: "Hang-Ups," about a fractured family spread across Canada that takes place almost entirely in phone conversations (thanks, Braydon Beaulieu, for the recent edit), and another called "The Walk" (for now), about a father's misguided attempt to teach his son a lesson.

Downtime is a funny concept for a writer, but I think it applies here. Most stories I've been working on since 2009 are finished, some await publication, and as a result, I'm mired in that period of sporadically picking at several stories at once, flailing around in half-finished or frequently-abandoned drafts for the one that finally breaks through. My process is such that I don't fully commit until a story shows some promise; and when it does, I work only on the piece in question, obsessively, banging away until it (and I) can take no more.

Until Sunday, "Ode" was nearing that point. I was going back to it more and more often, and I was into the fourth round of revisions of the week. And then, while reading Sherman Alexie in Christie Pits, and getting a sunburn as I sort of watched the Maple Leafs baseball team get routed, the seed of "The Walk" came to me. Next thing I knew, I had an 800-word "memo" in my Blackberry - the first quarter of the story - and it was enough to bump even the almost-finished "Ode" out of focus.

So, suddenly, the downtime is back. It's ok, though. Any excuse to go to a bookstore.

New story, "Bondo," to appear in White Wall Review

Thanks, White Wall Review, for taking on "Bondo," one of my favourites among the stories I've written.

This, (for me, anyway), is a big one. I've been revising this story for a year exactly, and it's come close a few times. I don't think it would have ever seen the light of day without the feedback I received from Aspen Gainer (Other Voices) and Matthew Firth (Front & Centre), or even the recent encouragement I took from Julie McArthur's mention of those stories you refuse to give up on. Thanks also to first readers Marshall Bellamy, Marcin Mokrzewski, Eric Johanssen, and of course, to my amazing girlfriend Sidonie Wybourn, whose improv chops have taught me a ton about "raising the stakes" in a scene, and whose support for me and my work is unflagging.

Thanks also to you, for reading my work and my website. The issue's set to come out in November, 2011.