The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Author: Heidi Tiedemann Darroch

  • Another Form of CNF True Crime: Trauma and Abuse Memoirs

    This isn’t material I would teach as mandatory reading in a creative writing class, and probably also not in a literature course, no matter how well crafted. Teaching fiction that deals with childhood violence has offered me enough instances where undergraduate students, many of whom are still teenagers, react strongly and not always predictably to…

  • Handle with Care: True Crime, Creative Nonfiction, and Content Warnings

    Next week is True Crime week for my Creative Nonfiction students, and this is perhaps our most challenging set of readings and podcasts. I’m trying to set up the materials to be both trauma-informed and attentive to individual student needs, which I can’t fully anticipate. There was an acutely tragic Victoria-area murder this winter and…

  • Solving Plot Problems

    Most of my focus has been on revising a novel draft that I’ve despaired of, these past two years, since I completed my 75,000 or so words. [Worse than feared: 104,665, which is, for my chosen genre, a baggy monster of a book, and unpublishable as a first novel.] I could see the plot and…