The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Category: publishing

  • Can You Teach Creative Writing?

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    Times are tough at colleges across Canada. The Globe & Mail is reporting this morning on the hundreds of part-time and sessional instructors who are losing jobs they’ve held for years. Many will struggle to find alternate work, because the layoffs are so devastating and pervasive across the whole sector. I ran into a colleague…

  • Crime Fiction Festivals: A Few Thoughts

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    A brief post, today, because deadlines are looming for three writing projects and two reviewing tasks. But I’m also planning a trip, and working out how to be in Stirling for Bloody Scotland in the middle of September. As with most large events held in small-ish cities, finding accommodation is the tricky part, so I’m…

  • In Praise of Editors

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    I’ve just completed comments/corrections in response to the best copyediting of my academic work that I’ve ever experienced (for a forthcoming MLA volume on teaching Margaret Atwood). It was a marked contrast to some past mediocre experiences, and one real disaster, when an entire book manuscript, including my chapter, was outsourced to a non-English-speaking country…

  • Freedom to Read Week in Canada: February 23 to March 1

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    This year I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about banned books (and it’s only February). In the United States, organized efforts are removing LGBTQ+ books from classrooms and school libraries; these initiatives are spreading to Canada and affecting community libraries, too, which is shocking. Next week is Freedom to Read Week in Canada, and…

  • Ghost Writers: Generative AI, Intellectual Property, and the Trope of the Hidden Author

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    Grading concerns are converging with literary critical ones this weekend as I type less-than-patient messages to class members who wrote an analysis of an autobiographical sketch in which they misrepresent the topic, themes, events, and personages. Thanks, ChatGPT, for that hallucination. Very much appreciated. But intriguingly (one finds the silver lining), mystery fiction is also…

  • The Mystery of Bestsellers

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    As part of my Certificate in Creative Writing at U of T, I’ve been trying to take a course on how to write bestsellers, but it’s been cancelled a couple of times in a row (surely not for lack of student interest?). I’m signing up again for a spring session, but the instructor is ominously…

  • Writing and Publishing with a Chronic Illness

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    by

    Heidi Darroch
    in ,

    Academic research thrives under particular conditions. Material resources, time, reliable child care, access to library and archival materials, and the good health to pursue the work in a sustained way. I have all but one of these. My health isn’t terrible, just not great, some days. Today’s one of those days. A week of increasingly…