Tag: fiction
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Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty
Here’s something new and different, and very welcome: a murder mystery (cozy-ish) set in a multicultural Scarborough neighbourhood with a widowed Indo-Canadian woman in her late 50s as the plucky heroine. Uzma Jalaluddin is a Canadian author and journalist who has written acclaimed fiction and one play; this is her first murder mystery. Kausar Khan’s…
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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…
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In Praise of Editors
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…
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Ghost Writers: Generative AI, Intellectual Property, and the Trope of the Hidden Author
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…
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Alice Munro, Again: “Fiction”
But first, for something completely different. Readers may have noticed that there is a decided lack of ethnocultural/racial diversity among the authors I’m considering in this project. It’s a challenge in the field of crime fiction in Canada and it leads to, for instance, Pamela Bedore’s excellent book devoting a chapter to Ausma Zehanat Khan’s…
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“Don’t Exhaust Yourself” (from Sisters in Crime)
The full quotation from this morning’s email from my favourite organization is “Challenge yourself; don’t exhaust yourself.” I’m doing a “January Jumpstart,” which is a kind of crime-writing marathon training of daily writing practice. My relationship with my writing gets tetchy if I don’t write five or six days a week, and it’s much like…
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Ellen Godfrey and Rebecca Godfrey: Mothers, Daughters, and Crime Writing
I was intending to write on Alice Munro’s “Vandals” (redux) this morning, but it’s the first teaching day of the term and so my mind has turned, inevitably, to final proofreading of course outlines. At the moment I have a creative writing course, Introduction to Creative Nonfiction, taught entirely online. Contemplating how to make this…
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The Idea of a Female Literary Tradition: Unfashionable in 2025?
The premise of my book project is that there is something distinctive about the way that Canadian women writers craft crime fiction, even though they do so in contrasting genres of the cozy (domestic setting; food and friends; no gore), the thriller (domestic or public setting; more enemies than friends; potential gore), and the police…
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 