The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: writing

  • Considering Alice Munro

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    Heidi Darroch
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    I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on a Munro chapter, in my Canadian women’s crime fiction book. The revisions since the spring have been rather more extensive than I’d anticipated. I thought I was writing about how Munro depicts violent crime, or suspicion that crimes have been committed, in a range of…

  • Newspaper Coverage of Crime Fiction

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    Heidi Darroch
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    I’ve been grumpy for some time about how diminished the Globe & Mail‘s book coverage has been, lo these many years. I miss having a Books section, with a weekly column on crime fiction by Margaret Cannon. (Dream job!) That’s down to once a month or less, and it’s more of a quick round-up. But…

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

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    Heidi Darroch
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    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…

  • Solving Plot Problems

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    Heidi Darroch
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    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…

  • In Praise of Editors

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    Heidi Darroch
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    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…

  • 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…

  • “I’m no prude but . . .”: Alice Munro’s Women and the Problems of Sex and Love

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    In Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (I always feel like the question mark is wrong, as it’s an accusation and not a question), Rose recovers from the birth of her first child in a maternity ward, where one woman dominates the conversation about how her kitchen shelves are arranged. In a sea of…

  • “Don’t Exhaust Yourself” (from Sisters in Crime)

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    Heidi Darroch
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    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…

  • The Idea of a Female Literary Tradition: Unfashionable in 2025?

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    Heidi Darroch
    in

    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…

  • Library “Privileges” and Alice Munro

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    Heidi Darroch
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    I awoke with a keen sense of excitement and anxiety this morning, the first day of the year. Per Louise Penny’s novels, I quickly murmured “rabbit, rabbit, rabbit” before getting out of bed to feed our rabbit-like cat, who was already making soft cooing noises. She appreciates my early wake-ups. The question on my mind…