The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction

Tag: writing

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

    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)

    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?

    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…