Gwendolyn MacEwen

The Bald-Headed Hermit
This is one of the funnest books I've ever reviewed. It remains a fixture on my shelf.[Originally appeared in The Danforth Review]*The Bald-Headed Hermit & The Artichoke: An Erotic Thesauruscompiled by A.D. PeterkinArsenal Pulp Press, 1999Where would we be without sex? Nonexistant, obviously. More importantly, however, we would be without many of

Beginnings & Endings
Ten years ago my first book, Thirteen Shades of Black & White (Turnstone Press, 1999) came out. Let's just say it wasn't a best seller.I don't often get asked about it, but I did last night, because I met a CEGEP professor fro

Fiction vs Fiction
[It would please me if readers took the title to refer to Spy vs Spy]It makes me spinny, the discussion about the place of "popular fiction" within "Canadian literature."Today I discovered an article William Deverell published in The National Post (September 14, 2009). The article concludes:The Brits knight their genre writers, the Yanks lionize them, but the Canucks (or at least our persons of letters) continue to treat them like unwashed in-laws tracking mud into the parlour. So sad.The

The Death of the (Canadian) Novel
[First published in The Danforth Review, 2001]The year would have been 1990. The Wall had just fallen. The Cold War was over. I was an undergraduate studying English at the University of Waterloo, and one of my professors told me the novel was dead. "It can’t be," I said. "I’m going to write one." I went to meet with him in his office. He called me a "reactionary." (Really!) Flustered, I went home and looked up that label in a dictionary: "one who supports movement in the direction of political conservatism or extreme rightism." Not me, I thought. I was just

John Raulston Saul
Canada is a Metis nation, says John Raulston Saul.He makes the startling claim in his book