David Demchuk, who attended Montreal's Blue Metropolis festival earlier this year, is the author of a Scotiabank Giller Prize-nominated collection of horror short stories, The Bone Mother. This was quite an accomplishment for a horror writer, especially since writers of horror fiction are so often excluded from the literary mainstream. The Bone Mother, set in …
Continue reading Archival Hauntings: A Review of The Bone Mother by David Demchuk
The last example is a direct lifting from Chant--or as I prefer to think of it, a scene that was stolen productively.
While a text asking you to believe in fairies and spirits might seem flaky, seeing as this gives us no solid program to reclaim the city, such faith does awaken the desire to see the postmodern, uneven city restored from its ruins
The final day of MythCon 46 was Monday August 3rd, during which I only took notes on one presentation: Vicki Ronn on "Graphic King Arthur," that is, the history of King Arthur comic books. Ronn presented a series of comics featuring or starring the mythical king, evaluating each for the quality of its illustrations, story, …
Continue reading MythCon 46: The Arthurian Mythos Part IV: The Conclusion
Does magic exist in the contemporary world? Charles de Lint's mythic fiction brings supernatural beings into the context of the everyday and Forests of the Heart explores the contact between ordinary people and what he calls Mystery. Bettina and Adelita are sisters, both partly Mexican, partly Indios, and raised by their grandmother to see la époco del …
Are there Canadian dragons? And if there are, what are they like? Canada is far too young a country to have ever had a population that naively believed in dragons of the European variety. By the time Europeans settled the land, dragons were known to be myths, creatures of the imagination. Besides, leathery wings and …
The following is the second part of a presentation I gave for this year's MA colloquium. I have included the accompanying PowerPoint file as well. Historicizing Moonheart Presentation A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint's Moonheart [...] The narrative structure at work during Mal'eka's seige is part of a larger rhetorical structure …
The following is the first part of a presentation I gave for this year's MA colloquium. I have included the accompanying PowerPoint file as well. Historicizing Moonheart Presentation A Multicultural Utopia: Historicizing New Fantasy in Charles de Lint's Moonheart “Utopia would seem to offer the spectacle of one of those rare phenomena whose concept is …
The following is an update of an essay I submitted to a class on Michael Ondaatje taught by Prof. Robert Lecker at McGill. The English Patient, especially after it was transformed into a movie, ignited a controversy about historical representation. Was it ethical to rewrite the death of marginal desert explorer László Almásy by having …
Continue reading The Almásy Controversy: History, Fantasy, and The English Patient
Monday at the D.B. Clarke Theatre in the Hall Building on Concordia University campus, Joseph Boyden talked about his identity and origins--both as a writer and a man of mixed Irish-Ojibwe blood. He was accompanied by renowned conversationalist Kate Sterns and Globe and Mail book reviewer Jared Bland, "Who are you?" opened Sterns, a direct …
Matthew Rettino 