How I Wrote This

Michelle Syba talks with Pamela about speaking in tongues, getting slain in the spirit, and why she is surprised that Richard Dawkins is surprised at the tenacity of religion. Michelle became a lapsed Pentecostal before she got her PhD from Harvard in English and began teaching literature and religion in the college’s creative writing program. She left the faith not because she disagreed with the...

H. Nigel Thomas talks with Pamela about identity, living vicariously through fictional characters, and the unchangeability of human nature. When Nigel was 22 years old, he left St. Vincent and the Grenadines for Quebec where he studied African American Literature, earning degrees from Concordia, McGill and Université de Montréal. He became a high school teacher then a professor before publishing h...

Neil Smith describes how, when he first began writing, there was one thing he was sure of: he didn’t want to write auto-fiction. But his childhood was the kind that haunted him and eventually, he had to turn tragedy into art.  Neil is a novelist, translator, and short story writer whose 2007 award-winning debut collection, Bang Crunch was re-released in July of this year and has been translat...

Kim Thúy talks to Pamela about her grandmother’s invention of condos, how fear paralyzes the mind and body, and the eternal gratitude she feels for her parents - and people of Granby, Quebec. Until the age of ten, Kim lived a relatively privileged life in Saigon. But when the war in Vietnam ended, the Communists took over and her family decided there was no alternative but to flee. They boarded a...

Baharan Baniahmadi talks to Pamela about growing up in Tehran, navigating a duplicitous life, and how her mother’s last words were a plea for her to leave the country. Just four years after moving to Quebec, Baharan published Prophetess and won the 2022 QWF Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction . In lyrical prose, she captures the story of a young girl who witnesses a terrible crime against...

Sean Michaels talks with Pamela about starting the mp3 blog Said the Gramophone , why writing fiction is not a mercenary job, and how winning the Scotiabank Giller Prize changed his life. Sean emigrated from Scotland at the age of five, grew up in Ottawa, and moved to Montreal to study at McGill University. While still a student, he created Said the Gramophone , an mp3 music blog that would later...

Mikhail Iossel talks with Pamela about growing up in the former Soviet Union, becoming an underground writer in a KGB-monitored group, and the lasting damage of the Trump presidency on the reputation of America. Mikhail was born in Leningrad in the ‘50s. The son of a prominent scientist, his application for leaving his country was refused and his education all but wasted when he quit his engineeri...

Anita Rau Badami talks with Pamela about travelling by train through India, witnessing the violence that followed the assassination of Indira Ghani, and how her visual art intersects with her writing. Anita moved to Calgary in 1991 when her husband was pursuing a Master’s degree at the university. Already a journalist, she enrolled in a creative writing program and began the manuscript for the nov...

Heather is a best-selling, award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. In 2006 she published her debut novel Lullabies for Little Criminals , which critics called “hypnotic” and praised for depicting “ the most sympathetic abusive father in literature ”. It won the Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the Governor Generals’ Award, and when i...