This year the Blue Metropolis Festival, Montreal’s annual literary festival, dedicated the opening event to Mavis Gallant who passed away earlier this year. Afterwards, Linda Leith, founder of Blue Metropolis and friend of Mavis Gallant, gathered writers, friends and fans together to pay tribute to her.
The stories painted a colorful picture of an entertaining conversationalist, an acute observer, a reluctant interviewee, a quick, incisive wit, an independent woman, a determined hard-working writer (over a period of ten years, she wrote 1,000 pages of a never-finished non-fiction book on the Dreyfus affair), a person who took great pleasure in her daily routine of ordering the plat du jour at her favorite bistro after her morning’s writing.
As a very young child, excited at meeting the Mother Superior, she Continue reading
I’m working on a story in which one of the characters is very superstitious.
I was stuck with my novella, not a bad stuck, just a point when I needed to stop, think, and realign characters and plot.
An ancient tribe struggles through this desert, leaning on their crooked staffs which have what look like a little leaf or bird at the top but are in fact tiny bells.
I have a very unwriterly reason for having a soft spot for 
Why am I writing about story endings when the very thought makes me want to whimper and hide my head under my pillow?
What’s a writer to do when winter just goes on and on and it’s March and there’s still snow on the ground and minus temperatures? Take up fencing.
“Have it taken with a cat,” advises a friend. “Everyone likes spending time with a person who has a cat.”
Susi Lovell 