When Words Collide Festival Report

From the Desk of Senior Editor, Robert Runté When Words Collide (Calgary) convention was once again wildly successful, with great programming, wonderful Guest of Honour speeches, and 650 wonderful-to-meet-and-talk-with attendees. Small enough convention to feel ‘intimate’, but large and diverse enough that one constantly learns new things. The cross-genre format of WWC leads to a lot of cross-pollination. (For example, the launch of Sleuth at WWC this year, a new mystery magazine from the people…

Day in the Life of an Editor

From the Desk of Robert Runté, Senior Editor: So…my 11 year-old is having trouble getting to sleep one night, so I offer to sit with her until she is asleep. I bring my computer so I won’t be bored and so she can’t talk to me when she should be trying to get to sleep. And I’m doing my email, because that’s the sort of not-having-to-concentrate work you do when you’re in a dark room…

Five Rivers at When Words Collide Festival

From the Desk of Robert Runte: Five Rivers will have seven authors and two staff attending the When Words Collide Festival in Calgary, August 14-16, 2015. It’s my favorite writers convention because of the high proportion of writers, the cross-genre orientation/cross-pollination, and the high quality of the programming. I missed that Susan MacGregor (pictured below) was going to WWC this year until after I’d already done the poster, but she’ll be there too, and doing…

Are Canadians Boring?

From the desk of Senior Editor, Robert Runté Jeet This Week (June 23, 2015) on CBC’s Q gave a fascinating rant entitled, “Canada hides behind the myth of boringness”. It’s worth the nine minutes and 3 seconds it takes to listen, though I’m most interested in what he has to say in the last half: his theories of why Canadian history is (portrayed as) so boring. He’s not wrong when he says “Canada has constructed…

Senior Editor, Robert Runté, talks about the Prime Ministers of Canada Series

Contrary to popular belief, Canadian history is not boring.  The Death of General Wolfeby Benjamin West It is true that we have not had as many civil wars, assassinations and riots as some other nations—most of our riots have been over hockey rather than politics or religion—but that does not make our history boring. There is plenty of history in just surviving in our climate, in exploring the continent, and in building a nation; there…