Category: News
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Granta’s issue on Canadian writing
The UK literary journal Granta is publishing its first issue featuring Canadian literature, edited by Madeleine Thien and Catherine Leroux. My story “The Initials” is included. The issue includes many amazing writers, including Dionne Brand, Karen Solie and Margaret Atwood. The issue can be ordered online here. You can read more about the project in The…
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Book #3
I’m very glad to say that my third book, Vancouver for Beginners (poetry), will be published by BookThug publishers in Toronto. A number of pieces from the book-in-progress have been published over the past several years in various journals and anthologies, including Descant, EVENT, The Capilano Review, Best Canadian Poetry 2015 (Tightrope Books), Lemon Hound‘s new…
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Reading at Growing Room festival in March
I’m glad to be reading at Room magazine’s new feminist book festival, the first gathering being this March 8, 11-12 in Vancouver. There’s a bit about the festival here and they’ll be releasing the full program soon. Here is the Facebook event.
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Reading December 12
I’ll be reading at the Tonic reading series holiday event, along with a great lineup of poets. The Facebook event is here. Monday, December 12 at 7 PM The Emerald, 555 Gore, Vancouver
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Review in Herizons
Thanks to Herizons for recently reviewing my book, The things I heard about you (Nightwood, 2014). From the review: “Exploring sexuality, youth, loss and urban life, this collection is tough and tender, and the format (each poem is set apart with a title page bearing a simple, striking line drawing) gives the work the breathing room…
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Journey prize anthology
I was very happy to learn that my story, “The Person You Want To See,” is long listed for this year’s Journey Prize. As such, it will be included in this year’s Journey Prize anthology published by Mclelland & Stewart/Random House, this fall. Thank you to the judges, Kate Cayley, Brian Francis, and Madeleine Thien.…
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Writing So Hard
Thanks to poet Sachiko Murakami for inviting me to participate in her interview series “The hardest thing about writing” about……. the hardest thing about writing. There are also interviews up on the site with writers like Vivek Shraya and Laura Broadbent. Mine is here. It’s complicated to talk about this stuff because my relation to…
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Orlando
In the last year of high school I met Orlando, not quite real, a creature in a book by Virginia Woolf. A classmate, proud in her teenage Catholicism, declared that there was a mistake in the middle of the book. The teacher asked what she meant. She said, The character changed gender, from one to…
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Some things
Recently poet Sachiko Murakami started up a website The Hardest Thing About Being a Writer that’s updated every week with an interview with a writer talking about their “hardest thing” about writing. Having published two books and currently working away on my third, I’d say that one of the hardest things is the sheer endurance required…
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One million years
It’s been approximately one million years or so since I’ve posted on this thing. That is the way writing is sometimes. I’ve been working away at my manuscript, getting a lot of work done, and so it goes. Here I am, posting, because something public is coming up. I have some work in Poetry Is…
Alex Leslie 