In Elizabeth Hay’s 2007 novel Late Nights on Air, the book a character selects to cure her insomnia falls open at a passage beginning “Like imperfect sleep.” It is a “lovely coincidence,” the character muses, “but it doesn’t lead anywhere.”
As Hay’s work demonstrates better than almost anyone else’s, coincidences, recurrences, re-encounters and reverberations from the past can lead novelists to fruitful places in their explorations of human…
Erika Ritter
Erika Ritter is a novelist, playwright and non-fiction writer living in Toronto.
Articles by
Erika Ritter
Between Two Worlds
Manitoba and Lancashire are the poles in a tale of rupture and recovery March 2009
Among other worthy preoccupations, Joan Thomas’s first novel, Reading by Lightning, explores the potent fantasy of being snatched from familiar surroundings and deposited in a completely alien realm, far from home. That is, I think, a common childhood conception, and one that strikes most of us even now as alternately terrifying and tantalizing.
For those of us who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s (including…
A Living Past and a Complex Present
Linking 1607 with 2007 is a tall order for fiction September 2008
“Can we agree, the past is not dead but the present is its surprising and complex flower?” posits Felix d’Amboisee in the quotation that opens Bill Gaston’s latest novel. Proving d’Amboisee’s dual proposition is the tall order that novelist Gaston seeks to fill in The Order of Good Cheer, by alternating narratives of two Canadian coastal…
A Sister’s Sad Burden
The chronicle of a sibling’s decline keeps its readers at a distance December 2006
Perhaps the most difficult task, when undertaking to chronicle something as personal as the life and death of a brother, is to be straightforward, factual and specific—yet also somehow synthesize the details into a story with broader implications for the rest of us. With Requiem for My Brother, Marian Botsford Fraser succeeds admirably in the…