Steven Hayward
Steven Hayward teaches in the English Department of Colorado College. His most recent book is the bestselling novel and Globe 100 selection, Don’t Be Afraid. He is also the creator and host of the NPR radio program Off Topic.
Articles by
Steven Hayward
A Haunting Crime Revisited
The Emanuel Jacques murder through the eyes of a young Toronto boy December 2013
In the summer of 1977 Toronto was a city on the move, a boomtown rising out of the ashes of the Big Smoke. Finishing touches were being placed on an improbably ambitious building in the south of the city that, when completed, would be the tallest freestanding structure in the entire world. The glittering Eaton Centre had just opened its…
Plots are as much subject to the vagaries of fashion and taste as anything else. Some seem to have a definite shelf life (if you are working furiously on a novel about a Parisian time traveller’s wife you should probably stop; that ship has sailed) and others disappear because they cease to be plausible (it is…
Dispatch from Colorado Springs
A Canadian resident learns what happens when the town council calls the bluff of the lower-taxes movement. January–February 2011
It is early October 2010, and I am in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on my way to a session about planning city budgets, at not quite six in the evening. The sun has just set behind Pikes Peak, and the dying light throws a purple glow off the mountain. This is the same luminescence that Katharine Lee Bates noted in 1893 when she lived here and taught English at The Colorado College—the same department and university that employ me now—and that she remembered two years later in her famous poem about majestic purple mountains and amber waves of…