I fell in love with literature as an 11 year-old in the middle of a BC kid-snatching divorce. We were poor but my dad could afford to buy some paperbacks. He and I read Ian Fleming, Douglas Adams, Frank Herbert, James Clavell, and Stephen King. We talked about them.

Novels seemed inapproachably large in scale so as a kid I wrote poetry instead, which girls liked so I stuck with it. One girl who liked my poems got me reading other sorts of novels by writers like Thomas Pynchon, Hermann Hesse, Albert Camus, and Graham Greene. She and I attended the University of Victoria, where I studied music history and wrote about music. It was a great way to spend the 90s.

After university I became a music and arts writer, but always felt, for no valid reason, as though I was the one who should be being interviewed. Then, when Martin Amis came to Vancouver in 2002 to read from The Information, I decided novel writing was incredibly cool. Since then I moved to Toronto, in order to grow my journalism career, but arts writing’s no longer in demand. It took me eleven years to get my first novel right, and then the next two came out fast, about a year apart.

I love teaching this unteachable art form.
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