The Next Chapter
with Shelagh Rogers

• Douglas Gibson on Stories About Storytellers
• Ellen Hamilton on reading Alice Munro
• From the TNC vault: Shelagh's conversation with Alice Munro
• Shane Koyczan's spoken word tribute to singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith
• From the TNC vault: Shelagh's conversation with Shane Koyczan

• Patrick Lane on The Collected Poems Of Patrick Lane
• Sophie Milman on Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood
• Literary Smackdown with Helen Humphreys and Zsuzsi Gartner: Writing the Past vs. Writing the Future
• Daniel Kalla on his day job as a computer programmer
• Lorne Elliott on Two Little Savages by Ernest Thompson Seton

The Next Chapter and Canada Writes are teaming up again to present our fourth Literary Smackdown, an authorial showdown about the ins and outs of writing. 

This time, Helen Humphreys and Zsuzsi Gartner hop in a literary time machine but they can't agree on which direction to take.  What's better: writing the past or writing the future?   

Helen Humphreys is a novelist and poet.  She prefers to set her fiction in the past because she's fascinated by how little things have actually changed.  Her most recent novel is The Reinvention of Love.  Zsuzsi Gartner is the author of Better Living Through Plastic Explosives and the editor of Darwin's Bastards, a collection of dystopian and science fiction stories.  Zsuzsi thinks the present is elusive, ever-changing, and impossible to capture in words.  She prefers having fun with the "what if" scenarios that can play out in the future.

Past or future: which has the most creative possibilities for a fiction writer?

Press play on the player above to hear Helen and Zsuzsi's debate.  Click here to read their essays on the Canada Writes website.

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• Chilly Gonzales on Memo from David O. Selznick: The Creation of "Gone with the Wind" and Other Motion Picture Classics, as Revealed in the Producer's Private Letters, Telegrams, Memorandums, and Autobiographical Remarks edited by Rudy Behlmer
• Christopher Heard on The Suite Life: The Magic and Mystery of Hotel Living
• Adrienne Clarkson on Room for All of Us
• Marina Nemat on Prisoner of Tehran