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SELECTED SCRIBBLING

SELECTED SCRIBBLING

HIGHLIGHTS:

  • “How Canada Fell in Love with the Stanley Cup,” Hazlitt (May 7, 2019). An excerpt from the book I’m writing about Dawson City’s 1905 Stanley Cup challenge and how Canada fell in love with hockey
  • “It’s Okay to Suck,” Hazlitt (July 26, 2016). The case for doing things you’re terrible at
  • “Everything We Can’t Describe in Music,” Hazlitt (April 16, 2016). Timbre—the terroir of sound—is crucial to how we hear music. An excerpt from Bad Singer 
  • “Klondike Creative Class,” Maisonneuve (Winter, 2013). The gold rush is long gone, but a new generation of artists is stoking the myth of the Yukon
  • “Face the Music,” Maisonneuve (Spring, 2012). How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness

LATEST ADDITIONS:

  • “How Canada Fell in Love with the Stanley Cup,” Hazlitt (May 7, 2019). An excerpt from the book I’m writing about Dawson City’s 1905 Stanley Cup challenge and how Canada fell in love with hockey
  • “Beautiful Losses,” Hazlitt (November 2, 2017). Leonard Cohen’s decision to pursue music certainly proved a good one—for him and for us—but I’m still curious about what we lost when he gave up writing fiction
  • “The Literary Turf of Jay McInerney,” Hazlitt (June 5, 2017). About the time I met Jay McInerney and we talked about, among other things, Raymond Carver, crashing British sports cars and how the novel endures
  • “How Bad Singing Landed Me in an MRI Machine,” The Scientist (March 1, 2017). One author’s journey through the science of his congenital amusia
  • “The Year in Not Dying,” Hazlitt (November 28, 2016). A lot of my heroes died this year. But I didn’t. So I wrote about my year in staying alive

BOOK EXCERPTS:

ARTS & CULTURE:

  • “Boyhood is Bigger Than the Stereotype,” Hazlitt (July 5, 2018). I talked to Rachel Giese, the author of Boys: What It Means to Become a Man, about boys
  • “Beautiful Losses,” Hazlitt (November 2, 2017). Leonard Cohen’s decision to pursue music certainly proved a good one—for him and for us—but I’m still curious about what we lost when he gave up writing fiction
  • “The Literary Turf of Jay McInerney,” Hazlitt (June 5, 2017). About the time I met Jay McInerney and we talked about, among other things, Raymond Carver, crashing British sports cars and how the novel endures
  • “You reveal something very personal about yourself when you sing, TVO.org (July 28, 2016). The crucial bonding that takes place when we sing together. An excerpt from Bad Singer
  • “Why it took me nine years to finish Bad Singer,” TVO.org (July 27, 2016). The idea for a book about learning to sing struck me in 2009; the book came out in 2016. Here’s what happened along the way
  • “Everything We Can’t Describe in Music” Hazlitt (April 16, 2016). Timbre—the terroir of sound—is crucial to how we hear music. An excerpt from Bad Singer
  • “Klondike Creative Class,” Maisonneuve (Winter, 2013). What’s the Klondike like more than a century after the Gold Rush? Like Leonard Cohen’s Greece, according to one filmmaker who lives there. How the coolest town in Canada created a thriving arts community
  • “Face the Music,” Maisonneuve (Spring, 2012). How can someone who passionately loves music also be a terrible singer? Tim Falconer takes up voice lessons—and discovers the surprising science of tone deafness
  • “Boys Don’t Try,” This Magazine (March-April, 2005). I tell the story of the book that changed my life in this essay about why many men don’t read fiction

CITIES:

PEOPLE:

  • “Legacy of a Legend, Ryerson Review of Journalism (November, 2014). This guest blog post is a tribute to Don Obe, a pioneer of literary Journalism in Canada—and someone I considered a friend and mentor
  • “In a Different Light,” What’s Up Yukon (May 24, 2012). A profile of Austrian filmmaker Andreas Horvath
  • “The King of Stanley Street,” McGill News (Fall, 1987). I reminisce about Luigi Scarpini, who was a seigneurial bohemian, a genuine Montreal character and my friend
  • “If Ever a Wiz there Woz,” InfoAge (June, 1984). At the beginning of my career, I was lucky enough to interview Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

POLITICS:

  • “Like Father, Like Son,” Maisonneuve blog (October 20, 2015). We associate “Passion over reason” with Pierre Trudeau, but it also describes the choice Canadians made when they elected Justin Trudeau
  • “Vengeance is Ford’s,” All Fired Up in the Big Smoke (July 17, 2011). A look at how getting even is more important than good policy for Toronto mayor Rob Ford
  • “If Toronto’s Mayors were Maple Leafs, ”This first appeared as a guest post on All Fired Up in the Big Smoke (Sept. 9, 2010) during the municipal election. I updated it the following June after we’d all seen Rob Ford in office
  • “How the politics of parking can defile a city, ”The Toronto Star (May 11, 2008). An excerpt from Drive: A Road Trip through Our Complicated Affair with the Automobile

SCIENCE:

SOCIETY:

THE YUKON:

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