A psychologist, a professor, a police officer, a nurse, a farmer, a midwife, a soldier, an engineer, a lawyer, an accountant, and a handful of public servants all walk into the public library. It sounds like the opening of a long-winded joke. It is, in fact, just a regular Thursday in Stittsville. The Stittsville Creative Writing Group has been meeting weekly for 13 years to share our creative fiction, non-fiction and poetry. Like villagers contributing the produce of their gardens to the ...

The Stittsville Creative Writing Group is a program of the Ottawa Public Library. The group meets every Thursday at the Stittsville branch for approximately an hour to read pieces they have written. Other OPL groups exist, often with different models, however SCWG has found its model has worked to the extent thatwe've been in "business" for several years. Also, despite increasing our membership to 25, the OPL still has to maintain a waiting list!We are: poets, scholars, rogu...

We are a group of people who love to write, who come together each week to share what we have written, to listen to the offerings of each other, and to share links to experiential knowledge gained in the completion of our craft, word-smithing. We write because we love to write; we simply are driven to write. These are our stories. We hope you enjoy them.

The Stittsville Creative Writing Group is a program of the Ottawa Public Library. The group meets every Thursday at the Stittsville branch for approximately an hour to read pieces they have written. Other OPL groups exist, often with diff erent models, however the SCWG has found its model has worked to the extent that we've been in "business" since the autumn of 2012. Also, despite increasing our membership levels, the OPL still has to maintain a waiting list.We are: poets, scholar...

Toronto in the twenty-first century: At night, a beacon on a lonely ancient lake, a drainage pond from the last ice age. In the daytime, a bulwark of glass, glinting in the radiant sun. Joe, Mary, and her cat, Sam, sit in a lakeside condo, trapped by a crazed, mysterious sniper. What has become of their lives? What has become of their city? What has become of their century? As the situation begins to unravel, Mary finds herself wondering, “What would Margaret Atwood do?”

Villages are full of tales: some are forgotten while others become a part of local folklore. But the fortunes of one West Country village are watched over and irreversibly etched into history as an omniscient, somewhat crabby, presence keeps track of village life.In the late sixties a Californian musician blows through Underhill and writes a set of haunting folk songs that will earn him a cult following. Two decades later, some teenagers disturb a body on the local golf course. In ...

New York Times best-selling author of ten genre-bending novels Jonathan Lethem helms this collection of the year’s best mystery short fiction.For Jonathan Lethem, “crime stories are deep species gossip.” He writes in his introduction that “they’re fundamentally stories of power, of its exercise, both spontaneous and conspiratorial; stories of impulse and desire, and of the turning of tables.” The Best American Mystery Stories 2019 has its full sha...

At once brazen and terrified, Sarah Maria Griffin's beautifully written memoir, Not Lost: A Story About Leaving Home, opens a doorway into the interior life of the Celtic Tiger Cubs who have left Ireland to escape the recession and in search of prosperity. Thrown into life 5,000 miles away from home, Sarah's tale echoes that of many of her generation forced to forge new lives and build new homes on distant shores. She describes in open, honest, detail her experience of her first year in Sa...

On Spec: The Canadian Magazine of the FantasticFrom its modest beginnings with a single test issue to its Aurora Award-winning present, On Spec has delighted its fans with tales of the fantastic for 25 years. What better way to celebrate On Spec's silver jubilee than showcasing some of its best stories?Spanning two decades of On Spec's history, these twenty-four stories and poems offer a tantalizing taste of the wondrous, dark, humorous, and surreal tales that have appeared...

Addicted to buying clothes, Alison shops until she steals, pulls a scarf around her neck and, quite literally, drops . . .Part of the Storycuts series, this short story was previously published in the collection Blood Lines.

Skin is a short, sharp, frightening story from Roald Dahl, the master of the shocking taleIn Skin, Roald Dahl, one of the world's favourite authors, tells a sinister story about the darker side of human nature. Here, a very unusual painting proves to be more valuable than anyone, especially its owner, could ever have predicted . . .Skin is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You, which includes seventeen other devious and s...

Just as the title suggests: Pain Isn't Pretty but It Creates Nice Art.. Many artists including myself transform our pain into the art you view, read or listen to. This is my latest dosage of pain.