If you take a gander at Joyland today, you’ll see my stupid head in a photo and a story posted below, called Shape of a sitting man. This story got picked up by Joyland’s Kathryn Mockler a few months ago, after ending up as a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award. It is a pretty short one, at about 2500 words, so it’s perfect to just tear through on the bus or in line for something and just get really depressed in a short amount of time.

Big, big thanks to Mockler, my editor on this one, who had to put up with my disdain for all commas. Also thanks to Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis, and everyone at Joyland who helped get this story out there.

Right now they’re trying to raise a little bit of dough to redesign Joyland, and to possible get some paid internship type stuff going on. So check out their fundraising efforts if you can and throw a few dollars their way if you can spare it. 

Joyland publishes authors from all over North America, and they’ve published many, many established writers along with up and comers. Writing folks I know like Andrew Sullivan, Catriona Wright, Andrew Hood, Tory Hetherington, Kerry Clare, and Naben Ruthnum, have all been published there over the last couple of years, going toe to toe with all the excellent writers south of the 49th parallel. It is a great journal with a long reach and stories that have gone in the Journey Prize Anthology and Best American Short Stories.

That story of mine is another one that is going to be part of my collection, Debris, coming out with the mighty Biblioasis next year. So yeah, give it a go if you like, and wander around the place to read a pile o’ good stories.

Thanks,

Hardcastle

As of this week, I’ve been told by the the Journey Prize folks that we are able to let out some secret news from earlier in the year. My story “Old Man Marchuk,” published by EVENT in January, has been included in Journey Prize Stories 26, and will be published as part of that anthology in early October.

I know a few other writers that are in this year’s anthology, like Andrew MacDonald, and the notorious Amy Jones. The folks at McClelland & Stewart are going to announce each author on their Journey Prize facebook page over the next few weeks. In fact, they’ve already started. If the other authors involved are as strong as those I know about, we are probably looking at one hell of a book come October. 

That is all a result of the fine judges that took part this year: Saleema Nawaz, Steven W. Beattie, and Craig Davidson, and the pile o’ stories they had to read through. Massive thanks to all of them for their time and effort in selecting the anthology entries. Also, I think special attention should be given to the journals that read, published, and nominated this group of JP stories. I gotta thank EVENT for putting this one out there, and for nominating it secretly for a few different prizes (more to come later on that). But I’d also like to holler at The Puritan, who published a story of mine called Bandits early in 2013, and nominated it for the 2014 Journey Prize as well. That story was one of the first to help me gain some traction over the last couple years, and the community of writers/editors/readers that make up The Puritan have always been great at promoting that story. Go read their journal now and continue to read it until your corneas ache. 

The three finalists for the Journey Prize will be announced on October 1st. So keep an eye out for that. And the anthology will be in bookstores that do not suck as of October 7th. You can also pre-order it here through the McClelland & Stewart site. In the meantime, like the Journey Prize fb page, and follow the Writers’ Trust on twitter for updates on all of the writers included this year, and for important announcements leading up to the big show that is the Writers’ Trust Awards on November 4th, where the Journey Prize winner will be announced, as will other WT prize winners.

 

The next bit of news for “Old Man Marchuk” is that this old bugger is also a finalist for a Western Magazine Award in the Fiction category. I found this out earlier in the month in the usual way, by a bunch of people messaging me things I didn’t understand. Another sneaky move by EVENT that I greatly appreciate. The journals that submit to the WMAs are some of the best in the country, so I’m in tough with some other good writers in my category. Though, I dodged that Trevor Corkum guy, who has a story in the finals of the Human Experience or Creative Non-Fiction type category. That narrowly stopped some kind of short story highlander scenario, is my guess. 

The winners will be announced on September 26th at a fancy gala in Vancouver, where I don’t think I’m allowed at nor have the suitable shoes or boxcar ridin’ capabilities to put in an appearance. Either way, look out for that one also. Follow the Western Magazine Award Foundation twitter page for more updates. Thanks again to EVENT for the nomination. This story has managed to get a lot of mileage and whatever happens it ain’t done yet. It’ll also show up in the next edition of Best Canadian Stories sometime in the near future. 

Otherwise, the full list of nominees for the Western Magazine Awards can be found by clicking this line.

That’s it for now. Some other secret doings coming up, as I said and got heckled for in the last post. I should have something to tell you about that in September. Until then, thanks for reading all my shit, and for spreading the word about Hardcastle stories and other rantings. 

Cheers, 

KH

A couple weeks ago a writer friend of mine, Amanda Leduc, asked me to stop being weird and participate in this blog hop deal. Where somebody tags you and one other writer, and you answer a few questions about your writing process and such, and then suggest a couple more writers to carry it on. So yeah, I did it.

The two other writers I roped into this thing are Andrew Forbes, a very published writer of sports fiction, shorts fiction and hillbilly mayhem, and Jess Taylor, National Magazine Award champion for fiction and also champion for emerging writers in Toronto. Check out their sites and I’ll write some more about them after my answers to the questions.

Also check out my blog kin for this little project, Liz Windhorst Harmer. She is Leduc’s old timey friend from Steeltown and also a winner of things like the NMA, and an excellent writer of fiction and creative non-fiction, and she wrote The Hunger Games just for shits and giggles…

So yeah, here it is:

BLOG HOP THING

Question One

What am I working on?

Right now I’m still hammering out a bunch of short stories to round out this collection, Debris, which is getting published in 2015 by Biblioasis. I had enough stories to fill that sucker, but my editor, John Metcalf, has been partial to some of the recent stories I’ve written and they’ve been landing in journals pretty consistently. We’ve got some months to figure it out, and it doesn’t look like there’ll be a lot of heavy edits, so I’m just finishing them and sending them over to Metcalf (and to journals) to see what sticks.

I’ve also got secret news about possibilities for a novel, finished early in 2013 and promptly sold to nowhere. This thing is going to get reworked, properly and with a proper editor, and we’ll see if it can’t do some damage when it’s ready.

Question Two

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

I think it depends what kind of genre it gets lumped into. Sometimes my work gets thrown in with writing that has similar subject matter, or a bunch of cussing and violence, stories considered “edgy.” Since Can Lit tends to suffer from a dearth of actually good writing in that territory (other than a few very good writers, some of whom I’m unlucky enough to know), they tend to lump a lot of us together if we write things that are unpleasant or about characters from the wrong side of the tracks. For the most part, my writing is a lot more traditional than some “similar” writers in the way the sentences are set down, and there are rarely stories that try hard to situate themselves with geographical specifics or pop-culture references. There is also about a zero percent chance of any of my work being written in first person, present tense.

The kind of writing I put out there is most closely related to the work of American writers like Cormac McCarthy or Daniel Woodrell. Mainly because I flat-out stole from them as far as writing style and sentence construction, and set that over whatever I learned from reading Hemingway. It is safe to say I’m worse than all of those writers and probably always will be, but the fact that I’m a few decades younger, with different country and unique settings and characters to draw from, tends to set it apart a little bit. The perspective of the work is definitely different than say, the work of Woodrell (who I think is the closest in style), and I’m getting to where I think the voice itself has gone from being too spare or too cobbled together, to something that stands apart from these other influences.

Otherwise, comparisons to other contemporaries are not a real strong suit for me, because, as a bunch of other writers will tell you, I’m probably the worst at reading new work of any writer in the history of writing. Hasn’t ruined me so far, but it baffles a lot of people.

Question Three

Why do I write what I do? 

It has been pretty simple for me as far as the material I write about and the way I go about writing it. As I mentioned, I have a long way to go to get near the high watermark set by writers I look up to, but I am confident that what I’m writing about and where I’m trying to get to is the only real route that makes sense for me. I don’t read or write much for escapism, in as far as I care as little about what it’s like to be a stock broker as I do as what it would be like to be a wizard (actually, far, far less). I’m a miserable shit for reading and like a bunch of realism and a bit of mythology in the blood and guts of it. I write a lot of what I know or what I could know if things went sideways at some point or another.

But mainly, I think the life and death matters, and matters that affect the working class, speak to me most and will always dominate the writing. I’ve got very little use for ponderings and elaborate psychologies that characters mete out for you because they don’t know who the fuck they are. I’m also fascinated by the natural world, wildernesses and how they act on the lives of characters, and the lives of actual people. I’ve tried to write a little more about folks in an urban setting, but all that means is figuring out how that environment stands in for the woods or the rivers. Sometimes it is not as much of a stretch as it seems.

Question Four

How does my writing process work?

I get most of my material and ideas from my own experience and from things I’ve seen firsthand, which is no shocker. But even for stories that I’ve written based on things external to my own sort of wheelhouse, I focus on character and narrative voice far more than plot. In a very un-artsy sort of move, I plan almost every story point by point and almost always follow that outline. Interesting things tend to happen in the gaps between, but it is pretty straightforward as far as process goes.

One thing I don’t follow is the write-however-many-words-a-day type deal, though I know it works for a lot a writers out there. I think you are working as long as you are thinking about the writing, and if you have a very intense focus on the work when you do sit down to write. As I’ve gotten along in my writing I write less and less throwaway stuff. I think I’ve figured out the most of what I’m trying to do, and the voice I’m going for, and I spent so much time writing without other eyeballs on the work that I think I’m fairly ruthless with cutting fat from a story and being honest with myself if something isn’t working. Like everybody else, I sometimes have to abandon something that looked promising at the start, sometimes cannibalize it later for another story. All in all, I end up trying to drill a solid first draft (going back and re-reading it in downtime), and then I do one big revision with major fixes, and one last clean-up job for typos and technical errors. After then it’s mostly over with and I start filling envelopes.

*

There it was. If you have any questions or complaints about anything I wrote feel free to email Amanda Leduc or call her on the phone between 4-5:30am to discuss it. In the meantime, thanks to Amanda for getting me into this. Now go and check out what Liz Windhorst Harmer threw down today (or will at some point). I’m sure it will be profound and you will have a 12% chance of soiling yourself.

On September 1st, keep an eye out for what Mr. Forbes and Ms. Taylor have to say. Here is some more info on those weirdos:

Andrew Forbes is a fiction writer and co-founder of the literary sportswriting website The Barnstormer. His stories have appeared or are forthcoming in The Feathertale Review, Found Press, PRISM International, The New Quarterly, Scrivener Creative Review, The Journey Prize Stories 25, This Magazine, Hobart, and The Puritan. Forbes’ debut story collection, What You Need, is getting published in 2015 by Invisible Publishing.

Jess Taylor is the host and founder of The Emerging Writers Reading Series. She writes poems, stories, novels, and songs. Sometimes she draws and paints. She co-edited Echolocation Magazine and blogs for The Puritan’s Town Crier. Most recently, her work was published in Little Brother, Little Fiction, Great Lakes Review, and Emerge Literary Journal. Her story Paul, published by Little Brother, won the Gold National Magazine Award for fiction in July 2014.

That’s all I got. Cheers. KH

Issue #131 of The New Quarterly has just hit the shelves and has been shipped out to subscribers. The theme for this issue is War: An Uphill Battle, and there are some excellent works of fiction in there that relate to that topic, as well as some fine poetry and essays.

The story I got in there is called Spread low on the fields, and it is about a man coming back to his hometown to bury his father, who was killed under rather unusual circumstances in a nursing home. I won’t give it away too much, for those of you that have the gumption to read the story, but it gets into violent family histories and new battle lines that are drawn as a result of certain present-day deeds. It also has a bunch of drinking and cussing, because consistency is goddamn important.

Other than this story, I’m pretty damn excited to be sharing these pages with Tamas Dobozy, an incredible short story writer and the headliner of this issue. Justly so. A couple years back during the Journey Prize events of 2012, I was paired up with Tamas for a National Post interview where we talked about the craft of writing and a couple of other things. The folks at the Writers’ Trust who brokered this match (the relatively patient Becky Toyne and Elizabeth Cameron) got roughly 12548 more words of email back and forth than they asked for, with me and Tamas shooting the shit about writing and whatever else came up. In any case, he was one of the first writers that gave me the time of day and supported my writing since I started making some inroads with my work, and I’m honoured to be in the same journal. Back in those days I didn’t know anybody and sure as hell nobody ever heard of me. A lot has gone down since then, and this brings it full-circle to some degree. Anyway, after you read Tamas’ story in TNQ 131, go out and get his prize-winning collection Siege 13, if you haven’t read it already. If it doesn’t blow your mind you probably should just go take a nap.

So, do yourself a favour and grab a copy of The New Quarterly, Issue 131, and get some of this work rattling around your brainpan. Also, there is a little feature on the site, called Who’s Reading What, where a number of the authors in this issue talk about what they’re reading, or re-reading in my case, because I don’t like new things. Check it out and see what writers get into while they write stuff.

Massive thanks again to Pamela Mulloy, and all TNQ staff. Pamela gave one of my very long stories a shot last year, and worked with it pretty extensively to get it sorted out, and that is not the usual deal, as many writers will tell you. That story, Hunted by Coyotes, came out in TNQ 129, just two issues back, and this new story got a real quick turnaround to show up later in the same year. Probably it is safe to say that TNQ gets a look at the vast majority of Hardcastle short stories that get wrote going forward.

Both of the TNQ stories are going to be in my short story collection, Debris, coming out next year with Biblioasis, and by the looks of it they will be the only journal to repeat in that book. Hell, there is time yet before the books comes out, so maybe I’ll write and submit something magical soon and we can go for the threepeat. It’s worth giving it a go.

I still have work forthcoming in Joyland, probably this summer also, and a story in The Fiddlehead that does not have a release date yet. Also, Old Man Marchuk, from EVENT Issue 42/3, will be in Best Canadian Stories, curated at Oberon Press by John Metcalf, my editor at Biblioasis. Finally, the title story from my collection, Debris, will be published in Shenandoah this fall. Keep an eye out for all that. There is also a secret thing that I can’t tell you about. But I’ll drop it when I can.

Cheers,

Hardcastle

 

This has been in the works a little while now, but, now that contracts are all worked out and whatnot, I figure it is okay to let people in on some good news…

My first book will be published by Biblioasis in 2015. It is a collection of short fiction, tentatively called “Debris,” after a story of mine that is going to be published later in the year by Shenandoah.

As I talked about in an earlier post, John Metcalf gave me a call in March to talk about including a story of mine, “Old man Marchuk,” in the upcoming edition of Best Canadian Stories by Oberon Press. Mr. Metcalf scours all of  Canada’s literary journals to fill out that collection, and he read that story in EVENT and called me up. Like a lot of people, he didn’t know who the hell I was or where I came from, and asked if I had more stories. I had a bunch of them, and I sent them over to him.

Along with his writing and literary criticism, Metcalf is also fiction editor at Biblioasis, which turned out to be pretty fortuitous. After a couple months of writing and reading stories, and talking with Biblioasis’ managing editor Dan Wells, an offer was made and accepted.

So, after years of being told a load of weird shit by a bunch of people in this business, and a pile of rejections for stories and novels, this one little story read by the right person at the right time led to all of this magic. I always say that you should never be just sitting around waiting on other people to do something with your work, and, when you are waiting on worthwhile things, you should keep at the writing. Since 2012 I’ve just tried to lay down as many stories as possible, and to get better at it as I go. A lot of things didn’t work out the way I thought, but the stories kept on getting written, and people started reading them, and this is where it all ended up.

I don’t know whether the launch will be spring or fall, but I’ll report further when that is all sorted out. In the meantime, I’ve still got stories to be published this summer in Joyland and The New Quarterly, and that titular story this October in Shenandoah. Keep an eye out for those.

The stories will keep coming, and I think we are going to be able to build something solid over at Biblioasis, whether that means more collections or novels or both. A lot of really dumb things had to happen for this one great thing to turn up, but it worked out perfect in the end. I’m real impressed with Biblioasis so far, and especially with Mr. Metcalf and Mr. Wells, and I am pretty damn certain this is the right place for my work. For more about how they punch way above their weight class, you should read this excellent profile in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Pretty incredible stuff. Especially for a guy who thinks his writing might do even better on the south side of the 49th parallel.

Anyway, thanks again for all the support, and to everyone who continues to read my work and tell other folks that it does not suck. I appreciate it very much.

Hardcastle

Not too long ago I got word that The New Quarterly is going to publish another story of mine in their summer issue (#131). The story is called Spread Low on the Fields. It involves a middle aged man coming back to his hometown to handle his father’s affairs after the old man is killed. Pretty quickly he gets tangled up in some ugly stuff while trying to make sense of the unusual circumstances that led to the killing.

This is my second story in The New Quarterly in 2014. After giving me a shot with a longer story that needed some real work (Hunted by Coyotes – TNQ #129), Pamela Mulloy turned this new one around quick, and I can’t say enough about how impressed I am with TNQ after going through two very different sets of revisions with them now.

Spread Low on the Fields will be out later in the summer, toward the end of July. That’s what I hear anyway. So keep an eye out.

Last week I also found out I’ll be getting a story done in Joyland. I’ve been sending them my work for a long time, and nothing ever stuck until recently. That story is called Shape of a Sitting Man, and it was a finalist for the The Malahat Review Open Season Award earlier in the year, and whiffed at another prize before going out for regular submissions. That one is about a beef between two rural families, leading to a little bit of mayhem and a manhunt for the main character through some marshland. It’s a quick and dirty one and I’m glad it’ll get to see the light of day.

I’ll know when that story is going to land a little later on, but it will likely be sometime this summer also.

Still working on some other stuff that I can’t really speak to yet. If I get that sorted out soon it’ll be on here as well. Otherwise, you’ll notice that I’ve got a tab for Manuscript Assessments up on the site. After getting clear of my nonsense day job I’m branching out into freelance work, including the assessment service. As of now I have a few spots open, and am actively taking on projects, so if you have a line on any writer looking for some assistance with their manuscript, or if you are actually that writer, go ahead and fire me an email at hardcastleassessments@gmail.com. I’ll happily read any queries sent to that address.

In the meantime, thanks for reading. More to come soon…

Cheers,

Hardcastle

First off, I’d like to thank the folks that came out to the EW Reading Series the other week, and especially Jess Taylor, who runs the whole deal and got me up there. I read the middle part of the story Old Man Marchuk, which appears in the current issue of EVENT. All in all it seemed to go swimmingly. Below is a picture that I stole from the EW facebook page.

 

That same story still has some legs apparently. As I recently had John Metcalf call me up and let me know that he wanted to include Old Man Marchuk in the Best Canadian Stories anthology that he curates for Oberon Press. Metcalf is a renowned writer, critic, and fiction editor (currently at Biblioasis), and he collects these stories by reading every single issue of every literary journal published in Canada in a given year. I am honoured to have that story chosen and will pass more info along when I get some. As far as I know Best Canadian Stories is published at year’s end. Writers who have appeared in BCS include Alice Munro, Leon Rooke, Rohinton Mistry, Timothy Taylor, Lisa Moore, Patrick Lane, Zsuzsi Gartner, Marjorie Celona, Zoey Leigh Peterson, Lynn Coady, and the notorious Amy Jones.

 

Last week I also got word that a new story I wrote, called Debris, has been accepted for publication in Shenandoah, a leading US literary journal out of Washington & Lee University. I have been trying to crack the US journal scene for a long while, with just a few online publications so far. This story was almost picked up a couple of times with some very kind commentary on how it narrowly missed. Nonetheless, the good folks at Shenandoah, and especially their editor Rod Smith, read and accepted this story quickly and I’m told it should be set for October, in their fall issue. Landing this one made me pretty damn happy. Perhaps I’ll be able to find a few more journals south of the 49th that are willing to print some of my newer stuff.

That is the most of it for now. I am working on other secret moves that I can’t talk about, but I’ll say something to that end if or when I can. In the meantime, thanks for reading and for keeping the dream alive.

Hardcastle

This week I’ll be doing a reading for the first time since I got kicked out of my writing MA at Cardiff due to poverty, as part of a hilarious evening for the Emerging Writers Reading Series.  This month’s reading is called Meat Locker March, and also includes Seamus Ogden, Christine Ottoni, and Dave Proctor, who is a special guest and Meat Locker Editions author. This is an anniversary show for the EW Reading Series, and there will likely be much drinking and ballyhoo.

This excellent series is masterminded by Jess Taylor, who does a hell of a lot of work to put this event on every month and give emerging writers a chance to put their stuff out there in front of proper audience. Most of whom are a shit-ton better at reading than I.

So, come by and watch me read a chunk of story where an old man shoots the hell out of a bunch of burglars and then has his hillbilly clan-folk terrorize the local RCMP constable tasked with putting the old man away. That’ll likely be what you hear, unless I flip out and change it up at last minute.

Here is the Facebook link to the event. It’ll be at Duffy’s on the westside of Toronto, near Dufferin and Bloor, starting at 8pm. It is all pay what you can, and you should scrape together some scratch for Ms. Taylor and her assisting people so that this series can keep on happening.

Hope to see a bunch of your ugly mugs there. At the very least it is a prime opportunity to heckle me offstage and/or throw clods of dirt in my direction. Leave the other readers alone though. They deserve your attention and respect, and some free beers.

Thanks. KH.

As of this week you should be able to find all three of my latest stories on the shelves, or, for those who can’t get to bookstores that carry lit journals, you can order them all online, whether in print or as a digital type deal.

The first story to show up is called Hunted by Coyotes, published in The New Quarterly, issue 129. The theme of the issue is ‘The Wild and Unwonted,’ and the story is introduced briefly in the issue’s foreword…

‘In “Hunted by Coyotes,” Kevin Hardcastle’s startling and gritty story of a modern day peddler selling electricity door-to-door, coyotes roam the subdivisions—a frontier of sorts.’

This story is a long piece that got a lot of good attention from Pamela Mulloy, who had the patience to work with me on revisions and help narrow it down to the stuff that counts. You can grab a copy here on TNQ’s site, and can learn more about the other great work in there by clicking the ‘Welcome to this Issue’ link.

 

If you haven’t had your fill of prairie mayhem, you can have a go at this other story in EVENT issue 42/3, called Old Man Marchuk. It involves an RCMP constable stationed out in the middle of nowhere, trying to handle a situation involving a trigger-happy old man and a county that favours frontier justice. For more info on the other contents, or to grab it online, go here to EVENT‘s brand new site. 

 

 

 

 

 

The third story, One we could stand to lose,  appears in the pages of the venerable PRISM international, issue 52.2. This happens to be their theme volume for the year, the ‘Love & Sex Issue.’ I managed to sneak into this one with a story that is probably stretching the boundaries of the theme by not really involving any sex whatsoever and, probably a tenuous claim to the love part as well. But I think I got lucky by being published in this issue rather than a later one, not only because of the other writers involved, but also because of one of best covers going for any journal. PRISM folks run it down as follows…

‘Kevin Hardcastle’s “One We Could Stand to Lose” tells the story of an isolated man’s complicated love for the decrepit flop house where he has worked for years.’

Get this guy here at PRISM‘s online store.   Huge thanks to Jane Campbell for her work on this, and for the insanely quick turnaround from submission to publication.

If anything else turns up I’ll write about it on here, and no doubt will be tweeting nonsense about all manner of things as well. In the meantime, I hope people manage to read some of this stuff and keep on supporting literary journals throughout the country. They keep writers honest and often give them the encouragement they need to continue grinding on. This past year that has been of real significance for me, I can promise you that.

Thanks all for the support and for reading my work. I appreciate it always. Hardcastle.

Happy New Year everyone. I gotta get behind 2014 and hope this year will be a good one. 2013 was a real son of a bitch in a lot of ways and I’m pretty glad to see it go. Nonetheless, despite some of the nonsense that last year brought, I wrote a fair bit and met a lot of good writer folk around town, and that kind of kept me alive and sewed some oats to prevent murder and jail in 2014. So yeah, no regrets. And thanks to all those who put up with my raving over the year…

Just before the holidays I got word that another new story, “Thought you were fast,” has been taken on by The Fiddlehead, one of Canada’s most hallowed literary journals. Not sure when it’ll show up yet, but I should hear more shortly and will get that info out when I have it.

“Thought you were fast” is a story is about a contractor in a small town who has a run of bad luck while trying to put food on the table for his family, and seems to be outmatched by the universe in being able to impress his young son on terms that the boy will understand. In the end he reaches a breaking point when his buddy, in a similar position, decides to pack it in, and eventually the whole story comes to a head by the rampaging of a mad bull and a good, old-fashioned car-fire.

So yeah, standard Hardcastle fare all around.

I’ve been trying to crack The Fiddlehead since 2007, and had a few stories come back with excellent notes and the chance to rework them for possible publication. It didn’t turn out after all, but one of those ended up being my first print publication in subTerrain Magazine (which you can still read online right here). Either way, this story went out for submission way back at the beginning of 2013 and got passed over while some newer stories were snagged by other journals. I liked this one, and I’m very happy that The Fiddlehead took it in the end.

There are some other story developments that might happen with the folks there based on my last run of short fiction, but that’s to be reported on later if and when it all shakes out. Until then, I’m just proud to have got a nod from another of Canada’s great literary journals and will keep at it until I can maybe talk them all into printing something. Then I’ll probably bombard them with more stories again…

Otherwise, there should be a quick and dirty run of Hardcastle fiction out there over the next month or two. I mentioned them before. But here’s what they are and where:

“Hunted by coyotes” – The New Quarterly, Issue 129 (Late Jan 2014)

“Old man Marchuk” – EVENT, Issue 42/3 (Jan 2014)

“One we could stand to lose” – PRISM international, Issue 52.2 (February 2014)

My work aside, there are some very good writers in all of those issues, and it would probably be a real good idea to buy all of them and see what kind of magic goes on in those pages. Without journals like these we’d all be sunk as short story writers, and I know that I’d be banging my head against the wall considerably more than I should be. So, thanks to all of the people who work so hard to get good fiction printed in this country. For my latest set of stories, that means Pamela Mulloy at TNQ, Jane Campbell at PRISM, Ian Cockfield/Christine Dewar at EVENT, and Mark Anthony Jarman at The Fiddlehead. Also thanks to all the readers and other staff that battle those story-piles and put in their time and two-cents over and over to make sure good writing gets noticed.

In the same vein, I gotta thank the two journals that started everything off last year after the Journey Prize ruckus. The mighty Little Fiction, owned and operated by Troy Palmer, published my story “We gotta save the leg” back in June 2013. And The Puritan, run by Tyler Willis and Spencer Gordon (with a great editorial/production staff behind them, including young Hank McCoy, aka Andrew Sullivan), published “Bandits” in July. These were the first stories I actually had published since 2011 (before I got down to finishing the latest book I was writing), and they seem to have broke down some doors for the others that followed. I thank you all for that sincerely. No fucking around, for real. Thanks all.

That’s it for now. I’ll be on here with more news hopefully sooner rather than later. Take care. KH.