Watershed Writers w/ Tanis MacDonald

Join host Tanis MacDonald this week on Watershed Writers when she talks to Nasser Hussain — Wilfrid Laurier University's 2024 Edna Staebler Writer in Residence — about the PLAYFUL SERIOUSNESS which informs his recent work.

Tanis MacDonald is joined by the celebrated and prolific Kitchener poet Chris Banks to discuss the speed of life in the 21st Century, writing metaphors for anxiety, and using humour to cast light on the heaviest subjects.

Host Tanis MacDonald brings us Anuja Varghese, winner of this year’s Governor General’s Award for Fiction to discuss her genre-bending use of gothic elements in the familiar settings of her horror-adjacent dark fiction in her collection of short stories, Chrysalis (2023).

Tanis MacDonald spends an hour talking with author and mentor Carrie Snyder on her career writing through real-life FRICTION — and how her writing is informed by her busy life in the Grand River community.

Tanis MacDonald sits down with Alison Fishburn to talk about purity culture, writing about class and finding fellowship as an author, and her award-winning performance in her one-woman play… Church Boyfriends and Other Impure Thoughts.

Tanis MacDonald hosts Sarah Tolmie to laugh about medieval literature, learn about Sarah’s astonishing novella-writing process, and to discover the meaning of… WEIRD FICTION!

Carol Duncan talks to us about writing short stories inflected with Caribbean history and culture, and about her research roots when writing the historical fantastic. Her collection of short stories, This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto is available through Wilfrid Laurier University Press and fine booksellers everywhere.

We kick off our fourth season with the ‘To and Fro’ episode. We’ll take a look back at writers we’ve interviewed, a sneak peek at who we’ll be talking to this fall, and discover what local authors are writing — and reading!

Tanis speaks with novelist Jessica Vitalis about her work for middle-grade readers treating big issues like life, death, empathy, and social justice in The Rabbit’s Gift and her forthcoming Coyote Queen.

This week on Watershed Writers, we talk with writer and epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews about the fun and frustrations of raising backyard birds, and his new book, A Conspiracy of Chickens.