I realize that my last four posts have arguably been more directed towards writers rather than to the broader audience of readers. I also realized that it’s been a while since I reported from the road as an itinerant writer. With this in mind, here’s a snapshot of a two week stretch in my happy writerly life earlier in June.
I’ll start with the most recent event my wife Nancy and I attended. If you’ve been with me for a while now, you’ll know how much winning the Leacock Medal in 2008 and 2015 means to me. I’ve said before that winning the Leacock Medal for my debut novel not only changed my life as a writer, but in my mind, it gave me my life as a writer. And I don’t mean because winning the Leacock Medal sells thousands of books. It certainly doesn’t hurt sales, but it tends not to move the sales needle dramatically. I mean winning the Leacock Medal, Canada’s second oldest literary award, gave me my writing life because it persuaded me that I was in fact a bona fide writer and could continue to be if I worked hard at it.
Over the years, I’ve been truly blessed with good fortune around the Leacock Medal. My first five novels were all finalists for the Leacock Medal and two of them miraculously won. Then, this past April, I discovered, much to my happy surprise, that The Marionette had been long-listed for this year’s medal.
My etched-in-stone gratitude for the role the Leacock Medal played in helping establish me as a writer—if only in my mind—has meant that I have not missed a single Leacock Gala Weekend since my first win in 2008. Doing the math, that means I’ve attended eighteen Leacock galas in a row. It would have been nineteen but for 2020 and the Covid lockdown. Looking ahead, and good health permitting, I plan to attend every year.
The three finalist this year are all very talented writers with very funny books.
At the Friday night event, all three finalists read from their books and of course cut the cake that we all enjoyed for dessert that night.
After the Friday dinner, the three finalists along with former winners, short-listers, and long-listers lined up on stage to respond to audience questions. We had several laughs along the way.
At the Saturday night gala, when it was time for the big announcement, Meredith Hambrock was named the winner of the 2026 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour for her fine and funny book, She’s a Lamb.
Rina Barone runs a bookstore in and an enterprise called Stratford Arts and Lectures, which led to me appearing at the beautiful Bruce Hotel in Stratford on June 10 for what Rina dubbed “Spilling the Tea.” It was an onstage conversation with her about my writing life in general and The Marionette in particular. It was a sellout event attended by a very enthusiastic and literary crowd who asked very thoughtful questions in the Q&A after the interview. I signed books afterwards.
It’s always a great honour when a community selects your novel for their annual reading program. I’ve been lucky enough to have my novels chosen about half a dozen times over the years by communities across the country. Two years ago, I spent about ten days touring around British Columbia when the Kamloops region selected my ninth novel, A New Season for their community reading program. Lucky for me, it just happened again.
Earlier this year, I was contacted by the City of St. Catharines and their public library to inform me that my latest novel, The Marionette, had been selected for their city-wide community reading program. The citizens of St. Catharines in the Niagara Region were encouraged to read The Marionette and then come together for a culminating event where I would be interviewed by the Mayor, Mat Siscoe, and readers could then ask questions.
Creemore is a lovely little village north of Toronto with a wonderful bookstore called Curiosity House Books. The bookstore owners, Kate and Joel, invited me to join them for one of their Books and Beer events held at the Creemore Springs Brewery. It was a great evening with a sellout crowd in a unique space. We sold a lot of books that night. I drove back home to Toronto afterwards with a pleasant ache in my signing hand.
The Toronto International Festival of Authors (TIFA) again held their crime and mystery festival, called MOTIVE, in early June. For the second year in a row, I was invited to moderate one of the author panels. The two writers I was to interview were Doug Johnstone, a very funny and accomplished Scottish crime writer whose novels defy the traditional conventions of the genre, and Hannelore Cayre, a French criminal lawyer and film maker who also writes very compelling novels. We discussed Doug’s novel Tombstoning and Hannelore’s The Godmother and then opened the floor for questions. We all had a great conversation and judging from the audience’s reaction, they all enjoyed it, too.
So there you have it. A couple weeks in what has been a very busy month of June. And it doesn’t look as if things are slowing down at all. And that’s just fine with me. It’s when I’m not busy that I start to worry.
Here’s hoping you’ll subscribe—it’s free, fast, and easy—so you don’t miss future posts. Coming very soon is the big cover reveal as well as exciting news about a blurb for my eleventh novel. Many thanks and we’ll be back in two weeks.
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