Author Archives: Anita Morris
Dosa to die for
For lovers of dosa, a delectable crisp crêpe made from fermented rice flour, few things compare to a masala dosa from Saravana Bhavan. The dosa’s flavour and texture, the potato filling, the sambar, the tomato chutney, and the coconut chutney (which separates the wannabes from the real thing). Delish. And pure veg if you care about such […]
Birth day
We congratulate the birthday girl/boy/wo/man but never the woman who gave birth (and we know Labour Day is not about that either). As my child’s birthday approaches, I think of the last days of pregnancy, of friends visiting us in hospital and making us laugh till we cried, of labour, of the hours after our baby took her first breath […]
Shortlisted for the Marina Nemat Creative Writing Award!
So excited! My collection of short stories titled Bee Stings is now with the jury. Click here to read more. Members of the jury are: Martha Sharpe (Simon & Schuster, Canada), Patrick Crean (Harper Collins, Canada), and Mark Medley (National Post, Books Editor). Now to find an agent and a publisher. Sigh.
Daffodils
Spring has arrived desperately late this year. Winter in Toronto has been long and cold and miserable. The daffodils in my garden bloomed only last week. And that got me thinking of having to memorise William Wordsworth’s poetry at St. Joseph’s High School in Poona, India, in the 1970s. I wandered lonely as a cloud […]
Grown men scared of girls
The grown men who kidnapped hundreds of young women students in Nigeria are not stupid. They know a threat when they see it. And the threat of female education is real. Girls and young women go outside their homes to attend school. There, they meet other other young women, are exposed to new ideas, learn new ways […]
Incredible India: Elections 2014
As the three week election season in India comes to a close, Narendra Modi is poised to be the next Prime Minister of India, a country of 1.27 billion people. No wait. 1.016 billion. Because he only wants to be Prime Minister of a Hindu nation. And neither he nor his party consider Indian citizens of […]
Jhumpa and me
The magnificently talented Jhumpa Lahiri was interviewed yesterday at the Isabel Bader Theatre about her most recent book, “The Lowland.” Interviewer Tina Srebotnjak posed questions about identity and the sense of displacement or alienation that are themes in so much of Ms. Lahiri’s work. Ms. Lahiri was born in London, England, into an academic Bengali […]
Off with their heads!
The Indian courts have condemned to death two of the four men who gang raped and killed a 23 year old student in Delhi last December. The third was a juvenile and was tried separately. The fourth committed suicide in prison. As the defence lawyer, A.P. Singh, was leaving the court after sentencing, he said: […]
Giving helpful feedback on writing
The purpose is to help the writer improve her/his story by identifying what works well and what doesn’t. In my writing group, each writer sends a list of queries to the group along with her story. These vary depending on the stage of development of the story, the particular challenges in the story, and the […]
Why structure feedback?
My writing group has struggled with this issue. In the past, there’s been some disagreement about how to structure the feedback process and whether a structure was even necessary. Ultimately, we did develop a structure for providing feedback. However, it has changed over time based on the needs of individual writers. Readers have lots of […]
bits & pieces 