Mary Norris on Blackwings

Longtime New Yorker proofreader Mary Norris is a pencil enthusiast. She especially loves the elite Blackwing (“Half the Pressure, Twice the Speed”). In a New Yorker essay, she wrote: “Every pencil is a sandwich. All these years, I have been wondering how the lead got inside the pencil. It turns out that pencils are made […]

The Street Art of Wrdsmth

Wrdsmth is an Los Angeles-based graffiti artist who starts with a stylized typewriter image and adds to it some text, sometimes amusing, sometimes thoughtful, sometimes Hallmark-worthy. He’s from Cleveland, worked as an advertising copywriter in Chicago, and moved to LA to pursue other writing ambitions. He has now written screenplays and had a novel published. […]

The Talking Typewriter

Published in 1940, The Talking Typewriter is a totally charming story about how Johnny “Hunt-and-Pecker” Hopkins wants to write a novel. So he learns how to type from his imaginary friend, Mr. Asterisk. Written by Margaret Pratt with wonderful illustrations by Tibor Gergely.

Who Wrote the Best Ghostwritten Book?

These days, I make my living as a teacher and a ghostwriter of books. Ghostwriting is a mysterious occupation. Since discretion is one of its chief virtues, I can rarely name my clients. And one of the most important roles of a ghostwriter is to express the words of another person as they would have […]

The Debate Over In Cold Blood

For the U.S. journal, Critical Insights, I wrote an essay that looks at why Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, his 1966 “nonfiction novel” about a crime, remains a revered example of creative nonfiction, even though Capote was rather too creative with his nonfiction in many parts of the book. The essay is here: http://davidhayes.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Truman-Capote-and-the-Legacy-of-In-Cold-Blood.pdf.

How Not to do Research…

MFA in Creative Nonfiction Meet-&-Greet

University of King’s College MFA in CREATIVE NONFICTION Meet & Greet  Western Canada: Tuesday, November 3, 6:30 pm Pacific  Central Canada: Wednesday, November 4, 7:30 pm Eastern Atlantic Canada: Thursday, November 5, 7:30 Atlantic If you have an idea for a nonfiction book, we can help you get it onto the page—and you can do […]

Working with Robert A. Caro

What I learned from historian and journalist Robert A. Caro’s 2019 book, Working. On research: “Of course there was more. If you ask the right questions, there always is. That’s the problem.” “It’s the research that takes the time — the research and whatever it is in myself that makes the research take so long, […]

Epistolary Nonfiction

I was thinking the other day about epistolary novels, based on documents, traditionally letters but sometimes diary entries or other correspondence (could be emails, tweets, texts, blog posts, etc). Over the years, I’ve read some I really liked — Samantha Harvey’s Dear Thief (a kind of “cover novel” of Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat); A. […]

The Book That Changed My Life

As a teenager and into my early 20s, I loved writing and music. Influenced by the rock revolution led by The Beatles and Stones, I played bass in a band. Influenced by Rolling Stone magazine, Creem, and The Village Voice‘s pop music coverage, I planned to attend journalism school. Instead, in 1975, I became an […]