à la carte blog

Announcing the judge for the 2016 carte blanche/CNFC contest

Deni Ellis Béchard is a journalist, novelist, memoirist, photographer, and activist. He has published three books, the first of which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was translated into French, Arabic, and Russian. His articles and photos—often about human rights, women’s rights, and the conservation—have appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines, including the LA Times, Salon, The Guardian, La Repubblica, Vanity Fair Italia, The Solutions Journal, The Harvard Review, The Herald Scotland, and Foreign Policy Magazine.

“If the bad side of CanLit were a criminal operation, Omertà would be in full effect” — An Interview with Author Kris Bertin

Kris Bertin is from Halifax. His stories have appeared in The Walrus, The Malahat Review, TNQ, and PRISM International. He has twice won the Jack Hodgin’s Founder’s Award for Fiction and has appeared in The Journey Prize Anthology. His first collection of short stories Bad Things Happen (Biblioasis, 2016) has received very good reviews in the Toronto Star and Quill & Quire – good thing too, because it is it a gritty, funny, and memorably weird book. Brad de Roo avoided a lot of bad things on the internet to interview Kris Bertin for carte blanche this March. Read more →

From the Underground: A Writer’s Life with Zines

I had tapped into a vibrant community of punk writers who crafted great stories and then cut and pasted their work together, photocopied it, and released it with no thought of gaining attention from the world of mainstream literature. These were my first literary heroes. In a time before our current memoir boom, they wrote honest and true stories full of grit and heart. Read more →

carte blanche seeks a new Fiction Editor

carte blanche welcomes applications for the position of Fiction Editor to contribute to our ongoing growth and development. Based in Montreal, our primarily online publication is the official magazine of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. While this position is not salaried, it pays a modest honorarium annually.

Call for Submissions: This Really Happened at Blue Metropolis

Our friends at the long-standing This Really Happened series are looking for storytellers ready to take the stage and reveal some inner truths, April 16th at Montreal’s Blue Metropolis Literary Festival. The following is the official call for submissions.