Miriam Toews

“Her faith in a loving and forgiving God is strong, but she worships laughter.”

“I find it curious that she hasn't been excommunicated. Are her small acts of rebellion a convenient outlet for Peters, a type of performance that satisfies the colonists' need to assert them...”

“Perhaps all of us are crazy, Ona says. Of course we're all crazy, says Mejal. How can we not be?”

“A person might see that I've blurbed a certain book and decide they want nothing to do with it! Like, 'If that reprobate Toews likes it, forget it!' So, it's a crapshoot. But it feels good t...”

“The whole notion of pain, and how every individual experiences pain, is up for debate. We don't know how another person experiences pain - physical pain or psychic pain. Some of these clinic...”

“'Cue for Treason,' by Geoffrey Trease, radicalized my young girl brain and made me want to be a gender-bending, sonnet-writing anarchist. It really made something roar to life inside of me.”

“The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I kno...”

“Canada has, at times, represented itself as a country in a valiant struggle against powerful and menacing agents that are indifferent to its special practices and sensibilities - most especi...”

“Writing helps me to create order out of chaos and make sense of things. It helps me to understand what I've experienced, what I've felt and seen, so it becomes a little easier to handle. On...”

“When everything does seem out of control, writing fiction is a way I can order that chaos and restore some sort of meaning. I like the playful aspect of writing fiction. You know how it is w...”