The Coast

I've always felt a kinship to Claudia Dey, both of us being right-brained alumni of the same lawyer- and engineer-producing high school. The florid style of her plays and her Globe and Mail advice column has a timeless, nearly ethereal quality. Stunt, her first novel, brings to mind the poetry of Gwendolyn Mac-Ewen (the subject of Dey's play The Gwendolyn Poems) or prose of British author Jeanette Winterson, with its mythological allusions and shape-shifting characters.

n 1999, Toronto writer and artist RM Vaughan had a crush on his therapist, often referred to as transference. But when his therapist showed up at the opening night of one of Vaughan's plays, a real sexual relationship began. Troubled is a memoir of an inappropriate union, and its emotional, psychological and legal consequences. But Troubled isn't Dr.

This is not a book of poems about TV as much as it is about the memory of TV, the way time spent in front of the tube bleeds into the time spent away from it. What you get in former Coast TV columnist McGimpsey’s Sitcom is a resonant image of the headspace -- the thought patterns -- created by much TV watching as one way of living in this day and age.