Interview with Brian Henry of Quick Brown Fox on Beyond Words

Brian Henry of Quick Brown Fox interviewed by Jeanne Bannon of Beyond words:

I’ve been a follower of your blog, Quick Brown Fox, for quite some time and I am a huge fan. I was wondering where you find all the interesting and varied information? Do you have to look for it, or do people approach you?

Both. People who have been in my classes or workshops are always emailing me to let me know they’ve gotten something published. I post those emails, and I also check if I’ve done a post about the journal or book publisher they’ve gotten published with.

So, suppose someone’s gotten published in CommuterLit or Jersey Devil, Ronsdale Press or ECW. Then I figure that’s a good place for other writers to send their work, so I make sure they can look up the submission info on Quick Brown Fox....

Also, I continually get emails from agents, literary journals, organizations sponsoring writing contests, book publishers, authors with a new book, etc. The bottom line is that Quick Brown Fox is Canada’s most popular blog for writers. So when someone wants to get info out to writers, they send it to me...

I’ve heard you were a mentor to best-selling Canadian author Kelley Armstrong, could you tell readers a little about this?

Sure. Kelley lives in Aylmer, down in Southwest Ontario, and she used to be a regular at my workshops in London. She asked me to look at a manuscript she’d been working on for five years and to tell her whether I thought there was any hope and maybe make some suggestions about how she might improve it.

Well, it was pretty rough in the way a manuscript always is when it’s a first effort and it’s been written and rewritten a dozen times. But – and this is the important thing – when I read it, I got goose bumps. The writing was brilliant.

Kelley reworked it a bit and then I phoned the agent Helen Heller to convince her to take a look at it. That was tough because Helen hates anything like a horror novel and this was a werewolf book. So I softened Helen up by explaining the manuscript was hip and contemporary, with sentences that skipped off the page. Then I just whined until Helen broke down and said she’d read the damned thing...

Read the whole interview at Beyond Words here.

See Brian Henry's schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing courses in Kingston, Peterborough, Toronto, Mississauga, Brampton, Georgetown, Oakville, Burlington, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Kitchener, Guelph, London, Woodstock, Orangeville, Barrie, Gravenhurst, Sudbury, Muskoka, Peel, Halton, the GTA, Ontario and beyond.