Mitchell Toews

Always on the edge of this thing, this writing thing. Always writing, taking my shots in public without a safety net—first in marcom, now in fiction.

Learning from doing, heuristically, and from school, from colleagues and other writers, from reading. From rejection and failure. From sober (and otherwise) self-deprecation. Learning from my wonderful editor, too.

I write to fulfill my love of creating, and—I'll be honest—for pride, for selfish reasons, to spit in your eye, and to feed ambition, too. Gotta watch that last one, a real Medusa.

I write to express my feelings with fiction, in a way I can't otherwise. I write for my grandkids, and I hope, for yours. Everyday heroes, the complicated lives of the quotidian, the beauty in life's small kindnesses, and the cruelty that rolls off our fingers like pennies to a beggar.

Working every day. Want to be raw and real. May always be unvarnished. (Hope so.) Untarnished by too much twitter-nonsense; five things every new writer should know, and all that fluffy stuff, even if some of it would help. 

I want to be read. Want to make you laugh, cry, cringe, and roar. Want to contribute; be part of the moral Gemeinde, suffering for that, if need be. I want to fulfill Faulkner's charge to lend my voice to what is compassionate, and honest, and true.

This is no lark.

~

Mitchell Toews writes from his 1950 cabin in the boreal forest in Manitoba. He writes short stories, flash fiction, and is a more than a year-in on a lit fic novel. Mitch works with a freelance editor in London and hopes to begin querying his book sometime in 2019. He's also editing a darling-filled, punch-drunk SFF novella complete with night-scittering kakerlaks and a band of flame-tossing human survivors on the top of Mount Tafelburg. Less dramatically, but with the same degree of difficulty, he's also working on grant applications to keep alive his everyday struggle against poverty and to prevent his beer fridge from turning to stone.