I always start a novel with this terrible feeling that there's no way I can do it, because the initial ideas are too audacious. Experience has taught me that once I actually do get going, most of those problems that seemed so gargantuan are not actually problems at all--the book is already in you and you have to play tricks on yourself to get it out of you. |
A BIT ABOUT STEVE
Steve Noyes was born in Toronto and raised in Winnipeg, where he attended Dakota Collegiate. The only boy in typing class, he was already a writer, and put an ad in the local paper offering his services as poet-for-hire. After playing basketball for Brandon University, he went on to finish his journalism degree at Carlton, then took an MFA in Creative Writing at UBC, during which time he was Editor-In-Chief of Prism international.
Since grad school, Steve has published many books, poems, stories, and reviews, and his writing has appeared in top Canadian periodicals and newspapers as The Malahat Review, Queen's Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, The Vancouver Sun, and The Globe and Mail. He has also worked on road crews and in factories; as a sawmill labourer and a printing press grunt; as a disabilities advocate, sessional lecturer in creative writing, and editor.
In his late twenties, while traveling across Europe, Steve spent a winter studying Islam with an imam in a Turkish mosque. He later lived for extended periods in China, and has held foreign expert posts at Tsinghua and Qingdao universities; he also studied Mandarin at Fudan University in Shanghai, earning an International Mandarin Proficiency Certificate. For over ten years he was a senior policy analyst at the Ministry of Health in Victoria, BC.
These days Steve and his wife, citizens of Canada and the UK, are enjoying living near Canterbury, where he's pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Kent. A new novel is in the works.
Since grad school, Steve has published many books, poems, stories, and reviews, and his writing has appeared in top Canadian periodicals and newspapers as The Malahat Review, Queen's Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, The Vancouver Sun, and The Globe and Mail. He has also worked on road crews and in factories; as a sawmill labourer and a printing press grunt; as a disabilities advocate, sessional lecturer in creative writing, and editor.
In his late twenties, while traveling across Europe, Steve spent a winter studying Islam with an imam in a Turkish mosque. He later lived for extended periods in China, and has held foreign expert posts at Tsinghua and Qingdao universities; he also studied Mandarin at Fudan University in Shanghai, earning an International Mandarin Proficiency Certificate. For over ten years he was a senior policy analyst at the Ministry of Health in Victoria, BC.
These days Steve and his wife, citizens of Canada and the UK, are enjoying living near Canterbury, where he's pursuing a PhD in Writing at the University of Kent. A new novel is in the works.