Contributor

Sam Martin

Samuel Martin holds a B.A. in English from Redeemer University College and a M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto, and he is a Ph.D. Candidate at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is also the author of the story collection This Ramshackle Tabernacle, which was shortlisted for the BMO Winterset Award, and the novel A Blessed Snarl, hailed by the 49th Shelf as one of “the most anticipated books” of 2012.

Sam’s stories, reviews, and articles have been published in Image, Riddle Fence, Comment, Relief, the Christian Courier, The Telegram, and qwerty. He currently lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland with his wife Samantha and their black lab Vader. However, as of August 2012, Sam will take up the post of Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern College in Iowa.

He blogs at Dark Art Café.

Diving Deep: A Review of Hugh Cook’s novel, “Heron River”

If writing a novel is an effort to bring such beauty into the world—to in any way redeem Creation—then the author of that story must swim deep and bring up fistfuls of human experience as it is: muddy and meaningful.

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More From This Contributor

Sam Martin Mar 1, 2011 Letters to the Young

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Letter to a Young Writer

If the salt loses its saltiness, if you as a writer only scratch the surface of the world instead of digging deeply into life on this earth, your stories won’t stay on the table but be thrown out into used book bins.

Sam Martin Apr 16, 2010

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Sacred and secular justice

There could scarcely be a more timely novel. Linden MacIntyre’s The Bishop’s Man is a troubling portrait of a Catholic priest trying to walk the high wire between justice and compromise, between his calling as a priest and his own humanity, between sacred and secular justice.

Sam Martin Jan 22, 2010

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“God Is”

A testament to the necessity and the ultimate inescapability of faith, even in a profoundly secular world.

Sam Martin Apr 4, 2008

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A .364 batting average and the wrong colour skin

Although a “baseball novel,” Safe at Home is also a story deeply rooted in the racial conflict surrounding the early civil rights movement in the American South. Racism in this novel, much to Doster’s credit, is never dealt with lightly or typically, forcing the reader to confront the insidiousness of racial prejudice.