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Bill Stenson . . . means well



Biography

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Bill Stenson is a fiction writer born in Nelson, BC.  He didn't live there long.  There are a lot of hills, which may explain why he didn't learn to walk until he was 18 months.

Like most Canadian writers he works to give himself time to write.  He's done some weird jobs including night watchman in an abandoned sawmill, fiberglasser of fish boats and getting up at 2:00 in the morning to drive to the ferry to pick up the Province newspaper to deliver up and down Vancouver Island.  He hates early mornings.

Most of his life he taught.  He taught in two one-room schools (including one he once attended), all the grades in public school, University of Victoria and the Victoria School of Writing.  He also taught his dog how to look mildly interested while listening to the stories his master wrote.

He has had stories published in many of Canada's fine line of literary magazines and has a short story collection titled Translating Women and a novel titled Svoboda, both with Thistledown Press.  A novel titled Hanne and Her Brother will come out with Thistledown in 2016.

Fiction is his main interest, but he reads a fair amount of poetry and he loves memoirs.  He was head cook and bottle washer at CanadianMemoirs.com for years where he was privileged to interview many  of North America's finest memoirists.   He has a book in electronic form called Memoir Writing for Smart People available for download.

Bill co-founded The Claremont Review, an international literary magazine that publishes young-adult writers aged 13 to 19.  He worked for the magazine as an editor for more than twenty years and is proud that this magazine is still alive and well to this day.



Bill lives in Victoria, B.C. with his wife (his guiding light and coolest person he knows) poet Susan Stenson

He's always writing something.  Then he crosses the word something out and gets down to business.

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 Ordinary Strangers won the 2018 Hunt For The Great B.C. Novel Contest with Mother Tongue Publishing.

"You know a movie or a book has got you hooked when you start feeling relieved when bad things don't happen to the characters, when it's looking like they will.  A sophisticated novel about unsophisticated people."  --  Alan Twigg


​"Never since Jack Hodgins made mirth and myth out of lumberjacks has Settler Coast culture been so accurately rendered"  --  Linda Rogers