John Gould teaches in the Department of Writing at UVic, and has been a member of the Malahat’s fiction board for a decade. He has worked as a treeplanter, a carpenter, and an environmental researcher. He created and coordinated writing programs for the BC Festival of the Arts and the Victoria School of Writing, and teaches workshops in various settings. His fiction has appeared in literary periodicals across the country, and has been adapted for short films; his books include the novel Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good and the collection Kilter: 55 Fictions, a finalist for the Giller Prize. A random sampling of the authors in his office (leaving out his friends, who’re some of his favourites): Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Bernhard, Rivka Galchen, Martin Amis, Soren Kierkegaard, Ian McEwan, Alice Munro, Donald Barthelme, Yasunari Kawabata, Heather O’Neill, Don Delillo, David Foster Wallace, Simone Weil, Basho, Dogen, Rilke, Chekhov, Proust, Kafka, Borges. Currently on the go, Lorrie Moore's novel A Gate at the Stairs.