David Demchuk (who works at CBC as a communications officer) has made the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist for his debut novel The Bone Mother, a collection of horror fairy tales from a group of Eastern European mythical creatures who are sharing their stories before possibly being destroyed by war.

We asked Demchuk to take the CBC Books Magic 8 Q&A and answer eight randomly selected questions from eight authors.

I enjoy being read, but I mostly write for myself. I write to try to understand the world and its people — including myself — and to tell the stories that I personally need to hear.

I wish more people knew about Laurie Colwin, who wrote short fiction and novels in the late 1970s and 1980s before she died from an aneurysm at the age of 48. She wrote charming and sophisticated comedies of manners and thoughtful meditations on the complications of love, marriage and family. Her novel Happy All The Time is one of my very favourites, as is her collection The Lone Pilgrim. An unlikely choice, I know, but I am devoted to her.

This is a challenge, as you don't want to eat something that will get all over your keyboard or your paper and pen. Lately it's tea and cookies: oatmeal or social tea or almond crisps, homemade or off the grocery store shelf.

It may be apocryphal but I believe Sam Shepard said it best: "Fighting and f****ing."

Not being able to sing or dance or swim. If I could do any one of those things, I wouldn't write.

I had a relationship for several years with a recovering crack addict who had an unusual fetish. Even though he was a screw-up in other ways, he did at one point save my life. There were many surprising and disturbing aspects to our story, including how it ended — but sadly (or not) it is not my story to tell.

Thomas Tryon's The Other, which is a masterpiece of rural gothic terror that all but ruined me as a child. In fact, if you look closely at my book, you can see one or two moments where I paid it homage.

a) "Whomever you're not."

b) "Depends what you're offering."