Wordfest Host Jeet Heer in the News

In a recent Globe Books feature article (Saturday, January 10, 2015), Michael Hingston reviews Sweet Lechery by Jeet Heer who hosted a number of Wordfest 2014 events last October.

Heer is well known for his journalism and reviews of comics and Canadian literature, which Hingston describes as always "playful, erudite and thorough."

He is also prolific on Twitter where his commentary often takes the form of "Twitter essays," described as "multipart riffs on culture, politics and the many unlikely connections between the two."

In the two and half years Heer has been using Twitter, he’s built up an international audience of more than 15,000 by bending the medium to his purposes, and in the process established himself as one of the country’s foremost – or at least most visible – public intellectuals.

The format is straightforward. Each segment of a Twitter essay is numbered sequentially and is no longer than 140 characters, the maximum allowed length of a Tweet.

However, Jeet Heer maintains that he didn't invent the Twitter essay genre. He only popularized it. To discover more, start following him on Twitter at @HeerJeet or read this op-ed piece where Heer explains his approach to writing essays on social media.