“I live in this two-block radius. The school’s over there. I sit here, I go to the school. I come back here,” Paul Fischer says. “Occasionally we go to Little Brick.” It’s a routine familiar to work-from-home parents: home, school and the coffee shop for a change of pace. Fischer is a writer of primarily nonfiction, though he has other projects in the works, including a collab with his 11-year-old daughter.
He appreciates the fact that his routine can be executed on foot. “I’m a European city boy,” he explains. He was born in Saudi Arabia to a Swiss father and an Egyptian mother, raised in Paris and lived in London for 15 years.
He met his wife, jewelry designer Kelty Pelechytik, while they were in New York. Pelechytik is from Edmonton and the couple moved first to London, then to Canada in the wake of political change in the U.S.
“I love Edmonton. I like a progressive working-class city. I like the entrepreneurial vibes. People are just willing to try things here.” Fischer recently returned from a trip to London for the U.K. launch of his third book, the New York Times bestseller The Last Kings of Hollywood: Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg — and the Battle for the Soul of American Cinema. Given the third-book milestone, it was time for a real desk in his home office, which none of his European flats would’ve had room for. Occasionally, Fischer still finds himself writing from the coffee shop, the acoustic match for a global life that is stubbornly local in practice.
This article appears in the May 2026 issue of Edify
