Writer's ProcessTag

Poetry School: Getting specific with Amiri Baraka

Writing is reading, teaching is learning. As I said in my invitation for readers to join me this month-long online Poetry School, I expected to benefit the most from these researches into the craft and ...

Poetry School: Feminist re-vision with Ms. Rich

Feminist revisionist mythologies represent a vibrant stream in mid-to-late 20th- and 21st-century poetry. I’m thinking of Muriel Rukeyser’s Orpheus; Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and Feminine ...

Poetry School: Rilke’s advice against advice

My aversion to the poetry workshop grew quickly many years ago. Let me correct that: my aversion to the untutored, undisciplined poetry workshop.Although I’ve been writing poems off and on since I was ...

You’re Going the Right Way. It’s Just a Really, Really Long Way.

I’m often asked by aspiring writers, “How did you become an author?” or “How did you get into the publishing world?”I used to think this was a really tough question. Because of course there’s ...

The Part of It You Don't See

If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...

Domenica Martinello on Poetry Exercises

The next writer featured in my series on poetry exercises is Domenica Martinello. She's a writer from Montréal, Québec, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Interzones (2015). She is also an interviews ...

Kathryn Mockler on Poetry Exercises

Today in my series on poetry prompts and exercises, I'm featuring writer Kathryn Mockler. She teaches creative writing, poetry, and screenwriting at Western University, and runs private workshops through ...

Introducing Zalman Nehemiah Razovsky … Maybe.

I’ve been wrestling with it for years, and I pondered it a bit in my essay “How Jew You Do?” in Further Confessions of a Small Press Racketeer (Anvil Press, 2015). Should I change my name — Ross ...

THE Incredible Shrinking Writer

It’s almost six years now since, after nearly half a century in Toronto, I moved to Cobourg, pop. 18,500. My adopted home — "Ontario’s Feel Good Town" — is just a ninety-minute commute east by ...

Service Industry Hell (Part 6): Service Industry Heaven!

A lot of the inspiration for my new book, Congratulations On Everything, came from the things I saw while working in bars, restaurants, and hotels, and from the experiences of friends who did the same. ...