Columnists

Who I Think About When I Write … It’s Probably You: A List of Questions to Ask Yourself About Audience as You Write

I find it really challenging to write a picture book without imagining its audience. In whose hands will the finished book end up? What will make them pick it up? Will they find my story satisfying? To ...

My Reading Year: What I Learned from Reading 275 Books in 365 Days

The other day I told a friend that I'd read 275 books in 2018 and he responded by laughing and declaring emphatically, "That's a reading year!"I think that's an excellent way to describe my past year. ...

“Psychically, process was a funnel . . .” an Interview with Caroline Szpak

Teasing language until it threatens to go ballistic, Slinky Naive, Caroline Szpak’s debut collection, is sheer sonic joy; a sensual, linguistic hodgepodge worthy of Gertrude Stein and Sylvia Legris ...

On Re-Fusing CanLit--Or Why We Need Integrity, Community, and Roses

In a lot of the trauma memoirs I’ve been reading lately, I see the same metaphor used to describe the process of healing. You’ve likely heard it too. It compares healing from trauma to the Japanese ...

Beyond the Possible: On World Building

Sometimes, I think about what would have happened to Frodo and Sam if, during their journey across the land to Mordor, Frodo had fallen down a jagged slope of rocks and broken his leg.Would Frodo, delirious ...

“I want my poem to embody this poem-like feeling.” - An Interview with Mark Truscott

For years Mark Truscott has digging out his own unique niche in Canadian poetry, one with intense focuses on language, minimalism, and abstract inquiry. Branches, his latest collection, is something of ...

Calling All Aspiring Authors: Never Ask an Illustrator to Illustrate Your Picture Book for Free

A few weeks ago, I was in a local tavern with some friends—a few of them are professional illustrators. They were drinking overpriced mocktails and commiserating about the emails they get from aspiring ...

On Fairy Tales

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…[w]e look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition ...

An Interview with Paul Vermeersch

Self-Defense for the Brave and Happy, the sixth collection by poet, professor, artist and editor. Paul Vermeersch, feels like a flashlight found in a blackout. By his own admission, when writing the poems, ...

Bad Reviews and Broken Hearts: How to Deal with All the Feelings

First: Spend several years working on you—I mean, a manuscript. Revise each draft based on feedback from your therapist—I mean, editor. Get Tinder—I mean, get publishing deal. Agonize over each ...