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October 17, 2020Fertile ground
Sometimes story ideas seem to come from out of the blue.“I don't know myself where the ideas really come from, what makes them come, or whether one day they'll stop. I used to tell people the not very ...
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December 06, 2017The Striped Scrapper
When I was fifteen, Dad moved my sibs and I from the chilly West Coast to the hurricane belt—Grand Cayman Island. We spent six months living by the Caribbean Sea where Dad, bewigged and robed, practiced ...
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June 01, 2021Podcasting about Indigenous books
The world of podcasting is already saturated. Even book podcasts are abundant, with various shows focusing on everything from reviews to an author’s body of work to genre. Although it seems a new podcast ...
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December 16, 2017What's So Big About Green?
Earle Birney asks, “What’s So Big About Green?” in his poem of that name. Green is huge. Green is the colour of money--which is why one of our major chartered banks has Green Machines, ATMs that ...
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December 18, 2017The Swarm
My father would fill up our triple-seater truck with six bench seats worth of brats—his own and the neighbour’s--on any given Saturday. One Saturday, he told us that we were heading up Nanaimo Lakes ...
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December 22, 2017The Art of Xmas
Christmas is stage and spectacle—lighting, costumes, song, set and dance. It features hammy acting (Oh I just love this pair of candy cane stockings! Or, ooh, this freebie library card—I’ve always ...
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December 02, 2017The Colour Purple
I am very, very short-sighted. Way off the normal sight spectrum. Like a career politician. The spawn of two myopic parents, I am a mole, midget-sighted. My natural focal point is my own nose. No, I have ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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April 14, 2014
Ideas
I keep a list of things I think I want to write about. Back when the list was a more manageable size, I’d tackle my ideas at enough of a distance for me to have processed the simple stuff, the details, ...
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April 11, 2014
Revision
It’s a risky thing to put a poem out of sight in order to let it germinate or steep, whatever the science of hope might call the process. Some poems only turn up posthumously and are declared masterpieces ...
