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March 24, 2017How to Feel, What to Eat
I just got a latte at Starbucks. My drink took a long time. While I waited I eavesdropped on a good chunk of a date, between a man and a woman, taking place at a table near the pick-up station. I believe ...
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June 01, 2017How to Find Your Material -- and Mike Babcock
So there I was last Friday, landing in Phoenix with my hockey team, heading for a recreational hockey tournament. Ice hockey, I should specify, since we’re talking Phoenix, temperature 34 degrees C ...
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September 12, 2018How to Finish Your Damn Book - For Beginners!
I often joke that writing a novel is like running a marathon---only no one bothers to tell you what the route is. When the gun goes off, you’re just supposed to head off in whatever direction you think ...
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January 03, 2023How to Get Published in Canada Today: A Conversation with Patricia Westerhof
With three decades of experience teaching creative writing under her belt as well as three acclaimed books, Patricia Westerhof is a very good person to talk to about how to get started (or move forward) ...
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April 05, 2016How to Give Good Read
In a month, I will be hitting the road to tour my new book of poetry, even this page is white. In addition to trying to manage the general anxieties that arise when putting art into the world, I have ...
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July 31, 2025How to Give Useful Writing Feedback
Many writers have friends who are also writers, and sometimes those friends ask us to give feedback on their work. Yay! We get to help our friends succeed! However, there can also be anxiety behind it. ...
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March 14, 2018
How to hold a launch.
There comes a time in a writer’s life when, if you are very lucky, you will be published (frequently but not always a book) and you may feel the need to draw attention to it with some kind of hoohah. ...
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October 07, 2016How to keep a small chapbook press alive for twenty-three years (a primer)
By the time you read this, above/ground press will most likely be two or three items away from an accumulated eight hundred publications. How does that happen? Even I find it strange and remarkable that ...
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July 28, 2020How to Keep Dreaming in the Pandemic (or, How I Finished the Third Draft of my Novel)
Living in a pandemic means that we are facing death every day. Thinking about death pushed me into survival mode. I was stressed and depressed to the point of migraines and insomnia. I stopped doing things ...
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May 26, 2020How to Keep Making Children’s Books Right Now, Or Not
As this new normal becomes, well, more normal, those of us able to self-isolate may start to find a bit of space in-between all of our feelings and obligations to build new writing routines, drawing routines ...