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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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July 04, 2015
A Roadblock All Writers Set for Themselves Every Now and Then
When I teach classes in creative writing at U of T’s School of Continuing Studies and at Haliburton School of the Arts, I have on occasion faced this predicament: A bright, talented, energetic student ...
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June 11, 2018
Tweet Tweet: A City’s Past & Present: Remapping Vancouver
@poetchelene: After reading and researching about the setting in my novel I felt compelled to recognize the city as a character. #hogansalleyfactorfiction “Junie stood on her balcony overlooking the ...
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October 07, 2022
Best Advice
Good morning folks,Besides reading as much as you write, the best advice I received from other writers was to observe people. To watch them, to note their body language and actions, and if you can, ...
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April 06, 2023Read an Excerpt from Richard Sanger's Final Poetry Collection, Way to Go
Facing a terminal diagnosis, poet, playwright, and translator Richard Sanger had to decide how to use his final days – and how he felt about the end. In time, he decided to do what he'd been doing ...
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June 15, 2017The Entitled Interview, with Eamon McGrath
In his literary debut, Berlin-Warszawa Express (ECW Press), musician and songwriter Eamon McGrath tackles a question that plagues artists in every medium: does art necessitate suffering? He wonders ...
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January 26, 2017On Writing, with Julie Salverson
Julie Salverson has written plays, operas, scholarly texts, and non-fiction, but her newest book, a memoir, may be her most unique work yet. Lines of Flight (Wolsak & Wynn) traces her ten-year journey ...
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August 17, 2018Form as Home
Every time I sit down to write, I find myself exasperated by the considerations. The considerations of who will be reading it, how it’ll be interpreted, if it’ll hurt someone within or outside my ...
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September 19, 2018Talk to Me
My little sunroom office at home (which is also our dining room) faces a fairly busy street, so when the weather’s good and our windows are open, bits and pieces of random conversations drift up to ...
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June 26, 2024Read an Excerpt from Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon
Though many of us live in urban surroundings, and may well be caught up in all of the concrete, glass, and metals that make up our neighbourhoods and streets, the natural world is always there, beneath ...
