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September 21, 2023I’ve been invited to present at a literary festival, now what?
From the Brigadoon-esque setting of The Eden Mills Writer Festival to the hustle and bustle of TIFA Kids, it’s literary festival season. Everyone loves an invite to a party, but make sure you have all ...
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April 07, 2020Poets in Profile: Irfan Ali on Vulnerability, Strong Endings, and His New Collection
12th century Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi created an iconic, seemingly indestructible work when he birthed the tale of Layla and Manjun. Over the years, the re-telling of the classic story has become ...
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February 22, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 7 of 9
Love like anything that matters in this life is a risky business. To fall in love, one must take a big leap of faith. I wanted my characters who were dissatisfied with their isolation to jump both feet ...
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March 02, 2017The WAR Series: Writers as Readers, with Anne Fleming
The Kid thinks it might be a tiny white cloud. The rumours say it's a goat. All we know for sure is there is something up there on the roof of the NYC apartment building where the Kid has just moved with ...
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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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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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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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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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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 ...
