Search
-
February 05, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 2 of 9
As an artist of colour, I am acutely aware of how underrepresented our work is in all areas of media. Many times, our work is not funded, ignored, or not reviewed but we forge ahead all the same. I once ...
-
August 04, 2020Retreating from writing
Sometimes our stories practically beg to come to life on the page. Yet despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, stories almost never just 'come to life' as easily as we might have imagined. ...
-
April 23, 2020"I Know Exactly What Made Me a Poet: Impatience" Grant Loveys on Being a Writing Addict, Killer Endings, and the Thunder of Yates
As its title suggests, the things, people, and situations in Newfoundland poet Grant Lovey's newest collection, Miscreations (ECW), are far from perfect. But that's precisely what makes them so fascinating.An ...
-
January 11, 2018"Writing is Like Learning Where to Look for Lost Things": Talking with Debut Author Marc Labriola
In Marc Labriola's Dying Behaviour of Cats (Quattro Books), Theo hasn't set foot outside in seven years. On the night of a violent hurricane, he swears he sees a leopard climb onto his roof. It turns ...
-
November 30, 20237 Ways to Develop Secondary Characters
Many authors do a good job at developing their protagonist or POV characters. After all, readers will be in these characters’ heads throughout an entire book. But as many readers can attest to, sometimes ...
-
July 31, 2017An Interview with David O’Meara, organizer of the Plan 99 Reading Series
In the Manx Pub, a basement bar on Ottawa’s Elgin St., there’s a slim shelf of books – lots of poetry, but also some prose. The books are often browsed, often borrowed, and often returned. They’re ...
-
September 17, 2024Jacob Wren Stumbles Into a Strange Utopia Amidst a Raging War Zone in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
It's a difficult task to distill the political struggles of our time into fiction, and authors run the risk of either alienating readers by doing so, or by creating a story that is simply too close to ...
-
July 31, 2019Why you should re-read books
I am a big reader, but I am an even bigger re-reader. Yes, I have a mountainous stack of to be read books, but I believe that it’s important to my writing practice—and to my basic existence—to dive ...
-
November 03, 2016The Art of Giving Feedback
In 2009, after I had finished an early draft of my first book, God Loves Hair, I gave some of my closest friends a copy of the manuscript for their feedback. It was a vulnerable experience, especially ...
-
May 24, 2022"You Will Start Writing Again When You're Ready" Dan K. Woo Shares His Inspiring Writing Journey
If Amazon has changed modern life in the West, Taobao, China's massive online marketplace (which is owned by e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group), may have changed the Chinese experience even more. So ...