Search
-
March 25, 2019
How to Secure a Literary Agent
With spring just around the corner (we hope), there’s a renewed sense of optimism in the air. Writers are slowly emerging from the depths of their hobbit holes, and some have manuscripts ready to be ...
-
April 21, 2022
How to Start a Writers’ Group
I spent years working on a novel about a lifeguard who was terrified of drowning. Years, of sitting in the same corner of the same coffee shop bashing out draft after unreadable draft. And the only feedback ...
-
October 30, 2015
How to Start an Author Blog
A lot’s been made about “author platforms” over the past few years. Marketers love jargon and “platform” is just another word for presence.“The line between writer and creative entrepreneur ...
-
November 08, 2022
How to tame your nerves at a live/online reading
The other week, I stood on the edge of a stage down at Harbourfront, waiting for my cue. I wasn’t nervous about reading. After a year of online events, I was excited to read to a live audience, but ...
-
March 19, 2019
How Twitter Transformed My Writing Life
“Ugh, I’m on Twitter and I hate it,” I remember telling a friend and fellow writer at her birthday party last year.The room was full of writers and the conversation had somehow shifted to talk about ...
-
September 18, 2020
How writing rituals saved me from quitting as a writer
I define my writing ritual as a series of unique actions taken that tells my brain it’s writing and creation time. This is part preparation, part boundary-setting, part protective aura. I know that ...
-
August 30, 2017
Humour and Children’s Books
I don’t think I was raised in a particularly funny family. My dad was often described as being extremely intelligent, but I don’t think I ever heard someone call him funny.Growing up, I recognized ...
-
September 20, 2019
Humour and Coping
We’re living in a discombobulating era to put it mildly. Recently my son sent me a text that read, we didn’t eat the rich soon enough. My children regularly make flip comments about the end of the ...
-
September 23, 2021
Hydra/Hyphae and Vampirism
“Simplicity is a mode of being in the world available to those enmeshed in white structures of feeling. Simplicity is an affect that motors the cultural imaginary of whiteness, an interpretive strategy." ...
-
November 29, 2021
I am a celebrationist
I am a celebrationist.I celebrate big things and small things, all the things, really—kids getting their final molars, the anniversary of my fella and I meeting, the first day of summer (and fall and ...