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May 23, 2025Unlocking Out of Editing
In my April 2025 column for Open Book, I wrote about the difficulties of locking into editing. Coming back to a manuscript you feel you’ve completed is tricky, especially when you’re at the stage ...
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September 18, 2025In Defense of Procrastination
The procrastinating author is a time-honoured trope. For me personally, I’m at my most productive with other tasks (vacuuming, crocheting, washing dishes, doing laundry, clearing up clutter) when I ...
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November 13, 2017David Huebert on Inspiring a Dress Code, Being Haunted by Cows, and his Bachelorette Canada Connection
David Huebert has been going from strength to strength recently, gathering successes in multiple genres including both the CBC Short Story Prize and the Walrus Poetry Prize. Now, just two years after ...
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June 05, 2016Smoky Garden Songs - a playlist for writing
So much of writing is creating the right mood, the right place. Do you need absolute silence? Do you like a bustling coffee shop?Well, I asked Damian Rogers, whose recent book of poetry Dear Leader blew ...
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March 24, 2016Writing Tips (Tips Also Appreciated)
1. It’s now or never or you’ll have to wait for the sublime to hit you, which might take centuries, or seconds, so might as well start now.2. Write for no other place than heart—and not only out ...
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May 24, 2016Bobcaygeon
This is a damned weird country. Culturally and geographically, it has some peculiarities which rest not off to the side but squarely in the middle of our shared national consciousness. There is a rib ...
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July 16, 2016Love and Poetry
Last year, Brick Books marked 40 years as Canada’s most influential poetry publisher by asking dozens of poets, novelists, booksellers, musicians and other folks to write short tributes to a favourite ...
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April 16, 2014
Puzzle
At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my students a Seamus Heaney poem, “A Personal Helicon,” cut up into a puzzle of words, running the gamut from eight “a’s” to one “you” and “your” ...
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April 10, 2014
Perfection
I’ve been running a writing workshop all winter and, once again, marveling at the courage that it takes to tackle the tricks and complexities of the English language. The writers are exposing themselves ...
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April 03, 2014
Voice
Maureen McLane’s book, “My Poets,” goes beyond poetics and criticism into a kind of channeling of the poets themselves: her versions of their work, her obsessions with their obsessions. She not ...
