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August 13, 2018Defending your writing
Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I read everything in my library from A – Z. I was the secretary of the Library Club and loved my after-school gig of sorting the books according ...
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July 25, 2018How to Make $3000 a Month Writing Children’s Books: A Case for Day Jobs
When I was a teen, I thought that every children’s author got to sit at home alone and undisturbed, joyfully tapping away at a computer all day and night. Before I went off to university, I learned ...
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July 16, 2018
Make It New (Again)!
I was shocked a few years ago when, in a workshop I attended, a thirty-something writer who had already published a book (and has since gone on to publish two much more successful ones) dismissed the ...
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July 16, 2018Why It’s Okay If You Haven’t Finished Your First Book Yet
I thought I would finish my first novel by the time I turned 25.I laugh at the absurdity of that now. But in my early 20s, I believed it when people told me that anything was possible with hard work and ...
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July 10, 2018
Did You Really Go Through All That?
I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...
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July 05, 2018Scarborough: A Setting
When I was growing up in Scarborough, I loved it and hated it. I don’t think it’s an uncommon feeling towards places where we grew up. But there are things about coming of age in a suburb as a racialized ...
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June 16, 2018
Tweet Tweet: writing and publishing as acts of resistance: a continuation in three acts
@erica_mojo: “@poetchelene I really appreciated your participation in the closing panel of #BookSummit18. Commanding, empathetic, supportive. Glad I got to hear you speak.” @poetchelene: “Thank ...
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June 03, 2018Tweet Tweet: Form and Structure: Ripping Stitches
@lethal_heroine: “Love the way this book by @PoetChelene is structured. Each chapter is an apartment or hotel room she & her mother lived in. I felt those mattresses, looked out those crummy windows, ...
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May 23, 2018Talking Short Fiction with the 2018 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award Finalists
There is short list of literary awards in Canada that serve as reliable prognosticators of future CanLit heavy hitters. One of them is the $10,000 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award, awarded to fiction and poetry ...
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May 21, 2018
In Praise of … Performing Your Work
A passion for public speaking, for public performance, has been with me even longer than the passion for writing. I trace it back to when I won a public speaking competition as an elementary school student ...
