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November 22, 2011The Proust Questionnaire, with Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee, also known as the Yarn Harlot, is the author of All Wound Up (Simon & Schuster Canada). Her hugely popular knitting blog receives more than 40,000 visitors per month.In her ...
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September 14, 2023The Pull of Two Needles
My first version of this essay was about how my two obsessions, knitting and writing, don’t compete with each other. I wrote at length about how they spin together in my brain in complicated steps, ...
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March 14, 2014
The Reading Rulebook
I used to go to a lot of public readings of poetry and fiction. Then I had kids, and rarely went, but recently, due to changing circumstances, I've been out to a few more, and what hasn't changed are ...
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May 22, 2022
The Reasons I Write
I can think of many reasons why I should not write. The pay is terrible. The hours, though flexible, are insufferably long (i.e., even when I stop doing writing, I am thinking about writing). It can be ...
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December 14, 2021The Renaissance of Fanfiction
For those who have grown invested in any fanbase whether it be movies, musicians, anime, cartoons and, of course, books, it’s more than likely you’ve come across fanfiction at some point in your life. ...
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June 25, 2023The Rule of Three
I read somewhere once that a writer will always write three versions of their book: one for themselves, one for the professional reader, and one for the public reader. Knowing this has changed my life ...
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February 22, 2017The Same Aspirations Persist: An Interview with Cameron Anstee, editor of Apt. 9 Press
In 2016, three of the five chapbooks nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award came from the same press, Ottawa’s Apt. 9 Press. One of those Apt. 9 Press nominees, Nelson Ball’s Small Waterways, ultimately ...
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May 26, 2022
The Soul of Story: Authenticity
My first car was a 1980 Toyota Tercel hatchback, payment for which I had earned working 60 hours a week at two jobs all summer. It was a gutless four-speed manual with a top speed of eighty km/hour. But ...
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May 15, 2022
The Stories I Shelve, Part I
With the advent of the Kindle, the refrain among publishing analysts was that the book’s days were numbered; the e-book would change accessibility for stories as the printing press had all those centuries ...
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May 19, 2022
The Stories I Shelve, Part II
In Part I of this blog post, I looked at the importance of physical books in my life, how the books represent more than just the stories within them, that they also hold the stories of their acquisition, ...
