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November 21, 2017Geoff Berner on Unforgettable Characters: "My Favourite Characters are the Fabulists"
DD has disappeared. The mysterious, charming, mercurial (and fictional) musician is gone and no one knows where, leaving novelist Geoff Berner to search for her and put together everything he can through ...
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June 27, 2018
Mentors & Allies 5: David Chariandy
When I think about writers whose words have influenced me, those powerful words are usually nothing more than a short line, phrase or fragment that embeds itself in my mind. Writers who have lodged their ...
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March 18, 2021The Chaos of Creation and Why I Chase the Rupture Point
When I write, it feels like I am on the inside of a spinning wheel that never stops. The wheel lets itself loose from the chassis and throws itself, willingly, down the hillside. The after effects of ...
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May 27, 2022Nonfiction "Explores Things Much Larger than the Individual Self" Michael Trussler on His Memoir of a Neuro-Atypical Life
From modern parenting to living with anxiety and more, photographer and award winning author Michael Trussler's memoir-in-essays The Sunday Book (Palimpsest Press) is a relatable, poignant, and moving ...
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March 02, 2020Acknowledging Fear in Writing
“Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” – Toni Morrison Fear.Fear of the first draft, fear of spiders, fear of ...
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December 05, 2019The Unselfish Act of Being Alone
I want to talk about the power and necessity of being alone.It’s 4:30 am and I should be asleep, but jet lag is real. And I can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t be thinking about exhaustion ...
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June 16, 2019Always A Blank Page Waiting
I remember the first time I heard a writer admit that she hated writing. It was 2011, on a panel during the Summer Writing School facilitated by the Creative Writing program at UofT’s School of Continuing ...
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August 27, 2019Heads or Tails: On Writing Myself Into the Narrative
Last spring I competed for—and won—an executive position in the arts. When I found out, I was thrilled because, let’s be honest, the industry is predominantly cis, white, and male, and I was all ...
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October 23, 2019The Surgical Evolution of a Poem
Last spring one of my students confessed that she wasn’t sure what she was writing was real poetry because she didn’t know a lot about technique and form, and she was concerned that her poetic toolbox ...
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August 04, 2020My Attraction to Gritty Stories
Not all stories are romantic or are tied up neatly at the end. Sometimes characters do not have a redeeming quality, and sometimes their experiences have made them hard and difficult to “save.” Gritty ...
