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July 02, 2015
On Getting My First Novel into Print
My first novel, Eulogy, has just been published.What has the experience been like?Well, it only took eleven years, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. Things could have been far worse: I could have never ...
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March 11, 2022Writing What You Don't Know
Write what you know. It’s an adage you are always told as a beginning writer.My first book was definitely written because of what I knew. I had been teaching a studio course on the development of Western ...
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March 01, 2022Happy St. David's Day
Happy St. David’s Day!St. David is the patron saint of Wales, and every March 1st I make Welsh cakes. A Welsh cake is like a pancake –– you cook it on a griddle. It’s also like a scone –– ...
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March 28, 2022What's Beyond: Writing as an Actor, Part 2
One of the important exercises we do in theatre is called “What’s Beyond.” It’s a Viola Spolin exercise to help actors understand the full, inner life of their characters. Viola Spolin is credited ...
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September 12, 2014On Silence in Poems
“To reveal all is to end the story. To conceal all is to fail to begin the story." Robert Kroetsch, The Lovely Treachery of Words.Where is there silence within the poem? Where on the page? Emptiness? ...
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November 03, 2016Writers' Trust Awards Honour Campbell, Thanh & More with $200k in Prizes!
Last night, at an event at CBC's Glenn Gould Studio, the Writers' Trust of Canada gathered authors, publishers, and readers together to present over $200,000 of prize money to the winners and finalists ...
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September 29, 2016Final Post
Hi Open Book Readers,I’ve had such a wonderful time being your Writer in Residence this month.It feels like perfect timing that I’m writing my last Writer in Residence post immediately after doing ...
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September 18, 2014Q&A with Lorie and Robert Wright, Co-Owners of the Tamworth Book Shop
Coordinates: 44.4667° N, 76.9833° W“Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes ...
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July 22, 2015
A Bona Fide Once in a Lifetime: Awaiting the First Review of My First Novel
Coming off a one hour presentation about my novel this evening at The Haliburton School of the Arts, a presentation that I enjoyed immensely (largely because of the engaging and welcoming audience), I ...
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March 17, 2014You Are God
Writing is all on the page. Take most other arts: film, music, painting, and what goes into the making of each – the processes, the materials, the effort, are not obvious, are not laid out bare. There’s ...