Search
-
October 05, 2021Poetry Should "Be Surprised By What it Says": David O'Meara on Why Poems Shouldn't Try to Be Poems
Canadian writers know Ottawa-based poet David O'Meara not only for his acclaimed collections but also his contributions to the community. From serving as the founding Artistic Director for VERSeFest ...
-
November 15, 2018"A Title Has to Win A Reader Over... Twice" Matthew Tierney on His Eye-Catching New Title & How Titles Function
Midday at the Super-Kamiokande (Coach House), the newest collection by Matthew Tierney is named after a neutrino observatory in Japan, which gives readers a good bit of context for where the Trillium-winning ...
-
March 29, 2021
Writing/Not Writing
Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...
-
June 30, 2016The Many Colours of Kamal Al-Solaylee
Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote an amazing book called Brown. It's essential reading and its subtitle, What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), says why you need to read it much more concisely ...
-
October 20, 2021Harold R. Johnson on Blending Swedish and Cree Influences in His Innovative New Fantasy Adventure
Armed aliens searching for heaven; mysterious storytellers; otherworldly medicine women and sacred trees; and, of course, dragons. It sounds like a list that could never be contained in a single book, ...
-
September 24, 2019
A Writer's Best Friend
I think I could be accurately described as an outgoing introvert. I can make small talk, and I even enjoy it, but I find it exhausting. Most of the time I’m happier just hanging out by myself or with ...
-
April 22, 2020All of this listening
It was hard to write this column. Like everyone else, I’m all for trying to grasp at normalcy where I can, but I don’t have many writing tips to share right now. (Actually, I do have one writing tip: ...
-
August 02, 2016THE Incredible Shrinking Writer
It’s almost six years now since, after nearly half a century in Toronto, I moved to Cobourg, pop. 18,500. My adopted home — "Ontario’s Feel Good Town" — is just a ninety-minute commute east by ...
-
May 11, 2020Goals from another time.
I found this piece of paper recently. I’d made it many years back and stuck it to my wall when I was trying to get organized with my linked short story collection, Coconut Dreams.Some observations:I’d ...
-
December 02, 2017The Colour Purple
I am very, very short-sighted. Way off the normal sight spectrum. Like a career politician. The spawn of two myopic parents, I am a mole, midget-sighted. My natural focal point is my own nose. No, I have ...