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October 30, 2015
Literary Readings: Do You Have to Do Them?
Picking up from where I left off about book launches, today I’m talking about whether writers really need to read from their work to promote it.Books are sometimes (often?) tricky things to sell. There ...
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February 17, 2016
Why Writers Should Be Reading Works in Translation or Part 1 of The Extravagant JT Reading Plan Never to Be Started or Completed
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about reading because I’ve rekindled that love. I go through phases with reading, as I guess most of do, usually dependent on how engrossed I am in my own projects. ...
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August 31, 2022"They are Warriors, They Bear Witness" September Writer in Residence Martha Bátiz on the Women Who Fill Her New Story Collection
The stories in Martha Bátiz's No Stars in the Sky (House of Anansi Press) are painfully, urgently timely, exploring the objectification and oppression women experience as their rights, bodies, and ...
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October 22, 2023Writing For Ghouls
It’s spooky season, and here in Atlantic Canada the ambiance is that of a flooded crypt. The smell of wet fallen leaves, rainy days that feel heavy and dark as night, smoke on the air indicating warmth ...
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November 27, 2015On "Fiction" - Writing from Real Life
Over the past while I’ve noticed a number of situations where an author is asked about the autobiographical or non-fiction elements in their books. It has always been something that people are interested ...
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November 12, 2019
Keeping Momentum
After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...
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November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
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November 23, 2019Getting Over Getting Stuck
That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...
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November 19, 2019Revision Part Two, Long Projects
Short stories, essays, or poems are wonderful to revise—I say this while I’m revising a longer project, but story length does make a difference. You can reading through a short draft in an afternoon, ...
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July 26, 2016Women's Covers and Male Privilege
The default look for works of literary fiction, especially those written by women, was once this: “A stock image of a woman with her back to the camera, gazing over a shoreline.”(Or a tree. Or a field. ...
