Search
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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, ...
-
December 06, 2017The Striped Scrapper
When I was fifteen, Dad moved my sibs and I from the chilly West Coast to the hurricane belt—Grand Cayman Island. We spent six months living by the Caribbean Sea where Dad, bewigged and robed, practiced ...
-
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 ...
-
December 18, 2017The Swarm
My father would fill up our triple-seater truck with six bench seats worth of brats—his own and the neighbour’s--on any given Saturday. One Saturday, he told us that we were heading up Nanaimo Lakes ...
-
October 01, 2020The sweet spot
First off, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you to Graham and Grace and all the good folks at Open Book for inviting me to sit in this month. I thought I’d start by telling you how I came to writing, ...
-
October 31, 2015
The Thing That Terrifies Me the Most About Writing
It came out of me the in a journal entry the other day, a fear I know has been swimming around inside for years now, but one that I never fully articulated, or maybe even fully acknowledged, until it ...
-
November 27, 2016
The Toronto Heliconian Club: Literature Section readings
By Bianca Lakoseljac: OB Writer in Residence Since I was a child, reading has been an escape for me. A leap into the world of imagination. As a writer, when I guest as a reader or a presenter, it’s ...
-
December 20, 2023The Transition to Short Stories (as a poet)
I’ve spent years now honing my craft as a poet. I know how to edit individual poems, as well as to approach and rewrite entire manuscripts. Why did the need to do the same in fiction seem so daunting ...
