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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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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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November 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
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January 15, 2025Award-Winning Author Chelene Knight Shares Savvy Literary Advice in Safekeeping: A Writer’s Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love
Chelene Knight is renowned not only as an author, but also as a writing mentor and advisor who helps writers navigate their careers and learn best practices to find readers for their books. And now, after ...
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July 08, 2016To the Moons, Alice
Earlier this week, on July 4, NASA announced that the spacecraft Juno had successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit. That it did so on Independence Day, and that NASA used the term “Mighty Jupiter” in ...
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April 10, 2015
Revision and Sedgwick and Surprise
In my head my posts this month were going to unfold more linearly than they seem currently to be doing. I imagined each post, in advance of writing it (and an advance of writing any of the posts) as a ...
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May 31, 2017
Noor Naga wins RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers
The Writers’ Trust of Canada has announced Noor Naga as the winner of this year’s $10,000 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Naga won the award for her poem “The Mistress and the ...
