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February 26, 2016Writing Hangovers Are Denim on Denim: Part 2 of Four New Writers to Watch
I posted the first half of my interview with four exciting writers-to-watch, Noor Naga, Sofia Mostaghimi, Kristel Jax, and Faith Arkorful, earlier today. We talked about writing into dark places, what ...
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November 18, 2024Writing Lessons from Joni Mitchell
I often look to books for inspiration, but I just got back from seeing Joni Mitchell play in L.A., and as I was sitting at the Hollywood Bowl, with the moon rising over the hills, I realized how much ...
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February 19, 2025Writing Lessons Learned From Zines
In my early twenties, my friend Teri Vlassopoulos introduced me to zines and it changed my life. If you’re not familiar with the term, ZineWiki defines a zine as “an independently- or self-published ...
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September 05, 2023Writing on the Clock
A common question from the published writer is: will I ever earn out my advance? Recently I wondered: what about my stolen time? If I only ever wrote when I was “supposed to” (in periods of grant ...
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October 20, 2025Writing Protagonists Who Don’t Care If You Like Them
As writers, we want our readers to connect with our protagonists, to root for them and relate to them. It makes sense – human connection is at the heart of storytelling. If a reader just utterly hates ...
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March 18, 2014
Writing Sex
"And Panhuyzen really gives good sex.” ~National Post, August 1999 Sex! Did you hear that, sex! We’re talking about sex today. Oh, what’s that, you don’t want to talk about sex? Well, too bad, ...
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September 30, 2015
Writing Through Life Change
I used to think that writing was an all-alone endeavor: I thought that all you need is a laptop and some time. I don’t know why I thought that. It’s not true, it turns out. I’ve had help. This help ...
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January 06, 2017Writing Through Pain
Carlyn Zwarenstein, in Opium Eater: The New Confessions, fuses memoir, reflective inquiry, cultural journalism, and literary investigation to look at opiates and what they have done for her. She is a ...
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August 20, 2019Writing Through Trauma Is Writing Through Forgetting
A few days ago, I finished writing a short story. A new short story. Because my fiction is drawn from my life, I journalled first, did a freewrite, and then outlined the first half of the story to nudge ...
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March 05, 2021
Writing Time
When it comes to writing, I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the basics—namely space and time. I find it easy to imagine myself into a character’s head—to project myself into a character’s ...
