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August 04, 2020Retreating from writing
Sometimes our stories practically beg to come to life on the page. Yet despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, stories almost never just 'come to life' as easily as we might have imagined. ...
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June 17, 2016Revenge of the Indie Bookstore
In 2014, when I began booking my Crushes and Mountains US book tour with fellow Toronto-based writer Elisha Lim, I Googled “gay bookstore” or “independent bookstore” in cities we were planning ...
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August 24, 2017
Revising Your Vomit Draft
Every time I sit down to revise a new picture book (aka vomit draft), I can’t remember how to do it. How can I turn something terrible into something better? How do I make things actually happen in ...
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April 11, 2014
Revision
It’s a risky thing to put a poem out of sight in order to let it germinate or steep, whatever the science of hope might call the process. Some poems only turn up posthumously and are declared masterpieces ...
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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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November 15, 2019
Revision Part One
Revision, where the piled fragments of a draft shift and reassemble, is my favourite part of writing. It’s where the most substantial changes happen, and a story is overhauled in ways that are surprising ...
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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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May 26, 2016Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...
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December 14, 2017Richard Teleky Examines the "Ordinary Paradise" of the Unnoticed Art That Constantly Surrounds Us
Sometimes it is easy to forget we are constantly surrounded by works of art. In postcards and prints, books and movies, home crafts, and songs on the radio, we experience what author Richard Teleky refers ...
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October 22, 2021RIDING THE WAVES
Marigold stood, held up her fist and struck a defiant pose as she recited William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus.” Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever ...
