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December 01, 2017What’s Your Story? Short Prose and Poetry Competition for Emerging Writers
What’s Your Story? Short Prose and Poetry Competition for Emerging WritersCALL FOR SUBMISSIONSThe Ontario Book Publishers Organization is pleased to announce that submissions are being accepted until ...
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May 29, 2015What’s Your Vision: Publish or Perish?
Note to self: forget the zeitgeist. Trends are for dolts. What I mean is that when it comes to some writers and their embrace of social media, e-book culture and new audience development there seems to ...
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February 26, 2019When All Your Faves Are Problematic
Recently, at a dinner with several writer friends, I learned that a writer I’ve long admired has been known to behave rather smarmily around young women. This writer is now on the list of names that ...
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September 20, 2019When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence
A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...
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December 29, 2023When Life Influences Form
What’s the best form for your next writing project? Often, this is decided by the sort of thing you want to write. Your sprawling epic fantasy idea likely won’t work as a short story, for example. ...
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May 08, 2020When My Mind is Frenzied, I Don’t Read—I Listen
Being read to is a luxury.Growing up, there were no bedtime stories in my household, at least none that I can remember. There were true stories traded around dinner tables of course, but there was none ...
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November 30, 2020When old ways, thoughts, beliefs, and people no longer serve you
“Every moment is a fresh beginning.” —T.S. EliotLately I have been thinking about the act of releasing the things in my life that no longer serve me. When I revise a piece of writing, the first ...
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June 07, 2023When Readers Write
Whenever I do a book event, people tell me things. Sometimes they tell me a bit about themselves or their families. At other times, they disclose traumatic experiences. I respond by holding the moment, ...
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September 01, 2020When Your Father is Your Biggest Fan
I don’t believe that any father was more proud of having a son for a writer than my own dad. Whenever I met somebody who knew him—it might be a waiter in a restaurant—the person would say, “Oh, ...
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January 03, 2017Where Are the Classmates Now?
I met Rebecca Rosenblum in the Advanced Fiction Writing class during my undergrad in Creative Writing - at Concordia University, in Montreal. But Rebecca did not go to Concordia - she went to McGill - ...