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May 02, 2019Facing the Double-Headed Dragon: Perfectionism and Fear
Guys. My last few weeks have been bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I hope you will all bear with me this month. There may be some punctuation errors here and there. Even a typo ...
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August 31, 2018On the future of Canlit
You guys, this is my last Open Book column.I have been writing this column for a year now and I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was going to write about when Holly Kent and Kevin Hardcastle asked me ...
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May 26, 2019The Devil is in the Details - Researching and Writing Your Novel
If you’ve been reading my other posts you’ve probably noticed that my upcoming book THE LOST SCROLL OF THE PHYSICIAN is set in Ancient Egypt. The Second Intermediate Period, to be precise. Unfortunately, ...
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February 19, 2019On Burnout
I’ve finished my first book. I’ve done the writing, the rewriting, the editing, more rewriting, the copy editing, the fact checking… I think you get the point. It was a lot of work. But now I’m ...
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May 16, 20195 Tips on the Editing Process
Edits, edits everywhere, and several drops to drink...The final edit of the interior pages of my new middle grade adventure, THE LOST SCROLL OF THE PHYSICIAN, is due this Monday.Now is the time when I ...
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April 16, 2019A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection
We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:POETIC LAYERINGdiscovery ...
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June 11, 2019Confessions of an Uncertain Booklover
All my life, I’ve considered myself to be a booklover. Even my twitter handle has the word ‘literati’ in it (don’t judge me. I was a pretentious undergrad when I came up with it). English was ...
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March 24, 2019Writer at Work: Speaking with the Dead
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honour of speaking on panels at Room Magazine’s Growing Room Festival. During a Q&A session with the audience after the intersectionality, diaspora, and Asian-Canadian ...
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March 26, 2019CBC Canada Reads 2019: Diverging Votes at the Halfway Mark
Today was Day Two (of four) at CBC Canada Reads and the debates were intense but marked by a generosity amongst the panelists towards each other's chosen books.Joe Zee was the competition's first free ...
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July 31, 2019Why you should re-read books
I am a big reader, but I am an even bigger re-reader. Yes, I have a mountainous stack of to be read books, but I believe that it’s important to my writing practice—and to my basic existence—to dive ...