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January 22, 2018What to Expect When You’re Expecting: The Editorial Process for New Writers - Part One
A little while ago, we were contacted by ECW's senior editor, Jen Knoch, with an interesting suggestion for the site. We profile a lot of authors, in all forms and genres, and post a good deal about the ...
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July 03, 2019What We Owe To One Another
In the immediate few weeks and months after the Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) takes place in Brampton each May, I’m always struck by a strange feeling, something that’s equal parts euphoria, ...
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March 12, 2020What Wolves Are You Missing? How Writing Communities Improve Our Writing
“The Yellowstone river is healthier today than it was in 1995. The wild part about this positive ecological trend (which cuts against so many other ecological trends in the world) is that we understand ...
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March 28, 2022What's Beyond: Writing as an Actor, Part 2
One of the important exercises we do in theatre is called “What’s Beyond.” It’s a Viola Spolin exercise to help actors understand the full, inner life of their characters. Viola Spolin is credited ...
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December 16, 2017What's So Big About Green?
Earle Birney asks, “What’s So Big About Green?” in his poem of that name. Green is huge. Green is the colour of money--which is why one of our major chartered banks has Green Machines, ATMs that ...
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November 04, 2015What’s the Future of the Future?
Is the future now? Is it tomorrow, as it should be? Or is the future just an accelerated version of the past and present? Uhhh, have you heard the rapper Future’s new What a Time to Be Alive mixtape ...
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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 ...