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March 01, 2021
Writing violence (again)
On violence and trauma and repetition...When I was nineteen, I went to dinner at a friend’s, and afterwards, her father invited us all upstairs to see his attic art studio.There were so many canvasses ...
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July 13, 2018
Writing What You "Know"
I’m one of countless writers who found his way thanks to this old standby, and having just published a book of stories set in small Southwestern Ontario towns a lot like the ones where I grew up, it’s ...
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March 11, 2022Writing What You Don't Know
Write what you know. It’s an adage you are always told as a beginning writer.My first book was definitely written because of what I knew. I had been teaching a studio course on the development of Western ...
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May 31, 2016Writing What’s Closest to Home
Last year, when I turned in the first draft of a memoir on rape trauma, my editor had a pretty reasonable observation. Despite divulging various details of violation, illness, and the path to getting ...
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July 20, 2017
writing with dyslexia
I could not really read until I was about eight. I have a distinct memory from 1977-- around June-- when I was sitting in my elementary school class watching other kids read. I had just transferred schools ...
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June 10, 2022Writing with kids: Impossible or sometimes maybe possible?
Summer is nigh, which means picnics and sunlight until 10 p.m. and swimming pools and watermelon. And it also means my kids are going to be around a lot more, and finding windows to write is going to ...
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May 12, 2022
Writing Within the Cracks
May is always a busy month for me. We have several May birthdays, summer to prepare for, and the usual sort of unexpected situations to deal with. Why, in this month alone, I have had to submit a first ...
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March 29, 2021
Writing/Not Writing
Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...
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November 02, 2020
Written and On-Screen Selves: On Diaries and Social Media
Do you remember your first diary?Mine was a baby blue hardcover with a cute little rhyme on it that I still remember to this day:People, places, faces. My life in words and phrases. All I've thought ...
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January 18, 2019Yard Dog author A.G. Pasquella on Keeping the Rawness from Draft to Draft (and a Tattoo Suggestion)
Sometimes getting the thing you want most doesn't quite work out. That's what Jack Palace discovers in A.G. Pasquella's gritty new thriller Yard Dog (Dundurn Press). When Jack gets out of prison, it ...
