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October 05, 2022
About that Award
Several months ago, I was sent an e-mail sharing the good news from the Alumni team at Algonquin College that I was to receive an Alumni Award of Distinction for Apprenticeship. I graduated from the ...
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November 26, 2019
Workspace
1. Desk: the desk belongs to my partner, Bradford Werner. He covered it in plastic during his university years. I poke fun of him for it, but the wood is pristine. I cleaned for this photo, but if you ...
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November 04, 2019
Music, Writing, and the Practice of Art
Like many people in the arts, I have a number of jobs. For me, that includes writing, teaching writing, transcribing music notation, and teaching music.Teaching music came first. For the last fifteen ...
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November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
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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 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
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November 23, 2019
Getting Over Getting Stuck
That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...
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April 29, 2021
Your life is yours: a future wish for emerging writers
Today’s the day, friends! This will conclude my residency with Open Book and the Careful Inventory skillshare. I’m very grateful to each of you who have read along and shared your thoughts with me. ...
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February 23, 2016
Recognizing Something Human: Part Two of Andrew F. Sullivan in Conversation
Yesterday I posted the beginnings of my G-Chat conversation with Andrew F. Sullivan. We focused the discussion on the characters and worldview of his first novel, WASTE. Our conversation continues below. JT: ...
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January 13, 2021
Excerpt: Josée Boileau Exposes Quebec's Dark Response to December 6 in Because They Were Women: The Montreal Massacre
Josée Boileau's Because They Were Women: The Montreal Massacre (Second Story Press, translated by Chantal Bilodeau) takes readers back to one of Canada's darkest days to memorialize the the fourteen ...