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July 30, 2015
Do Not Wait for Inspiration
Do not wait for inspiration; that bus is on an irregular schedule.I’ve been asked several times now what was the inspiration or vision for my recently published novel, and I often see disappointment ...
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April 06, 2017Guest Column - So I Opened a Bookstore
So I opened a bookstore.Yes, yes, I know – “in this day and age?” “Bookstores are going under!” “What about digital books?” “No one reads paper books anymore!”But I had been reading ...
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February 11, 2016Tearing Down The Walls: Jacqueline Valencia on The Toronto Poetry Talks
Jacqueline Valencia, a Toronto poet and critic, has been organizing the Toronto Poetry Talks on Racism and Sexism in poetry for about a year. This summer, the talks will be held at the Toronto Metro Hall ...
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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, 2019Getting 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 ...
