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May 09, 2016Where We Do What We Do
The first stories of any quality that I produced were written at an old white melamine desk in the windowless furnace room of my future in-laws' house in suburban Ottawa. The hot water tank clicked and ...
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April 12, 2016Why Don’t We Take Sports Writing Seriously?
In February of last year, Canadian Notes and Queries publisher Dan Wells kindly approached me with a question. “Brainstorming a games issue of CNQ,” he wrote in an email. “Wondered if you might ...
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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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November 30, 2022Book Therapy: Cyclettes
“If I had paused for too long to reflect on whether I was making the ‘right’ choices to optimize satisfaction, I might have become paralyzed in a never doing. Instead I sped towards my hypothetical ...
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September 14, 2023The Pull of Two Needles
My first version of this essay was about how my two obsessions, knitting and writing, don’t compete with each other. I wrote at length about how they spin together in my brain in complicated steps, ...
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August 30, 2017“I think suffering shows us who we truly are.” - Q&A with Gurjinder Basran
A Q&A with Gurjinder Basran, author of Someone You Love is GoneIn 2010, debut novelist Gurjinder Basran won the Search for the Great BC Novel Contest, and the following year took home the Ethel Wilson ...
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February 16, 2019Poetry School: Denise Levertov on form as a revelation
After reading poet Denise Levertov’s 1965 essay “Some Notes on Organic Form,” I had a revelation: I write poetry mainly in organic form. Given that the notion of the work of art as a self-germinating ...
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October 08, 2015
How to Make a Book Soundtrack
I’ve always thought that if I ever make a movie, choosing the soundtrack would be one of the things I would be most excited to do.So I figured why not do the same for a book?Even though I’m not big ...
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October 31, 2015
The Thing That Terrifies Me the Most About Writing
It came out of me the in a journal entry the other day, a fear I know has been swimming around inside for years now, but one that I never fully articulated, or maybe even fully acknowledged, until it ...
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October 24, 2015
Why Your Book Doesn't Really Need a Launch Party
A couple of years ago, I finally admitted something to myself:I hate organizing launch parties.Like, completely just no.I love coming up with ideas for them. I love talking about them. I love making posters ...
