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March 27, 2020On Emergency Landings
A few years ago, I boarded a crowded plane to Asia. As I reached my aisle seat, I was dismayed to notice that the guy next to me had his arm all over our shared armrest, spilling over to my side. He was ...
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May 01, 2022
The Writer (You Think) I am
The year before trying out for the Simon Fraser University basketball team, I trained in ways and at an intensity I never before had. I wanted to make that team so badly, so desirous was I to prove myself, ...
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April 07, 2023I Just Got Published - So, Why Don't I Feel Great?
When I was 18, I resolved to be a published writer one day. It was something I’d dreamed of even before then. As a younger teenager I wrote simple books inspired in varying degrees by The Outsiders. ...
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May 30, 2016Lat & Long
It's a rare thing for me to find myself somewhere new – or even somewhere I know but haven't been in a while – and not be visited by an urge to set a story there. I'm not exactly sure why this is, ...
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April 23, 2014
The War Series: Writers as Readers, with Evan Munday
Evan Munday is the Silver Birch Award-nominated author and illustrator of middle grade novel Dial M for Morna, The Dead Kid Detective Agency and the graphic novel Quarter Life Crisis: Only the Good Die ...
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August 04, 2020Retreating from writing
Sometimes our stories practically beg to come to life on the page. Yet despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, stories almost never just 'come to life' as easily as we might have imagined. ...
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August 09, 2016Doing My Song and Dance
I sent out my first godawful poem for publication when I was ten or eleven years old. I sent it to the Toronto Daily Star; I obviously hadn’t done my market research, since they didn’t publish poetry. ...
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August 28, 2023How Much Do Book Tropes and Aesthetics Matter?
If you’ve spent time on Twitter or Instagram recently, you may have noticed authors and readers sharing graphics that outline a book’s major tropes, or the aesthetics of a book through mood boards.I’ll ...
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June 25, 2018Eric Schmaltz's Reading Love: His Strangest, Most Comforting, & Most Unsettling Reads
Artist and writer Eric Schmaltz's Surfaces (Invisible Publishing) is a debut collection to remember. The poems are sharp and timely, reflecting Schmaltz's multi-media, cross-platform approach to art. ...
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August 20, 2017
Finish Your Vomit Draft Now
After I posted my last entry, I felt like I didn’t spend enough time talking about why it’s so important for you to finish your vomit draft.How many times have you read a book and thought, “How ...