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September 27, 2018"I Know My Characters Very Intimately" October Writer-in-Residence Waubgeshig Rice on Crafting His Powerful New Novel
Waubgeshig Rice's hotly anticipated second novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press), plunges the reader into a small northern Anishinaabe community suddenly cut off from the outside world. Panic ...
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September 27, 2018Coming to Voice
I worked on this piece while at a residency for BIPOC writers in the fall of 2017. I did not pick it up again when I returned. While workshopping it there, I was not convinced it captured what I was trying ...
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October 02, 2023Book Launch Season, Part 2: Being an Audience Member
In the first part of “Book Launch Season,” I talked about how to enter this period of time as an author. Writers are (I hope) readers. As a poet especially, going to readings and sitting there as ...
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July 13, 2022"An Act of Freedom and a Precarious Practice" Tanis MacDonald on the Politics and Culture of Taking a Walk
Taking a walk is a deceptively simple thing. To walk around outside can do wonders for our mental and physical health, sense of community, and stress levels. And yet "taking a walk" also exists at a fascinating ...
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July 20, 2016Writers on Donald Trump
Some literary smarm and alarm to mark the occasion of the wildest, most Godwin's Law-baiting political nominating convention ever. “Trump is a pugnacious idiot with no real understanding of how government ...
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May 25, 2021
The Many Faces of Writer's Block
Despite the fact that I don’t really believe in it, the words Writers’ Block always conjure up a dark, amorphous cloud in my mind. Which is ironic, because the part I don’t believe is that there’s ...
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October 30, 2019
Daddy Writer to Be – Umbilical Cord
As writers, we are always inspired by the life experiences that we go through; the traumas, the fears, and the excitement of it all. As a follow up poetry book to War/Torn, I have started working on a ...
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August 02, 2016THE Incredible Shrinking Writer
It’s almost six years now since, after nearly half a century in Toronto, I moved to Cobourg, pop. 18,500. My adopted home — "Ontario’s Feel Good Town" — is just a ninety-minute commute east by ...
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July 26, 2018
What I Talk About When I Talk About Talking Points
When a publisher agrees to publish your book—or at least, when both of my publishers agreed to publish my two books—the author is presented with a questionnaire. If you don’t overthink it, the questions ...
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July 10, 2018
Did You Really Go Through All That?
I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...
