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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 ...
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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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August 25, 2020Memoir is Not the Story of Your Life
The funny thing about memoir is that it is not the story of your life.It is true that memoir deals with and includes stories from the author’s life, but therein lies the distinction. For while autobiography ...
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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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March 21, 2019Writer at Work: A Book Is A Community
Yesterday, my first book of poems, Port of Being, was shortlisted for the 2019 BC and Yukon Book Prizes (BCBP), for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. I expected to feel happy but I feel disbelief. The ...
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March 24, 2019Writer at Work: Speaking with the Dead
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honour of speaking on panels at Room Magazine’s Growing Room Festival. During a Q&A session with the audience after the intersectionality, diaspora, and Asian-Canadian ...
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March 30, 2019Writer at Work: The Steadfastness of Beauty
Last fall, a few days after my book, Port of Being, was sent to the printer, I met with Juliane Okot Bitek, whom I had asked for a blurb. During that rainy day at a pub, Juliane and I shared our parallel ...
