Search
-
April 24, 2019What a Poem Does, Not what it Means
In an earlier post, I wrote that both writer and reader should focus more on how a poem comes to be.We seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to understand what a poem means as opposed ...
-
November 02, 2020November Writer-in-Residence Sennah Yee on How Picture Books Can Teach Kids About Connecting Across Generations & Cultures
Any kid lucky enough to get to know their grandparents knows it can be a totally unique and fun-filled family connection. But sometimes it takes something special to bring the generations together - just ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
