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November 15, 2019
Revision Part One
Revision, where the piled fragments of a draft shift and reassemble, is my favourite part of writing. It’s where the most substantial changes happen, and a story is overhauled in ways that are surprising ...
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November 19, 2019Revision Part Two, Long Projects
Short stories, essays, or poems are wonderful to revise—I say this while I’m revising a longer project, but story length does make a difference. You can reading through a short draft in an afternoon, ...
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February 21, 2020On Trying Not To Fly By the Seat of My Pants
I’m a writer who regularly finishes projects, but I wouldn’t describe myself as a writer with a regular practice. This is something I feel I should be able to correct and yet somehow writing continues ...
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November 26, 2019
Workspace
1. Desk: the desk belongs to my partner, Bradford Werner. He covered it in plastic during his university years. I poke fun of him for it, but the wood is pristine. I cleaned for this photo, but if you ...
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November 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
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November 23, 2019Getting Over Getting Stuck
That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...
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April 16, 2020KiPoWriMo
Remember February? It was a whole lifetime ago in this pandemic moment. In retrospect, it seems innocent to have hated on winter so hard, to have been holding out for March and the advent of spring when ...
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May 11, 2016On Doubt
It'll be your constant companion. You won't know a day without it. It will defy cold logic and your efforts to cultivate confidence. It will be haughtily contemptuous of your desire to focus on positives, ...
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February 21, 2024On Writing the Same Book Over and Over
In a 2015 webchat on The Guardian’s site, Kazuo Ishiguro was asked about his varied subject matter. He replied:“My subject matter doesn't vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The ...
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September 11, 2021
On Anabiosis and Mosses Helping with Sleep
On Wednesday, on the way to the river, I stopped in my tracks, struck by the moss habitat on a birch tree on the bank. It is a twinned paper birch — with one dead trunk snapped off about two meters ...
