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September 10, 2019
On Reading
Writers need to read— I offered this advice earlier in the summer— and I sincerely hope it’s not news to any writer looking at this post that reading is a most instructive way to learn what does, ...
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November 04, 2019
Music, Writing, and the Practice of Art
Like many people in the arts, I have a number of jobs. For me, that includes writing, teaching writing, transcribing music notation, and teaching music.Teaching music came first. For the last fifteen ...
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November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
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November 12, 2019
Keeping Momentum
After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...
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November 13, 2019Home
This October I travelled to Calgary from my home in Kingston to do some book promotion and to catch up with my family and cherished friends. It had been a little over a year since I’d returned home, ...
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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 ...
