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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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June 02, 2016On Writing, with Nadia Bozak
Nadia Bozak's gorgeous collection of linked short stories, Thirteen Shells (House of Anansi), is drawing tons of praise, including comparisons to Alice Munro, for its deft rendering of a young girl coming ...
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April 29, 2009
Ten Questions with Pamela Mordecai
OBT:What was your first publication and where was it published?PM:It was either a poem in my high school paper, or an essay that won a competition and was published in the daily newspaper. I hope it was ...
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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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February 28, 2019Poetry School: Dana Gioia on the matter of poetry
Twenty-eight years ago US poet Dana Gioia’s essay “Can Poetry Matter?” was published in the Atlantic, sparking “a firestorm of debate and discussion” over the role of the poet in contemporary ...
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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 ...
