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May 16, 2016Arguing Balls and Strikes
I always come back to baseball. As subject, I mean. Each time I think I'm done writing about it, or that I'd be better off focusing exclusively on the production of fiction, something occurs on a green ...
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May 12, 2016Strength in Brevity: A List for Short Story Month
Maybe it's fitting that I'm the Writer-in-Residence for May, since somebody, somewhere decided this is Short Story Month, and the short story is far and away my favourite literary form. In the past, Steven ...
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May 09, 2016Where We Do What We Do
The first stories of any quality that I produced were written at an old white melamine desk in the windowless furnace room of my future in-laws' house in suburban Ottawa. The hot water tank clicked and ...
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May 06, 2016Mother's Day
As people, as writers, we are often formed or directed by crystallizing moments in our lives, brief happenings which nonetheless persist in our minds, or which port some lesson, or confirm for us a suspicion ...
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May 05, 2016The Unscripted Idle
I spent this past Saturday at Books & Company in Picton, under the auspices of Authors for Indies, and I came away feeling happy, but with a top note of frustration, because I passed the afternoon ...
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May 03, 2016Some of the Best Books I Ever Read Weren't Books at All
I am on the record—somewhere, or perhaps multiple somewheres—as having said that one of the stories in my first collection, What You Need, represented an effort on my part to capture the feel of a ...
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May 02, 2016By Way of Introduction
If, as I am given to understand, the point of a writer-in-residence, whether virtual or actual, is in part to hold forth on the mechanics and practice of writing, then let me start by laying bare my understanding ...
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May 31, 2016Thank You, and Good Night
There isn't enough time. There's never enough time. But at the beginning of May I thought the whole month unfurled before us like an endless field of wildflowers waiting to be picked as we strolled lazily ...
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May 30, 2016Lat & Long
It's a rare thing for me to find myself somewhere new – or even somewhere I know but haven't been in a while – and not be visited by an urge to set a story there. I'm not exactly sure why this is, ...
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May 26, 2016Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...