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May 14, 2009
Should Professors of Poetry at Oxford Be Without Sin?
A friend of mine, a Jamaican man, told me many years ago that he disliked going to bars in England, where he’d been a student. Why? Because if a man put his hand up under a woman’s skirt, he was likely ...
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November 23, 2020
Comparing Myself with May from My Day With Gong Gong
Writing May, the main character in my kids book My Day With Gong Gong, was a joy! It was my first time writing from the perspective of a kid as an adult, and for kids as a main audience. A lot of her ...
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August 21, 2020Why Bother Writing?
A few nights ago, I woke up to the sound of a wolf howling into the bowl of the sky. We all know the sound, I’d heard versions of it my whole life, but I’d never actually heard one in the flesh like ...
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October 16, 2018Black Beach author Glynis Guevara on Her Title, Her Next Book, and the Word Zaboca
In Glynis Guevara's Black Beach, (Inanna Publications) Tamera is just 16-years old, but she's got adult-sized struggles to contend with as she strives to take care of her mother, who lives with mental ...
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October 27, 2018
Characters like family
One of my favourite parts of the writing process is creating and developing characters. I’ve always believed a story is only as strongly crafted as the people in it. Characters are the pillars of and ...
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August 31, 2020The Nature of Truth in Art
For my final post as writer-in-residence, I’d like to devote a bit of space to one of the subjects I love to chew on: the nature of truth in art. (As a friend of mine recently noted: ‘You always go ...
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May 30, 2009
Canadian English and His Relatives
Back to our English. Having raised the question of how old he is, and mused about how we decide, we now consider his relatives. Perhaps we should begin with great-grandma.Our English, we know, is Canadian, ...
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October 11, 2023Vulnerability is a Writing Tool
My most reflexive apology is, “I went to theatre school.” Usually delivered with a shrug or a knowing smirk as if to say I can’t help it, it gets a laugh from the creative set about 82 percent of ...
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October 01, 2018
Binaakwe Giizis - Moon of Falling Leaves
Happy October! In Anishinaabemowin (the Ojibwe language), October is commonly known in many places as "Binaakwe Giizis", or the Moon of Falling Leaves. Anishinaabemowin is a very poetic and descriptive ...
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October 18, 2016
Poetic Inspiration II
This is the second in a series of posts highlighting poems that have made my synapses crackle, broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. The first ...
