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October 31, 2018
We've always been here
My time here is drawing to a close and I’d like to express great thanks to the Open Book team for inviting me to this space for the past month. It’s been a real pleasure and an immense honour to have ...
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October 09, 2018
"How do you find time to write?"
Like many authors, I have a full-time job that’s my primary source of income. It’s a wonderfully fulfilling gig in a truly enjoyable and engaging profession that’s been my primary career for the ...
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May 02, 2019Facing the Double-Headed Dragon: Perfectionism and Fear
Guys. My last few weeks have been bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I hope you will all bear with me this month. There may be some punctuation errors here and there. Even a typo ...
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January 29, 2020Read an Excerpt From Teva Harrison's Gorgeously Devastating 'Not One of These Poems Is About You'
In April of last year, the Canadian literary community suffered a profound loss at the passing of celebrated author and illustrator Teva Harrison after a lengthy battle with metastatic breast cancer. ...
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March 25, 2020Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
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July 02, 2015
On Getting My First Novel into Print
My first novel, Eulogy, has just been published.What has the experience been like?Well, it only took eleven years, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. Things could have been far worse: I could have never ...
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November 24, 2015On Writing Violence - An Addendum
I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback and some questions about one of my first posts for Open Book, “On Writing Violence.” One reader, Susan, asked me in the comments about how this all ...
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June 21, 2017Flash -- Opportunity for Writers
A post on social media: Wilfred Laurier University seeks applicants for the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence position on its Waterloo campus in southwestern Ontario.For ten weeks, starting in ...
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September 01, 2020When Your Father is Your Biggest Fan
I don’t believe that any father was more proud of having a son for a writer than my own dad. Whenever I met somebody who knew him—it might be a waiter in a restaurant—the person would say, “Oh, ...
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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 ...
