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October 08, 2015
How to Make a Book Soundtrack
I’ve always thought that if I ever make a movie, choosing the soundtrack would be one of the things I would be most excited to do.So I figured why not do the same for a book?Even though I’m not big ...
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April 01, 2022How to Make a Chapbook
My first chapbook of poetry I made myself. It was a research-creation project for an English class I was taking at the beginning of 2019. I was really propelled in my studies by research-creation, and ...
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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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May 01, 2017
How to go on
It’s Monday. First of May. It’s foggy outside (in Toronto) but not in that lovely misty way that feels like a spa—no, this is a cold, cold fog that is more like a damp basement. Everyone seems ...
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April 27, 2021How Writing a Grant App Can Make You a New Person
This month I broke down while revisiting the statement for my Research and Creation grant app with the Canada Council for the Arts. I cried because I saw – for what felt like the first time in a while ...
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July 28, 2020How to Keep Dreaming in the Pandemic (or, How I Finished the Third Draft of my Novel)
Living in a pandemic means that we are facing death every day. Thinking about death pushed me into survival mode. I was stressed and depressed to the point of migraines and insomnia. I stopped doing things ...
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May 01, 2019On Perfectionism: Stop it Right Now Thank You Very Much*
“Once you have realized what you need to improve in your piece—either from a writing partner's helpful responses or your own insights—you're ready to begin revising, a process you would be well ...
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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...
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March 19, 2019How Twitter Transformed My Writing Life
“Ugh, I’m on Twitter and I hate it,” I remember telling a friend and fellow writer at her birthday party last year.The room was full of writers and the conversation had somehow shifted to talk about ...
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October 03, 2017The Writer in the World: Introduction
The reader became the book; and summer night was like the conscious being of the book— Wallace StevensI became a book a long time ago. Or perhaps I am possessed by the memory of the experience of ...