Search
-
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 ...
-
May 28, 2021The Writing Moment with... Word Service
“A waste of skin.”That’s what I am. At least according to the Starbucks customer who hurled this insult (and others) at me, when I informed her we were out of honey.According to various customers ...
-
October 23, 2016
Poetic Inspiration III
This is the third in a series of posts highlighting inventive poems that have broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. (The previous instalments ...
-
April 12, 2021Practice in the mirror: "I don't answer that question," and other helpful phrases for poets
Welcome to week two of Careful Inventory, poets and friends! Thanks so much for coming back or tuning in. As promised, today’s post is an opportunity for you to practice setting some boundaries that ...
-
October 31, 2024Read an Excerpt from the New Anthology, Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction
The new and frighteningly good anthology, Zegaajimo: Indigenous Horror Fiction (Kegedonce Press), derives its name from the Ojibwe term meaning "to tell a scary story." And, the author that have been ...
-
October 29, 2016
L.M. Montgomery, Ontario, and Poetry
Today I gave a reading from How to Draw a Rhinoceros from the pulpit of the Historic Leaskdale Church, a somewhat unlikely location for my first public reading from this book. The occasion was LMM Day, ...
-
December 02, 2017The Colour Purple
I am very, very short-sighted. Way off the normal sight spectrum. Like a career politician. The spawn of two myopic parents, I am a mole, midget-sighted. My natural focal point is my own nose. No, I have ...
-
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 ...
-
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 ...
-
May 16, 2020Readings...that feeling never goes away.
I always get that feeling right before reading my work in public. You may know it: the urge to simultaneously faint, throw up, and run out of the room. My first few readings were terrifying. I was fortunate ...