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February 22, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 7 of 9
Love like anything that matters in this life is a risky business. To fall in love, one must take a big leap of faith. I wanted my characters who were dissatisfied with their isolation to jump both feet ...
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February 26, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 8 of 9
What happens when the unexpected occurs. As a writer, I like to throw unexpected elements in when things seem to be progressing smoothly. The same way I don’t conceive of a beginning or middle before ...
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October 24, 2017Getting to Know Fantasy Author S.M. Beiko: Cancelling Plans, Smashing the Patriarchy, & Keeping it Weird
Creating an entire mythology from scratch is no small feat. But S.M. Beiko pulls it off with style in her epic fantasy novel Scion of the Fox (ECW Press), the first of a planned trilogy. Set in Winnipeg, ...
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May 28, 2025Tim Welsh's Debut Novel, Ley Lines, is a Refreshing, Intimate Take on Frontier Life
Readers have seen frontier tales about the gold rush and mining boom towns before, many of which carry familiar tropes and trappings. But, our featured author today has written an original work that upends ...
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April 29, 2022Book Therapy: Good Mom on Paper
“Children require their parents to search for small moments of peace or grace or dignity. Maybe we can treat creativity the same way: creating the one true thing within a project that is otherwise just ...
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June 06, 2019Interdependence as Disabled Poetics and Praxis: Or Why My Novel is Dedicated to My Disabled Friend Maddy
People often say that they couldn’t have written their books without the help and support of friends and family. This is particularly true for disabled writers. Finishing my novel required many hours ...
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November 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
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November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
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November 23, 2019Getting Over Getting Stuck
That Tiny Life, the title story of my collection, is about family—about distance that grows between families over time. I can tell you that now because the story is written. Writing it, I didn’t know ...
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November 12, 2019
Keeping Momentum
After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...
