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July 31, 2018Tanis MacDonald on How We Can Expand Our Idea of the Writing Life to Include Smaller Communities
The stereotype of the artist and writer tends to be an urban one - tiny apartments; cigarettes and whisky; gritty, loud, and busy streets outside the window. But where do these pictures come from and, ...
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December 18, 2017The Swarm
My father would fill up our triple-seater truck with six bench seats worth of brats—his own and the neighbour’s--on any given Saturday. One Saturday, he told us that we were heading up Nanaimo Lakes ...
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November 30, 2017A New National Emblem
Canada is a land of plenty. But it is a state poor in symbols. Our national emblems are few and time-worn. Canada’s plant is the maple tree, which, in an annual strip tease, releases red leaves clogging ...
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March 19, 2016Accepting Rejection
“You have to know how to accept rejection and reject acceptance.” ― Ray BradburyI've been thinking a lot about the experience of being "rejected" and getting "accepted" and the strange similitude ...
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March 17, 2016A Note on the Imagination
To thrive off the imagination, even if it affords only a dull light at the end of the day, is worth it; or not to thrive, even, but to loosely depend upon, keep the fires of imagining alive, in order ...
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March 16, 2016Writing "Well"
Illness spoils any story that desires a certain romanticism of adventure or self-discovery, the solitary act of Manifest Destiny. Many of history's beloved novels have entertained (and sometimes genuinely ...
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March 14, 2016A Day in the Life
Rise, water and fruit, spend about twenty minutes adjusting my spiritual frequency to the world. Think about the day and what it will entail. Recalibrate against the chaos if I've had strange dreams. ...
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March 12, 2016Writing as a Way "In"
I think many writers would agree that, in the beginning stages when we first pick up the pen, writing is a "way out" for us. It offers something therapeutic, or in more dramatic cases, the promise of ...
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March 08, 2016Nuance vs. Notoriety
For the longest time, I’ve been of the strong belief of the writerly life as associated with an either/or mentality: concision and painstaking precision, or, as writer Jack Kerouac would put it in his ...
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March 07, 2016Rethinking a Room of One’s Own
A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf once famously wrote, is a necessary part of being able to write successfully for women, who could often not find such a thing, being loyal to a certain level of constant ...