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October 11, 2023Vulnerability is a Writing Tool
My most reflexive apology is, “I went to theatre school.” Usually delivered with a shrug or a knowing smirk as if to say I can’t help it, it gets a laugh from the creative set about 82 percent of ...
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August 31, 2016The Lower Reaches of Pulp
It’s rare for me to be disturbed by a book: usually, I enjoy being scared or pushed to an extreme emotion within the safety of a page. But I was badly bothered by a pulp novel from the 1980s that I ...
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October 18, 2016
Poetic Inspiration II
This is the second in a series of posts highlighting poems that have made my synapses crackle, broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. The first ...
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October 22, 2016
Beautiful Chapbooks
Chapbooks are versatile. They can take a multitude of forms and serve a multitude of functions. It’s generally a lengthy process for a regular book to make its way into print, but a chapbook can enter ...
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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 ...
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October 12, 2016
Norfolk, Murder Mysteries, Birds, and Mimesis
I spent the weekend in Norfolk visiting an old friend. I’ve never been to that part of England before, and because I see the world through a fictional lens, Steve Burrows’ birder mysteries, set in ...
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August 14, 2020Portrait of a Woman Flying
María was seven years old on her first day of work, the morning her father left her in Mexico City at a large house with tall ceilings and walls that were covered in tiles. Whenever she got homesick, ...
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May 25, 2009
Things to Do This Summer in Toronto, for Free
In these difficult times when every penny must count, and money for entertainment, as for everything else, needs to be wisely spent, it’s reassuring to know that there are lots of things to do in Toronto ...
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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly and the Canefields
Sugar Belly pulled all kinds of sounds out of his bamboo sax. Hear the sax wail!
