Columnists

Making Time: How Ondaatje Taught Me To Show Up For Myself, or Plotting vs. Pantsing

There are some books whose images stay with us long after we’ve read them, far more than the stories or the characters themselves. An image that has stayed with me over the years is from The English ...

Making Time: Making Randomness & #SSCLUB

When 2020 began, I’d been off most social media for about twenty-two days. My decision wasn’t deliberate. In fact, it was reactive. The night before I went offline, I read a short story: “Innards” ...

How to Make and Keep Writing Resolutions

Resolutions. I’ve made them. You’ve made them. We’ve broken them the next day, the next week, a few months into the new year. We’ve even forgotten about them. A resolution involves making a decision ...

Becoming Bigger Than Ourselves

In mid-November, a few days after I’d returned to Vancouver from the Singapore Writers Festival a week prior, I saw an owl.I was in a jet-lagged haze at dusk, on my way to the convenience store to get ...

When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence

A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...

Writing Through Trauma Is Writing Through Forgetting

A few days ago, I finished writing a short story. A new short story. Because my fiction is drawn from my life, I journalled first, did a freewrite, and then outlined the first half of the story to nudge ...

Why I Don’t Announce My Social Media Breaks

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched several writers announce that they’re taking a break from social media. Sometimes they edit their profile so that their status, “on hiatus,” is added ...

On Synchronicity and Writing: The Path Back to Myself

Last month, I had the privilege of going on a road trip across Northern BC as part of an author’s tour organized by the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for which my book of poems, Port of Being, was a finalist. ...