Columnists

KiPoWriMo

Remember February? It was a whole lifetime ago in this pandemic moment. In retrospect, it seems innocent to have hated on winter so hard, to have been holding out for March and the advent of spring when ...

Book Therapy: Cordelia Strube’s Misconduct of the Heart

“I so wanted things to be normal.”“They can’t be normal. Make a new normal.”—Cordelia Strube, Misconduct of the HeartFrom the moment we went into isolation, people were making jokes. I don’t ...

Guest Column: What exactly is a ‘rights sale’?

Have you ever wondered how books rights are sold, and what kinds of rights are in play when a book is published? Many published authors are still mystified by some of these aspects of publishing, so we've ...

Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing

On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...

Trips Down Memory Lane: On Inhaling Old Notebooks

I’ve always envisioned Fall as the best season for fresh starts and rebirth, while Spring has always been a reflective season where I look back at previous months and years while documenting and acknowledging ...

What Wolves Are You Missing? How Writing Communities Improve Our Writing

“The Yellowstone river is healthier today than it was in 1995. The wild part about this positive ecological trend (which cuts against so many other ecological trends in the world) is that we understand ...

Book Therapy: Shani Mootoo’s Polar Vortex

“The body is always in the moment. It doesn’t care if it was warmer or colder any other time. It’s concerned—a matter of survival, naturally—only with how it is in the present.”—Shani Mootoo, ...

Acknowledging Fear in Writing

“Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” – Toni Morrison Fear.Fear of the first draft, fear of spiders, fear of ...

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 ...

A Love Letter to Scarborough Writers

To busy writers, penning poems on the back of receipts, scribbling into notebooks on Line 3 — this is for you.I rarely find time to sit down and write anymore. Instead, I create fragments wherever I ...