Columnists

A note to future book creators from a friendly book publicist

It has recently come to my attention that not everybody is familiar with what a book publicist does. On paper, a book publicist’s main responsibilities include, but are not limited to securing earned ...

The Unselfish Act of Being Alone

 I want to talk about the power and necessity of being alone.It’s 4:30 am and I should be asleep, but jet lag is real. And I can’t shake the feeling that I shouldn’t be thinking about exhaustion ...

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 ...

What Does Work/Life Balance Look Like for Writers?

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”This is a question children are often asked with a bemused smile by teachers, family, or friends. They expect that you’ll reply with some fantastical thing: ...

What to Do When Your Story Already Exists in the World

We all know that every story has already been told and our challenge, as writers, is to come up with new, original ways to tell stories. Unfortunately, sometimes you think you’ve done just that and, ...

Offstage Magic

Festival season is over, and I’m still reeling from all the conversations and questions that have arisen offstage. What it is about the magic of writers without microphones, with cups of coffee and ...

3 Practices the Literary Scene Could Learn from Spoken Word Artists

 When I was curating So Fresh: A Scarborough Reading, I desperately wanted to bring together two worlds that I deeply loved. First were the authors that I knew from the literary community. Authors like ...

Home

This October I travelled to Calgary from my home in Kingston to do some book promotion and to catch up with my family and cherished friends. It had been a little over a year since I’d returned home, ...

Book Therapy: Jessica Westhead’s Worry

 "Her brain and her body were still so wobbly then. Nothing about her was behaving the way it was supposed to. The birth had been a traumatic one, and she thought she would never heal.” - Jessica Westhead, ...

Prize Season

Earlier this summer, I had the chance to do some writing at the Banff Centre. It was a wonderful experience. I wrote, I slept, I went for long walks through the mountains. I ate too many pieces of cake ...