Columnists

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 ...

The Surgical Evolution of a Poem

Last spring one of my students confessed that she wasn’t sure what she was writing was real poetry because she didn’t know a lot about technique and form, and she was concerned that her poetic toolbox ...

Act Now to Keep Seasonal Creativity Disorder at Bay!

It’s not winter yet, but as we head into fall it’s starting to get darker earlier. It’s also getting colder. Maybe some days you’ve even wished you’d worn a light scarf or gloves as you walked ...

On Building a House

When I was a young girl throwing myself into books, I I remember how I used to pull random books from library shelves without concern about what the book was about or who wrote it. I ran my hands down ...

The Art of the Deadline

Every word I’m typing right now is late. Not a month late, or even a week late, but three days late. And with every tap, tap, tap on my keyboard, I feel a pang. Anxiety. Guilt. Racing thoughts. Why ...

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 ...