Manahil BandukwalaTag

Book Launch Season, Part One: Being an Author

In the book world, the arrival of fall usually means the arrival of a whole host of new books to look forward to. And with new books comes book launches, tours, and celebrations—and sometimes it can ...

Things I Didn’t Know About Residencies

Before 2023, I could barely describe what “residency” meant in the realm of writing and art. A residency felt like it was reserved for someone with more writing experience, more books, and just more ...

Literary Secrets

And this is my last post as Writer-in-Residence with Open Book, and I’m grateful to you for reading and revelling in poetry-world with me. I didn’t know how to start this, or how to quantify the month’s ...

Building an Author Website

You don’t need an author website, but it has helped me to have one. The more you start to publish, the more people will want to contact you for interviews, solicitations, and event invitations—and ...

Things you didn’t know you could get funding for

There really is a huge world of funding out there beyond grants for individual writing projects. These professional development grants offer anywhere between $1000 to $12,000 (or even more) for numerous ...

Writing the same poem as everyone else, over and over

If you’re in Southern Ontario you might have spent last week soaking in the sun, switching from sweatpants to shorts, and strolling along a river, lake, stream, etc. I walked along my usual path around ...

Love Poems in the Wild

Moments of love from photos in my camera roll from 2020-present. 1. A heart-shaped piece of limestone from Elora Quarry2. Chalk graffiti reading "Love is the only engine of survival"3. Love Song from ...

Cool-down Time

There’s a third part to the poetry tour series. This post doesn’t have resources or logistical advice, but rather on how to survive the way a book tour suddenly occupies huge parts of your life.In ...

Poetry Tours: Funding

Last time on the WIR blog, I talked about tips for planning a poetry tour, including tips on building a tour from existing events. In this post, I hope to share some resources on funding a poetry tour, ...

Poetry Tours: Planning

Planning a book tour is a lot of work, and it’s the kind of work I dread the most. Events are unpredictable. You can plan and plan, but factors like weather, health, money, and so many others can come ...