WritingTag

Grant Writing 101: How to write an artist CV

I know the pools are still open, and we’re still subsisting on popsicles and ice cream truck soft serve, but grant season is coming, and no matter what grant you’re applying for, you’ll need an ...

Adapting an Adult Book Into a Book for Young Readers

I know that young people are reading my 2019 book, because they’ve written me e-mails and messaged me on various social media platforms to tell me where they got it (thank you, libraries) and who they’re ...

Writing Family and Community Stories

Why do we write? Some people want to write the definitive work on a subject. Others want to create new audiences or business potential. Some want to introduce readers to a place or time they wouldn’t ...

Research, Research, Research

I thought I had mended my ways. I thought I had discipline. The evidence is clear: I don’t put all my digital research materials into one folder on my desktop computer anymore. I actually have sub-folders! ...

Bringing It All Back Home

As I write this, I am sitting outside in the backyard of a rowhouse in Toronto’s East End. The wind is stirring the leaves of a big maple tree spreading its branches high above me, and stirring the ...

On Writing in Longhand

I have bad handwriting. I always have. I remember as a child being put through the terrible paces of the Canadian Penmanship books at school, which were intended to teach us to write in cursive (one of ...

Dessert

Outside my window are two strands of spidersilk, about five inches apart, both slanting downwards from left to right at a sharp angle. They move semi-independently in the slight morning breeze, almost ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 5: The Speak o the Mearns

My parents are renters, so we moved houses a lot growing up. How can you expect continuity under those conditions, the steady passage of an uncomplicatedly teleological time? We can’t point to the place ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni

I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"

So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...