WritingTag
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May 03, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?
Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...
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May 01, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1
It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...
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April 28, 2023
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 ...
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April 18, 2023
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 ...
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March 28, 2023
Painting a Story: Danila Botha on Writing and Painting
Since I was a kid, I’ve always painted. I’ve painted through every age of my life, through every possible emotion. I’ve painted when I was ecstatic and needed to share the feeling, I’ve painted ...
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January 31, 2023
Writing Goals for 2023
I love the clean slate of a new year—the new, unsullied notebooks, the expanse of the year stretching out full of potential, and how everything feels possible. As I was thinking about what I wanted ...
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December 19, 2022
The year’s writing wins
I love a good December retrospective. I love looking back on the year and creating a highlight reel—favourite books, best swims, most listened to songs, best cake I made, best TV show I watched...But, ...
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September 29, 2022
On Listening to Music and Writing a Novel
Do you listen to music as you write? I often do, particularly when writing a short story, but it has been several months since I typed the night away with a melody playing in the background. At this moment, ...
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September 22, 2022
A Thousand More Lives: On Reading
I recently stumbled across an article written by Umberto Eco in Rome in 1991, translated into Spanish by Jorge Cruz and published in the Argentinean newspaper La Nación, explaining why he believed that ...
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September 18, 2022
Plant a tree, have a child, write a book? Not so fast!
“Plant a tree, have a child, write a book.” Whether it was Cuban poet and freedom fighter José Martí or some other worthy who first uttered this maxim is irrelevant. What matters is its message: ...