writing

the obsessive

by

i’ve come to the conclusion that true artists are obsessive.  they live to create, repeating themselves, over and over again.  their work is never done and they are often too shy to show it to many people.  over the years, they follow their subjects, seemingly compelled to explore them from 360 degrees. and they rarely … Read more

shitty first drafts

by

i sorted out my messy story that i sorta kinda completed last weekend. parts of it were okay and others were absolute shit. i don’t know what i was thinking when i wrote some of those words. and that is the process. back and forth, back and forth, advancing slowly to story’s end. it occurs … Read more

i can’t sleep

by

i’m at The Banff Centre and i can’t sleep. it’s too stimulating. i’m writing my brains out and, all night long, i lie in my bed in a half-awake, half-asleep state. the radiators tell me that somewhere in this building a baby is crying. it’s all good.

vulnerability

by

i reworked an old essay of mine titled “MEmory” and shortened it so i could submit to CBC Creative Nonfiction contest.  it was difficult to do for a variety of reasons, mostly emotional.  it’s an essay about my grief after my Mom died and, in it, i’m as honest as i can be.  this kind … Read more

i avoid personal stories

by

and i don’t know why beyond fear.  and conditioning.  but every once in a while my stories show up inside my fiction and it’s always a surprise.  it happens when i’m in flow.  yesterday i wrote about changing my mom’s dressings for the first time, hands shaking.  oh, i placed the scene inside a story … Read more

the marginalized short-story cycle

by

i’m working my short-story cycle through Humber College and the structure of it has got me thinking: i don’t know a fucking thing about the structure of a short-story cycle. sure, there’s the various structures for stories that i’ve experienced, largely by a combination of trial and error, modelling, and falling into something by accident. … Read more

i’m honoured

by

that one of my stories has been nominated for a National Magazine Award for fiction. the story is titled ‘The Suitable Dress’ and it ran in the summer 2012 edition of GRAIN Magazine (39.4). not only is it a pleasure to have published in GRAIN, but this nomination is an honour. http://www.grainmagazine.ca/archive.html  

object memory

by

i read a book recently that is lingering.  THE HARE WITH AMBER EYES by Edmund De Waal is a family memoir that traces the secret lives of tiny Japanese wood and ivory carvings, called netsuke through his family history. historically, it’s significant.  yet there’s something fascinating about De Waal’s obsession with the object that’s captured … Read more

dear alice #7

by

dear alice, a writer friend and i talked about modeling your writing to see how it works and agreed it wasn’t a paragraph or page that would work, that we’d have to model an entire story and, you know, some of your stories are pretty long, Alice.  not that there’s anything wrong with that. that … Read more

listerature

by

wrote a list story for a contest:  http://www.littlefiction.com/beta/Listerature.html ListOphelia.  it was harder than i anticipated and i struggled to find an ending as a point.  however, in the end, i had 24 points and the final one involved a lost train ticket.  punk Ophelia infatuated with Hamlet’s pale skin.  knocked up and can’t get out … Read more