In the Whiteshell last weekend, at the gorgeous and oh-so-welcoming Falcon Trails Resort, I wrote with eleven other women during the Wild Writing in the Boreal retreat Donna Besel and I co-taught. I went a bit wild, too – thanks to a singalong, fantastic company, and too much homemade Hutterite Colony wine… Lucky for me, that […]
I’ve been thinking about fun lately. Seems strange, given the state of the world. Ugh. But something has shifted in me (if you’re a regular reader, you’ve probably read that before… insert self-deprecating chuckle here…) Maybe it’s the result of the last few years, learning over and over again how fragile life is, how short. […]
Last Friday night seems so long ago. Since then, I’ve been catching what I can of the events at our city’s extraordinary writers’ festival and also trying to negotiate the rising, rollicking tides of anger I feel at what’s happening in the U.S. (see my Twitter feed)… Looking back, last Friday seems like a respite, […]
….for the many emails, comments and congratulatory messages after my news last week about my next novel. This Has Nothing To Do With You is the title but, of course, it has everything to do with you: the readers, the ones who will bring the story to life! I would have liked to respond to […]
Well, it’s official! News about my next novel has hit the internet…. This Has Nothing To Do With You will be published by Freehand Books in Fall 2019! Here’s the tweet from Freehand, making it official (click on the image to go to the announcement on my agent’s site). I’m so, so, so (SO) excited […]
Magical Juggling by Jennifer Farquhar Mother to three kids, one of whom is a night-nursing toddler. Half-time elementary school teacher. Squeezing in work late at night until my eyes burn, because there’s no other time to do it. Every single one of the readers here can match, if not trump, my busy-ness, am I right? […]
Day after day of dazzling sunshine has lately lifted my spirits. It helps too that I sent off my poetry manuscript to the publisher this week and that the birds are back. Purple finches and dark-eyed juncos at our backyard feeder. White pelicans crowding the Red River. Hawks, eagles, and, of course, robins. A multitude […]
For the past few nights I’ve been waking up at 1:13 a.m. In the spare room, I’ve kept a sort of vigil – reading, thinking, crying, making lists of things I have to do, trying to make plans. If I’m lucky, I’ll write. On Saturday night, I re-wrote the whole plot line of my current […]
I’ve been returning to the roots of writing practice lately. To the book I bought and cracked open as I was crossing the Georgia Strait between Tsawwassen and Vancouver Island on my way to Salt Spring Island, circa 1993. Back then, as I read the first pages of Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, a pair […]
I’m stuck on Chapter Four. Partly because I’ve spent the past five days working to eradicate some of the beige that covers every wall (well, except for bathroom’s combo of ’80s aqua and stark white and the kitchen’s half-and-half neon yellow and, again, stark white) in our new-to-us home. All the while, my mind’s been […]