The Power of 10 Minutes

Ten minutes. Start with that. Last month, at our annual invigorating Wild Writing in the Boreal retreat, I found myself suggesting it often. One participant said, Yes, because then you’ll keep going. If you do 10, you’ll do 20, even an hour. Maybe, I replied. But you can also just fill those 10 minutes. It […]

Poetry and PPE

I’ve been writing a lot lately – that’s what happens when you commit to pick up the pen pretty much every day, for at least twenty minutes. Some fiction (one of the prompts that I gave in one of my live-streaming sessions through my Write Ramble Facebook group was to write about mud and that […]

Introducing… the Pandemic Response Reading Series

This slow morning, the cat gets us up with his insistent meowing to be fed. J. and I take care of the animals, then recline on the couch for coffee. We watch the snow slanting out of a purple-grey sky and talk about narrow-boating in Yorkshire canals (reminiscing over the ‘journey’ we went on during […]

One Day At A Time

One of my mantras when I’m working on long-term writing projects is a single word. Patience.  I mutter this to myself often as I’m writing through a first draft and, once that’s completed, when I have to type up whole novels written in longhand in notebooks. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of […]

The Magic of the Retreat

I’ve been lucky to attend lots of retreats. There was a silent, five-day Vipassana meditation retreat back home in Ontario a couple of decades ago, and the memorable Sage Hill Writing Experience in 2014, where I spent two weeks working with an amazing group of women and poet Jan Zwicky. At that one, apart from […]