Barefoot By Choice

Last night I had a dream that I was at the end of a retreat. It was one of my retreats, through Wild Ground Writing. But instead of hugging people, making plans to reconnect over ZOOM, thanking them, being thanked, I was scrambling around under a table, cleaning up a mess of clutter: papers, craft […]

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 […]

Guest Post: Hurtling Down the Page

By Angilene Gallop After a year-long health crisis that took me completely out of the writing game, I’m on my way back. So, imagine my surprise and pleasure when, during one of Lauren’s Simply Write sessions a full-blown, post-health-crisis writing manifesto emerged. I hope it inspires you as much as it inspires me…  We were […]

The Laurence Prize and Lineage

As a young woman living in Peterborough, Ontario, I never would have thought that one day I’d move to Margaret Laurence’s home province of Manitoba. If a fortune teller had also muttered in my ear that I’d win a prize named after her for my second novel, I might have been skeptical too (yet also […]

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 […]