Island Clearances: Behind the Poem

Last spring, I had the great privilege of being mentored by the poet Jan Zwicky at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, along with seven other extraordinary writers. For those two weeks, I sifted through a manuscript-in-process about my great-great-grandparents’ 19th-century migration from present-day St. Catharines, up the Niagara escarpment, to Manitoulin Island. Along the way, […]

A Few Questions About Writing

My friend and colleague Aaron Shepard, author of When is a Man and this thoughtful guest post on my own site, recently asked me to take part in a blog tour happening in the literary community across Canada. He was tagged by fiction writer Julie Paul who was recruited by Alice Zorn. So far, I’ve […]

Transitions

For the past two weeks, I’ve spent my days gazing out a wide window at the Qu’Appelle Valley, watching the highway move cars up/down the hill, to/from Regina, and walking the road onto wide prairie, under the huge, changeable sky. We’ve done amazing things here, we eight poets who arrived at Sage Hill to work […]

Launch Day

Yesterday was the official launch day of my book. It felt incredibly anti-climactic. Not a whole lot new happened, other than my awareness that the book could now be easily ordered – rather than pre-ordered – online or even outright purchased in the bookstores that carry it. But mostly I spent the day typing out […]