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 […]

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 […]

Writing Through the Pandemic

So… how are you? I mean it. How are you? In my quiet household, where the animals don’t seem to be aware that anything’s wrong (except for Mowat’s amped-up need for evening cuddles as I watch The National), we are muddling along. Talking every day with my mom, texting with my mother-in-law who is in […]

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 […]