Writing and Teaching Writing: It’s the Same Thing

A few years ago, I was interviewing to find a new writing teacher for our arts camp. One applicant told me in the interview: It’s good that teaching positions exist because when you can’t make enough money in the arts, teaching is the next best way to make money. Wrong. If an artist views teaching as financial fallback, then I would question how they define what it means to be an artist. As A.L.Kennedy puts it in her excellent book on writing, being an artist may be HARD, but it’s also a privilege. Privileges carry responsibilities. And those include the responsibility to inspire. We inspire by writing, making art, acting… but by creating, we also open a dialogue. We speak to our readers and to [...]

2015-09-08T14:20:15-04:00September 8, 2015|Life at Centauri, On Writing, The Finding Place, Young Writers!|
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The Finding Place: Book Launch Announced!

Join us as we celebrate the launch of The Finding Place! I’ll be there to share a reading from the book, and there will also be a photographic display of all the locations in China featured in the novel. Signed copies will be available for purchase and we’ll be celebrating with food and music! When?      Sunday 20 September, starting 4pm. Where?     Centauri Arts Academy, Studio 218A, 2323 Bloor Street West, Toronto (this is a short walk East of Jane subway; parking is available. We hope to see you there!

2015-09-07T19:01:46-04:00September 7, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, The Finding Place, Young Writers!|
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The Finding Place: Ten Days to Go!

Each day, for the next ten days, I will be posting a Behind-the-Scenes glimpse at one part of The Finding Place. These blogs will conclude with the release of my novel, ten days from now! Raizel’s Chocolate Shop Kelly’s special friend in The Finding Place is a girl by the name of Raizel. Even in the earliest draft of the novel her personality and her unusual name were very clear to me. However, her home wasn’t featured in the novel as it is now. Instead, the girls met to chat in a coffee shop that might easily have been Starbucks, or Second Cup. They drank hot chocolate, sitting opposite each other, and discussed their absent dads. There was something wrong with all this, but it [...]

2015-09-05T19:30:29-04:00September 5, 2015|On Writing, The Finding Place|
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The Finding Place: The Books have Arrived!

We hit another important milestone with The Finding Place yesterday when many, many boxes of books were shipped from the printer’s to the warehouse at Red Deer Press. I drove up to their offices immediately to collect my author copies. How thrilling it was to hold the book in my hands for the first time! Visiting Red Deer Press itself was equally exciting: being introduced to everyone who works there, seeing displays of all the wonderful books they have published… and then realising The Finding Place was displayed among them! It’s hard to believe, at times, that this is really happening. During our visit, I was asked to sit at an oak desk and sign copies of my book. This was, of course, the very [...]

2015-08-29T17:56:02-04:00August 29, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, The Finding Place|
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The Finding Place – Front Cover!

What a thrilling moment, to see the front cover of your novel for the very first time! And here it is. The background shows the Karst Peaks around Yangshuo, a magical landscape that features prominently in the novel.  

2015-05-15T16:10:45-04:00May 15, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, Parenting, The Finding Place, Uncategorized, Young Writers!|
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About ‘The Finding Place’

The Finding Place is about that greatest, messiest, most essential of all things: family. Kelly didn’t have the greatest start to life. Like tens of thousands of baby girls in China, she spent her first few months in an orphanage. She will never know why her birth parents couldn’t raise her – but poverty, and China’s one child policy, likely played a part. Kelly was adopted into a loving family at ten months old and for almost thirteen years lived the life of a typical North American kid. She may have wondered, occasionally, about her birth parents and birth culture, but she had parents who loved her, and she felt happy and secure. All that changed shortly after her thirteenth birthday when Kelly’s dad walked [...]

2015-05-14T23:20:34-04:00May 14, 2015|On Writing, The Finding Place, Young Writers!|
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Creative Writing: Unplugging to Recharge

I have just finished reading Michael Harris’ wonderful and thought-provoking book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Harris encourages us to take a close look at what we might be losing, as all things technological and wired encroach upon our daily lives. He argues that we are moving toward knowledge and away from wisdom, that ‘manic disruption’ and the type of multitasking our wired lives encourage can lead to incredible stress. Having worked with thousands of teens over the years I would also argue that it leads to anxiety, depression, social insecurity and a host of other problems. I was thinking about Harris’ book as my writing students walked the labyrinth in High Park on Monday evening, [...]

2015-05-07T02:16:28-04:00May 7, 2015|Life at Centauri, On Writing, Parenting, Young Writers!|
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Creative Writing: It All Begins with the Daydream

Do we day dream enough these days? Do we tell ourselves stories in our heads for our own entertainment? See something unusual and ask ourselves, what if? Perhaps not. Ten years ago, perhaps twenty, we all had so-called dead time in our days. The walk to work or school. The moments spent relaxing in a bath. Time on public transit. Time spent waiting. And none of it was wasted. We day dreamed. Made plans. Formulated possible futures in our heads to see what they might look like. We imagined, and out of those imaginings ideas were born – some big, some to be discarded or smiled at, all of them worthwhile. These days, dead time has been killed. We fill it with texting, checking emails, [...]

2015-05-05T01:32:26-04:00May 5, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, Parenting, Young Writers!|
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Creative Writing: Getting Surreal

Recently, at the Centauri Arts Academy, I’ve been using surrealist experiments as a part of the writing workshops. Most people take writing workshops for one of three reasons. The first two are usually evident to them: they want to learn techniques that will help make them better writers, and they want to share their work to get help with the editing process. But there is a third reason that writing workshops can be a huge help to young or emerging writers: they help us to identify what inspires us, how and when we are at our most creative, and under what conditions we write best. Discussion with like-minded people is a great way to discover many of these things about ourselves. So are surrealist writing [...]

2015-04-24T00:22:19-04:00April 24, 2015|Home Page, On Writing, Young Writers!|
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