Great Uncle Ben drove his shiny Cadillac all the way from El Paso to Montreal. He brought his new camera to take pictures of our family. Nana says he’s a hero but he doesn’t look like one – he’s kind of old and bald. My sister’s eleven and...
Canada Writes is currently hosting a competition called Bloodlines, judged by Lawrence Hill, where writers are invited to share stories/lore/anecdotes from their family archives. I thought immediately about the Wild West stories my grandmother told, but could only...
There is ongoing dialogue regarding the relative efficacy of academic versus more experiential approaches to developing the creative process. And I would like to go on record as one who is bursting with gratitude for alternative methods of learning. I learned...
Recently I was speaking to Barbara Turner-Vesselago, author of Writing without a Parachute – The Art of Freefall and writing teacher extraordinaire, about the requirements and cost of writing memoir. In an upcoming article for the WCDR’s Word Weaver magazine,...
In the first session of our memoir writing course, we were asked to spend a few moments writing down what we imagined we were going to write about. Here’s my run-on rundown: This story is about my time with Osho, from the first whisper of words that cracked my...
As I sat listening to Hilary McMahon speak this morning at the WCDR breakfast I heard her say almost word for word what I heard Samantha Haywood say two years ago at the Ontario Writers’ Conference: that non fiction sells more easily than fiction, and that if...
