Late Spring 2020, I began taking photos and shooting short videos in response to rolling bouts of extreme anxiety. It didn’t take long for me to discover that closely observing nature was the best way to calm my frazzled, distressed brain. Week after week, for over a year, I kept up the practice, occasionally sharing some of the images via social media. The other day I decided to dump a bunch of my favourite moments from that experiment into iMovie and wound up with sixteen minutes of what I call “everyday magic.” Nearly all the photos and clips were shot …
Category: the writing life
Cover reveal! Introducing the beautiful new cover of the upcoming paperback edition of my memoir. Notice anything different? Normally, the paperback release of a book happens about a year after the hardcover’s original publication date. Sometimes, the paperback’s cover requires a tweak, an update, or even a complete makeover from the hardcover’s dust jacket. And, occasionally, in extremely rare cases, the book’s original title is changed. Wait, what? My memoir, originally and for-the-moment titled Daughter of Family G : a memoir of cancer genes, love and fate was published late September, 2019. At that time, I went on a cross-Canada …
A few months ago, (which seems like a lifetime ago now) fellow writer Dean Jobb asked me if I’d be willing to give a talk at the University of King’s College in Halifax titled: Why I Write. I happily accepted the invitation and looked forward to spending a Sunday afternoon in June with the students and faculty of the King’s Creative Non-Fiction MFA Residency to discuss the ins and outs of the writing life. Of course we all know what happened next. But rather than cancel the lecture, we carried on virtually—the students and faculty from their respective homes, and …
A slip of paper I stuck in a book three weeks ago as a bookmark (in Elizabeth McCracken’s excellent short story collection: “Thunderstruck”) brought me to tears this morning when I rediscovered it. The simple phrase – “Work together as a society” was the result of an artistic exercize that I gave my Teen Writing Academy students this past summer at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts. During the two week intensive, I challenged the five writers in the Academy to write down 50 things they fear. They, in turn invited their peers to add their fears to the …
How’s your summer been? Mine’s been busy in the best possible sense. When I wasn’t in the garden with the bees, or preparing for my youngest to head off to university, or teaching at the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, I was recording the audiobook version of Daughter of Family G. I knew from the start that it was going to be an interesting journey, especially when we had to enlist the help of two cast iron ravens to steady the stand for the i-Pod I’d be using to read the manuscript. (The fuzzy blue blanket we’d draped over …
Hello Summer—season of wild exquisite light and ideas that require open-hearted courage. The publication date for Daughter of Family G is still three months off, but there’s plenty happening behind the scenes in preparation for the September 24th launch. As the final touches are being added to the cover, I’ve been prepping to record the audio book, and my fabulous publicist at Penguin Random House Canada has been putting together an amazing fall tour. I’ve already posted the details for a few of the events and there will be more added in the weeks to come. So far cities include: …