“If you love it, you can learn it”: Dave Bidini on writing
“It’s part of the artist’s job: to see and sense things that other people are just too busy to notice.” Author, columnist and songwriter/musician Dave Bidini‘s memoir On a Cold Road: Tales of Adventure in Canadian Rock (read an excerpt here) was recently chosen as one of five finalists for CBC’s Canada Reads: True Stories [...]
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
Writing “Home First: A Memoir in Voices”
Guest Post by Susan Siddeley I love writing: fashioning sentences, crafting a tale, getting feedback. A nightmare for me is to be stranded in a queue with no pen or paper, where nothing is moving, yet life suddenly makes sense. Backing sixpenny notebooks with brown paper and scribbling about blackbirds, bluebells, and earwigs when I [...]
Friday, November 4th, 2011
“The Boy in the Moon”: Love Letter to a Son, Voice for the Disabled
Guest Post by Mary E. McIntyre Twenty-one years ago, my brother and his wife had twin sons with cerebral palsy. The son who was more severely affected died at 17 years, of complications from his disability. The remaining twin is wheelchair bound, unable to look after his physical needs. Though he can talk slowly and [...]
Thursday, October 20th, 2011
Claire Dederer: Taking her memoir voice out for a spin
Claire Dederer’s memoir, Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses, published in January by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is structured around her developing relationship with yoga and the insights she has gleaned from her practice. Her wry and sincere writing style elevates her book above the typical “yoga saved my life” story. Claire didn’t need [...]
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
New Writers’ Organization Launches in York Region
Whether you’re a writer or aspiring writer, an editor, a publisher, or an avid reader—or several of the above—WCYR, a new writers’ organization in York Region, has something to offer you. The Writers’ Community of York Region (WCYR) launches Sunday, October 2, in Aurora, with a workshop, luncheon and guest speaker. And while registration for this [...]
Thursday, September 29th, 2011
Memoir of Growing Up Black in 1950s: 1st Runner-up
Toronto-based writer Lynette Dathorne’s story “Scenes from My Youth,” an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, has been named first runner-up in the Nonfiction category of the annual OASIS Journal anthology competition in Tucson, Arizona. “Scenes from My Youth” will be Lynette’s first published story. “The year was 1953,” she says, “and the focus of my submission was [...]
Monday, September 26th, 2011
