“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
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
The World and How We Make Our Way Through It
Profile: Travel Writer Erin Van Rheenen Erin Van Rheenen has done an impressive amount of globe-trotting and living abroad, and writing about both—especially for someone who says her earliest travel memory mostly involved crying. But then, she was only three years old when her mother and father, a Peace Corps doctor, moved the family from [...]
Monday, August 29th, 2011
“Simply Plunge Ahead. Writing Is an Adventure”: Interview with Beth Powning (Part 2)
Read Part 1 of this interview. Twice Beth has been guest author for my University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies online course Memories into Story: Introduction to Life Writing, and I edited her memoir Edge Seasons (Knopf Canada, 2005). The following are questions some of my students asked Beth after reading three of her [...]
Friday, August 19th, 2011
“Simply Plunge Ahead. Writing Is an Adventure”: Interview with Beth Powning (Part 1)
“Don’t ever prejudge yourself or the possible outcome of what you are going to do…. You might start writing something, and it twists and turns, and you end up in an entirely different place.” — Beth Powning, memoirist and novelist Twice Beth has been guest author for my University of Toronto, School of Continuing Studies [...]
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011
The Best Ideas Always Come from the Act of Writing
TAKE-5 Interview with Author and Poet Dan Gilmore by Allyson Latta DAN GILMORE has published a novel, A Howl for Mayflower (Imago Press, 2006), and two collections of stories and poems,Season Tickets (Pima Press, 2003), and Love Takes a Bow (Imago Press, 2010). He has received awards from the Raymond Carver Fiction Contest, the Martindale Fiction Contest, and Sandscript. [...]
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
