Feb
05
Here's something a little different for this Wordless Wednesday. The African-American woman in this photo is famous. Do you know who she is? If you do -- or think you may -- please comment below. On the far left is my maternal grandmother, Evelyn (Northfield) Jeffrey. The photo was taken in the late...
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Feb
05
A couple of weeks ago I posted a quote from Lucy Maud Montgomery's autobiography The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, along with three exercise questions to encourage you to write about a place, or places, special in your memory. Sandra Shaw Homer liked the idea, and surprised me...
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Jan
30
From Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson: "Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text? The photographer frames the shot; writers frame...
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Jan
23
From Lucy Maud Montgomery's slim memoir The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1997), originally published as a series of essays in the Toronto magazine Everywoman's World in 1917, and as a book in 1975: "I have never drawn any of my book people from life. The exception...
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Jan
16
From Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer's Notebook by Timothy Findley (Toronto: Harper Perennial Canada, 1999; first edition Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 1990) "Stone Orchard November 11, 1970 Radio In the plays of Anton Chekhov, there is always a moment of profound silence, broken by the words: “I remember ...” What...
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Jan
09
Happy new year, everyone! I hope you've plunged into 2013 keen to begin, or carry on, writing. Coming up, new teaching initiatives for me include full-day introductory memoir workshops at Koffler Centre of the Arts creative writing retreats in...
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