I’ve moved around a lot in the past decade, and I’ve had to cull my writing friends from a number of different sources. The first time I joined an actual writing group was when I moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and found one through Meetup that was only a few minutes from my children’s school. In many ways, Just Write changed my life. I had started a…
I am so excited to welcome former Deb Lara Lillibridge back to the ball this week! I feel as though I’ve known Lara forever, although I suppose it’s been less than a year. She was the deb from last year who first emailed me to ask if I would like to be one of this year’s five, so let’s just say I’ve been fond of her ever since. She…
I could not be more thrilled to be hosting author Roselle Lim this week on the Ball! I’ve been waiting many months for her magical debut, Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune, to come out, and now it’s almost here! Roselle Lim was born in the Philippines and immigrated to Canada as a child. She lived in north Scarborough in a diverse, Asian neighbourhood. She found her love of…
I’m always interested in talking about formal education when it comes to the arts, because these are vocations for which anything goes—you can study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, or you can paint in a completely naïve, unschooled manner, learning everything by feel, and the validity of your art will not necessarily be affected. You will simply invite different kinds of judgement. I always go…
This week’s topic: “MFA vs NYC vs Choose Your Own Adventure.” Aloha. What if my writing education has been all three? I confess I’m a bit of a professional student. I love to be in a class, I love to have homework and get direction. The underlying motivation all throughout my writing life has been my desire to find community and gain skills, to chip away at a steady pace….
Because my release day fell on my birthday, I’ve already written a little about writing and age. One of the best things about writing, I believe, is that you can do it at any age. It belongs to you at any age. As long as you want to put words on paper, you can, although how you approach it might change. How it affects you, and what it…
There aren’t a lot of Easter eggs in The Dream Peddler, but I can think of a couple of things that most readers wouldn’t pick up on—they’re just there for me, or for anyone who happens to have the specific knowledge you would require to get my meaning. The first is a small thing having to do with naming. I had a really hard time getting through…
I’ve lived in a number of different places across Canada and the United States, and I think to some extent I’ve absorbed something from each of them that colors my writing in some way, but I honestly never gave much thought to that until I sat down to write this post. The first thing that seems to influence me is being Canadian. I have a penchant for describing long,…
Like most writers, I’ve been an avid reader since the day I learned to read, and some of my fondest childhood memories are of the independent book stores I frequented with my family. Every time we visited the small town in Ontario where my grandparents lived, for instance, a visit to the bookstore was in order. My parents would let my brother and me browse for ages and…
I could not be more thrilled to welcome this week’s guest, Kirstin Chen, to the debutante ball! Kirstin Chen’s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take, was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the author of Soy Sauce for Beginners. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, the…
