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I never ever start with a full-fledged idea of the story in its entirety. I start with language. Not even a whole sentence. It’s as if the writing literally flows out of my fingertips as much as out of my brain. I am wildly envious of people who are able to plan out their stories and then when they can catch a moment, they pour the whole thing onto paper in one shot.

Okay Booknet, you can stop throwing things anytime you want. I don’t really know if you can vilify them, or not, but I know they have Google alert because I’ve written about them before. Fine, I get it, agents scour Booknet to see how crappy my sales are and then sign some canoe paddling Canadian forest ranger who stubbed their toe in Manitoba and was lost in the woods for four hours. I get it. I’m not anti-Booknet, I just thought I’d be relevant.

“We’ve invited her since the beginning of the festival, but to no avail,” Arnold said in an interview at the festival kickoff news conference. “Last January, I was at the airport in Toronto going through customs. I was with a friend who looked back and saw Margaret Atwood. I started shaking and hyperventilating, grabbed a business card out of my wallet, went up to her, told her I was a huge fan and invited her to come.
Alan Cochrane/Times Transcript

I think the role of the writer, like the role of any artist, should be self-defined. To me it seems that the writer’s role is to look at the world and try to see what it is, and then to create something out of that investigation. A novel is an intimate form that can explore interior landscapes in a way that other forms, even film, struggle awkwardly to describe. My aim is to exploit that power.

Writing poems is not just a matter of sitting in front of the computer; it also involves living a life, going to work, doing the dishes. Perhaps the real question is how we arrange our lives so that we live as fully and as interestingly as possible?

If you were ever a teenaged badass in Montreal, the girl version, you will know Lee Goodstone. He’s the kind of dealer you can befriend with ease; he’ll smoke you up for the exchange of his appreciative glances and harness the kind of wit an adolescent girl will swoon for in its cynical wisdom, and later recognize as trite.
Zoe Whittall reviews You comma Idiot for Globe and Mail

“This journal is a glimpse of him as a young man,” said Behne, who is in the process of writing Adney’s biography in addition to editing his journals. “Adney has become my obsession,” Behne continued, comparing his fascination with the journal author to Adney’s fixation with canoes. “I realized I think about him every day. I really enjoy the work, discovering more about him. I get a pleasure through telling stories about him and watching the light come on.”
Michelle Della Serra/Berkeley Heights Patch

You do have to wade through the mud to get to the gems. Don Cornelius did wonderful work creating and producing the show, but we don’t need so much of him hosting, all the standard intros and animation openings included. If those had been cut out, it would have made for a faster-paced, more watchable product on DVD.

“Do you think your mother will want to save his glasses or his false teeth? They take those out prior to cremation.” I have to be at work, behind a counter, in about an hour and a half. I will have to answer this question: “How’s it going today?” This will happen many times.

First, is art merely a hobby? For some, probably. But for those who take it seriously, it is not. Art takes tremendous determination, practice and time for it to evolve. I can only speak of writing because that is the artistic discipline I practice: much study needs to be undertaken to learn elements of craft (style, metaphor, prosody, etc.) and then much time needs to be spent to develop. A hobby is something done in spare time; art is, in many ways, an employment.