The Artisanal Writer

03/01/2025

Apply Now! Deadline extended to March 31....

Apply Now! Deadline extended to March 31.

03/01/2025

At one point, I was pulled aside and asked if I thought my “brain thing” was due to my dad’s mental health. While I remained calm, avoiding eye-contact and mumbling something about my “brain thing” being a genetic mutation, I began to focus on swallowing any emotions that may be perceived as wrong....

At one point, I was pulled aside and asked if I thought my “brain thing” was due to my dad’s mental health. While I remained calm, avoiding eye-contact and mumbling something about my “brain thing”…

03/01/2025

A lot of the poems in the collection relate to physical spaces -- dwellings, markets, villages, cities, hills -- straddling between continents, atmospheres, cultures and time periods. They raise questions like whether dislocating from one place and relocating to another can really be permanent, except maybe in material terms....

A lot of the poems in the collection relate to physical spaces — dwellings, markets, villages, cities, hills — straddling between continents, atmospheres, cultures and time periods. The…

03/01/2025

The craft challenge of this novel was always going to be the integration of the father’s history from 1948 with the son’s journey in the “present” of the novel in the early 2000’s. There’s narrative material from each. And I thought we needed both to unroll in a continuous way. And the result is a kind of narrative dovetail joint that extends through the structure of the novel....

The craft challenge of this novel was always going to be the integration of the father’s history from 1948 with the son’s journey in the “present” of the novel in the early 2000’s. There’s narrativ…

03/01/2025

Many of the social scripts that impinge on our lives are outlandish fantasies...we live under the weight of fantasies about how our bodies are meant to look and function, what our relationships are meant to be like, what s*x is meant to be like, what a successful life trajectory looks like...so a book like Look Who’s Morphing can dare us to ask: What fantasies are more outlandish and groundless?...

Many of the social scripts that impinge on our lives are outlandish fantasies…we live under the weight of fantasies about how our bodies are meant to look and function, what our relationships…

03/01/2025

A story need not begin or end at any specific point in the protagonist’s life, or any plot-relevant point at all. The world simply exists, and the reader sees the world. Like your year, in which likely no monumental experience will begin exactly at 12:00AM on January 1 and end exactly at 11:59PM on December 31, there is no tidy beginning or end to a fictional character’s experiences....

A story need not begin or end at any specific point in the protagonist’s life, or any plot-relevant point at all. The world simply exists, and the reader sees the world. Like your year, in which li…

12/21/2024

What I love about knitting is that it’s tactile, that it’s a simple technology—two sticks and a string—that can create something beautiful. It’s slow, but unlike the other two major aspects of my life—parenting and writing—I can see progress and my mistakes instantly. It’s simple yet immediately gratifying. Writing has a similar magical quality—just words on a page....

What I love about knitting is that it’s tactile, that it’s a simple technology—two sticks and a string—that can create something beautiful. It’s slow, but unlike the other two major aspects of my l…

12/21/2024

The story is this: there’s a Husband and Wife and adolescent twin boys in a home in the forest. The deck is crooked and the house is full of the half-finished projects of busy parents. In the dark winter months, this Wife feels trapped in a valley under a cloud. In the summer, I’m still in awe we even get to live here, facing a wild river as we do....

The story is this: there’s a Husband and Wife and adolescent twin boys in a home in the forest. The deck is crooked and the house is full of the half-finished projects of busy parents. In the dark w…

12/21/2024

I do many drafts, the last ones simply to refine the language. It’s not just the plot that should draw the reader through the story, but the actual rhythm of the words and sentences....

12/21/2024

I was fortunate to grow up in a predominantly oral and aural culture, which meant I paid close attention to sound, rhythm, phrasing, and cadence. This is not to say that India had no emphasis on the visual: far from the truth. But where Canadians my age had television, I had a radio....

I was fortunate to grow up in a predominantly oral and aural culture, which meant I paid close attention to sound, rhythm, phrasing, and cadence. This is not to say that India had no emphasis on th…

12/21/2024

For me, writing is a process of seeking or looking for what’s hidden. I rarely understand what the poem is about while I’m writing it. I think it’s the ‘hereness’ of these directly experienced details: something touched, felt, particular observations, that make the poem tangible and transmittable to the reader. These aren’t things I can make up, and I think they help the poem become more inhabitable and grounded....

For me, writing is a process of seeking or looking for what’s hidden. I rarely understand what the poem is about while I’m writing it. I think it’s the ‘hereness’ of these directly experienced deta…

12/21/2024

I wanted to explore the disruptive kind of repetition in this book while staying true to mundane forms in our lives. When you look at a photograph across time, what happens when you pile your seeing on top of the other over time? What do you do when it feels that the seeing (or feeling) doesn’t seem to change, but you’ve accumulated those layers as sediments over time?...

I wanted to explore the disruptive kind of repetition in this book while staying true to mundane forms in our lives. When you look at a photograph across time, what happens when you pile your seein…

12/21/2024

In this collection I’m aiming to make links between labour that is apparently unphilosophical, like manual or tractor work and philosophical, scholarly work. I’ve always been struck but how much knowledge and wisdom slips from the pleats and knots in, say, growing lettuce, knitting a sweater, hanging a door....

11/04/2024

When I was writing Her Body Among Animals, I was very aware that I wanted to write about really hard truths that involve women and the boundaries placed on their bodies; postpartum anxiety, domestic abuse, women who are not acknowledged when they are having a mental health crisis....

When I was writing Her Body Among Animals, I was very aware that I wanted to write about really hard truths that involve women and the boundaries placed on their bodies; postpartum anxiety, domesti…

11/04/2024

Over Zoom calls, Stella and I came to understand each other and our collaboration blossomed. I researched blogs, books and read everything I could about creating sequential art which a difficult art form. Many drawings didn’t make the grade. I noticed many similarities between writing a novel and creating character sketches....

Over Zoom calls, Stella and I came to understand each other and our collaboration blossomed. I researched blogs, books and read everything I could about creating sequential art which a difficult ar…

11/04/2024

Realia specifically responds to the amazing work of Jan Zwicky and Jorie Graham; their sheer intelligence, inventive gifts and unrelentingly attentive eye on ecological devastation is something pretty well every poem speaks to and with....

Realia specifically responds to the amazing work of Jan Zwicky and Jorie Graham; their sheer intelligence, inventive gifts and unrelentingly attentive eye on ecological devastation is something pre…

11/04/2024

The Artisanal Writer would like to thank and the Government of Ontario for their funding support of The Wisdom Project. The Wisdom Project is a fully funded memoir writing workshop for Ontario seniors. This OAC funding allows us to continue promoting new Canadian writers awaiting readers across Ontario, and the country!

The Artisanal Writer would like to thank and the Government of Ontario for their funding support of The Wisdom Project. The Wisdom Project is a fully funded memoir writing works…

11/04/2024

For Bad Land, it was important to me to capture the eeriness of the landscape in order to cultivate a gothic tone and create an unsettling tension that would sustain the mystery that stretches across the first half of the book. But it was equally interesting to think about how the badlands are known for the relics that are deeply buried below their surface....

For Bad Land, it was important to me to capture the eeriness of the landscape in order to cultivate a gothic tone and create an unsettling tension that would sustain the mystery that stretches acro…