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Confessions Of A Professional Liar
It’s true, I am a compulsive liar. Of course I could be lying about that too. And if I am telling the truth, then I am not a compulsive liar. This kind of paradox is so typical when it comes to issues...
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Heart Murmur
At one of our Descant meetings, Robin Elliot, a former co-editor, made a guest appearance. She is now Executive Director of the MurmurToronto project. Passersby in various Toronto areas, when they see...
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The Narrator’s Voice
During the Summer Writing Workshop at the Humber School for Writers, they had organized a three-minute student reading night. Somehow, my name ended up at the front of the queue. Most of instructors...
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Sign of A Survivor
The pioneers of Vancouver’s Chinatown had taught Wayson Choy: ”Survivors pay attention to signs.” And in many ways he has benefitted from this wisdom. His writing career had two auspicious starts. The...
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Courage of Lions
I recall hearing Mavis Gallant once talking about her beginnings as a writer. In 1950 she was a reporter for the Montreal Standard when she packed up her pearls and Channel suits and ran off to Paris...
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A Dialogue with a Dramatist
Colleen Murphy is an award-winning playwright, an actor, editor, director and an opera librettist. Somehow, she manages to find time to teach the art of scriptwriting. I sat down with Colleen for a...
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Copycats and Copyrights
Writing workshops open up many fears for new writers. One of them is submitting copies of original work to complete strangers. I have been in workshops where not all students handed back a critiqued...
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The Soul of a Nation
The first sight anyone sailing into Copenhagen catches is the statue of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy-tale character The Little Mermaid. For visitors from North America, this stone tribute to a...
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Ten Submission Missteps to Avoid
Once a month we at Descant have our ‘reading session’ when we try, like a dog and his tail, to catch-up with our submissions. We receive about a thousand envelopes a year, packed with poems, fiction,...
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Confessions of an OAC Juror
Dickens did not take critique very well either. The e-mail appeared in my inbox along with the usual make-money-from- home spam. It seemed I had been chosen to be a juror for the Ontario Arts Council....
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