Category Archives: Writing

Project 366 – Week 6

36/366
my old nemesis
strikes again. grading essays
procrastination

37/366
for dinner: homemade
turkey chili, cornbread, beer
life tastes delicious

38/366
grading grading grad-
ing grading grading grading
grading grading… aughh.

39/366
z z z z z
zz zz zz zz zz zz zz
zzz zzz zzz zzz zzz

40/366
slept thirteen hours and
all I’ve wanted today is
to go back to bed

41/366
dude in front of me
tells his wife it’s ok if
she goes commando

42/366
memory: my high
school bedroom, singing along
to “How Will I Know“

Project 366 – Week 5

29/366
misty air heavy
with other people’s dinners
woodsmoke and damp earth

30/366
fiction, poetry
creative nonfiction, flash
reading submissions

31/366
daily to-do list
always much too ambitious
one item, crossed off

32/366
…have any spare change?
T3s anybody? I
got T3s. Do you…

33/366
he touches her hip
she leans away. PDA
on the number 3.

34/366
nocturnal beasts live
below me. music & food
one a.m. nightly

35/366
so clear I can see
The Eye of the Wind at the
top of Grouse Mountain

A symbiotic relationship

Taking care of the reader isn’t merely a matter of dispensing appropriate facts as necessary. It’s a commitment on a writer’s part to maintain the reader/writer relationship, and to honor the fact that readers co-create the work with their own voices and imaginations. Our works reach fruition through a symbiotic relationship with readers that we must attend to and maintain. If we offer them only a murky, imprecise experience, have we really held up our end of the bargain as writers?

—Steven Wingate

9 Writing Tips

1. Write every day.
2. Even fifteen minutes is long enough to write.
3. Remember that good ideas often come during the revision stage.
4. Don’t binge-write.
5. Keep a commonplace book, inspiration board, scrapbook, or catch-all box to keep track of ideas and images.
6. Consider physical comfort.
7. Down with boredom.
8. Stuck? Go for a walk and read a good book.
9. Have something to say!

—Gretchen Rubin

Different

[W]e need to make a distinction between living alone and being alone, or being isolated, or feeling lonely. These are all different things.

—Eric Klinenberg

Mostly I’m glad for [Daniel] Orozco’s damn good example – of taking your time. Of doing what you do, as very best as you can do it, and shutting out the noise of what everyone else is doing. Of focusing on quality not quantity, which seems an apt, if cliché, mantra for someone who set most of his stories in uninspiring workplace settings. Orozco’s cumulative oeuvre to date, and how it came to be, is itself a resonant narrative, the 10th story of the collection you might say. It speaks to the reader about foraging for a truthful place, a perch of realness, in the midst of and despite the specter of loneliness.

—Sonya Chung

Project 366 – Week 4

22/366
Sunday afternoon
post-run Mad Men marathon
blanket, tea and snacks

23/366
it seems like there must
be an easier way but
maybe there isn’t

24/366
another poem re:
the weather. what can I say?
it’s raining sideways

25/366
must write a haiku
before I crawl into bed
how very meta

26/366 brought to you by Phoebe (mew)
I told you, human
Friskies is so delicious
I eat it all up

27/366
I run like the wind
in my imagination
feet skimming the ground

28/366
dear sidewalk hogs: move.
I am not invisible.
stop being assholes

In which The Globe and Mail notices slow writing…

First there was fast food, then came slow food, followed quickly (!) by every imaginable iteration of the theme: slow cities, slow travel, slow schools, even slow cycling. So it was only a matter of time before slow writing seeped upon the scene.

It happened inconspicuously earlier this month…

—John Barber

insert record screech here

Ahem.