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Personal experience and writing skill engage in a warm embrace in the personal essay. They need each other and they know it. In the personal essay the writer carefully and prayerfully chooses to bare their soul to the reader, offering up some ...

The other day I sat in church, two pews back from a young couple with a little girl who has sprouted up in recent weeks, like a tulip. She moved away from their pew, exploring the stand up fan that offered some relief ...

I remembered this week one of the nicest things that happened to me last year. Two writing friends sent me pies. Belinda made them. Wendy paid for them. I remembered this because Wendy Nelles died last week, very young in her early ...

From the moment a fellow student tapped me on my shoulder at the welcome barbecue to tell me I had my shirt on backward, I knew I was in over my head.  Nevertheless, this week I graduated with a Master of Fine ...

It's been a few times now that I've witnessed my friend Patty create beautiful art rather quickly, and unexpectedly, and in front of a room full of people. And every single time there is a moment I have to turn away because I ...

I was a little girl in glasses who would walk home after school without ever looking up. I knew exactly where I was going. My feet knew the way. I wasn’t sad or lost, I was just thinking, worrying about the rocks ...

I have a great friend who has been writing a science fiction novel for years, plotting and plodding, like writers do, especially those involved in such a big work. He was visiting recently with his family and I asked him, like fellow writers always ...

Last night I mustered all my courage and stood in a line of other people who had mustered all their courage, at a wine and cheese at HarperCollins in downtown Toronto. We were lining up to speak to one of several very ...

The other night I witnessed a lovely collaboration play out at a church in downtown Ottawa. Steve Bell, Canadian Christian music icon, sat on stage with his good friend Malcolm Guite, a poet, priest and singer-songwriter from Cambridge. It was Steve who ...

Because sometimes one does things backward and higgledy piggledy, I wrote chapter one of my Master of Fine Arts writing project sixth in line. This made sense to me because I wasn't sure how to launch this baby properly, and I may ...

I just finished -- for now -- a  chapter for my MFA, this one on forgiveness. I usually begin a chapter throwing a whole bunch of stuff into a fresh, clean word document. All my stories that I think will fit, my ...

I was in New York City in January, for my week long residency of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Nonfiction that I'm completing through the University of King's College in Halifax. So was an editor from The Walrus. There were five ...