The Finding Place – Front Cover!
What a thrilling moment, to see the front cover of your novel for the very first time! And here it is. The background shows the Karst Peaks around Yangshuo, a magical landscape that features prominently in the novel.
About ‘The Finding Place’
The Finding Place is about that greatest, messiest, most essential of all things: family. Kelly didn’t have the greatest start to life. Like tens of thousands of baby girls in China, she spent her first few months in an orphanage. She will never know why her birth parents couldn’t raise her – but poverty, and China’s one child policy, likely played a part. Kelly was adopted into a loving family at ten months old and for almost thirteen years lived the life of a typical North American kid. She may have wondered, occasionally, about her birth parents and birth culture, but she had parents who loved her, and she felt happy and secure. All that changed shortly after her thirteenth birthday when Kelly’s dad walked […]
Creative Writing: Unplugging to Recharge
I have just finished reading Michael Harris’ wonderful and thought-provoking book, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection. Harris encourages us to take a close look at what we might be losing, as all things technological and wired encroach upon our daily lives. He argues that we are moving toward knowledge and away from wisdom, that ‘manic disruption’ and the type of multitasking our wired lives encourage can lead to incredible stress. Having worked with thousands of teens over the years I would also argue that it leads to anxiety, depression, social insecurity and a host of other problems. I was thinking about Harris’ book as my writing students walked the labyrinth in High Park on Monday evening, […]
Creative Writing: It All Begins with the Daydream
Do we day dream enough these days? Do we tell ourselves stories in our heads for our own entertainment? See something unusual and ask ourselves, what if? Perhaps not. Ten years ago, perhaps twenty, we all had so-called dead time in our days. The walk to work or school. The moments spent relaxing in a bath. Time on public transit. Time spent waiting. And none of it was wasted. We day dreamed. Made plans. Formulated possible futures in our heads to see what they might look like. We imagined, and out of those imaginings ideas were born – some big, some to be discarded or smiled at, all of them worthwhile. These days, dead time has been killed. We fill it with texting, checking emails, […]
10 Ways to Raise Great Readers
1. Read aloud together. Tell stories. Share stories. Make this a family activity. Relaxing, stillness, contemplation and shared experiences are essential in today’s hectic world. Families and communities have shared stories for thousands of years. Stories swapped, shared and discussed have always been an essential cultural pursuit. There are so many other demands on our time these days – but stories are as essential to the passing on wisdom – and the cementing of attachments – today as they have always been. 2. Make quiet time for reading. TV, MSN, surfing the web, texting, social media, video games… these activities often require less mental energy than reading a book. Set aside quiet time each day for reading and discussing… TV off, phones on silent. Start […]
Creative Writing: Getting Surreal
Recently, at the Centauri Arts Academy, I’ve been using surrealist experiments as a part of the writing workshops. Most people take writing workshops for one of three reasons. The first two are usually evident to them: they want to learn techniques that will help make them better writers, and they want to share their work to get help with the editing process. But there is a third reason that writing workshops can be a huge help to young or emerging writers: they help us to identify what inspires us, how and when we are at our most creative, and under what conditions we write best. Discussion with like-minded people is a great way to discover many of these things about ourselves. So are surrealist writing […]
The Finding Place: Getting Published
In just a few weeks my novel for young readers, The Finding Place, will be published in both Canada and the States, by Red Deer Press. I’ve been asked quite a few times about my experiences with this novel, so I thought I would share some of those here, with a second blog entry to follow when the novel appears! I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Like a lot of the young writers who take my classes, I wrote my first novel before leaving school. Through university I continued writing, but despite winning a few awards and publishing stories in literary journals, a major publication deal eluded me. After that, I moved on. Got married, then emigrated to Canada, where we opened Centauri Summer […]