David Elias presenting at an international conference about Mennonite Writing at Canadian Mennonite University June 13th,2025 At the Mennonite/s Writing Ten conference I attended last weekend I heard Manitoba author David Elias talk about a book he had recently stumbled upon called Voice in the Wilderness which contained a collection of memoir pieces written by […]
My novels in McNally Robinson Booksellers in Saskatoon this April For Father’s Day my publisher Heritage House asked some of its authors to record videos about their relationship with their father and their writing. You can listen to the videos I made by clicking on them below. My Dad harvesting tomatoes from his garden My […]
This is the time of year when people are planting seeds in gardens and flower beds, hoping for a summer display of colour and produce. I came across an article recently by Colleen M. Story that offers ideas for writers looking to have a colourful and productive career. Colleen called her seven ideas seed planting […]
A new cover for my novel was created by a student One of my favourite things about visiting a school to talk to a group of students who have just finished reading my book, Lost on the Prairie, is to see the artwork they have created for the novel. A fair bit of the action […]
The McNally Robinson Booksellers store at Grant Park Shopping Centre-photo by Mike Deal / Winnipeg Free Press It’s Canadian Independent Book Store Day, a day to celebrate the importance of indie bookstores that contribute so much to their local communities and provide a bastion of support for Canadian writers, illustrators and publishers. This week’s purchases […]
Image from Whale Rock Workshops I’m taking a course right now in learning how to write picture books. Over the years, I’ve developed quite a number of picture book manuscripts, but none of them have sold, so I decided it was time to take a course in picture book writing. I’m currently enrolled in one […]
I’m not sure how many poems kids memorize these days, but when I was in elementary school, we memorized poetry a lot. Steinbach, the community where I spent my childhood, had a speech arts festival. Every year, I recited a solo poem in a competitive class, and my school class also memorized a poem we […]
The Atlantic Monthly published an article yesterday revealing that millions of authors’ works were used without permission to train META’s artificial intelligence. META is owned by Mark Zuckerberg. According to writer Alex Reisner META explored buying the rights to the works they were going to use for training AI. They eventually decided that would be […]
In the last few weeks, the social media posts of Canadian authors have been filled with expressions of gratitude to the Canada Council. Every year the council sends out cheques to Canadian authors. You can receive between $500 to $4500 depending on how many copies of your books are on the shelves in public libraries […]
February is I Love to Read month so I thought I’d kick things off with a photo collection featuring people reading. My students read in the 1980s. I had an old bathtub in my classroom for kids to sit in when they read books. My mom and her sisters read a book around 1933. My […]
