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 […]
I’m working on my third novel right now. It is set during the 1930s depression. One of the things I’ve been researching the last couple of weeks is what kind of foods were popular during the Great Depression in Canada. In one scene the family in my book needs a quick meal after they’ve worked […]
When I was in Victoria in October I had the pleasure of lunching with Lara Kordic the editorial director at Heritage House, the publishing company that has released my first two novels Lost on the Prairie and Sixties Girl. Lara and I discussed the new books Heritage House will publish in 2025. We also talked […]
I am working on a third novel. It will finish the series that begins with Lost on the Prairie my first book and Sixties Girl, the second one. This yet unnamed story will take place, between the time periods in the other two novels, in 1939, near the end of the depression and just before […]
Look at this AMAZING painting some kids from Sargent Park School here in Winnipeg did after reading my novel Lost on the Prairie. This is a section in the book that has my hero Peter escaping from a burning barn where he is spending the night. Can you see Peter just outside the barn door […]
