creative process
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The following is a transcript of Episode 3 of The Divine Dissatisfaction podcast. Click here to listen to the episode. Last month, I realized that one of my projects was celebrating a significant anniversary. It had been a decade since I self-produced a workshop production of my play The Maple Leaves. This is a project that for
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This is a transcript of Episode 1: Encased from The Divine Dissatisfaction Podcast. Click here to listen to the episode. Here where I live in southwestern Ontario, we have, not often, but definitely more often than we used to, these periods of freezing rain. And on those mornings, I take my dog to the park, and we
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When I teach closed form poetry, I’ll often use a clip from Taskmaster, a British TV show that features celebrities (primarily comedians) competing in a series of often ridiculous challenges. Each task has specific rules, and most of the time there’s always some time pressure element, and that can lead to some spectacular failures, but
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I must have started this month’s post over a dozen times in my head, thinking of an idea, turning it around a few times in my mind, and then dismissing it, the flash of inspiration extinguished by the desire to get it right. Because January brings with it a particular pressure—even if what we’re trying
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I’m a sucker for any show focused on the creative process. Portrait Artist of the Year, Landscape Artist of the Year, The Great British Sewing Bee, Blown Away, The Big Flower Fight, The Great Pottery Throwdown—basically any show that lets me witness creators creating. Part of my love for these shows is the ability to witness
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A couple of weeks ago, I became frustrated while prepping for my Introduction to Creative Writing class. I was trying to decide on a writing exercise to use for our lesson on character, and I couldn’t figure out which one to use. When I used to teach Communications and Business Writing, the courses were always
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Fall has always felt like a season of re-commitment to my writing. Often that’s taken the form of really digging into a particular project — either beginning something new or deep revision of a work-in-progress. This fall has looked different than the last few, though. Late in August I was offered the chance to teach
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The new year for me always feels like it starts in September rather than January. Even those years when I’ve been neither a student nor a teacher, there is something about fall that always feels like the beginning of something new, that space of new experiences, new possibilities—and let’s not forget the excitement of new
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In spring 2020, I attend a Zoom workshop with Jenny Offill on Writing Erasure Poetry and Flash Fiction. The entire session was insightful, but one of the main things I took away from the session was Offill’s idea of “Stretching the Canvas.” She told a story of being at an artists’ residency where she spoke
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I’ve been thinking a lot about expectations. Possibly because the writing of the second draft of my novel is so different from how I expected it would be. When I started working on this draft, my intention was to write what I called “a slow draft.” I’d written most of my first draft very quickly,
heather debling 