Island Living
I live on Prince Edward Island, that little bow tie on the east coast of Canada. It would take a long day’s drive to get from North Cape to East Point with much-varied landscape in between. It is very fertile…
Margaret Westlie
Fiberglas Horses
I like to look at horses. I don’t ride and have no desire to, I just like to look. There was a beautiful honey-coloured horse with a creamy mane and tail who used to live in the field behind our…
The Germ Theory
When I was taking the Masters’ Degree in English at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, I was taught the germ theory of writing. You hear a story or read an article in a magazine and take a word…
Poetry Carcasses
I was grumbling to John this morning about how every topic I think of to write a poem about seems to have been done to death by greater and lesser poets than I. He told me about the view of…
Just Imagine!
Imagination is as much a thief of time as procrastination. The difference is that imagination gives you something wonderful to show for the time it steals, while the time stolen by procrastination is merely wasted and gone forever. I discovered…
Writing Poetic Forms
I wrote my first Haiku the other day. Twenty-five years ago when I first heard about them I thought: “Oh, what a cute little poem.” Try as I might back then, I just couldn’t make one. I finally conceded defeat.…
Purposeful Poetry
I’ve been reading and writing and thinking about poetry a lot lately. I’ll soon have enough for another book. What I’ve been thinking about has been its construction. In many ways it’s a lot like writing an essay. It has…
Playing Chess
[If you read my blog post last week about free association, you will recognize the same principle at work in this post. The trigger for writing this was my husband, John, crowing about winning a game in an online chess…
Free Association
To be able to free associate is a very useful skill. To let your mind roam freely and leap from idea to idea no matter how preposterous is helpful when you’re stuck. Start with where you are and keep track…
Ideas
Someone once asked me where I get my ideas from. In other words, where does creativity come from? Two different questions, really. My ideas come from others’ stories, family lore, newspaper articles, books and other places. Wherever I can hook…
