The form that Bloodroot inclined toward (and soon insisted on) was one I had never worked in before: an entries form. Later, I came to call it a faux diary or journal form. Although the entries moved back and forth in time, there was an underlying chronological...

After a month or so of handwriting the beginning pieces of Bloodroot, I realized I had to pace myself even more than my plan to inscribe first drafts of Bloodroot in the mornings; do final revisions on What Holds Us Here in the afternoons.

I had never before encountered such a strong imperative to slow down my writing process. It was disorienting and I doubted it. I tried to fudge it a bit (slow down a bit more) but it didn’t co-operate. The writing faltered.

This is one of the most challenging points in writing any narrative: how to move from an idea, or an initial jotting of an intriguing snippet on to a sustained inscribing of the narrative. It’s so tenuous! With Bloodroot, I did something instinctively: I begin writing...

The seed for writing Bloodroot was sown the fall before my mother’s death in May. I had driven down from Saskatoon to visit her in Fort Dodge, Iowa at the care facility she lived in. This was the area in which she had lived her entire life. One afternoon while having...