Lily Iona MacKenzie's Blog, page 34
June 10, 2019
Writers as Travelers
My husband and I like to travel when we have the time and money. We’ve managed to visit St. Petersburg, Moscow, the Atlas Mountains in Morocco, Marrakech, Fes, Rabat, Istanbul, the entire Aegean/Mediterranean coast off Turkey, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and many other countries. I enjoy these excursions because they take me into physical and psychic […]
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June 3, 2019
What motivates writers to persevere?
In “Spirit of the Law,” a short story I’ve written, I wanted to explore life after death and something else—how the dead go on living or not living if only in our memory and in the physical places where we’ve known them. Of course, I’m not really capturing what life is like after death. It’s […]
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May 27, 2019
Is autobiography the only form in all the arts?
I recall reading a review by Elaine Blair of Rachel Cusk’s novel Outline in the New Yorker a few years ago. Blair says, Cusk has written admiringly about Karl One Knausgaard, and her proposed cure for the trouble with fiction sounds like a gloss of his. ‘Autobiography is increasingly the only form in all the arts,’ she […]
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May 20, 2019
Writing To Experience Life’s Strangeness!
Writing is such a major part of my day that if I don’t get to it, I’m constantly distracted, as if I have a lover I’m thinking about. It’s like a siren’s call, pulling me away. My husband notices it. He comments on me seeming drifty. He’s right. I’m not fully there. But the discipline […]
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May 13, 2019
Writers as Shape Shifters!
Those of us who write undergo a personal odyssey each time we pick up our pens or apply fingers to a computer. We also participate in discovering the origins of fiction. But what starts us out on these explorations of other’s lives? One of my bios states “Lily sprouted on the Canadian prairies under cumulous […]
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May 6, 2019
Where do characters come from?
Readers who aren’t writers themselves tend to think that most aspects of a novel come directly from an author’s imagination. Some novels do arrive in that fashion, but most don’t. These readers don’t understand how characters can appear and then evolve during a narrative, learning and growing through their actions and the resulting events that […]
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April 29, 2019
Viva libraries and the writers that stock their shelves with books!
I may be a little late to celebrate National Library Week, but I have been thinking about my own evolution as a reader. At some point in my early years, my parents purchased a set of the Books of Knowledge. My grandfather, a Scots’ school-master, must have urged my mother and stepfather to buy the encyclopedia since […]
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April 22, 2019
Wondering about Wonder Woman
For several days, I’ve been absorbed by Jill Lepore’s The Secret History of Wonder Woman. I once idealized (and still do) this superheroine. As a girl, I read every comic I could find about her because she embodied something lacking in many female’s lives: power. And freedom. Though she had a public persona as the […]
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April 15, 2019
Blogging into Visibility
Fling!was published in 2015, my publisher told me to create a fan base. I don’t think he was referring to the kind of fan I’m used to, a mechanical object with rotating blades that whirl around and stir the air. In a way, though, I suppose the kind of fan my publisher was referring to […]
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April 8, 2019
How are writers detectives?
I’ve been thinking recently how writers are like detectives. They need to be constantly observant, picking up clues from what people are wearing, how they gesture, the words they speak, the way they interact with others. They study people’s facial expressions and what they suggest, storing away the data in their memory banks or taking […]
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