Marion Agnew

Last weekend, the Northwestern Ontario Writers Workshop honoured me with the Kouhi Award. LitFest offered two days of writerly events, including the Saturday banquet with excellent food! Thank you! Flowers are always welcome Here's how they choose people for this award: " The Kouhi Award was established by NOWW in 1999 to recognize 'outstanding contributions to the literature of Northwestern Ontario.' It is named in honour of poet Elizabeth Kouhi." My husband, Roy Blomstrom, was honoured last year. Given the range and quality of his writing--plays, poems, short prose, now three novels, various contest wins and shortlistings--I was especially surprised to be recognized. I'm so grateful. It's humbling to feel seen in this way.  One of the weirdest parts of writing something to share is that feeling of exposure. Yes, you sent your writing out into the publishing world, and you knew that meant it might be published--shared on a platform larger than yours alon...

As a dual citizen of the US and Canada, with a Canadian mother and an American father, I've crossed that border often.* I've had decades to think about borders. (I even blogged about them for a while.) And boundaries--both the geographical kind and the personal kind. Artsy vacation shot :) . I recently made a cross-border trip, my first extended visit since pandemic lockdowns, and wondered again about the people in an office somewhere drawing lines on a map. I also thought about the ways I expected my life to unfold, and how different my experience has been. Performing onstage has never appealed to me--I managed it as a musician because of all the others up there with me. Safety in numbers and all that. So as I turned from professional and technical writing to creative work, the thought of reading my own work aloud in front of others, and trying to say something coherent in interviews, was daunting. Imagine my surprise to learn that I enjoy talking about my work, both my essay ...