More on: advice

Huge hunks of the silver maple we’d just cut down killing the grass, trunk pieces split into quarters a good hundred pounds each, and my father’s start with the trouble in my head again as I loaded the biggest ones into the wheelbarrow, metal scrape and sawdust, tightrope balance to the woods’ edge, then back…

Born in 1950 in Newcastle, New Brunswick, David Adams Richards is one of Canada’s most prolific and powerful writers. His first novel The Coming of Winter was published in 1974, followed by three more novels from Oberon, a small press in Ottawa. In 1988 his Nights below Station Street (McClelland and Stewart) won the prestigious…

The following is adapted from a commencement address given at the Seattle Pacific University MFA in creative writing graduation in Santa Fe on August 9, 2014.   IN THE RAPIDLY CHANGING, cutthroat literary marketplace—where it’s easy to get published but harder to make any money or sustain a career—my usual commencement address, based as it…