I am not a blogger, but when Dyane Forde — who’d interviewed me after the publication of my first novel, Cycling to Asylum — asked me if I wanted to guest blog on her site, I agreed. I’d been thinking a lot about the role that writing groups have played in improving my writing, and more than that, how they have become a very important part of my day-to-day life. I am grateful to Dyane for helping me to articulate both my thoughts and my gratitude to the members of my groups. You can read the beginning of the piece here:

It was my friend Sharon who invited me to my first writers’ group meeting.
This was the spring before my year-long writing sabbatical, a sabbatical I had earned over a period of three years by working full-time while having 25% of my salary put aside. Those three years were difficult, and the wait before I could start writing the novel I’d been imagining was frustrating. I tried to convince myself that I was in some kind of important pre-writing phase. I made a list of things I needed to do. In my ignorance, the list was pretty short: Join the Québec Writers Federation. Buy a laptop computer. Take a fiction workshop. Now I had another item I could add: Join a writing group…. (Read the rest of the piece here.)