Sometimes the best way to renew waning enthusiasm for a project is to step away from it for a while. But what if you step away for a short time, then a longer time, and your enthusiasm simply doesn’t come back? Should you just let it go? Chalk that one up to ‘good practice’ despite…

New editions — Korean and Portuguese coming soon too. But that’s not all that’s been happening with this book lately.     The National Arts Centre has big plans. The multi-talented composer Anne Dudley has been laying the groundwork for a musical treatment of the book — for orchestra, solo violin, and narrator. Normal –…

When I’m not juggling writing, editing, and time with my family, one of my favourite pastimes at this time of year is gardening. Gardening is a lot like writing. How? When you make a change to solve one problem, it often creates a new problem to solve. You often have to yank out and discard…

“Spectacular!” “Inspiring!” Two words people used to describe my keynote speech at CANSCAIP’s Packaging Your Imagination conference last month. Pretty gratifying feedback! You missed it? Fear not! I’m going to post the whole speech here at “Turning the Pages.” “Sock Fluff” was my introduction to Loris Lesynski, back in the early 90s, before it was…

There’s nothing quite like having a reviewer as highly respected as Dana Rudolph, founder of Mombian (a blog, resource directory, and book database for lesbian moms and other LGBTQ parents), totally get and appreciate all the decisions made during the course of creating one’s book. When Annick Press and I decided to update The Bare…

“Kathy Stinson’s stories have always found ways to offer hope and comfort, easily getting into the heads of her characters and recognizing what is important to them,” says Helen Kubiw in her CanLit for Little Canadians review of my latest book. Writing a story often begins for me with wondering, What would it be like…? To…

Red Is Best is now older than I was when it was first published. It has appeared in hard cover, soft, and in board book formats, as an Annikin, a Gage big book, and as an e-book. And it’s been translated in many languages so kids in other countries can enjoy reading it too. Wow.…

A Tulip In Winter sits alongside several other wonderful books on the CCBC’s Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award shortlist and I’m delighted. I’m told it deserves to win. Of course, all the other titles do too! I learned some fascinating things while conducting my research for the book, but sometimes what we learn leads to…

Hearty thanks to the over 100 people who tuned in to hear multiple perspectives on this picture book biography last week. Editor Bev Brenna interviewed me, illustrator François Thisdale, the book’s subject Anne Innis Dagg, and Anne’s daughter Mary. We got brief perspectives from cohosts Fitzhenry & Whiteside and The Bookshelf too. Watch the recording…