Columnists

Meritocracy in a Pale World

Inevitably, I find myself having this conversation:“Why does there always have to be preference or segregation? We should all be judged together and that the best literature will naturally rise to the ...

Combatting Oppression With Community

Two months ago, I attended Fuel for Fire, a professional development conference for writers of colour, organized by the Ontario Arts Council. The event provided a venue for discussions about writing and ...

Happy Birthday, Marian Engel!

Today is the eighty-fourth birthday of Marian Engel, or it would be, had the novelist not died of cancer in 1985. Now, instead of a person, she is a name, survived like all people by her family and friends, ...

Kid Lit Can: Personal "Firsts" In Kid Lit, Part Two

Welcome back to my conversation with five amazing authors about their “firsts” in children’s publishing.Just to catch you up: Naseem Hrab is pleased to have her first picture book published; Suzanne ...

“What If Everyone Is Having the Same Thoughts, but in a Different Order?” an Interview with Suzannah Showler

Thing Is, the latest collection of poetry from Suzannah Showler, shares a tone that fits somewhere between the quirky intellect of This American Life and the dream-logic ambles of Sleep with Me. It ...

Tips from a Festival Director

One of the surprising things to happen when I moved to Yukon was that I became director of an annual writers’ conference. As part of my role, I secure authors, negotiating their fees, even signing their ...

Publishing Tips for the Existentially Endangered

A couple of years ago I had a serious health scare. Without going into too much detail, I was admitted into the hospital in late spring and for a brief time no one was able to tell me for sure whether ...

In Praise of Those Who Publish Nothing

Like many of my time zone, I spent the night of November 9th with my smartphone on the same pillow as my head, awakening every now and again to check, and get my mind around, the news. I also had very ...

Poetry in Yukon

“The next unit is Poetry.”Was there any phrase that could make me less popular as a teacher?I was teaching Grade 8 English in Dawson City, an historic Gold Rush town of 1,500, just 5 hours from the ...

My final two columns: Part Two

As rob has mentioned, this is the second part of his final column for Open Book. The staff at Open Book would like to share our appreciation for a decade of columns, and for rob's contributions to the ...