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June 20, 2015
Bravery Through Bestsellers
In a recent cultural comment in The New Yorker, South African-born social anthropologist and writer Ceridwen Dovey investigates whether reading can make us happier. She describes a session with a bibliotherapist ...
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November 29, 2019
Fiction, Memory, and Family
I reread books, often because a story or scene moved me and I want to know how the writer engineered it. It’s exciting to flip back to the first page and say, “of course! Of course the story ends ...
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November 07, 2019
Where Ideas Begin
Questions every writer is familiar with: “Where did you get the idea?” or “How did you decide what to write about?”How did Denis Johnson decide to make a character obsessed with Elvis Presley’s ...
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December 13, 1901The Lucky Seven Interview, with Alexis von Konigslow
We are thrilled to welcome debut author Alexis von Konigslow as our September 2015 writer-in-residence. Alexis' hotly anticipated first novel, The Capacity for Infinite Happiness (Wolsak & Wynn) combines ...
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November 12, 2019
Keeping Momentum
After the initial idea for a story is grounded, but before there’s enough material for real revisions and edits, writers are somehow expected to get words on the page. This is intimidating! Here a couple ...
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June 07, 2017The Dirty Dozen, with Pasha Malla
Trillium Prize winner Pasha Malla's new novel Fugue States (Knopf Canada) tells the story of Ash, an intellectual, anxious radio host, and his uncouth, entitled nightmare-bro of a friend, Matt, who shows ...
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November 30, 2023Zain Bandali Uses Mehndi to Talk About Gender, Creativity, and Being Your True Self in His Delightful Debut
In Zain Bandali's Mehndi Boy (Annick Press), Tehzeeb loves to draw. He practices his clouds, patterns, stars, and more, as whole galaxies of beautiful and intricate designs swirl across his notebooks. ...
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November 15, 2019
Revision Part One
Revision, where the piled fragments of a draft shift and reassemble, is my favourite part of writing. It’s where the most substantial changes happen, and a story is overhauled in ways that are surprising ...
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November 04, 2019
Music, Writing, and the Practice of Art
Like many people in the arts, I have a number of jobs. For me, that includes writing, teaching writing, transcribing music notation, and teaching music.Teaching music came first. For the last fifteen ...
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November 26, 2019
Workspace
1. Desk: the desk belongs to my partner, Bradford Werner. He covered it in plastic during his university years. I poke fun of him for it, but the wood is pristine. I cleaned for this photo, but if you ...
