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October 24, 2016
A Poetry Bookshop in Toronto
An exciting thing happened in Toronto while I was away. Jeff Kirby opened a poetry bookshop, knife|fork|book, in Rick’s Café in Kensington Market. Having missed the October 6th grand opening, I raced ...
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October 12, 2016
Norfolk, Murder Mysteries, Birds, and Mimesis
I spent the weekend in Norfolk visiting an old friend. I’ve never been to that part of England before, and because I see the world through a fictional lens, Steve Burrows’ birder mysteries, set in ...
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December 23, 2019How You Get Paid Writing Children’s Books or: Math is Fun!
One question I rarely get asked is how you get paid when you write and/or illustrate children’s books. I know people have a lot of questions regarding how much they might get paid, but how does the ...
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August 27, 2018An Open Letter to the Stranger Who Asked Me, “How Did You Write That Book for Children If You Don't Have Children?”
Dear Stranger,I realize that writing a book is kind of a self-important undertaking. When I write, I sometimes imagine that there are people out there who might actually enjoy reading my words and letting ...
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April 22, 2020All of this listening
It was hard to write this column. Like everyone else, I’m all for trying to grasp at normalcy where I can, but I don’t have many writing tips to share right now. (Actually, I do have one writing tip: ...
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May 20, 2009
More About Knowing Where We’re Coming from
Funny. In the last post, talking about the need to preserve our cultural creations, I said that we have to know where we’re coming from or we won’t know where we’re going. Today, by accident, I ...
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly and the Canefields
Sugar Belly pulled all kinds of sounds out of his bamboo sax. Hear the sax wail!
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May 19, 2009Sugar Belly, the Bamboo Saxophone, and Slide Mongoose
Sugar Belly, the Jamaican mento musician who invented the bamboo saxophone, explains how he made it, and plays a Jamaican folk tune, "Slide Mongoose"
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May 19, 2009
Sugar Belly's Bamboo Sax
We were teenagers, older teens.On Saturday morning, we’d go down to Victoria Pier, named after the Queen whose Day we celebrate as I type, so that I just found myself ducking fireworks that seemed dangerously ...
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May 07, 2009
Cool Stuff
Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES carried an article in their “Dining” section about Shave Ice, which Florence Fabricant, the author, describes as “popular in Hawaii and Japan as well as other parts ...
