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April 01, 2014
Welcome to National Poetry Month
I always feel a bit uncomfortable when Poetry Month commences. It’s like I’ve had a secret for the last eleven months, no one really interested in how I’ve spent my days, successfully managing to ...
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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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February 08, 2017The Dirty Dozen, with Leanne Dunic
Artist and musician Leanne Dunic has proved she's got literary chops on top of her other artistic talents, with honours including first prize in the Alice Munro Short Story competition. So it's no surprise ...
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March 19, 2020"Don't Throw Anything Out!" Caroline Adderson Talks Her New Book, Writing For Love, and Walking on the Sunny Side
Best pals Pierre and Paul might not speak the same language, but they've got no problem understanding each other!Using their powers of make-believe to create daring adventures out of normal life, the ...
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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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June 28, 2024Read an Excerpt from Anomia by Jade Wallace
Mystery and missing-person stories are not a rarity in novel-length fiction, but, there are authors brave enough to bend form and invent new and exciting approaches that set their take on the genre apart ...
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October 04, 2023Music, Automation, and Writing With a Satellite Mindset
Technology drained away my love of new music with the promise of access. That’s why I didn’t see it happening. Logging on to my subscription streaming service, I’m greeted with abundance—playlists ...
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January 05, 2018"Poems are Like People When it Comes to Goodbyes": Talking with Debut Poet Margo LaPierre
If you've ever worn make up, you know what raccoon eyes are - the result of smearing dark eye make up across your face, the telltale sign of a night out that went either way too well or quite the opposite.The ...
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June 23, 2020
The Male Default in Children's Literature - What It Is and Why It Matters
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Bechdel Test for movies. A film that passes the Bechdel Test must have at least one scene in which two female characters are talking to each other – and not about a man. ...
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March 13, 2017My final two columns: Part One
After nearly a decade, my time as a columnist for Open Book comes to a close. According to my email folder, it was May 2009 when Amy Logan Holmes first approached me with the idea of submitting pieces ...
