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September 19, 2022"All Language is Your Playground" Poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek on Chance Encounters and the Power of Poetry
In her new collection, decorated poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek plays with form and expectation, rewriting history both colonial and literary. A Is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn) sees Okot Bitek rewriting ...
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April 28, 2023May 2023 Writer in Residence Geoffrey Morrison on the 7 Words That Sparked His Captivating Debut Novel
In a strangely deserted public park, Hugh Dalgarno is falling apart. Through an entire day and night, his fevered mind will take him, and anyone along for the ride, on a rollicking interior journey, touching ...
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May 24, 2024A Discussion of Blasphemy and Other Ancestors: 4 Novellas by Padgett Powell, Darius James, Lee Henderson, & Jean Marc Ah-Sen
"It's the fate that awaits us all," says Jean Marc Ah-Sen of the four novellas in Blasphemy and Other Ancestors (Gordon Hill Press), written by him, Padgett Powell, Darius James, and Lee Henderson, explaining ...
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April 03, 2020Writing Communal Poetics in Isolation
Wednesday was April Fool's Day. It was also the day that my debut poetry collection, OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020), officially launched. The day was largely symbolic; I and several ...
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May 03, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?
Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...
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May 08, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"
So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...
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May 10, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni
I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...
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May 12, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 5: The Speak o the Mearns
My parents are renters, so we moved houses a lot growing up. How can you expect continuity under those conditions, the steady passage of an uncomplicatedly teleological time? We can’t point to the place ...
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May 29, 2023
Bringing It All Back Home
As I write this, I am sitting outside in the backyard of a rowhouse in Toronto’s East End. The wind is stirring the leaves of a big maple tree spreading its branches high above me, and stirring the ...
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May 01, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1
It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...
