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September 17, 2024Jacob Wren Stumbles Into a Strange Utopia Amidst a Raging War Zone in Dry Your Tears to Perfect Your Aim
It's a difficult task to distill the political struggles of our time into fiction, and authors run the risk of either alienating readers by doing so, or by creating a story that is simply too close to ...
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April 17, 2019Creative Life
I was asked to give a keynote address at the launch of the student literary journal, Scarborough Fair at the University of Toronto Scarborough. The theme was “The Creative Life”. As their Writer in ...
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May 24, 2023SJ Okemow on Her Heartwarming Debut Picture Book's Unconventional Path to Publication
The humble dandelion rarely gets much love, often cited as a nuisance weed that spreads easily and takes over. But the hardy little plant has many lessons to teach us, and in SJ Okemow's Âmî Osâwâpikones (Annick ...
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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...
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February 05, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 2 of 9
As an artist of colour, I am acutely aware of how underrepresented our work is in all areas of media. Many times, our work is not funded, ignored, or not reviewed but we forge ahead all the same. I once ...
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August 04, 2020Retreating from writing
Sometimes our stories practically beg to come to life on the page. Yet despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, stories almost never just 'come to life' as easily as we might have imagined. ...
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November 30, 20237 Ways to Develop Secondary Characters
Many authors do a good job at developing their protagonist or POV characters. After all, readers will be in these characters’ heads throughout an entire book. But as many readers can attest to, sometimes ...
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June 17, 2024Lunar Forests, Interplanetary War, and Cyberpunk Heroes Are Just the Beginning in Ben Berman Ghan's Debut Novel
How does an author ponder the important questions of our time while creating a speculative, fictional world that hums with intelligence and humanity? It's a tall order, but one that author Ben Berman ...
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May 24, 2022"You Will Start Writing Again When You're Ready" Dan K. Woo Shares His Inspiring Writing Journey
If Amazon has changed modern life in the West, Taobao, China's massive online marketplace (which is owned by e-commerce giant the Alibaba Group), may have changed the Chinese experience even more. So ...
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July 31, 2017An Interview with David O’Meara, organizer of the Plan 99 Reading Series
In the Manx Pub, a basement bar on Ottawa’s Elgin St., there’s a slim shelf of books – lots of poetry, but also some prose. The books are often browsed, often borrowed, and often returned. They’re ...
