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April 16, 2014
Puzzle
At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my students a Seamus Heaney poem, “A Personal Helicon,” cut up into a puzzle of words, running the gamut from eight “a’s” to one “you” and “your” ...
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June 26, 2024Read an Excerpt from Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon
Though many of us live in urban surroundings, and may well be caught up in all of the concrete, glass, and metals that make up our neighbourhoods and streets, the natural world is always there, beneath ...
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June 28, 2018July 2018 WIR Daniel Perry on Favourite Reads & Biggest Literary Influences, from O'Brien to du Maurier
You can almost feel the dusty air of Currie Township in Daniel Perry's stories. The desire to escape the rotting barns and crumbling roadways is palpable, and captured viscerally in the character of ...
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April 07, 2014
Compression
In Stephanie Bolster’s “A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth,” the writing is acutely compressed, each word standing in for what in another poet’s hands might take pages. There’s no room ...
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September 03, 2020
My One Week on the Bestseller List
On Saturday, June 21, 2014 I opened the Globe and Mail to the books section (back in the time when newspapers had book sections) and after reading the reviews I began to idly scan the bestseller list. ...
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March 01, 2022Happy St. David's Day
Happy St. David’s Day!St. David is the patron saint of Wales, and every March 1st I make Welsh cakes. A Welsh cake is like a pancake –– you cook it on a griddle. It’s also like a scone –– ...
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June 07, 2023Shane Neilson & Roxanna Bennett's Collaborative Poetry Collection Explores Ableism in the Pandemic & CanLit
The pandemic lockdowns were an isolating, complex time that were difficult in myriad ways for everyone effected. But for people with disabilities, mental health challenges, and neurodivergence, there ...
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June 27, 2018Why Do We Keep Picture Book Authors and Illustrators Apart? - or How to Play Well With Others
I completely underestimated how emotional the whole process of creating a picture book would be. When my first picture book was being published, I became a horrible self-involved troll-person. I couldn’t ...
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April 06, 2023Read an Excerpt from Richard Sanger's Final Poetry Collection, Way to Go
Facing a terminal diagnosis, poet, playwright, and translator Richard Sanger had to decide how to use his final days – and how he felt about the end. In time, he decided to do what he'd been doing ...
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August 14, 2024Author Sita MacMillan Begins an Essential Series Starring Sarah Ponakey, Storycatcher
It's often the case with young readers, and writers, that they simply do not see the stories that they would like to read and write being published with frequency. This is a distinct problem in CanLit ...
