Search
-
April 26, 2019Amazon Announces First Novel Award Shortlist
The Amazon First Novel Award returns this year with an even bigger prize purse: the winner will receive $60,000 and each of the six finalists will receive $6,000 in prize money.The winner will be ...
-
April 26, 2019"Inclusion Means More Than Just Checking a Box" FOLD Authors Ferguson, Foster & Rice on CanLit, How They Write & What They're Reading
It's hard to think of a literary event that has grown and expanded as quickly and with as much excitement around it as the The Festival of Literary Diversity (aka the FOLD). In just a few short years, ...
-
April 26, 2019Poet Ayaz Pirani on Oral Tradition, Literary Gatekeepers, and Writing Faithful Lines
Ayaz Pirani's work has been praised as "wise... surprising [and] sly" and his newest collection, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Mawenzi House), builds on his characteristic insightful, elegant ...
-
April 25, 2019What Agents Are Looking For: Interview with Marilyn Biderman
One afternoon, when I was feeling particularly angsty, I tweeted out to my followers, “How do BIPOC writers get agents?” I received some encouraging responses, as well as some that had me questioning ...
-
April 24, 2019Ben Ladouceur on Finding His Title Through Art and Tomatoes, Alice Munro, & the Allure of a Bossy Title
Ben Ladouceur, author of the acclaimed poetry collection Otter (and former Open Book columnist!) returns this spring with a characteristically smart, witty, emotionally sophisticated collection, Mad ...
-
April 24, 2019What a Poem Does, Not what it Means
In an earlier post, I wrote that both writer and reader should focus more on how a poem comes to be.We seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to understand what a poem means as opposed ...
-
April 19, 2019The “Place” of Poetry and the Brain's GPS
And so in poetry we again come around to the notion of “place” – a map composed in the size of the world.Poetry explores, pulling itself through the filter and modifying axis of the brain adapting ...
-
April 18, 2019Brenda Leifso on the "Wonderful Odd Ordinariness" of Poetry & an Act of Kindness that Led Her to Writing
Brenda Leifso's lush new poetry collection Wild Madder (Brick Books) delves into the strange, long process of finding one's way. Leifso is unafraid to let the rawness of disorientation, loss of identity, ...
-
April 17, 2019Read Three Powerful Poems from Treaty# by Armand Garnet Ruffo
What does the word treaty mean? Deceptively simple, it's a word with great weight and Armand Garnet Ruffo spreads the word and its meaning open in his powerful new poetry collection Treaty# (Wolsak ...
-
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 ...
