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October 21, 2020The casting call
“Each writer is born with a repertory company in his head and … as you get older, you become more skillful in casting them.” — Gore VidalThe characters who show up in my stories are truly a mixed ...
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April 26, 2014
The Most Important Skill
Someone asks me what’s the most important skill a poet can have and I start to say the power of observation. The world awaits us with all sorts of small truths that can’t easily be seen. When I lose ...
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February 10, 2017The Entitled Interview, with Dawn Green
Teacher, author, and coach Dawn Green's new young adult novel How Samantha Smart Became a Revolutionary (Red Deer Press) is a startling prescient look at a country torn apart by a tight election (sound ...
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April 30, 2014
Timelessness
Over the course of the WIR experience, I’ve often used my morning writing time to work on that day’s blog. This is sacred time when I shut the door on all distractions, from phone calls to my cat ...
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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 ...
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October 18, 2023Getting to Know Aley Waterman, the Newfoundland Author Whose Debut Novel is Destined to Become a Toronto Classic
In Aley Waterman's debut novel Mudflowers (Rare Machines/Dundurn Press), Sophie's life seems like an indie movie dream from the outside – in her cramped but cool apartment in Toronto's west end, she ...
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April 19, 2014
Truth Is...
I’ve been thinking about the difference between facts and details, how so many of us cling to something that isn’t quite working in our poems because it’s real, the way it actually happened. Changing ...
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April 12, 2022Read an Excerpt from Caroline van Rooyen's Any Girl, About a Teen Survivor Hunting Down a Predator
Content warning: sexual violenceCaroline van Rooyen's Any Girl (Mawenzi House) is the harrowing, fiery story of July, the unlikely 15-year old heroine who wages war on a rapist terrorizing her community ...
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March 24, 2020Dirty Dozen: Jane Munro Talks Teenage Jobs, Her First Poem, and the Joys of the Upside-Down
Griffin Prize-winning poet Jane Munro's newest collection, Glass Float (Brick Books), is a study of boundaries and connections. The limit of the horizon, of a land-bound glass float, is used to illustrate ...
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February 21, 2022
*Well, excuuuse me, Princess
Welcome back, Open Book reader. Lovely to see you again, hope you’re doing well. As promised, I’m going to give some insight into what fuels all this nerdiness I’m brimming with. The relatively ...
