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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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June 27, 2023Read an Excerpt from A Hostage by Charlotte Mendel, A Timely Tale of Power, Politics, & Media
When Charlotte is kidnapped by notorious dictator Kassem in Charlotte Mendel's A Hostage (Inanna Publications), she does what she has to in order to maintain sanity, from creating a compartmentalized ...
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November 04, 2020"There are Moments of Grace and Joy" The 2020 Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalists on What They Love About Writing Fiction
The Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (formerly the Writers' Trust Rogers Fiction Prize) is one of the biggest literary awards in the country, with a $50,000 prize purse and a history of highlighting some ...
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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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May 07, 2024Wendy Orr Takes Readers to The Valley of Horses and Beyond in Her Newest Book
During the fraught and uncertain years of the COVID-19 pandemic, author Wendy Orr and her family found themselves in Australia, locked-down and away from family back in Canada. Worried about the ways ...
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April 20, 2016Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: the Magic, the Wonder - Chatting with Ya Fantasy Authors (Part 1)
In my capacity as freelance story coach and manuscript critiquer, I receive many inquiries and, interestingly, I’ve realized that a disproportionately high number of them are from writers working on ...
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October 03, 2023Bradley Peters' Debut Poetry Collection Takes Readers into the Prison Experience & the Systemic Problems Within
One of the poems in Bradley Peters' Sonnets from a Cell (Brick Books) closes with the musing "A sonnet is not memory. More so/ It is a room the shape of my own face." This lyrical creativity and exploration ...
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April 13, 2018"I Write to Make Sense of Worries" David James Brock on Finding the Calm in Poetry
Poet, librettist, and playwright David James Brock's second collection Ten-Headed Alien (Wolsak & Wynn), is making an impact as big and bold as its title. Poet Linda Besner called it "a sophisticated ...
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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 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 ...
