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October 21, 2020How to Engage Online
Online engagement is a reality of the modern writer’s life. It’s rare now for an author to create a story in solitude, and then remain there once their book is out in the world. Digital media now ...
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April 30, 2020Poets in Profile: Catherine Owen on Accepting the Muse, Tennyson's "The Eagle", and the Politics of Poetry
After addiction claimed the life of her spouse in 2010, poet Catherine Owen packed up and moved into an apartment on Vancouver's Fraser River. During her morning walks along the shore, she found in its ...
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October 14, 2015Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Q and A with 2015 Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction Nominees, Part II
Welcome! Today I continue my chat with the three terrific authors whose five books have been nominated for the CCBC Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People: Patrick Bowman, Marsha ...
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May 30, 2018Aaron Tucker on Writing the Complex Man Who Fathered the Atomic Bomb
J. Robert Oppenheimer is known for his reluctant but irreversible legacy as the father of the atomic bomb and director of the infamous Manhattan Project. But there was more to the man than the bomb, and ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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April 25, 2014
A Poem Can Be About Anything
I came across a cat writing contest on the internet. At first I thought that the poems had to be written by cats and was sure that my Iris Belle had a stanza or two inside her just waiting to creep out ...
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November 20, 2023Getting to Know Marion Agnew, Author of the Witty & Poignant New Novel Making Up the Gods
Simone, a widow, lives a quiet life in her cottage by a lake – until one day, when a man named Martin shows up on her doorstep, claiming to be a cousin. He is potentially Simone's only living relative, ...
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May 31, 2018“What Does it Mean to Be Home?” Our June 2018 Writer-in-Residence Chelene Knight on Her Writing Journey
Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug) is the second book from Vancouver's Chelene Knight, whose debut poetry collection Braided Skin was praised as "compelling" and "a whorl of wisdom". With Dear Current ...
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January 24, 2024Nicholas Ruddock & Ashley Barron Show Tenderness to Tiny Fragile Snakes, and Other Creatures
It's always fun and insightful to have picture book authors featured on Open Book, but we're doubly lucky today to share this conversation between author Nicholas Ruddock and illustrator Ashley Barron. ...
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February 04, 2021Read an Excerpt from Parliamentary Poet Laureate Louise Bernice Halfe's Newly Re-Released, Iconic Collection Blue Marrow
Louise Bernice Halfe - Sky Dancer is an icon of Canadian poetry, so it was a celebratory moment when, earlier this week, she was announced as the ninth Parliamentary Poet Laureate, one of the country's ...
