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March 26, 2024Mylène Goupil Explores the Difficulties that Come With Change in Taming Papa
What does a young girl do when a parent comes into her life suddenly, and everything changes?This question is at the heart of Taming Papa (Groundwood Books) by Mylène Goupil (translated from French ...
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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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October 28, 2015The Lucky Seven Interview, with Kevin Hardcastle
We are thrilled to have debut author Kevin Hardcastle on board as our November 2015 writer-in-residence at Open Book. His short story collection, Debris has created tons of buzz, especially after Kevin's ...
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January 24, 2017On Writing, with Monia Mazigh
Monia Mazigh's Hope Has Two Daughters (translated by Fred A. Reed from its original French) is a powerful family story that covers not one but two revolutionary periods in Tunisian history. When Nadia ...
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October 28, 2016
Poetic Inspiration IV
This is the fourth in a series of posts highlighting inventive poems that have broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. (The previous instalments ...
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February 02, 2017The Lucky Seven Interview, with Claire Fuller
In Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons (House of Anansi Press), the truth is in the books -- literally. When Ingrid Coleman disappears, her husband Gil, is blindsided. What he doesn't know is that his ...
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January 29, 2020Read an Excerpt From Teva Harrison's Gorgeously Devastating 'Not One of These Poems Is About You'
In April of last year, the Canadian literary community suffered a profound loss at the passing of celebrated author and illustrator Teva Harrison after a lengthy battle with metastatic breast cancer. ...
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April 26, 2023Read an Excerpt from Rocco de Giacomo's Casting Out, a Poetic Memoir of Leaving Evangelical Life
Rocco de Giacomo's childhood was filled with TV faith healers, tense and frequent predictions of the rapture, and the dramatic and sometimes problematic practices of the extreme Pentecostal religious ...
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March 28, 2022What's Beyond: Writing as an Actor, Part 2
One of the important exercises we do in theatre is called “What’s Beyond.” It’s a Viola Spolin exercise to help actors understand the full, inner life of their characters. Viola Spolin is credited ...
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February 26, 2021Grinding Out a New Novel
Writing a novel is a grind. It’s an arduous, meticulous, and often repetitive process that can take years. There’s the actual typing of words onto the page, and then come the edits and rewrites, which ...