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May 10, 2018
In Praise of … Celebrating Success
Ours is a household that celebrates everything. Each year my wife and I mark the following occasions: the anniversary of our first date (March 19 – she gets roses, and we go back to the restaurant where ...
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April 25, 2018
In Praise of … Generosity
I’ve been told I sometimes need to tone it down in the hospitality department when entertaining company at our place. I am told this by my wife, acclaimed novelist and short story writer Rebecca Rosenblum, ...
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May 07, 2018
In Praise of … Book Reviewing
I still remember where and when I got into the book-reviewing racket. It was the late 1990s in Halifax, about a year after I graduated with my journalism degree from the University of King’s College. ...
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May 24, 2018
In Praise of … Reading Widely
I wonder if other writers feel a particular dread I sometimes get when I’m working on a new story or poem. It happens when an idea, or an approach, or a certain trope comes into my mind, one that suddenly ...
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December 20, 2018December Spotlight on Excerpts: Get a Taste of We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie
We're counting down to the holidays the best way we know how - by gifting excerpts from fabulous books! Today is our final instalment for our December spotlight on excerpts and we're finishing with the ...
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February 21, 2019Smokii Sumac on Being Seen in Poetry, Why Endings Matter, and a New Spin on Love Letters
Smokii Sumac's you are enough: love poems for the end of the world (Kegedonce Press), a debut collection that breaks your heart, makes you laugh, and leaves you gutted all at once, began as a daily writing ...
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April 12, 2019A Map of Reading From Zero to Infinity
“Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually.” (Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading)Around ...
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November 30, 2021Daniel Scott Tysdal Examines the Darkness, Strangeness, & Flickering Hope of Life in the 21st Century in His Spectacular Debut Story Collection
Daniel Scott Tysdal is a beloved creative writing professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a decorated poet. And of course, Tysdal is also an Open Book columnist and the subject of one ...
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October 18, 2016
Poetic Inspiration II
This is the second in a series of posts highlighting poems that have made my synapses crackle, broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. The first ...
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June 17, 2024Lunar Forests, Interplanetary War, and Cyberpunk Heroes Are Just the Beginning in Ben Berman Ghan's Debut Novel
How does an author ponder the important questions of our time while creating a speculative, fictional world that hums with intelligence and humanity? It's a tall order, but one that author Ben Berman ...
