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May 24, 2016Bobcaygeon
This is a damned weird country. Culturally and geographically, it has some peculiarities which rest not off to the side but squarely in the middle of our shared national consciousness. There is a rib ...
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July 16, 2016Love and Poetry
Last year, Brick Books marked 40 years as Canada’s most influential poetry publisher by asking dozens of poets, novelists, booksellers, musicians and other folks to write short tributes to a favourite ...
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April 16, 2014
Puzzle
At the suggestion of a friend, I gave my students a Seamus Heaney poem, “A Personal Helicon,” cut up into a puzzle of words, running the gamut from eight “a’s” to one “you” and “your” ...
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April 10, 2014
Perfection
I’ve been running a writing workshop all winter and, once again, marveling at the courage that it takes to tackle the tricks and complexities of the English language. The writers are exposing themselves ...
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April 03, 2014
Voice
Maureen McLane’s book, “My Poets,” goes beyond poetics and criticism into a kind of channeling of the poets themselves: her versions of their work, her obsessions with their obsessions. She not ...
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May 09, 2017Trillium Book Award Nominees Announced!
Today the Ontario Media Development Corporation announced the nominees for the 2017 Trillium Book Awards. The winners will be announced on June 20, 2017 at an event in Toronto, with the winner of the ...
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March 12, 2018Contest! Explore Remarkable Lives with Brick Books
Here's some good news on a Monday: You've got the chance to enter to win a huge prize pack of poetry courtesy of iconic Canadian publisher Brick Books!These poetry collections give you the chance to peek ...
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July 26, 2018
What I Talk About When I Talk About Talking Points
When a publisher agrees to publish your book—or at least, when both of my publishers agreed to publish my two books—the author is presented with a questionnaire. If you don’t overthink it, the questions ...
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November 15, 2018
The Importance of YA
Now that I’ve talked a lot about how I got to this point in my writing career, it seems important that I focus on why I choose to write young adult fiction. It seems, to me anyway, that despite the ...
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September 20, 2019When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence
A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...
