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August 31, 2024Jennifer Maruno Sends a Young Witch and Her Rodent Sidekick on an Adventure in Broom for Two
Prolific children's author Jennifer Maruno may be familiar to readers of Open Book. In fact, as recently as last week, another title written by Maruno was featured on the site.This time we're sharing ...
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December 14, 2017Dear UBC Accountable
Dear UBC Accountable,It’s been one year since you released your open letter to UBC, and Canada, and the world. I don’t want to wish you a happy birthday, because it’s not happy. Not for me, and ...
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September 05, 2023Something to delight in: Why I became a book publicist
From my bookish beginnings as an anxious kid who preferred the certainty of a good story to the probable humiliation of trying to make new friends, I always believed that making a career out of books ...
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March 28, 2022CBC Canada Reads Day One Recap: 2022 is Anyone's Game
CBC's Canada Reads kicked off this morning at 11:00am ET, with each of the five panelists proving themselves eloquent champions for their chosen novels. Host Ali Hassan followed the format of previous ...
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February 16, 2018On reading politically, or why the good old days are a flat out lie
It’s a funny time in the world of words. Every morning, when I log into Twitter, people are debating freedom of expression and the politics of how we read. Some of this is just nonsense, really just ...
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May 22, 2022
The Reasons I Write
I can think of many reasons why I should not write. The pay is terrible. The hours, though flexible, are insufferably long (i.e., even when I stop doing writing, I am thinking about writing). It can be ...
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September 12, 2018How to Finish Your Damn Book - For Beginners!
I often joke that writing a novel is like running a marathon---only no one bothers to tell you what the route is. When the gun goes off, you’re just supposed to head off in whatever direction you think ...
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February 02, 2021Why We Need to Question “Hobbies” in the Pandemic
On a rainy Thursday morning at the end of January 2021, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling for far too long... I couldn’t remember what I had done in 2020. I remember the past couple of years clearly: ...
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September 13, 2019The Unbearable Lightness of Being Between Writing Projects
Lately, I’ve felt a bit unmoored. For the last 6 years, I’ve organized my spare time around working on my novel. I’ve either been working on it or worrying about not having time to work on it, or ...
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May 24, 2017Happy Birthday, Marian Engel!
Today is the eighty-fourth birthday of Marian Engel, or it would be, had the novelist not died of cancer in 1985. Now, instead of a person, she is a name, survived like all people by her family and friends, ...
