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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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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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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 ...
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July 04, 2018
Stepping Twice into the Same City
On a recent trip to read from my new book in Vancouver—my second trip there, the last being more than 12 years ago—I found myself in conversation with Heraclitus.Best known, according to Plato, for ...
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October 29, 2020"It Is Okay to Go Inside of Yourself Even if it Scares You" Poet Joseph A. Dandurand on Opening Doors
Perhaps Richard van Camp said it best about prolific and powerful poet Joseph A. Dandurand's writing when he commented "Good Lord—what a voice!" Dandurand's 13 collections of poetry have consistently ...
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January 16, 2017This Was the Countryside
In Buttermere, the land hugs the lakes. Some of the lakes contain islands. Some of these islands are so small, they lack roots. They bounce from point to point, as slowly as fingernails grow. To make ...
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April 16, 2019A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection
We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:POETIC LAYERINGdiscovery ...
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February 10, 2017
The absurdity of literary prizes part 2 of 2
“ I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.”For my most recent book, I had a reviewer who skewered me for quoting Shakespeare, and then citing it in my end notes. Because, everyone who reads ...
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September 21, 2018Read an Exclusive Excerpt from A Skeletal Wand by Ruth Roach Pierson
Governor General's Literary Award nominated poet Ruth Roach Pierson's newest collection, A Skeletal Wand (Palimpsest Press), is a gorgeous book, full of poems that are uneasy and arresting, sketched ...
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February 15, 2014
Creative Writing as Martial Art? Part 2 (Final)
Step one is acknowledging that writing is a martial art. Words have power. To this day, in many countries the first people executed in times of war are poets. In the West this may be lost, but we have ...
