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May 26, 2022
The Soul of Story: Authenticity
My first car was a 1980 Toyota Tercel hatchback, payment for which I had earned working 60 hours a week at two jobs all summer. It was a gutless four-speed manual with a top speed of eighty km/hour. But ...
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May 11, 2016Posthumous Lit: How Do You Capture a Dead Author’s Voice and Intentions?
You all know the saying. It goes something like this. The only three things guaranteed in life are death, taxes, and the Toronto Maple Leafs not making the playoffs. Okay, so I tacked on the latter Leafs ...
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April 13, 2021"I Had Internalized the Belief That the Stories I Could Tell Had No Audience" FOLD Guest Authors on Progress & Process
If you haven't already marked May 1-15 on your calendar, now's the time. The Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD), the brainchild of author Jael Richardson, is now in its sixth year and returns again ...
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May 08, 2020When My Mind is Frenzied, I Don’t Read—I Listen
Being read to is a luxury.Growing up, there were no bedtime stories in my household, at least none that I can remember. There were true stories traded around dinner tables of course, but there was none ...
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June 30, 2016The Many Colours of Kamal Al-Solaylee
Kamal Al-Solaylee wrote an amazing book called Brown. It's essential reading and its subtitle, What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), says why you need to read it much more concisely ...
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August 21, 2018THREAD! The Role of the Twitter Essay in CanLit
When most people think of Twitter, they think of the short and pithy 280-character messages that the platform is best known for. But perhaps the most interesting content on the social network is shared ...
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April 25, 2018On respectable narratives and why diversity on the page matters
Growing up, I was very particular kind of Chinese girl. I attended Chinese school on Saturdays. I took piano lessons. My report cards were always the best in my class. I played first clarinet in my school ...
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November 20, 20193 Practices the Literary Scene Could Learn from Spoken Word Artists
When I was curating So Fresh: A Scarborough Reading, I desperately wanted to bring together two worlds that I deeply loved. First were the authors that I knew from the literary community. Authors like ...
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November 18, 2015Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Spotlight on 3 Picture Book Creators (2016 Blue Spruce Award Nominees), (Part 1)
How many Canadian picture books are traditionally published each year? Meghan Howe, Library Coordinator of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre, estimates the number to be between 180 and 200.So imagine ...
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November 03, 2016The Art of Giving Feedback
In 2009, after I had finished an early draft of my first book, God Loves Hair, I gave some of my closest friends a copy of the manuscript for their feedback. It was a vulnerable experience, especially ...
