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March 15, 2018Debut Novelist Christine Higdon on Character, Synaesthesia, & the Importance of Names
Christine Higdon's debut novel, The Very Marrow of Our Bones (ECW Press), opens in 1967, with a tough town on the Fraser River descending into panic. Two women - Bette and Alice - have disappeared without ...
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March 01, 2020
Blogpost #8: TRENDING CURRENTLY: Top 8 Diverse Middle Grade and Young Adult Themes I’ve Observed
Dear Reader:This is my final post as the February 2020 Open Book Writer In Residence. (And, did you catch that this is the 8th blogpost and I am listing 8 middle grade and young adult themes? Didn’t ...
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July 07, 2014Tending Toward Liquid
Habit makes time relative for us. At twenty, the faces surrounding us have no history except in the present of the gaze we turn toward them. So, young adults, old people, and children seem forever framed ...
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May 09, 2019Excerpt! Peek into the Dark & Unpredictable World of Cara Martin's Young Adult Novel, Shantallow
Meeting the girl of your dreams is supposed to be wonderful. But Tanvi isn't Mischa's dream girl; she's the girl he can't stop seeing in his nightmares. This is the premise that opens Cara Martin's chilling ...
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October 13, 2017Adam Bunch's Toronto isn't Boring - It's Deadly
We've all heard of a life story, but what about a death story? Just in time for the spookiest season, Adam Bunch's The Toronto Book of the Dead (Dundurn Press) offers a unique portal to the history of ...
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May 14, 2018
In Praise of … Rewriting. No, Actual Rewriting
Everybody says to do it. No matter where my writing life has taken me, the message, the orthodoxy, the shibboleth, has always been the same. Journalism profs have said it. Writing manuals spell it out ...
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February 20, 2024Make-believe and Melodrama Create Comedy in the New Picture Book, The Only Lonely Fairy
Make-believe and melodrama collide to create a heartfelt comedy in The Only Lonely Fairy (Pajama Press), the new picture book by Lana Button, illustrated by Peggy Collins. A story about emotional ...
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September 07, 2022Dr. Blair Bigham Explores "The Death Dilemma" that Emerges as Technology Blurs the Line Between Life and Death
The common idiom that there's "nothing certain except death and taxes" is beginning to feel a little less reliable in the current era, as we consider technologies existing, emerging, and imagined that ...
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April 14, 2014
Ideas
I keep a list of things I think I want to write about. Back when the list was a more manageable size, I’d tackle my ideas at enough of a distance for me to have processed the simple stuff, the details, ...
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November 28, 2017Tanya Talaga on the Title and Tragedy of Seven Fallen Feathers
The tragic story of 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack is a rightfully well known one now in Canada - how the young boy froze to death after running away from a residential school. What is less known is that ...