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April 04, 2017
A How-To Guide for Your Poetry Reading
There are a lot of poetry readings across Canada in April, National Poetry Month. I myself have a new book out, and therefore have a lot of poetry readings. All of which has gotten me thinking about poetry ...
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March 27, 2026A Long-Buried Secret Reshapes a Family’s Understanding of Itself in THE BREAKWATER by Leslie Shimotakahara
A long-buried secret reshapes a family’s understanding of itself in The Breakwater (Cormorant Books), a multigenerational story that moves between past and present to trace the impact of silence, displacement, ...
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March 09, 2021
A love letter (to books)
The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...
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November 28, 2022A Love Letter to the Canadian Children’s Book Centre
It’s November, month of #GivingTuesday, and I want to highlight the wonderful Canadian Children’s Book Centre, the only national, not-for-profit Canadian organization dedicated to “encouraging, ...
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May 21, 2025A Missing, Celebrity Feline is at the Centre of Another Case in Mystery at the Biltmore #2: The Classified Catnapping
Our featured title today is the second book in the ongoing, acclaimed Mystery at the Biltmore series (Pajama Press), which has been enticingly billed as "Only Murders in the Building meets Harriet ...
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November 30, 2017A New National Emblem
Canada is a land of plenty. But it is a state poor in symbols. Our national emblems are few and time-worn. Canada’s plant is the maple tree, which, in an annual strip tease, releases red leaves clogging ...
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December 04, 2017A New National Emblem Revisited
I was too hasty the other day. For nice, polite Canadians, the spider icon is just too darn ornery. In true Northern fashion, I apologize. We need something more civil yet found from coast to coast ...
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January 28, 2025A New Poetry Collection from Irene Marques Invites the Reader to Re-Enter Their Truly Bare Bones
Our featured poet today, Irene Marques, is an internationally renowned academic and author, with her many works published in a multitude of languages. In her latest collection, Marques focuses on "the ...
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March 17, 2016A Note on the Imagination
To thrive off the imagination, even if it affords only a dull light at the end of the day, is worth it; or not to thrive, even, but to loosely depend upon, keep the fires of imagining alive, in order ...
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March 18, 2018
A picture prompts a thousand words.
Readers of The Bone Mother will know that a significant part of the book’s effectiveness lies in the beautiful, unsettling archival photographs that illustrate the sections that are sent in and around ...