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April 10, 2020Kitchen Table Poetics: A Love Letter to My Ride or Die
Here I am writing to you today again in isolation. It’s going to be hard to not have every post start like this: a pining, a reaching out. Today I have felt less alone than others; my Italian Catholic ...
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April 20, 2016“I am Not Not Romantic,” an Interview with Andy McGuire
In a 2011 interview with Guernica Magazine, poet Timothy Donnelly, in response to a question about the influences he had just named (Keats and Shelley) and whether he considered his work in the tradition ...
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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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August 29, 2025Ryad Assani-Razaki Reaches for Hope in THE HAND OF IMAN
Dreams are a rare commodity in Ryad Assani-Razaki’s debut novel, now available to English-language readers in a striking translation. Set in an unnamed African country where urban sprawl collides with ...
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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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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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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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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, ...
