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October 18, 2017The Writer in the World: The Mismanagement of Mystery with Vladimir Lucien
A Conversation with Vladimir LucienPoetry's so-called "resurgence" as a form of public/social capital seems to reveal today something new of the role of the artist in the world. This new thing, to me, ...
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August 31, 2017
Characters. Emotions. Relationships. Action.
In junior high, my grade seven English teacher taught us about conflict in narrative: man against man; man against nature; man against self; and man against society. To be honest, I never really found ...
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March 08, 2018
Write well, write better, write often.
In my introductory Q&A I gave an abbreviated account of how I write, and in particular how I wrote my first novel. I always find other writers’ processes interesting, so I thought I’d talk about ...
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March 10, 2021A "Book Behind Which No Part of Me Could Hide": Andrea Actis' Poetic Memoir of Grief & Loss is Stunning
Content warning: death in the family, grief. It's an unimaginable scene: returning home one night in 2007, Andrea Actis entered her Vancouver apartment to discover her father, lying dead. The aftermath ...
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October 07, 2015
An Etiquette Expert Weighs in on How to Handle the Most Awkward Questions Authors Get
“So is being a writer what you really want to do some day?”This is a question that someone asked me when they found out I had just had a book published.“Well, I’m doing it now, actually,” I ...
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February 16, 2018On reading politically, or why the good old days are a flat out lie
It’s a funny time in the world of words. Every morning, when I log into Twitter, people are debating freedom of expression and the politics of how we read. Some of this is just nonsense, really just ...
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July 04, 2019"For Me, Voice is Everything" Talking with Michael Libling About Writing, Advice, & His Debut Novel, Hollywood North
Michael Libling's Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels (Chizine Publications) mines the rich - and largely unknown - history of a surprising Canadian film hotspot: Trenton, Ontario.Dark, smart, and ...
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January 30, 2018Behind Every Story, A Less Interesting Story
Lillian is trying to write a good play. When progress alludes her, she tears the false starts out of her typewriter, scrunches them up into balls, and kicks over the wastebasket that brims with bad drafts. ...
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July 06, 2017Anita Miettunen on Her Journey of Discovery with a Rare Blue Whale
When the remains of a blue whale were found on a remote PEI beach, environmentalists had a unique opportunity not only to learn more about the biggest animal in the world, but to share the whale that ...
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April 28, 2022How I look at a map (part two): found poetry
In previous posts you’ve seen some of the things I’m thinking through when I’m creating visual poetry. And in the last post we got started working on a new piece by looking through archival material. ...