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June 28, 2019Navigating Microaggressions as a Black Writer in CanLit
Story time! Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of doing a talk with the wonderful and talented Olive Senior and I was excited because it was held in the same neighbourhood where my protagonist, Kara, ...
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April 20, 2015
Otherwiseness: Thinking with José Muñoz and Lauren Berlant
About seven years ago, I wrote a series of terrible poems, each of which was trying to work out in my own head and writing how to think about “otherwise” as a process of perceiving and thinking. I ...
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June 18, 2015On Buttery Butter, Compress to Impress, Less Is More, Etc.
To indicate her displeasure with overwritten sentences, my grandmother used the phrase "buttery butter." What she meant by it was this: if you write "butter" it’s clear already what you’re talking ...
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May 04, 2014Guttersnipes: Elisha Lim
TCAF is the Toronto Comic Arts Festival. It is an annual week-long celebration of comics and graphic novels and their creators, featuring readings, interviews, panels, workshops, gallery shows, art installations, ...
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June 16, 2017Writers Working With Actors
Prep for the audio book: it was fun for me to Skype about my characters’ accents with narrator Pascal Langdale before the recording sessions for my new novel. Few people are interested in such arcane ...
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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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October 14, 2021Beating the Burnout
For those who were lucky enough to know someone in the book publishing industry before entering themselves, they might’ve heard the warnings: Don’t expect to be rich. In fact, don’t expect much ...
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November 03, 2022The Writers' Trust Honours Seven Writers with $270,000 in Prizes, Including Debut Authors francesca ekwuyasi & Nicholas Herring
Yesterday evening in Toronto, the Writers' Trust of Canada hosted publishers, writers, industry professionals, and book lovers to celebrate the best writing in Canada published in the past year. The charity ...
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September 18, 2023The Places I Write, Rated
I’ll write anywhere but not all writeable spaces are equal. My latest novel was written all over the place (see: How to Write a Novel in a Month) and if I learned anything from that experience it’s ...
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February 02, 2024Facing (the Failure of) an Empty Event
There’s a particular kind of feeling to describe preparing and planning for a literary event, only to show up and find the room empty, or nearly empty. You keep looking at the door hoping the passers-by ...