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June 21, 2021Playwright Makambe K Simamba on Fearlessly Exploring "How Far Characters are Willing to Go in Order to Live Their Truths"
CW: discussion of anti-Black violenceIt's a gutting image: a seventeen-year old Black boy, a child in a hoodie, dead far too soon because of hateful and unchecked anti-Black racism. Makambe K Simamba's Our ...
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September 05, 2023Something to delight in: Why I became a book publicist
From my bookish beginnings as an anxious kid who preferred the certainty of a good story to the probable humiliation of trying to make new friends, I always believed that making a career out of books ...
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June 27, 2023Read an Excerpt from A Hostage by Charlotte Mendel, A Timely Tale of Power, Politics, & Media
When Charlotte is kidnapped by notorious dictator Kassem in Charlotte Mendel's A Hostage (Inanna Publications), she does what she has to in order to maintain sanity, from creating a compartmentalized ...
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June 17, 2016Revenge of the Indie Bookstore
In 2014, when I began booking my Crushes and Mountains US book tour with fellow Toronto-based writer Elisha Lim, I Googled “gay bookstore” or “independent bookstore” in cities we were planning ...
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November 15, 2018
The Importance of YA
Now that I’ve talked a lot about how I got to this point in my writing career, it seems important that I focus on why I choose to write young adult fiction. It seems, to me anyway, that despite the ...
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February 02, 2017The Lucky Seven Interview, with Claire Fuller
In Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons (House of Anansi Press), the truth is in the books -- literally. When Ingrid Coleman disappears, her husband Gil, is blindsided. What he doesn't know is that his ...
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June 11, 2018
Tweet Tweet: A City’s Past & Present: Remapping Vancouver
@poetchelene: After reading and researching about the setting in my novel I felt compelled to recognize the city as a character. #hogansalleyfactorfiction “Junie stood on her balcony overlooking the ...
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February 28, 2022
七転び八起き ("Fall down seven, get up eight")
Hey there, Open Book reader! Let me start off by saying how honoured I am that you stopped by at any or all points in time this month. It’s been a blast delving into all my weirdness, and I’m so grateful ...
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August 10, 2023Book Therapy: Late-Summer Reading
We’ve now reached the point in the summer where my inner voice starts screaming “but there’s not enough time!” at full volume. With my genuine distaste for winter weather, summer is a precious ...
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June 03, 2020Nina Newington on Canada, Uncertainty, and Her Newest Book
Meg, the central character of author Nina Newington's newest book Cardinal Divide (publishing in September from Guernica Editions), needs a lot of important questions answered.Adopted as a small child ...
