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May 03, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?
Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...
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August 30, 2022
Carolyn Huizinga Mills on Spark Sentences, Creating Vibrant Settings, & Why a Writing Process Requires Chocolate
In Carolyn Huizinga Mills' new novel, Sins of the Daughter (Cormorant Books), Danah Calsely is doing just fine. She's working diligently towards her PhD and her life is calm. The fact that her mother ...
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January 28, 2020
"That Change, That Troubled Look, Was What Started Me Writing" Hannah Brown on Her Heartwrenching New Novel, Look After Her
International Holocaust Awareness Day passed just yesterday (January 27th), giving us an opportunity to remember its victims, meditate on its personal and global impact, and discuss why its lessons are ...
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September 14, 2014
On the Idea of a Secret (Part 1)
“The idea of a secret that will be revealed always results in one of two scenarios: death and destruction, or self-discovery and recovery beyond our wildest dreams of unification. And in the greatest ...
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April 29, 2014
Questions Not to Ask While Facing a Blank Page
Is enjambment supposed to be pronounced with a French accent?What do you do when you unpack a line and can’t figure out where you thought you were going in the first place?Is a metaphor just a simile ...
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September 27, 2018
You’re Going the Right Way. It’s Just a Really, Really Long Way.
I’m often asked by aspiring writers, “How did you become an author?” or “How did you get into the publishing world?”I used to think this was a really tough question. Because of course there’s ...
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February 21, 2017
A few minutes with ... Adebe DeRango-Adem
Throughout my month here at open-book.ca I've been sharing my conversations with various members of the literary community. Our last conversation is with noted poet, Adebe DeRango-Adem. To learn more ...
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October 04, 2016
Reconciling a Double Life: Law and Literature
I’m very happy to be spending the month of October as Writer in Residence at Open Book. I’m also happy that it’s a virtual residency as I was able to skip town on the very first day to attend a ...
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October 23, 2016
Poetic Inspiration III
This is the third in a series of posts highlighting inventive poems that have broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. (The previous instalments ...
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February 14, 2014
Creative Writing as Martial Art? Part 1
I have always tried to define the ethos that guides my writing. Until recently, the closest I could come to a complete answer was the idea of writing as craft. I was taking literature out of the world ...