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May 14, 2020Bring Back the Good ‘Ol Days of Getting Lost in Fiction
“The anonymous woman in bed beside me adamantly shakes my shoulder.”—Amber Dawn, Sodom Road Exit“Sometimes we would hide in the closet when the drunks came home from the bar.”—Tanya Tagaq, ...
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May 11, 2020Canadian Authors Discuss Pandemic Life in New Kobo/West End Phoenix Collaboration
Rakuten Kobo and Toronto community newspaper West End Phoenix have announced the arrival of Telegrams from Home, a three-volume eBook series featuring prominent Canadian authors as they reflect upon life ...
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May 08, 2020When My Mind is Frenzied, I Don’t Read—I Listen
Being read to is a luxury.Growing up, there were no bedtime stories in my household, at least none that I can remember. There were true stories traded around dinner tables of course, but there was none ...
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April 30, 2020Poets in Profile: Catherine Owen on Accepting the Muse, Tennyson's "The Eagle", and the Politics of Poetry
After addiction claimed the life of her spouse in 2010, poet Catherine Owen packed up and moved into an apartment on Vancouver's Fraser River. During her morning walks along the shore, she found in its ...
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April 28, 2020Literature in Isolation
“When this is over, remember how important books and movies and television and music and public radio were to your experience and your ability to get through a really hard time.”—Elisabeth de Mariaffi In ...
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April 07, 2020Book Therapy: Cordelia Strube’s Misconduct of the Heart
“I so wanted things to be normal.”“They can’t be normal. Make a new normal.”—Cordelia Strube, Misconduct of the HeartFrom the moment we went into isolation, people were making jokes. I don’t ...
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March 21, 2020Trips Down Memory Lane: On Inhaling Old Notebooks
I’ve always envisioned Fall as the best season for fresh starts and rebirth, while Spring has always been a reflective season where I look back at previous months and years while documenting and acknowledging ...
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March 12, 2020On Family Secrets
Why does my writing tend to focus on family secrets? In particular, on children trying to unearth secrets tied to their parents’ pasts? I’m often asked these questions during interviews. The first ...
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March 05, 2020Book Therapy: Shani Mootoo’s Polar Vortex
“The body is always in the moment. It doesn’t care if it was warmer or colder any other time. It’s concerned—a matter of survival, naturally—only with how it is in the present.”—Shani Mootoo, ...
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March 02, 2020Acknowledging Fear in Writing
“Don’t tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear’s caul.” – Toni Morrison Fear.Fear of the first draft, fear of spiders, fear of ...