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February 26, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 8 of 9
What happens when the unexpected occurs. As a writer, I like to throw unexpected elements in when things seem to be progressing smoothly. The same way I don’t conceive of a beginning or middle before ...
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March 05, 2021
Writing Time
When it comes to writing, I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the basics—namely space and time. I find it easy to imagine myself into a character’s head—to project myself into a character’s ...
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March 08, 2021"I Was Completely Transported by Every Sentence" The CBC Canada Reads Panellists on Their Debate Strategies & Their Love for Their Chosen Books
Everyone's favourite literary smackdown returns today through Thursday: the 2021 edition of CBC Canada Reads will bring the same fiery debates from passionate panellists championing their chosen book ...
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March 08, 2021On Giving Myself Permission Not to Write
I know I have to write it. The essay I’ve been trying to write for a year and a half.I will be in the grocery store or out in the muck of a hike dripping with sweat and a sentence of it will come to ...
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March 09, 2021CBC Canada Reads 2021: Two Down, Two to Go (Spoilers)
*This post contains spoilers about which books were voted off Canada Reads on days one and two*After a lively first day in which (final spoiler alert!) Jessica J. Lee's Two Trees Make a Forest was voted ...
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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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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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March 11, 2021Devery Jacobs Captures the Canada Reads Crown for Joshua Whitehead's Acclaimed Novel, Johnny Appleseed
Day One of CBC Canada Reads this year saw Jessica J. Lee's Two Trees Make a Forest, defended by singer-songwriter Scott Helman, voted off. On Day Two, it was The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk, ...
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March 12, 2021Zoom Class: Omar El Akkad and the Challenges of Writing Resistance
Sometimes there are Zoom meetings that can break you. Last week it took me five days to recover from the nausea, headaches, and light sensitivity caused by one single day of back-to-back virtual meetings. ...
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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...