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February 07, 2018
Watercolour Illustrator Qin Leng Shares her Dreamy and Inspiring Workspace
Yesterday we introduced you to Jessica Scott Kerrin, author of The Better Tree Fort (Groundwood Books). Today, we are thrilled to welcome Qin Leng to Open Book, whose beautiful watercolour illustrations ...
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October 25, 2023
Excerpt: Get Spooky with Chris Kuriata's Dark Wishing-Grant Tale, Sacrifice of the Sisters Lot
Every kid who ever made a wish while blowing out their birthday candles would assume that having your every wish granted would be, well, spectacular. But in Chris Kuriata's deliciously creepy new novel, Sacrifice ...
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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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July 27, 2020
The Erotic and the Prophetic: A Lesson Across Centuries
I’m loathe to admit that I only became intimately familiar with the works of celebrated Black feminist theorist and poet Audre Lorde a little over a year ago, when my partner gave me a copy of Sister ...
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July 30, 2020
Mom's Turn
While Accretion, my recently published debut, is a collection of poetry, it’s also a narrative closely based on a really transformative moment in my life a few years back. Given that family and tradition ...
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November 30, 2020
Playlist for How Do I Look?
To wrap up my Open Book Residency, and to lead us into December, I thought I’d leave with a little goodbye present: a good ‘ol playlist! I don’t ever listen to music while I write - I get distracted ...
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May 08, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"
So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...
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May 10, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni
I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...
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March 02, 2022
Carl Watts on Why Poetry's So-Called Shortcomings Might Be Its Greatest Strengths
It's easy to imagine the scene: at a poetry reading (pre-pandemic), an open mic-er ascends to the stage, taps the microphone, and announces with aplomb, "I just wrote this five minutes ago." Cue the ...
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November 20, 2020
Writing Beyond the End of the World
We spend our days scrolling through countless words. Many of us are fixated on screens from the moment we awake until the moment we return to the same bed to sleep. And from day to day, not a whole lot ...