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September 11, 2021
On Anabiosis and Mosses Helping with Sleep
On Wednesday, on the way to the river, I stopped in my tracks, struck by the moss habitat on a birch tree on the bank. It is a twinned paper birch — with one dead trunk snapped off about two meters ...
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February 20, 2022
Dorkus Malorkus Alert 2: The Search for More Nerdiness
Hey there, Open Book reader. Good to see you again. Can you believe February is over 70% done? (I can’t, and it’s keeping me up at night.) I know my previous post went pretty heavy on the nerd factor ...
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January 16, 2023Playwright Debbie Patterson on Why She Will Keep Exploring What It Means to "Die Well"
What does it mean to "die well"? If death is the end, is there anything left, at that point, to learn? These are the kinds of questions that fascinate acclaimed Winnipeg theatre creator Debbie Patterson, and ...
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November 03, 2016Writers' Trust Awards Honour Campbell, Thanh & More with $200k in Prizes!
Last night, at an event at CBC's Glenn Gould Studio, the Writers' Trust of Canada gathered authors, publishers, and readers together to present over $200,000 of prize money to the winners and finalists ...
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July 13, 2020Shortlists Revealed for 2020 Sunburst Awards
The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic have now announced their 2020 shortlists.Among the final-round authors this year are Scott R. Jones, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Aviaq ...
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May 04, 2021Amazon.ca and The Walrus Announce the Amazon First Novel Award Shortlist
It's clear that we're firmly in Spring literary prize season, and there's plenty to celebrate. With the announcement of the Griffin Poetry Prize shortlists, the CBC Short Story Contest winner, and the ...
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June 16, 2014Got Any Good Lit Jokes?
Several years ago, I spoke at a gala dinner at a writers’ festival in Thunder Bay. Picture a hotel ballroom filled with about a hundred people seated at tables for ten. I had tried to inject some humourous ...
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April 03, 2020Writing Communal Poetics in Isolation
Wednesday was April Fool's Day. It was also the day that my debut poetry collection, OO: Typewriter Poems (Invisible Publishing, 2020), officially launched. The day was largely symbolic; I and several ...
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March 25, 2020Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
