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June 30, 2025Let’s Talk Books: Five Tips for Starting Your Own Book Club
I love talking about books. A lot. And for years, I wanted to be part of a book club. But there was one small problem: after taking too many English classes in university, I hate being told what to read. ...
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August 30, 2017
Humour and Children’s Books
I don’t think I was raised in a particularly funny family. My dad was often described as being extremely intelligent, but I don’t think I ever heard someone call him funny.Growing up, I recognized ...
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September 22, 2017
Unsung Heroes of Literature: #Annoying: Fifteen Minutes with Hashtag
I caught up with Hashtag during the last days of the Toronto International Film Festival. While they weren’t promoting a film, Hashtag had swung through Toronto as a stop on his current twenty-seven ...
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May 26, 2016Rhubarb Crisp
By some trick of heredity, or upbringing, or brain chemistry, my greatest talent lies in finding the negative in what should be uniformly positive experiences. I'm generally on the hunt, when presented ...
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March 07, 2016Rethinking a Room of One’s Own
A room of one’s own, Virginia Woolf once famously wrote, is a necessary part of being able to write successfully for women, who could often not find such a thing, being loyal to a certain level of constant ...
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September 02, 2015On the Sensory Pleasures of Putting Pen to Paper
A few months ago, I lost a pen. A beautiful fountain pen with one of those squeezy ink chambers that you fill from an old-school inkpot. The pen had been a university graduation gift from my parents and ...
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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 05, 2017Special Feature! Talking Hamilton's gritLIT festival with Shari Lapena
Hamilton occupies a unique niche in Canada - it's a small city with a vibrant arts scene and a fascinating history. One of the mainstays of the thriving literary community in Hamilton is gritLIT, the ...
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April 28, 2017
Test Driving the Poetry Exercises
Today’s post marks the conclusion of my series on poetry prompts and exercises. Huge thanks to all the poets who responded so generously to my questions and offered their unique approaches and experiences. ...
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April 13, 2017Poetry in Yukon
“The next unit is Poetry.”Was there any phrase that could make me less popular as a teacher?I was teaching Grade 8 English in Dawson City, an historic Gold Rush town of 1,500, just 5 hours from the ...
