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September 19, 2016
The In Character Interview With Leon Rooke
Leon Rooke has been called "a national treasure" by the Globe and Mail with good reason — his contributions to CanLit over an astounding 50 years of work have been hugely influential. And he's not slowing ...
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July 14, 2021A Literary Drum Kit: J.J. Dupuis Takes Us Into His Writing Space & "Musical" Writing Method
If there's still an X-Files shaped hole in your life, you need to be reading J.J. Dupuis, whose delightfully creepy Creature X mystery series follows cryptozoologist Laura Reagan's search for monsters ...
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February 07, 2018Watercolour 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, 2023Excerpt: 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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November 20, 2020Writing 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 ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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April 12, 2014
Poet for Hire
I heard a few days ago that a colleague did a major job of editing that took the better part of a year to complete for a mere five-hundred dollars. I happen to mention this to a friend who works as a ...
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April 22, 2014
Endurance
It was a minute-and-a-half since I finished toying with a poem that hadn’t been working for weeks; I had that submarine feeling that it was sinking out of sight. But I had no time to dither with the ...
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April 18, 2014
Body Parts
Am I writing the same poem over and over again? My books are teeming with the invisible and a state of loneliness that could be a one-man cold war. I never set out to revisit these themes, but they almost ...
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March 08, 2018
Write well, write better, write often.
In my introductory Q&A I gave an abbreviated account of how I write, and in particular how I wrote my first novel. I always find other writers’ processes interesting, so I thought I’d talk about ...