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September 12, 2018The Future of WOTS: Maya Baumann of The Word on the Street Takes Us Behind the Scenes of the Festival
It's no secret we're counting down the days to The Word on the Street Toronto (Sunday, September 23!), one of our favourite festivals and a highlight of the Toronto literary calendar. While we wait, we're ...
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July 08, 2015
The Gift of Interacting with Readers
Many years ago I finished reading a book that resonated for me. The characters in it and their struggles felt real. I lived with them for a while, found pain in their sorrows, amusement in their foibles, ...
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June 27, 2017The Gods of Promise
Speaking of Cyril Connolly. Even though he isn’t read much anymore, we still remember more than his “pram in the hall” aphorism. But are any of them true?“Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first ...
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December 19, 2019The Great Kingston Bake Off
December! The end of the year! The end of a doozy of a decade! Bring on the next few weeks of excess, acid reflux and the superhuman effort to not compare my own work and efforts to anyone else’s as ...
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August 01, 2015
The Greatest Joy of Writing Is to Occasionally Be out of Your Mind
Writing these posts over the past month has reminded me of something. It seems obvious but I’d forgotten: When writing short pieces for regular publication (in this case, every other day), my writing ...
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March 15, 2023The Griffin Prize Announces Its First Longlist Since Merging Into the World's Biggest Poetry Prize
This morning the Griffin Poetry Prize announced its 10-book 2023 longlist, its first since the prize underwent major changes to open its eligibility to publishers worldwide, consolidating its two previous ...
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May 28, 2019The Griffin Prize Poets on Writers' Work Days & Favourite Canadian Poems
The Griffin Prize is not only one of the biggest literary prizes in Canada; it has become one of the most prestigious and influential poetry prizes in the world, annually honouring one International ...
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October 18, 2015
The Importance of Creative Rituals
“Inspiration is for amateurs. The rest of us just show up and get to work.”- Chuck CloseFor years now I’ve used a very simple way to mark the moment when it’s time to write: I light a stick of ...
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February 14, 2017
The importance of romantic poetry
Just like the Super Bowl, Christmas, and any other commercial holiday, I awoke today with little knowledge of its significance. Of course, it's Valentine's Day. In Japan, on Valentine's women deliver ...
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November 15, 2018
The Importance of YA
Now that I’ve talked a lot about how I got to this point in my writing career, it seems important that I focus on why I choose to write young adult fiction. It seems, to me anyway, that despite the ...
