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September 21, 2017The Word on the Street interview with Shannon Bramer
Shannon Bramer understands the strange intersection between the sad and the funny, the strange and the precious. Hence the title of her fourth collection of poetry, Precious Energy (BookThug), which ...
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October 03, 2017Writers & Money - Part Two
This is the second in a series of surveys that I posted in order to get an idea of how different writers manage to make ends meet. You can read the first response here: http://open-book.ca/News/Writers-and-Money ...
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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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April 30, 2017
Failed Dreams
In my new poetry book Beautiful Children with Pet Foxes, there’s a series of poems called “Dream Specimens,” based on actual dreams that I’ve had over the years. I had some fun with these poems, ...
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January 31, 2014
On Writing, with Dane Swan
By Open Book and Dane SwanDane Swan is Open Book's February 2014 Writer in Residence. In his On Writing interview, he tells us about his latest book, Bending the Continuum, his next project and his ideal ...
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January 18, 2019Yard Dog author A.G. Pasquella on Keeping the Rawness from Draft to Draft (and a Tattoo Suggestion)
Sometimes getting the thing you want most doesn't quite work out. That's what Jack Palace discovers in A.G. Pasquella's gritty new thriller Yard Dog (Dundurn Press). When Jack gets out of prison, it ...
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April 26, 2019Poet Ayaz Pirani on Oral Tradition, Literary Gatekeepers, and Writing Faithful Lines
Ayaz Pirani's work has been praised as "wise... surprising [and] sly" and his newest collection, Kabir’s Jacket Has a Thousand Pockets (Mawenzi House), builds on his characteristic insightful, elegant ...
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May 30, 2018"I Try to Find the Shape of a Poem" Talking to the Griffin Poetry Prize Finalists about Process & Poetry
When it comes to poetry, it doesn't get any bigger than the Griffin Poetry Prize. The two $75,000 prizes (one for a Canadian collection of poetry, one for an international collection) not only has one ...
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February 02, 2017The Proust Questionnaire, with Paul Benedetti
To paraphrase Tolstoy, it seems fair to say that each funny family is funny in its own way. The Hamilton Spectator's Paul Benedetti runs with that idea in his hilarious portrait of modern family life, You ...
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June 11, 2015
Why I Am in Love with Margaret Atwood
I wanted to do something different, so midway through last term, I wrote a proposal for Mutants and Monsters, a new science fiction course.Since I teach biochemistry for a living and have been reading ...
