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January 24, 2019"You Can Live Whole Other Lives" H.B. Hogan on Discovering the Most Important Books in Her Life
H. B. Hogan's debut collection of stories, This Keeps Happening (Invisible Publishing), is sit-up-and-take-notice short fiction. Assured, wonderfully strange, deftly funny, and totally fresh in both ...
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January 02, 2019Best Canadian Stories Editor Russell Smith on Short Fiction & the Importance of Variety
For more than 45 years, the most interesting, innovative, and memorable short stories of the year have been collected in Best Canadian Stories, with a list of past contributors that includes the likes ...
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December 20, 2018December Spotlight on Excerpts: Get a Taste of We All Need to Eat by Alex Leslie
We're counting down to the holidays the best way we know how - by gifting excerpts from fabulous books! Today is our final instalment for our December spotlight on excerpts and we're finishing with the ...
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December 10, 2018"I Need to be Deep Inside Their Hearts and Minds" Fran Kimmel on Building the Fascinating Characters in No Good Asking
Moving with family to an idyllic farmhouse sounds like a charming idea, but in practice, behind the scenes, Ellie and Eric Nyland's family is unravelling.Fran Kimmel's No Good Asking (ECW Press) opens ...
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November 20, 2018Mike Barnes on Choosing a Deceptively Simple Title for His Book of Letters to Caregivers
Sometimes deft simplicity is where we find the greatest impact when it comes to writing. That proves true in the title of Mike Barnes' Be With: Letters to a Caregiver (Biblioasis). The title Be With ...
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November 05, 2018Kim Trainor on Capturing Both a Tattooed Iron Age Woman & Modern Day Trauma in Her Book Length Poem
In 1993, a Russian scientist discovered the mummified remains of an Iron Age Pazyryk woman. She was covered in tattoos and buried with great ceremony. During the complex and difficult excavation, the ...
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October 31, 2018
We've always been here
My time here is drawing to a close and I’d like to express great thanks to the Open Book team for inviting me to this space for the past month. It’s been a real pleasure and an immense honour to have ...
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October 30, 2018
Journalism and Fiction
While I am very fortunate to have established a career as a published author, it’s not my primary gig. I’ve been working as a journalist in a professional capacity for more than two decades, first ...
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October 27, 2018
Characters like family
One of my favourite parts of the writing process is creating and developing characters. I’ve always believed a story is only as strongly crafted as the people in it. Characters are the pillars of and ...
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October 23, 2018"A Rough and Guttural Music" Adrian Michael Kelly on Writing His Short Story Collection, The Ambassador of What
13 years ago, Adrian Michael Kelly published his Alberta Book Award-nominated first novel, Down Sterling Road, with Coach House Books. Both readers and author expected more would follow soon, but ...
