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November 30, 2022
Location, Location, Location
I’m writing to you from the plane to London. I’m headed to my favourite city for ten days, following by a few days in Edinburgh visiting friends. Interspersed are trains to Cardiff and Cambridge.It’s ...
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September 07, 2017CanLit is a Raging Dumpster Fire
We’ve all said it, heard it, or, more than likely, done both at some point in the past year and a half. In fact, it would seem that dissatisfaction with the state of CanLit, strangely enough, is the ...
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December 27, 2017Reading Books While Desperately Avoiding Loneliness
There was a tree surrounded by countless of its kind, but also all alone, as the only one alive. Its nearby kin debarked and digested, steamed into slop, robbed of their resin and lignin, cleaned, screened, ...
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January 30, 2018Behind Every Story, A Less Interesting Story
Lillian is trying to write a good play. When progress alludes her, she tears the false starts out of her typewriter, scrunches them up into balls, and kicks over the wastebasket that brims with bad drafts. ...
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February 23, 2018Sorry Not Sorry: On Writing a Good Apology
To some extent, public apologies always are a little false. We’ve had no shortage of them recently. Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey and Louis C.K. come to mind. Their statements always feel removed from ...
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February 22, 2017The Same Aspirations Persist: An Interview with Cameron Anstee, editor of Apt. 9 Press
In 2016, three of the five chapbooks nominated for the bpNichol Chapbook Award came from the same press, Ottawa’s Apt. 9 Press. One of those Apt. 9 Press nominees, Nelson Ball’s Small Waterways, ultimately ...
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December 14, 2017Dear UBC Accountable
Dear UBC Accountable,It’s been one year since you released your open letter to UBC, and Canada, and the world. I don’t want to wish you a happy birthday, because it’s not happy. Not for me, and ...
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March 24, 2017How to Feel, What to Eat
I just got a latte at Starbucks. My drink took a long time. While I waited I eavesdropped on a good chunk of a date, between a man and a woman, taking place at a table near the pick-up station. I believe ...
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April 19, 2017In Praise of Those Who Publish Nothing
Like many of my time zone, I spent the night of November 9th with my smartphone on the same pillow as my head, awakening every now and again to check, and get my mind around, the news. I also had very ...
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May 24, 2017Happy Birthday, Marian Engel!
Today is the eighty-fourth birthday of Marian Engel, or it would be, had the novelist not died of cancer in 1985. Now, instead of a person, she is a name, survived like all people by her family and friends, ...