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October 31, 2022November Writer in Residence Helen Walsh on Gardening, Edinburgh, & Eating Dinner with Hans Gruber
Helen Walsh's Pull Focus (ECW Press) has something for everyone: thrilling intrigue, social commentary, film industry glamour, and a tough protagonist facing crises both personal and professional. The ...
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July 06, 2023On Uncanny Delays, Endings, and Dionne Brand
Last summer I moved houses briefly to work on my novel. A friend was leaving the country for a few weeks and I gladly left my little apartment to take care of his place and write. I came well equipped ...
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October 25, 2023Governor General's Literary Award Finalists Revealed, with Nods for Suzette Mayr, Iain Reid, and More
Today the Canada Council for the Arts revealed the nominees for the Governor General's Literary Awards in both English and French. The seven categories for English nominees include 35 books, five in each ...
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June 30, 2017Out-Takes from a Novel
Researching a novel means reading and travelling, amassing material and then cutting, cutting, cutting for focus and flow. This leaves outtakes, like the cloth left over after you’ve cut out the pieces ...
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August 13, 2014Pioneer Fashion Strikes Gold
Post-Victorian pioneer style is in. Big beards and work boots (boys); peasant skirts and sensible-heeled ankle booties (girls); huddling in old timey, barn-board-clad bars around old-timey-branded craft ...
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November 19, 2020Exhausted by the Parenting Wars? Read an Excerpt from Olivia Scobie's Brilliant Book, Impossible Parenting
At some point, amidst a rising tide of parenting blogs, personal essays, and, eventually, Instagram posts, good parenting shifted from something you do to something you are. If you aren't transcendentally ...
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December 22, 2016On Writing, with Tim McCaskell
Tim McCaskell drew on decades of experience as an activist to write Queer Progress: From Homophobia to Homonationalism (Between the Lines Books), which explores both the progress of LGBTQ activism and ...
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June 20, 2019On Synchronicity and Writing: The Path Back to Myself
Last month, I had the privilege of going on a road trip across Northern BC as part of an author’s tour organized by the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for which my book of poems, Port of Being, was a finalist. ...
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August 15, 2018Art After Money, Money After Art author Max Haiven on a Post-Work Society, Tea Sandwichs, & Sh*t Disturbing
Making art is work, but within our capitalist system, the relationship between money and art is anything but straight forward (cue all those corporate clients looking to pay for your art in "experience" ...
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March 26, 2013Kid Lit Can, with Susan Hughes: Classic Canadian Children's Books, Old and New (Part Two)
Welcome back to the kick-off of my monthly blog on Open Book: Toronto, which will be celebrating Canadian children's books, their creators and the kid lit biz in general!In Part One of this blog, I asked ...