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August 26, 2021
The Writing Moment with SHORT FILMS
As writers, we draw inspiration and learn from other arts, whether painting, music, comics, or videogames. By offering inspiration beyond the written word, these arts can provide new experiences for us ...
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March 04, 2020
The Dirty Dozen: 'Violet Shrink' Author Christine Baldacchino Talks Anime, Blanket Forts, and Bad Movies
Violet, the title character in author Christine Baldacchino's delightful new picture book Violet Shrink (Groundwood), feels uncomfortable and anxious in large groups. While the rest of her outgoing family ...
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November 07, 2019
Book Therapy: Jessica Westhead’s Worry
"Her brain and her body were still so wobbly then. Nothing about her was behaving the way it was supposed to. The birth had been a traumatic one, and she thought she would never heal.” - Jessica Westhead, ...
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October 20, 2015
How Tarot Can Help You with Your Writing
I was 13 the first time I tried to see the future in a playing card.I’d been at the grocery store with my parents, and in the checkout line was a small rack of books. I was immediately drawn to one ...
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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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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...
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March 16, 2021
A love letter (to libraries)
(—and other public places I once wrote to escape violence.)My life is very different from what it was when I began writing. While working on my latest novel, Girl Minus X, I often wrote in public ...
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May 24, 2016
Bobcaygeon
This is a damned weird country. Culturally and geographically, it has some peculiarities which rest not off to the side but squarely in the middle of our shared national consciousness. There is a rib ...
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July 27, 2020
The Erotic and the Prophetic: A Lesson Across Centuries
I’m loathe to admit that I only became intimately familiar with the works of celebrated Black feminist theorist and poet Audre Lorde a little over a year ago, when my partner gave me a copy of Sister ...
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February 22, 2019
Poetry School: Feminist re-vision with Ms. Rich
Feminist revisionist mythologies represent a vibrant stream in mid-to-late 20th- and 21st-century poetry. I’m thinking of Muriel Rukeyser’s Orpheus; Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife and Feminine ...