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September 21, 2018Read an Exclusive Excerpt from A Skeletal Wand by Ruth Roach Pierson
Governor General's Literary Award nominated poet Ruth Roach Pierson's newest collection, A Skeletal Wand (Palimpsest Press), is a gorgeous book, full of poems that are uneasy and arresting, sketched ...
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September 19, 2018Ontario's Vibrant Voices: Talking to The Word on the Street Authors Lezlie Lowe, Rabindranath Maharaj, & Merilyn Simonds
The Word on the Street Toronto's Vibrant Voices of Ontario stage is a perennial favourite with festival goers, packed as it is with some of the brightest, most talented literary voices in the province. ...
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September 19, 2018Talk to Me
My little sunroom office at home (which is also our dining room) faces a fairly busy street, so when the weather’s good and our windows are open, bits and pieces of random conversations drift up to ...
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September 16, 2018Schmoozing for Introverts
It’s that time of year again, when students return to school, the leaves change colour, and Fall Book Season begins.The brilliant Sarah Selecky has already written this excellent antidote to those icky ...
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September 12, 2018Notes on My Futile Attempts to Evade the Creeping Tendrils of Inescapable Progress
The other day, my six-year-old daughter told me that I’m on my phone too much.This was right after I’d grinned at a parking attendant and told him how thrilled I was to see a person at the gate instead ...
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September 10, 2018On Kindness, and Generosity
The Toronto literary community has recently lost two very bright lights, mourning the deaths of Priscila Uppal and Ann Ireland.Though I didn’t know either Ann or Priscila all that well, I feel fortunate ...
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September 06, 2018Anatomy of a Short Story, or Where I Get (Some of) My Ideas
I’m not one of those writers who makes everything up completely from scratch. And seriously, do those writers even exist? (If they do, I am jealous of them.)In my fiction, almost everything comes from ...
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September 02, 2018Show Me the (Writing-Grant) Money!
Hello, and Happy September! Thanks to the excellent folks at Open Book for inviting me here, and thanks to you for tuning in, lovely readers-who-I’m-guessing-are-mostly-also-writers.All right, let’s ...
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August 30, 2018Meet our September 2018 writer in residence, short fiction wizard Jessica Westhead!
A Jessica Westhead short story is a magical thing. Her darkly funny, heartfelt stories of misfits, loners, and compelling weirdos have racked up numerous honours, including nominations for the ReLit ...
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August 17, 2018Form as Home
Every time I sit down to write, I find myself exasperated by the considerations. The considerations of who will be reading it, how it’ll be interpreted, if it’ll hurt someone within or outside my ...