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July 14, 2021A Literary Drum Kit: J.J. Dupuis Takes Us Into His Writing Space & "Musical" Writing Method
If there's still an X-Files shaped hole in your life, you need to be reading J.J. Dupuis, whose delightfully creepy Creature X mystery series follows cryptozoologist Laura Reagan's search for monsters ...
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September 04, 2015
A Literary Will
There have been many articles written lately about literature’s power to improve empathy, to lead us to happiness, and there have even been essays that suggest that reading can make us better people. ...
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March 09, 2021
A love letter (to books)
The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...
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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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February 25, 2020A Love Letter to Scarborough Writers
To busy writers, penning poems on the back of receipts, scribbling into notebooks on Line 3 — this is for you.I rarely find time to sit down and write anymore. Instead, I create fragments wherever I ...
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September 21, 2015A Love Letter to the Tpl and to Ya Fiction – and an Interview with Cameron Ray
If you've been reading along, you'll know I’ve been really interested in literature’s ability to help people to change, and the literature that I always felt changed me most was what I read when I ...
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April 12, 2019A Map of Reading From Zero to Infinity
“Modern reading is a silent and solitary activity. Ancient reading was usually oral, either aloud, in groups, or individually.” (Paul Saenger’s Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading)Around ...
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July 27, 2021A Message of Hope: Silmy Abdullah's Debut Story Collection Spins Beautiful Tales of Migration, Family, & Self
When home is in flux, our sense of who we are can feel unanchored too. Enter writer and lawyer Silmy Abdullah's debut collection of short fiction, Home of the Floating Lily (Dundurn Press), which, ...
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November 30, 2017A New National Emblem
Canada is a land of plenty. But it is a state poor in symbols. Our national emblems are few and time-worn. Canada’s plant is the maple tree, which, in an annual strip tease, releases red leaves clogging ...
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December 04, 2017A New National Emblem Revisited
I was too hasty the other day. For nice, polite Canadians, the spider icon is just too darn ornery. In true Northern fashion, I apologize. We need something more civil yet found from coast to coast ...
