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May 25, 2021"I Felt Like I Had Found a Place" Poet Vanessa Shields on the High Highs and Low Lows of a Life Spent Writing & Publishing
Every family story contains at least one unforgettable character. A person who inspires those who come after with his or her strength, struggles, and legacy. For poet Vanessa Shields, it was her grandmother, ...
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October 14, 2015
Should You Hire a Book Publicist?
In my last post, I wrote about some of the questions authors might want to get clear on when it comes to publicising their books, especially when it comes to understand a publisher’s commitment to promoting ...
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January 24, 2017The Fraught Finish Line: Writers talk about the end of the book
The act of finally finishing a book comes with its own unique set of emotions. Some, of course, are fairly obvious—you spend weeks, months, and years of your life on a single project, writing and rewriting, ...
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December 12, 2019Book Therapy: Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark
“It can always be worse.”-Christy Ann Conlin, Watermark When my grandmother’s memory started to go, she would occasionally become belligerent. The sweet woman I had grown up knowing, the one ...
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May 09, 2016Where We Do What We Do
The first stories of any quality that I produced were written at an old white melamine desk in the windowless furnace room of my future in-laws' house in suburban Ottawa. The hot water tank clicked and ...
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April 12, 2016Why Don’t We Take Sports Writing Seriously?
In February of last year, Canadian Notes and Queries publisher Dan Wells kindly approached me with a question. “Brainstorming a games issue of CNQ,” he wrote in an email. “Wondered if you might ...
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March 01, 2021
Writing violence (again)
On violence and trauma and repetition...When I was nineteen, I went to dinner at a friend’s, and afterwards, her father invited us all upstairs to see his attic art studio.There were so many canvasses ...
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November 30, 2022Book Therapy: Cyclettes
“If I had paused for too long to reflect on whether I was making the ‘right’ choices to optimize satisfaction, I might have become paralyzed in a never doing. Instead I sped towards my hypothetical ...
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September 14, 2023The Pull of Two Needles
My first version of this essay was about how my two obsessions, knitting and writing, don’t compete with each other. I wrote at length about how they spin together in my brain in complicated steps, ...
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August 30, 2017“I think suffering shows us who we truly are.” - Q&A with Gurjinder Basran
A Q&A with Gurjinder Basran, author of Someone You Love is GoneIn 2010, debut novelist Gurjinder Basran won the Search for the Great BC Novel Contest, and the following year took home the Ethel Wilson ...
