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September 28, 2023Excerpt: Laurence Beaudoin-Masse Skewers Influencer & Wellness Culture in Her Brilliant YA Sequel
Laurence Beaudoin-Masse's debut novel, Suck it In and Smile was published to wide acclaim in 2022. Exploring our social media-influenced obsession with perfection and appearance, the young adult novel ...
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October 05, 2016The WAR Interview Series: Writers as Readers, with Devon Code
Journey Prize winner Devon Code moves from the short story to the novel with his newest book, Involuntary Bliss (BookThug). The insight and deft prose that won Code accolades for his short story collection, ...
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June 23, 2022Cut Road Author Brent van Staalduinen on the Books That Became His "Masterclasses" in Writing
Hamilton author and writing coach Brent van Staalduinen has a long list of honours for his writing, with three novels under his belt and more than a decade of publishing short fiction in some of the ...
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August 15, 2016You Pays Your Money & You Takes Your Chances
A ticker-tape parade broke out in my home the other day, when my basement excavations revealed a box of old paperbacks that contained my treasured copy of Robert Sheckley’s 1975 science-fiction novel ...
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August 09, 2016Doing My Song and Dance
I sent out my first godawful poem for publication when I was ten or eleven years old. I sent it to the Toronto Daily Star; I obviously hadn’t done my market research, since they didn’t publish poetry. ...
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September 08, 2021
The Books on My Desk, Time, Habits, Children, and Orderliness
I feel like I need to mention that I just found out this morning that Glorious Frazzled Beings has been long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize because it has taken up most of my morning with a hullaballoo ...
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May 24, 2024A Discussion of Blasphemy and Other Ancestors: 4 Novellas by Padgett Powell, Darius James, Lee Henderson, & Jean Marc Ah-Sen
"It's the fate that awaits us all," says Jean Marc Ah-Sen of the four novellas in Blasphemy and Other Ancestors (Gordon Hill Press), written by him, Padgett Powell, Darius James, and Lee Henderson, explaining ...
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November 20, 2015Taking Your Medicine in the Editing Room
In previous posts I’ve talked about the hard road to getting a book published, and even a bit about the effort that goes into just getting those first few stories done. I’ve talked about submitting ...
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November 24, 2015On Writing Violence - An Addendum
I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback and some questions about one of my first posts for Open Book, “On Writing Violence.” One reader, Susan, asked me in the comments about how this all ...
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November 27, 2015On "Fiction" - Writing from Real Life
Over the past while I’ve noticed a number of situations where an author is asked about the autobiographical or non-fiction elements in their books. It has always been something that people are interested ...