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August 20, 2019Writing Through Trauma Is Writing Through Forgetting
A few days ago, I finished writing a short story. A new short story. Because my fiction is drawn from my life, I journalled first, did a freewrite, and then outlined the first half of the story to nudge ...
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September 20, 2019When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence
A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...
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March 05, 2019Writer at Work: Reading Tarot for Story
You do not have to believe there is a divine order to read the Tarot. You do not have to believe that your future can be read to read the Tarot. You do not have to be spiritual to read the Tarot. You ...
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March 11, 2019Writer at Work: Journaling, Instinct, and Self-care
Before last week, it had been months since I cried. This is unusual for me. I cry often when I’m alone, especially when I’m writing. Last week, I opened the Word doc that is my journal. Counterintuitively, ...
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July 23, 2019Why I Don’t Announce My Social Media Breaks
Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched several writers announce that they’re taking a break from social media. Sometimes they edit their profile so that their status, “on hiatus,” is added ...
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March 19, 2019Writer at Work: Where I’m Writing From (On Dionne Brand, Black Earth Rising, and Writing with “Love”)
Books that change us challenge us and console us. They break our hearts, they make us think, but most of all, they make us see people as people. Aside from being a generalized and sentimental statement ...
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March 24, 2019Writer at Work: Speaking with the Dead
A couple of weeks ago, I had the honour of speaking on panels at Room Magazine’s Growing Room Festival. During a Q&A session with the audience after the intersectionality, diaspora, and Asian-Canadian ...
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March 30, 2019Writer at Work: The Steadfastness of Beauty
Last fall, a few days after my book, Port of Being, was sent to the printer, I met with Juliane Okot Bitek, whom I had asked for a blurb. During that rainy day at a pub, Juliane and I shared our parallel ...
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March 31, 2019Writer at Work: Criticism is Care
When I began the “Writer at Work” series for Open Book, I wanted to explore what it means for me, a poet and a writer, to be at “work.” As a woman of colour and an emerging writer, I have many ...
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March 28, 2019Writer at Work: “Identity is a pain in the arse” (On Zadie Smith)
Last month, Zadie Smith said: "identity is a pain in the arse." She said this at a festival in the context of a discussion about identity politics and her (white) partner, Nick Laird. Here's a snippet ...
