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May 30, 2016
Lat & Long
It's a rare thing for me to find myself somewhere new – or even somewhere I know but haven't been in a while – and not be visited by an urge to set a story there. I'm not exactly sure why this is, ...
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April 23, 2014
The War Series: Writers as Readers, with Evan Munday
Evan Munday is the Silver Birch Award-nominated author and illustrator of middle grade novel Dial M for Morna, The Dead Kid Detective Agency and the graphic novel Quarter Life Crisis: Only the Good Die ...
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August 04, 2020
Retreating from writing
Sometimes our stories practically beg to come to life on the page. Yet despite that begging, that longing, that desire to write, stories almost never just 'come to life' as easily as we might have imagined. ...
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August 09, 2016
Doing 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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August 28, 2023
How Much Do Book Tropes and Aesthetics Matter?
If you’ve spent time on Twitter or Instagram recently, you may have noticed authors and readers sharing graphics that outline a book’s major tropes, or the aesthetics of a book through mood boards.I’ll ...
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June 25, 2018
Eric Schmaltz's Reading Love: His Strangest, Most Comforting, & Most Unsettling Reads
Artist and writer Eric Schmaltz's Surfaces (Invisible Publishing) is a debut collection to remember. The poems are sharp and timely, reflecting Schmaltz's multi-media, cross-platform approach to art. ...
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August 20, 2017
Finish Your Vomit Draft Now
After I posted my last entry, I felt like I didn’t spend enough time talking about why it’s so important for you to finish your vomit draft.How many times have you read a book and thought, “How ...
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October 01, 2020
The sweet spot
First off, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you to Graham and Grace and all the good folks at Open Book for inviting me to sit in this month. I thought I’d start by telling you how I came to writing, ...
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October 13, 2021
Read an Excerpt from Hannah Moscovitch, Maev Beaty & Ann-Marie Kerr's Painful & Beautiful Exploration of Motherhood for Modern Artists
We're continuing our week-long spotlight on excerpts at Open Book, bringing you delicious free samples of some of the most exciting Canadian books out this year. Today we've got something special: our ...
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April 13, 2023
Read an Excerpt from Steven Heighton's Final Story Collection, Instructions for the Drowning
The CanLit community came together in mourning last year when the news broke that beloved and acclaimed Kingston-based writer Steven Heighton had passed away at the age of 60. Known for his powerful multi-genre ...