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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 ...
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January 24, 2020Making Time: Making Randomness & #SSCLUB
When 2020 began, I’d been off most social media for about twenty-two days. My decision wasn’t deliberate. In fact, it was reactive. The night before I went offline, I read a short story: “Innards” ...
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February 27, 2020Making Time: How Ondaatje Taught Me To Show Up For Myself, or Plotting vs. Pantsing
There are some books whose images stay with us long after we’ve read them, far more than the stories or the characters themselves. An image that has stayed with me over the years is from The English ...
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December 03, 2019Becoming Bigger Than Ourselves
In mid-November, a few days after I’d returned to Vancouver from the Singapore Writers Festival a week prior, I saw an owl.I was in a jet-lagged haze at dusk, on my way to the convenience store to get ...
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December 17, 2019How to Make and Keep Writing Resolutions
Resolutions. I’ve made them. You’ve made them. We’ve broken them the next day, the next week, a few months into the new year. We’ve even forgotten about them. A resolution involves making a decision ...
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March 25, 2020Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
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May 05, 2020Making Time: Finding Healing with Yayoi Kusama
Yayoi Kusama. You know her. You took a selfie in the Infinity Mirror Room at the AGO. You’ve seen her polka dots all over the Internet. You’ve seen her sobering gaze, her blunt bob.On April 15, Kusama ...
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May 29, 2020Making Time: Why Now is the Perfect Time for Tarot
I don’t want to pretend that I know the history of the Tarot or how it should be used, but I’ve been using it for the last three years because it’s been immensely helpful. I’m not an “expert,” ...
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July 28, 2020How to Keep Dreaming in the Pandemic (or, How I Finished the Third Draft of my Novel)
Living in a pandemic means that we are facing death every day. Thinking about death pushed me into survival mode. I was stressed and depressed to the point of migraines and insomnia. I stopped doing things ...
