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April 29, 2018Dream Space: an interview with Arielle Twist
Arielle Twist is a writer and sex educator from George Gordon First Nation, Saskatchewan who currently lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She is a Cree, Two-Spirit, trans femme supernova writing to reclaim ...
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July 20, 2018On Literary Festivals and Crossed Boundaries
As a writer of creative nonfiction—in particular, one who draws very heavily from my own life and experiences—I’ve learned it’s important to determine whether something I want to write about is ...
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October 22, 2018
Uncomfortable Questions
One of the most common questions any writer from a marginalized background gets is “who did you write this for?” A variation of that is “what audience did you have in mind when you wrote this?” ...
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February 04, 2019Poetry School: An invitation
Over the next month I invite you to join me at Poetry School. I will not be the teacher, but merely the messenger, a fellow student. Though the balance may one day shift, for me writing poetry is about ...
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June 25, 2018Eric 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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October 04, 2018An Interview with Shazia Hafiz Ramji
“My Instinct was to Listen and Notice in Order to Survive.” - Shazia Hafiz RamjiIn her debut collection, Port of Being, Vancouver poet Shazia Hafiz Ramji manages to take the personal and make it into ...
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September 10, 2018On Kindness, and Generosity
The Toronto literary community has recently lost two very bright lights, mourning the deaths of Priscila Uppal and Ann Ireland.Though I didn’t know either Ann or Priscila all that well, I feel fortunate ...
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June 30, 2019Behind the Title: "Frying Plantain"
This is my last post for Open Book and I’ve been thinking about how I should end my June tenure as Writer in Residence. I landed on writing about the title of my book. I’ve been asked a few times ...
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August 28, 2020Should Memoir be Considered Non-Fiction?
One of the things that makes this question so interesting is that the answer isn’t as obvious or cut-and-dried as it first appears. It varies from country to country, for one thing, changes from culture ...
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July 28, 2015
"...My Reading Pile Inevitably Grows: Books to Read, and Books to Read Again"
Several years ago a talented and passionate writer friend said to me, when I complimented her work, “Yes, but I want to be Virginia Woolf.”I said that if she wanted to be Virginia Woolf, then she ...
