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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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October 15, 2015
Why Writers Need to Talk About Work
Like a lot of people out there, I used to think that anyone who had a book published must be “making it” as a full-time writer. I didn’t wonder how much they might actually be making, just assumed ...
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December 23, 2019How You Get Paid Writing Children’s Books or: Math is Fun!
One question I rarely get asked is how you get paid when you write and/or illustrate children’s books. I know people have a lot of questions regarding how much they might get paid, but how does the ...
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March 08, 2016Nuance vs. Notoriety
For the longest time, I’ve been of the strong belief of the writerly life as associated with an either/or mentality: concision and painstaking precision, or, as writer Jack Kerouac would put it in his ...
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November 30, 2014
With Katrice Dustin: a P. for F. (Part III)
AI_SHA – with Katrice Dustin: a P. for F. (Part III) Can you participate in fashion if you don't have money? Katrice answers. And later I wile out talking about the transformative power of clothes. Some ...
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April 12, 2014
Poet for Hire
I heard a few days ago that a colleague did a major job of editing that took the better part of a year to complete for a mere five-hundred dollars. I happen to mention this to a friend who works as a ...
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April 09, 2014
Madness
Catching up on the frippery of “Downton Abbey,” I enjoyed Maggie Smith’s trenchant Dowager Countess of Grantham listening to her son wax a mite lyrically about land and history and then exclaiming ...
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May 10, 2024Amazon First Novel Award 2024 Shortlist Announced
Yesterday, Amazon Canada and The Walrus announced the shortlist for the forty-sixth annual Amazon Canada First Novel Award, which rewards the debut novel judged to be the finest of the year based on ...
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April 07, 2016On Fallout: an Interview with Michael Lista About "the Shock Absorber"
Please note the views and opinions expressed by writers in the Open Book writer-in-residence program are the authors' own and do not necessarily reflect those of Open Book, its staff or contributors__________________________________________________________________________When ...
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February 24, 2019Poetry School: Getting specific with Amiri Baraka
Writing is reading, teaching is learning. As I said in my invitation for readers to join me this month-long online Poetry School, I expected to benefit the most from these researches into the craft and ...
