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A picture prompts a thousand words.

Readers of The Bone Mother will know that a significant part of the book’s effectiveness lies in the beautiful, unsettling archival photographs that illustrate the sections that are sent in and around ...

A Piece of Fiction Is a Piece of Consciousness– a Conversation with Dr. Keith Oately

This summer, I pestered Dr. Keith Oately. He’s a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto, and the author of three novels and many works of non-fiction. He’s specialized in, among ...

A Poem Can Be About Anything

I came across a cat writing contest on the internet. At first I thought that the poems had to be written by cats and was sure that my Iris Belle had a stanza or two inside her just waiting to creep out ...

A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection

We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:POETIC LAYERINGdiscovery ...

A Poet, a Novelist and a Toddler Enter a Room

Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be one of those literary power couples, talent just oozing from their pores, words pouring from their pens, seemingly effortlessly? Meaghan Strimas & Nathan ...

A Poetry Bookshop in Toronto

An exciting thing happened in Toronto while I was away. Jeff Kirby opened a poetry bookshop, knife|fork|book, in Rick’s Café in Kensington Market. Having missed the October 6th grand opening, I raced ...

A Poetry Love-In: The Poetry In Voice Recitation Finals

Someone, I think it was Robert Bly, said you feel a good poem all along your body, which probably explains the goose bumps I got when I attended the Poetry In Voice/Les voix de la poésie recitation finals ...

A Precarious Enterprise: Making a Life in Canadian Publishing Book Launch

A Question of Motivation

If you ask any group of people about future goals they hope to one day accomplish, one of the most frequent responses would probably be that they’d like to write a book. Some of them may have ideas, ...

a quick aside on breaks, interpretations, and momentum

i realized two things after my last post. first, that i was missing video games more than i’d probably like to admit. and second, that after three months of online teaching and attempts at book promo ...