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September 29, 2016Interview With Vivek Shraya
Vivek Shraya is one of the most inspiring writers I’ve ever met. I was lucky enough to share the stage with her last year. She read from her beautiful novel, She of the Mountains, and I was moved by ...
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September 28, 2016Interview With Owain Nicholson
Owain Nicholson is a poet whose debut collection, Digsite will be published by Nightwood Editions next month. We had a chance to talk about his writing process, inspirations and literary influences.DB: ...
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September 01, 2022Debut Author Anouk Mahiout on the Importance of Talking, with Humour and Heart, About Tough Feelings in Kids' Books
Pretty much every kid has felt at some point that they don't quite fit in. For Pauline, the lovable protagonist of Anouk Mahiout's debut graphic novel, A Place for Pauline (Groundwood Books, illustrated ...
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October 30, 2019Prize Season
Earlier this summer, I had the chance to do some writing at the Banff Centre. It was a wonderful experience. I wrote, I slept, I went for long walks through the mountains. I ate too many pieces of cake ...
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November 14, 2018On Fairy Tales
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live…[w]e look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition ...
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October 18, 2019Novelist Brenda Brooks on Smoking Like Woolf, Setting Fire to Her Publisher's House, & the Inevitability of Mom Wisdom
In Brenda Brooks' new novel Honey (ECW Press), it's been six long years since the titular Honey disappeared from Nicole's life. When her vanished best friend returns unexpectedly, Nicole is forced to ...
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November 27, 2015On "Fiction" - Writing from Real Life
Over the past while I’ve noticed a number of situations where an author is asked about the autobiographical or non-fiction elements in their books. It has always been something that people are interested ...
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March 14, 2014
The Reading Rulebook
I used to go to a lot of public readings of poetry and fiction. Then I had kids, and rarely went, but recently, due to changing circumstances, I've been out to a few more, and what hasn't changed are ...
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August 08, 2017Read an Excerpt from Oisín Curran's forthcoming Blood Fable!
Today we have a sneak peek at an exciting Fall 2017 book from BookThug: Oisín Curran's Blood Fable will be released in October, but you can read an excerpt now, exclusively on Open Book. In Blood ...
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July 30, 2018
The Part of It You Don't See
If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...
