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June 16, 2023Writing Family and Community Stories
Why do we write? Some people want to write the definitive work on a subject. Others want to create new audiences or business potential. Some want to introduce readers to a place or time they wouldn’t ...
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September 27, 2018Coming to Voice
I worked on this piece while at a residency for BIPOC writers in the fall of 2017. I did not pick it up again when I returned. While workshopping it there, I was not convinced it captured what I was trying ...
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April 24, 2019What a Poem Does, Not what it Means
In an earlier post, I wrote that both writer and reader should focus more on how a poem comes to be.We seem to spend a disproportionate amount of time trying to understand what a poem means as opposed ...
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November 02, 2020November Writer-in-Residence Sennah Yee on How Picture Books Can Teach Kids About Connecting Across Generations & Cultures
Any kid lucky enough to get to know their grandparents knows it can be a totally unique and fun-filled family connection. But sometimes it takes something special to bring the generations together - just ...
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October 06, 2023Sara Truuvert Explores a Child's View of Japanese Internment in Her Moving First Picture Book
In Japanese folklore, a baku is a chimeric creature that children can call on to protect them from bad dreams – an eater of nightmares. In fiction writer and poet Sara Truuvert's first picture book Mira ...
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August 15, 2017Naben Ruthnum on Titles, Curry, and What's Next
Coach House Books' unique Exploded Views series publishes short and sweet non-fiction books that offer fresh perspectives on complex issues. Their newest offering is Journey Prize winner Naben Ruthnum's ...
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July 26, 2018
What I Talk About When I Talk About Talking Points
When a publisher agrees to publish your book—or at least, when both of my publishers agreed to publish my two books—the author is presented with a questionnaire. If you don’t overthink it, the questions ...
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July 10, 2018
Did You Really Go Through All That?
I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...
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September 27, 2018"I Know My Characters Very Intimately" October Writer-in-Residence Waubgeshig Rice on Crafting His Powerful New Novel
Waubgeshig Rice's hotly anticipated second novel, Moon of the Crusted Snow (ECW Press), plunges the reader into a small northern Anishinaabe community suddenly cut off from the outside world. Panic ...
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August 25, 2020Memoir is Not the Story of Your Life
The funny thing about memoir is that it is not the story of your life.It is true that memoir deals with and includes stories from the author’s life, but therein lies the distinction. For while autobiography ...
