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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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May 25, 2022"My Life Happened and Then the Stories Followed" Dayle Furlong on Writing Her Gritty, Gripping New Story Collection
The yearning hope and baffled rage of those characters who haven't been lucky in life is a palpable presence in Dayle Furlong's gritty new linked story collection, Lake Effect (Cormorant Books). With ...
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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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February 16, 2020
Blogpost #4: START TO FINISH, The Story Behind the Story 2- A Likkle Miss Lou
In this second instalment of my START TO FINISH, The Story Behind the Story series, I focus on my latest picture book A Likkle Miss Lou: How Jamaican Poet Louise Bennett Coverley Found ...
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February 23, 2018"True Stories are Always the Best Stories & They Can Be the Toughest to Write": The 2018 RBC Taylor Prize Finalists on Non-Fiction
On Monday, the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize for Non-Fiction will be presented to one of five shortlisted authors. This year's list is an eclectic one, making it tough to predict a winner in this strong crop ...
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September 03, 2019"Story is Story, No Matter the Medium" Playwright & Writing Teacher Diane Flacks on Finding "the Why" of Your Writing
Diane Flacks is no stranger to posing provocative questions in her work as a playwright. Her newest play, Unholy (Playwrights Canada Press), delves into a big one: Should women abandon religion? In ...
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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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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, ...
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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 ...
