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April 23, 2025Danny Jacob's Debut Novel is a Genre-Bending Gothic Fairy Tale
Poet and essayist Danny Jacobs is featured on Open Book today, and this time for his exciting debut novel, The Ignis Psalter (Gordon Hill Press/The Porcupine's Quill). In a multigenerational tale about ...
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May 11, 2016On Doubt
It'll be your constant companion. You won't know a day without it. It will defy cold logic and your efforts to cultivate confidence. It will be haughtily contemptuous of your desire to focus on positives, ...
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February 21, 2024On Writing the Same Book Over and Over
In a 2015 webchat on The Guardian’s site, Kazuo Ishiguro was asked about his varied subject matter. He replied:“My subject matter doesn't vary so much from book to book. Just the surface does. The ...
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September 11, 2021
On Anabiosis and Mosses Helping with Sleep
On Wednesday, on the way to the river, I stopped in my tracks, struck by the moss habitat on a birch tree on the bank. It is a twinned paper birch — with one dead trunk snapped off about two meters ...
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September 08, 2021
The Books on My Desk, Time, Habits, Children, and Orderliness
I feel like I need to mention that I just found out this morning that Glorious Frazzled Beings has been long listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize because it has taken up most of my morning with a hullaballoo ...
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May 17, 2016Public Exhibitions of a Private Act
A great many things in life that I expected to go one way have instead gone another. Imagine my surprise. Maybe this has happened to you, too. As example: I thought I'd know when I became an adult; that ...
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May 16, 2016Arguing Balls and Strikes
I always come back to baseball. As subject, I mean. Each time I think I'm done writing about it, or that I'd be better off focusing exclusively on the production of fiction, something occurs on a green ...
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May 12, 2016Strength in Brevity: A List for Short Story Month
Maybe it's fitting that I'm the Writer-in-Residence for May, since somebody, somewhere decided this is Short Story Month, and the short story is far and away my favourite literary form. In the past, Steven ...
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May 09, 2016Where We Do What We Do
The first stories of any quality that I produced were written at an old white melamine desk in the windowless furnace room of my future in-laws' house in suburban Ottawa. The hot water tank clicked and ...
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May 06, 2016Mother's Day
As people, as writers, we are often formed or directed by crystallizing moments in our lives, brief happenings which nonetheless persist in our minds, or which port some lesson, or confirm for us a suspicion ...
