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March 23, 2021
Decoder ring
In Girl Minus X, there are choices made by the main character, Dany, that seem more legible and logical to people who’ve experienced trauma and understand the way, afterwards, a person is forever scanning ...
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March 26, 2021
Monster
When I walked in, the four of them were seated at a folding card table. Behind a cardboard screen, the Dungeon Master sat shuffling his stack of wrinkled maps and notes. I pulled up a chair, though the ...
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March 29, 2021
Writing/Not Writing
Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...
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May 29, 2023
Bringing It All Back Home
As I write this, I am sitting outside in the backyard of a rowhouse in Toronto’s East End. The wind is stirring the leaves of a big maple tree spreading its branches high above me, and stirring the ...
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May 01, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1
It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...
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August 20, 2019Writing Through Trauma Is Writing Through Forgetting
A few days ago, I finished writing a short story. A new short story. Because my fiction is drawn from my life, I journalled first, did a freewrite, and then outlined the first half of the story to nudge ...
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May 07, 2018Craig Terlson on Exploring Truth Through Scandal and Conspiracy
Illustrator Craig Terlson spent more than twenty years drawing for the likes of The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, and Saturday Night magazine, racking up numerous awards. After making it to the ...
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January 03, 2023How to Get Published in Canada Today: A Conversation with Patricia Westerhof
With three decades of experience teaching creative writing under her belt as well as three acclaimed books, Patricia Westerhof is a very good person to talk to about how to get started (or move forward) ...
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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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September 04, 2015
A Literary Will
There have been many articles written lately about literature’s power to improve empathy, to lead us to happiness, and there have even been essays that suggest that reading can make us better people. ...
