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May 24, 2016Bobcaygeon
This is a damned weird country. Culturally and geographically, it has some peculiarities which rest not off to the side but squarely in the middle of our shared national consciousness. There is a rib ...
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April 06, 2015
Bodies Called Forth and Bodies Calling
Part of the reason I’ve decided to write about bodies this month is because I’ve been reading and talking so much about them—in newspapers, online, in books, and with friends and family. The transformations ...
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April 18, 2014
Body Parts
Am I writing the same poem over and over again? My books are teeming with the invisible and a state of loneliness that could be a one-man cold war. I never set out to revisit these themes, but they almost ...
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November 24, 2016
Book Club Talk and Margaret Atwood's Double Persephone
By Bianca Lakoseljac: OB Writer in Residence One of the highlights of being a writer is chatting with readers. Whether it’s about the setting for my novel, the characters’ triumphs and heartbreaks, ...
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February 27, 2017Book Criticism Is Not Book Promotion
Most people won’t read most books. It seems like a truism, but it’s an important fact to keep in mind if you’re thinking of reviewing a book. Whether it’s a brief write-up in an industry magazine ...
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October 02, 2023Book Launch Season, Part 2: Being an Audience Member
In the first part of “Book Launch Season,” I talked about how to enter this period of time as an author. Writers are (I hope) readers. As a poet especially, going to readings and sitting there as ...
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January 19, 2021Book Therapy: 100 Miles of Baseball
“Baseball is about connecting—with people we’ve just met, people we’ll never meet again, people we know, people we love and miss.”—Dale Jacobs and Heidi LM Jacobs, 100 Miles of Baseball In ...
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June 28, 2023Book Therapy: Big Shadow
“It suddenly felt pointless—no, more damning than that: it was embarrassing—to have devoted the day to him, travelling to the countrystead just to find his books, then imagining myself as the next ...
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June 04, 2021Book Therapy: Care Of
“I never set out to be a queer author. I really didn’t. I just loved writing and especially telling stories. I know now in retrospect that I was feeding and watering a vast and hollow space inside ...
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December 12, 2019Book Therapy: Christy Ann Conlin’s Watermark
“It can always be worse.”-Christy Ann Conlin, Watermark When my grandmother’s memory started to go, she would occasionally become belligerent. The sweet woman I had grown up knowing, the one ...