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March 16, 2021"Our Shared Past and Future" James Gladstone's Halley's Comet Picture Book Offers Historical Perspective
Halley's Comet, possibly the most famous celestial event in existence, and one which happens just once every 75 years, is a unique phenomenon. It has been dazzling onlookers for centuries, and its story ...
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March 13, 2021
Permission to dream
When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...
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March 10, 2021A "Book Behind Which No Part of Me Could Hide": Andrea Actis' Poetic Memoir of Grief & Loss is Stunning
Content warning: death in the family, grief. It's an unimaginable scene: returning home one night in 2007, Andrea Actis entered her Vancouver apartment to discover her father, lying dead. The aftermath ...
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March 09, 2021
A love letter (to books)
The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...
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March 08, 2021On Giving Myself Permission Not to Write
I know I have to write it. The essay I’ve been trying to write for a year and a half.I will be in the grocery store or out in the muck of a hike dripping with sweat and a sentence of it will come to ...
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March 05, 2021
Writing Time
When it comes to writing, I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the basics—namely space and time. I find it easy to imagine myself into a character’s head—to project myself into a character’s ...
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April 29, 2021May 2021 Writer-in-Residence Wendy Orr Explores Love & Disability in Ancient Greece in Her Captivating New Novel
Children's author Wendy Orr knows how to capture the imagination of young readers in her many acclaimed books (including fan favourite Nim's Island, which was even adapted as a blockbuster film). ...
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February 28, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 9 of 9
One thing about the pandemic is that it has changed how we socialize and interact with other humans. Even before the pandemic people seemed to be becoming more engaged online and less actually connected. ...
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February 26, 2021Grinding Out a New Novel
Writing a novel is a grind. It’s an arduous, meticulous, and often repetitive process that can take years. There’s the actual typing of words onto the page, and then come the edits and rewrites, which ...
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February 26, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 8 of 9
What happens when the unexpected occurs. As a writer, I like to throw unexpected elements in when things seem to be progressing smoothly. The same way I don’t conceive of a beginning or middle before ...