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April 26, 2010Canadians in New York: The Chelsea Hotel
Despite parboiling myself in the shower a few times I began to like the hotel, or at least some of the residents, or denizens as some liked to call themselves. You could get high in the elevators on the ...
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October 07, 2016How to keep a small chapbook press alive for twenty-three years (a primer)
By the time you read this, above/ground press will most likely be two or three items away from an accumulated eight hundred publications. How does that happen? Even I find it strange and remarkable that ...
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September 14, 2016Profile on Show and Tell Poetry Series, with a Few Questions
Show and Tell Poetry Series is a new reading series in Peterborough that features local emerging and established poets from Peterborough and beyond, held at Curated in the Charlotte Mews (203 Simcoe ...
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March 13, 2017My final two columns: Part One
After nearly a decade, my time as a columnist for Open Book comes to a close. According to my email folder, it was May 2009 when Amy Logan Holmes first approached me with the idea of submitting pieces ...
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October 24, 2013Writing Fatherhood
What do we know about pregnancy1.I shall begin, by speaking. Incubate, introduce a glossary. Just on the tongue. Unpaginated.2.Something is growing, inside. Occupant. Connects whole milk to healthy industry. ...
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December 12, 2018Beyond the Possible: On World Building
Sometimes, I think about what would have happened to Frodo and Sam if, during their journey across the land to Mordor, Frodo had fallen down a jagged slope of rocks and broken his leg.Would Frodo, delirious ...
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November 28, 2017Tanya Talaga on the Title and Tragedy of Seven Fallen Feathers
The tragic story of 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack is a rightfully well known one now in Canada - how the young boy froze to death after running away from a residential school. What is less known is that ...
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July 31, 2019Why you should re-read books
I am a big reader, but I am an even bigger re-reader. Yes, I have a mountainous stack of to be read books, but I believe that it’s important to my writing practice—and to my basic existence—to dive ...
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February 03, 2020Blogpost #1: Meet Nadia L. Hohn, or selected musings of a Black-Canadian djeli
Here ye! Here ye! My name is Nadia L. Hohn and I am proud to be the February 2020 Open Book writer-in-residence. Not only do you get to read my posts about writing, #kidlit, and Canadian publishing ...
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November 24, 2015On Writing Violence - An Addendum
I’ve been receiving a lot of positive feedback and some questions about one of my first posts for Open Book, “On Writing Violence.” One reader, Susan, asked me in the comments about how this all ...