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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 ...
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April 17, 2018Laurel Croza on Tasty Book Snacks, Finding the Romance, & the Book She Holds as a "Model of What a Kid’s Book Can Be"
Laurel Croza has become a beloved name in picture books through I Know Here (illustrated by Matt James), which won the prestigious Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award (amongst many other honours), and ...
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March 18, 2014
Writing Sex
"And Panhuyzen really gives good sex.” ~National Post, August 1999 Sex! Did you hear that, sex! We’re talking about sex today. Oh, what’s that, you don’t want to talk about sex? Well, too bad, ...
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May 12, 2023Read an Excerpt from Discipline n.v by Concetta Principe, a Wry Lyric Memoir of Navigating Academia's Prejudices
The academic world's nickname—the Ivory Tower—is meant to communicate that it's an environment where scholars can be cut off from everyday concerns while they pursue deep knowledge. But that removal ...
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April 07, 2021"Many Memoirs are Too Careful by Far": Activist, Minister, & Author Rev. Dr. Cheri DiNovo Shares Raw & Inspiring Truth in Her New Memoir
In Toronto, the name Cheri DiNovo is synonymous with passionate activism. Whether you know her from her time as a champion for the west end when she served as the NDP MPP for Parkdale-High Park or from ...
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March 09, 2018Author & Illustrator team Susan Hughes & Carey Sookocheff on the Ups and Downs of Publishing
Who hasn't had the feeling that they don't fit in? Despite the universality of feeling excluded, odd, and unworthy, we still struggle to find a way to reach kids experiencing those feelings, to curb bullying ...
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July 14, 2021A Literary Drum Kit: J.J. Dupuis Takes Us Into His Writing Space & "Musical" Writing Method
If there's still an X-Files shaped hole in your life, you need to be reading J.J. Dupuis, whose delightfully creepy Creature X mystery series follows cryptozoologist Laura Reagan's search for monsters ...
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July 30, 2018
The Part of It You Don't See
If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...
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September 17, 2020To Pandemic or not to Pandemic
Surely any period of upheaval and uncertainty is a difficult one to start a novel. And here we are, seven months into the pandemic and with no end in sight. Let’s say that you’re a novelist ...
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August 08, 2017Read an Excerpt from Oisín Curran's forthcoming Blood Fable!
Today we have a sneak peek at an exciting Fall 2017 book from BookThug: Oisín Curran's Blood Fable will be released in October, but you can read an excerpt now, exclusively on Open Book. In Blood ...
