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May 14, 2009
Should Professors of Poetry at Oxford Be Without Sin?
A friend of mine, a Jamaican man, told me many years ago that he disliked going to bars in England, where he’d been a student. Why? Because if a man put his hand up under a woman’s skirt, he was likely ...
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October 24, 2016
A Poetry Bookshop in Toronto
An exciting thing happened in Toronto while I was away. Jeff Kirby opened a poetry bookshop, knife|fork|book, in Rick’s Café in Kensington Market. Having missed the October 6th grand opening, I raced ...
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October 29, 2016
L.M. Montgomery, Ontario, and Poetry
Today I gave a reading from How to Draw a Rhinoceros from the pulpit of the Historic Leaskdale Church, a somewhat unlikely location for my first public reading from this book. The occasion was LMM Day, ...
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June 21, 2023Your Global Indigenous Playlist: Summer Solstice 2023
Yesterday, I received 200-plus comments from an editor on the first draft of a manuscript. I love this part of the publishing process, when I’m in conversation with someone about making a book. Page ...
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October 18, 2018
My friend Richard
In my last post I talked about some of the influential writers and books that inspired me to seriously pursue my own creative writing. My list is much longer than that, and there are many more storytellers ...
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September 11, 2019"I Like it When Characters Disobey the Narrative Around Them" Seyward Goodhand on Breaking Rules & Surprising Herself
Seyward Goodhand has been creating fresh, eerie, fascinating short fiction for years (racking up nominations for honours like the Journey Prize, CBC Short Story Prize, and a National Magazine Award in ...
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November 23, 2016The Dirty Dozen with Russell Wangersky
The characters in Russell Wangersky's short fiction collection, The Path of Most Resistance (House of Anansi Press), don't make things easy for themselves. Instead, they are consciously or unconsciously ...
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April 04, 2014
Fame
Patrick Friesen is a true lyric poet, open and honest, singing more often than talking. His poems are almost bodiless, his words slowly turning into rivers. In “Earth’s Crude Gravities,” language ...
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August 13, 2018Defending your writing
Ever since I can remember, I wanted to be a writer. As a kid, I read everything in my library from A – Z. I was the secretary of the Library Club and loved my after-school gig of sorting the books according ...
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March 25, 2022Locked Down and Longing for Community: The Genesis of The Quarantine Review
It started in a pub on the Danforth, the bar filled with older gentlemen dejected at the cancellation of the Dave Mason concert at the Music Hall a half-block away. COVID wasn’t real to them yet, as ...
