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September 21, 2020What Timothy Findley Taught Me
Unfortunately, it isn’t often that a major biography of a Canadian writer is published. Such a book takes years to write and costs the author a great deal, not only in work time but also in research ...
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September 14, 2020Short is Beautiful
Don’t get me wrong, I like to lose myself in a big, fat novel. My first and still-favourite author is Charles Dickens. Not long ago I managed to get through Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and a couple ...
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September 24, 2020Literary Ancestors
It’s said that every person has two families. There’s the one that you are born into and the one that you choose for yourself—your friends. But writers have a third family, the literary ancestors ...
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April 23, 2017
Phoebe Wang on Poetry Exercises
Today's post on poets and poetry prompts features Toronto-based writer and educator Phoebe Wang. She was the 2015 Grand Prize winner of the Prism International Poetry Prize and her debut collection of ...
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October 18, 2017The Writer in the World: The Mismanagement of Mystery with Vladimir Lucien
A Conversation with Vladimir LucienPoetry's so-called "resurgence" as a form of public/social capital seems to reveal today something new of the role of the artist in the world. This new thing, to me, ...
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September 27, 2017How I Learned to Write What Scares Me
Three years ago, I wrote a poem.Back then, a few very big things happened in my life. My marriage died. I found a new publisher. And, perhaps most importantly, I started teaching.For my entire publishing ...
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December 29, 2017The Canlit Year in Review: 2017 Can Suck It
I remember the moment when I realized that 2017 was going to irrevocably change Canlit. It was early in June, and I was sitting on a stage, speaking at a panel on diversity and the appropriation of voice. ...
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August 31, 2018On the future of Canlit
You guys, this is my last Open Book column.I have been writing this column for a year now and I’ll admit I didn’t know what I was going to write about when Holly Kent and Kevin Hardcastle asked me ...
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September 20, 2014Q&A with Linda Lacroix, Ceo and Head Librarian at the Lake of Bays Library in Baysville, On
Coordinates: 45.3000° N, 79.0000° W“Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations. Of all the institutions that purport to do this, free libraries stand virtually ...
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April 25, 2018On respectable narratives and why diversity on the page matters
Growing up, I was very particular kind of Chinese girl. I attended Chinese school on Saturdays. I took piano lessons. My report cards were always the best in my class. I played first clarinet in my school ...