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January 29, 2020
Read an Excerpt From Teva Harrison's Gorgeously Devastating 'Not One of These Poems Is About You'
In April of last year, the Canadian literary community suffered a profound loss at the passing of celebrated author and illustrator Teva Harrison after a lengthy battle with metastatic breast cancer. ...
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March 25, 2020
Making Time: Blueprinting, or How Durga Chew-Bose Showed Me the Kinship Between Music and Writing
On the first day of social distancing due to COVID-19, I woke up with my synthesizer beside me. I sat up in bed and stabbed some keys for an hour, fed it into my laptop, put it all aside, and returned ...
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July 02, 2015
On Getting My First Novel into Print
My first novel, Eulogy, has just been published.What has the experience been like?Well, it only took eleven years, so I guess it wasn’t too bad. Things could have been far worse: I could have never ...
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November 24, 2015
On 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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June 21, 2017
Flash -- Opportunity for Writers
A post on social media: Wilfred Laurier University seeks applicants for the Edna Staebler Laurier Writer-in-Residence position on its Waterloo campus in southwestern Ontario.For ten weeks, starting in ...
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September 01, 2020
When Your Father is Your Biggest Fan
I don’t believe that any father was more proud of having a son for a writer than my own dad. Whenever I met somebody who knew him—it might be a waiter in a restaurant—the person would say, “Oh, ...
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November 23, 2020
Comparing Myself with May from My Day With Gong Gong
Writing May, the main character in my kids book My Day With Gong Gong, was a joy! It was my first time writing from the perspective of a kid as an adult, and for kids as a main audience. A lot of her ...
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August 12, 2021
Words in Isolation
For many reasons, I felt conflicted about writing another pandemic piece. After the events of the last year, our everyday lives have been complete coloured by our experiences living in a pandemic. Despite ...
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November 19, 2021
Falling in love with audiobooks
I used to have to walk to get my babies to sleep in the stroller. I would walk and walk until they were asleep, loops of the same block, and then I’d sit on a bench, the one bench in my entire neighbourhood, ...
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June 09, 2016
A Poet, a Novelist and a Toddler Enter a Room
Do you ever wonder what it’s like to be one of those literary power couples, talent just oozing from their pores, words pouring from their pens, seemingly effortlessly? Meaghan Strimas & Nathan ...