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October 01, 2020The sweet spot
First off, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you to Graham and Grace and all the good folks at Open Book for inviting me to sit in this month. I thought I’d start by telling you how I came to writing, ...
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September 19, 2018Talk to Me
My little sunroom office at home (which is also our dining room) faces a fairly busy street, so when the weather’s good and our windows are open, bits and pieces of random conversations drift up to ...
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April 14, 2022"The List/ of Things I’ve Done/ for My Body is Too Long" Read an Excerpt from Nisa Malli’s Bold Poetry Debut, Allodynia
Allodynia, Nisa Malli’s follow up to her bpNichol Award winning chapbook, Remitting, is a tense, powerful collection that grabs the reader with razor-sharp, elegant forays into themes of pain and ...
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April 05, 2014
Fear of Flying
I gave a public performance the other night. It was supposed to be a reading from my recent novel, “The Outside World,” but I thought I’d sneak in a few poems from my “Invisible Dogs” as well. ...
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November 15, 2019
Revision Part One
Revision, where the piled fragments of a draft shift and reassemble, is my favourite part of writing. It’s where the most substantial changes happen, and a story is overhauled in ways that are surprising ...
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October 12, 2016
Norfolk, Murder Mysteries, Birds, and Mimesis
I spent the weekend in Norfolk visiting an old friend. I’ve never been to that part of England before, and because I see the world through a fictional lens, Steve Burrows’ birder mysteries, set in ...
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October 15, 2016
Literary Tourism
Every time I visit London, I stay in a different area. This time, I’m just a few blocks from Chancery Lane, in the heart of Dickens’ London. I suppose all of London is Dickens’ London given the ...
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January 14, 2021Achievable, Artistic Resolutions for Authors and Illustrators
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love coming up with new year’s resolutions. I love committing to some kind of regular creative activity … no matter the outcome! Last year, I said ...
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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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February 15, 2021
LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID: The writing process Part 5 of 9
In the isolation of lockdowns and social distancing where does romance go? For those who are romantically involve it could intensify the bond but for many the opposite has been true since there has been ...
