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September 24, 2019"I’m Something Else. Something in Between." Sonja Boon on Exploring Identity and Belonging in her New Memoir
Sonja Boon's memoir What the Oceans Remember (Wilfrid Laurier University Press) is a wise and deeply researched meditation on both her own family history and current issues in migration and identity. ...
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September 18, 2019"My Belief in Fate and Destiny Got the Best of Me" Read an Exclusive Excerpt from Nur Abdi's The Somali Camel Boy
Nur Abdi's debut novel The Somali Camel Boy (Mawenzi House) follows Ali, a young boy who has lost everything to a violent clan targeting his family. Tough and determined, he walks from his empty home ...
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September 16, 2019
My Teenaged Reading Secret
When I was six my mom started to take me with her on her weekly visits to the public library. Mom was a fan of Dorothy L. Sayers; I was a fan of Raggedy Ann and Andy books. Around the age of thirteen ...
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September 13, 2019The Unbearable Lightness of Being Between Writing Projects
Lately, I’ve felt a bit unmoored. For the last 6 years, I’ve organized my spare time around working on my novel. I’ve either been working on it or worrying about not having time to work on it, or ...
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September 12, 2019Marie-Louise Gay's Celebration of Young Readers' Imaginations in Fern and Horn: "You Have Your Unique Wonderful Way of Seeing the World"
In Fern and Horn (Groundwood Books), the titular twins Fern and Horn might be small, but their imaginations are huge. Fern loves drawing and helps Horn unlock his love of drawing too - the only trouble ...
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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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September 10, 2019
On Reading
Writers need to read— I offered this advice earlier in the summer— and I sincerely hope it’s not news to any writer looking at this post that reading is a most instructive way to learn what does, ...
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September 06, 2019
I Joined a Writing Group and I Liked It
When I moved to Kingston two years ago I was transitioning to the happy stage of life after raising kids that I’d been anticipating for a few years—tidy house! Lower grocery bills! The reality of ...
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September 05, 2019Tanya Lloyd Kyi Talks Under Pressure, Her Revealing New Book on the Science of Stress for Young People
In this age of self-care and social media breaks, it's easy to think of stress as the domain of the adult. But children and young adults are not only familiar with the experience, they're bearing up under ...
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September 03, 2019
On Beginning and Emerging
This is the first of my posts as September’s Writer-in-Residence for Open Book, and I’m thrilled to have been given this opportunity to share some of my thoughts on writing and the writing life. I ...