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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 03, 2020
My One Week on the Bestseller List
On Saturday, June 21, 2014 I opened the Globe and Mail to the books section (back in the time when newspapers had book sections) and after reading the reviews I began to idly scan the bestseller list. ...
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February 29, 2016Job Shadowing: Writer, Editor, and Artist Malcolm Sutton in Conversation About His Novel and Many Types of Work
I first met Malcolm Sutton as the fiction editor at BookThug. We worked closely on my book of short stories, and I admired how much Malcolm strove to understand my worldview and the thinking that went ...
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September 10, 2020A Wolf at the Dog Show
If you’re reading this article you are no doubt familiar with the names of major publishers and their imprints—Penguin Random House, Harper Collins, Knopf, Mcclelland and Stewart, etc. You might ...
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September 01, 2020When 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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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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October 17, 2022
My Abuser Died
Trigger Warning – Sexual Violence, Childhood Sexual Abuse, Trauma.I have pondered the title of this thread for weeks now, wondering if I should lead with a softer opening. Something like, ‘the ...
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April 26, 2023Read an Excerpt from Rocco de Giacomo's Casting Out, a Poetic Memoir of Leaving Evangelical Life
Rocco de Giacomo's childhood was filled with TV faith healers, tense and frequent predictions of the rapture, and the dramatic and sometimes problematic practices of the extreme Pentecostal religious ...
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October 11, 2022
Plain Tired
Part I 4:35 p.m.I’m just plain tired. I don’t usually write exhausted, but I want to be in the ‘best’ space to describe the chronic fatigue that bears on me. Not one spoon left today. (Spoon ...
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October 20, 2022
Sharon's Bench
I met Sharon shortly after I started building my home on Green Lake. In the early times we were more like acquaintances than friends, the kind to say ‘hi’ and exchange a few words than to sit ...