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April 12, 2022Read an Excerpt from Caroline van Rooyen's Any Girl, About a Teen Survivor Hunting Down a Predator
Content warning: sexual violenceCaroline van Rooyen's Any Girl (Mawenzi House) is the harrowing, fiery story of July, the unlikely 15-year old heroine who wages war on a rapist terrorizing her community ...
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November 30, 2021Daniel Scott Tysdal Examines the Darkness, Strangeness, & Flickering Hope of Life in the 21st Century in His Spectacular Debut Story Collection
Daniel Scott Tysdal is a beloved creative writing professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough and a decorated poet. And of course, Tysdal is also an Open Book columnist and the subject of one ...
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February 03, 2022Robert Earl Stewart on the Power of Nonfiction to Turn Our Most Broken Parts into Connection and Comfort
Blaise Pascal once wrote that humans were born with an "infinite abyss" that can only be filled by "God himself", originating a theory that spawned the idea of "a God-shaped hole" in the human psyche. With ...
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March 17, 2023Procrastination Station
It’s just shy of midnight and I’m sitting here, writing this, thinking about how I should have started it sooner. But if I had started it sooner, would it have been finished before now?If this question ...
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March 01, 2021
Writing violence (again)
On violence and trauma and repetition...When I was nineteen, I went to dinner at a friend’s, and afterwards, her father invited us all upstairs to see his attic art studio.There were so many canvasses ...
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April 15, 2017
Kathryn Mockler on Poetry Exercises
Today in my series on poetry prompts and exercises, I'm featuring writer Kathryn Mockler. She teaches creative writing, poetry, and screenwriting at Western University, and runs private workshops through ...
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October 11, 2021PECULIAR TIMES
Write at the edges of the day.― Toni MorrisonI was a thirty-four old woman with three children under the age of eight when I got the bright idea to write my first novel. I was also working outside the ...
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July 30, 2018
The Part of It You Don't See
If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...
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October 15, 2021MUSE ON THE LAM
Today’s post is about what to do when your muse goes AWOL. When your muse is a contrarian like mine is, getting them to show up for work often requires lengthy debates. Who has that extra time?The ...
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October 19, 2023Glimpse into the Wealth of Filipino-Canadian Writing Talent in this Excerpt from Magdaragat
Magdaragat: An Anthology of Filipino-Canadian Writing (Cormorant Books) opens with the line "Magdaragat is Filipino for 'seafarer' or 'mariner'". It's a first line that heralds the expansiveness of the ...
