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May 16, 2016Profile on Monty Reid, with a Few Questions
Ottawa poet Monty Reid, who moved to the area in 1999 after spending most of his working life in Alberta, including side trips to British Columbia and Quebec, was originally born in Saskatchewan. He is ...
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May 24, 2017Happy Birthday, Marian Engel!
Today is the eighty-fourth birthday of Marian Engel, or it would be, had the novelist not died of cancer in 1985. Now, instead of a person, she is a name, survived like all people by her family and friends, ...
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November 03, 2016The Art of Giving Feedback
In 2009, after I had finished an early draft of my first book, God Loves Hair, I gave some of my closest friends a copy of the manuscript for their feedback. It was a vulnerable experience, especially ...
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April 30, 2018Dream Space: an interview with Zoe Imani Sharpe
Zoe Imani Sharpe is a poet and essayist based in Toronto. Her work has appeared in the Puritan, Lemonhound and Sang Bleu Magazine in the UK. Her chapbook, Sullied, was published by Trapshot Archives ...
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March 22, 2018"I’m Coming in as a Book Lover": CBC Canada Reads Panelists on their Upcoming Literary Battle
CBC Canada Reads is unlike any other book prize in the country - rather than a jury selecting a book in private, the process is not just out in the open but televised, with panelists going to the mat ...
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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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August 29, 2023Read an Excerpt from South by Babak Lakghomi, a Disorienting, Dazzling Tale of Totalitarianism & Truth
Babak Lakghomi's new novel South (Rare Machines/Dundurn Press) is set against a bleak totalitarian landscape, following B, a journalist on a search for truth. A dazzling, disorienting addition to Dundurn's ...
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January 03, 2017Where Are the Classmates Now?
I met Rebecca Rosenblum in the Advanced Fiction Writing class during my undergrad in Creative Writing - at Concordia University, in Montreal. But Rebecca did not go to Concordia - she went to McGill - ...
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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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March 13, 2017My final two columns: Part One
After nearly a decade, my time as a columnist for Open Book comes to a close. According to my email folder, it was May 2009 when Amy Logan Holmes first approached me with the idea of submitting pieces ...