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October 20, 2021The Writing Moment with... Spooky Season
I love and dread the fall. The appeals are many: the crackling, fiery colours, the beginning of a new school year, Halloween’s ghoulish joys, the growing chill in the air, and the attendant comfort ...
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April 15, 2014
The Best Words
Sometimes I’m haunted by Coleridge’s nifty definition of a poem as the best words in their best order. If I try to say it quickly several times in a row, “order” starts to sound like “odour.” ...
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April 02, 2014
Poetics of Place
I’ve been thinking about the poetics of place: Tim Lilburn’s Moosewood Sandhills; Don Domanski’s wilderness of a cosmos; Karen Solie’s truck stops and motels; Tim Bowling’s fishing boats. It’s ...
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February 03, 2020Blogpost #1: Meet Nadia L. Hohn, or selected musings of a Black-Canadian djeli
Here ye! Here ye! My name is Nadia L. Hohn and I am proud to be the February 2020 Open Book writer-in-residence. Not only do you get to read my posts about writing, #kidlit, and Canadian publishing ...
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April 22, 2014
Endurance
It was a minute-and-a-half since I finished toying with a poem that hadn’t been working for weeks; I had that submarine feeling that it was sinking out of sight. But I had no time to dither with the ...
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January 30, 2020February 2020 Writer-in-Residence Nadia Hohn on Recommended Books, Overlooked Gems, and Charming Tropes
Critically-acclaimed Jamaican-Canadian children's author Nadia Hohn has spent her career celebrating Black stories, from her award-winning debut picture book Malaika's Costume (House of Anansi) to her ...
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April 14, 2014
Ideas
I keep a list of things I think I want to write about. Back when the list was a more manageable size, I’d tackle my ideas at enough of a distance for me to have processed the simple stuff, the details, ...
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April 08, 2014
Touch of Class
The other day, I agreed to read one of my own poems at a sixtieth wedding anniversary. There were fewer trees on the main street of the small town just north of Toronto than the last time I’d been there, ...
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December 10, 2017The Moth
I do not nominate the moth, pallid creature of night, to be any sort of talisman or totem. Moths are vandals, eating your heirloom woolens. These Visigoths deserve summary execution. No last meal of tartan ...
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September 02, 2018Show Me the (Writing-Grant) Money!
Hello, and Happy September! Thanks to the excellent folks at Open Book for inviting me here, and thanks to you for tuning in, lovely readers-who-I’m-guessing-are-mostly-also-writers.All right, let’s ...
