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September 02, 2015
An Interview with Bibliotherapist Susan Elderkin: the Science of Better Living Through Literature
I’ve used books to help me survive every difficult period in my life, and I can always remember the book that got me through. I read Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s ...
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June 30, 2019Behind the Title: "Frying Plantain"
This is my last post for Open Book and I’ve been thinking about how I should end my June tenure as Writer in Residence. I landed on writing about the title of my book. I’ve been asked a few times ...
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March 12, 2021Zoom Class: Omar El Akkad and the Challenges of Writing Resistance
Sometimes there are Zoom meetings that can break you. Last week it took me five days to recover from the nausea, headaches, and light sensitivity caused by one single day of back-to-back virtual meetings. ...
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October 01, 2018Contest! Get Personal with a Prize Pack of Auto-Fiction From Book*hug!
Not quite autobiography, not quite fiction: auto-fiction may be a new term to many, but it refers to a genre that's been beloved by readers and writers alike for decades, and which is getting a new life ...
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November 26, 2025Embracing Tropes
A lot of my summer reading list involved beachy romance novels like Leanne Toshiko Simpson’s Never Been Better and Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After, and, like many twenty-something women, (re)reading ...
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January 30, 2019My Reading Year: What I Learned from Reading 275 Books in 365 Days
The other day I told a friend that I'd read 275 books in 2018 and he responded by laughing and declaring emphatically, "That's a reading year!"I think that's an excellent way to describe my past year. ...
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March 02, 2017
Your Book Doesn't Belong to You
You can never control how your work is going to be read, and that's part of the lovely participatory nature of the writer-reader relationship. But it can sometimes be jarring. I spent seven years writing ...
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June 17, 2024Mentorship: Part II - Author Roundtable
After chatting with Rudrapriya Rathore, the founder and manager of the Flying Books Mentorship Program about the value of having a mentor, I turned to fellow authors to chat about what mentorship has ...
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February 02, 2016Poets in Profile: Majlinda Bashllari
Majlinda Bashllari published her first poetry collection in Albania in 2007. Less than ten years later the Toronto-based poet has released her first English language collection, Love is a very long word ...
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March 15, 2024In Conversation with Author Yewande Daniel-Ayoade and Illustrator Ken Daley
Author Yewande Daniel-Ayoade crafts a unique and uplifting fable in her latest picturebook. It's the story of an eight-year-old girl in a West African village who loses her father, who was the king, ...
