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May 21, 2018
In Praise of … Performing Your Work
A passion for public speaking, for public performance, has been with me even longer than the passion for writing. I trace it back to when I won a public speaking competition as an elementary school student ...
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March 28, 2014If Not DRM, What Then? (Part II)
A few people, some of them writers, have written to me, wondering about the fuss surrounding DRM. They very much want their work protected from copying, and didn’t realize a kind of hysteria exists ...
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March 03, 2014
Standing in the Light
Well hi. This is me standing nervously in the spotlight, governing my nerves. The light is blinding, I cannot see you out there, but in this bath of white energy I see dust motes floating, falling slowly, ...
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March 14, 2014
The Reading Rulebook
I used to go to a lot of public readings of poetry and fiction. Then I had kids, and rarely went, but recently, due to changing circumstances, I've been out to a few more, and what hasn't changed are ...
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March 14, 2023Don't Bother Saving The Cat
When it comes to books about memoir writing, there are a select few that I would recommend an aspiring author read, including BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott and THE ART OF MEMOIR by Mary Karr. But when I ...
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June 03, 2019I Promise You, It's Fiction.
Full disclosure, I had another post planned to kick off my Writer in Residency here on Open Book but I decided to change topics after seeing a write-up/review of my forthcoming short story collection. ...
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January 15, 2019Read an Excerpt of Leon Rooke's The House on Major Street
Leon Rooke has been an important part of the Toronto literary scene for decades, so it is perfectly fitting that his newest novel, The House on Major Street (Porcupine's Quill) has an unapologetically ...
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January 24, 2018Poet & Artist Judy Lowry on Her Reading Life, from Wordsworth Woes to Beat Poet Surprises
Judy Lowry's unforgotten dream (The Brucedale Press) is a poetry collection informed by the stark beauty of Grey County, where Lowry (who is also an artist) lives. The poems range freely, living up to ...
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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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October 11, 2019
Daddy Writer To Be – Writing for Children
For many years, I had a dream to write a children’s book. My passion of becoming a father inspired me to write a children’s book. As a child who questioned their own gender identity, I wanted ...
