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March 09, 2021
A love letter (to books)
The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...
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March 23, 2021
Decoder ring
In Girl Minus X, there are choices made by the main character, Dany, that seem more legible and logical to people who’ve experienced trauma and understand the way, afterwards, a person is forever scanning ...
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March 29, 2021
Writing/Not Writing
Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...
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November 23, 2021Book Therapy: Good Burdens
“You may feel like you’re behind the rest of the world because you haven’t accomplished your to-do list or gotten to inbox zero or have your side hustle rocking like your neighbour next door. (Newsflash, ...
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December 29, 2022Book Therapy: Favourites From My Favourites
“It was the book I was always meant to read. It spoke directly to me, braiding so many currents of my own life—messy motherhood, literary research, poetry—into a rich river of language and rhythm ...
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May 03, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?
Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...
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May 10, 2023
Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni
I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...
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May 01, 2023Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1
It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...
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October 24, 2023Book Therapy: My Body is Distant
“(Y)ou can be an elf, a monster, a kind of person you can’t be in Real Life. You can get outside of your head and escape.”- Paige Maylott, My Body is Distant Escape as a therapeutic avenue is ...
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May 28, 2020At the Desk: Claire Caldwell
Toronto poet Claire Caldwell's new collection, Gold Rush (Invisible Publishing), is a study of the various ways women can be considered settlers in their own time, and what effect that presence has had ...
