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June 11, 2018
Tweet Tweet: A City’s Past & Present: Remapping Vancouver
@poetchelene: After reading and researching about the setting in my novel I felt compelled to recognize the city as a character. #hogansalleyfactorfiction “Junie stood on her balcony overlooking the ...
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October 30, 2018
Journalism and Fiction
While I am very fortunate to have established a career as a published author, it’s not my primary gig. I’ve been working as a journalist in a professional capacity for more than two decades, first ...
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July 05, 2018Scarborough: A Setting
When I was growing up in Scarborough, I loved it and hated it. I don’t think it’s an uncommon feeling towards places where we grew up. But there are things about coming of age in a suburb as a racialized ...
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October 28, 2016
Poetic Inspiration IV
This is the fourth in a series of posts highlighting inventive poems that have broadened my sense of what poems can be and do, and sparked me to stretch further in my own work. (The previous instalments ...
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April 18, 2014
Body Parts
Am I writing the same poem over and over again? My books are teeming with the invisible and a state of loneliness that could be a one-man cold war. I never set out to revisit these themes, but they almost ...
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June 22, 2018
Mentors & Allies 1: Jen Sookfong Lee
Jen Sookfong Lee told me to write a novel. No, wait. I tried to pass off a book-in-progress as a book of short stories and she said it felt more like a novel. I think that was a nice way of saying, Chelene, ...
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October 07, 2016
Ampersands and
The symposium that I’m attending in Glasgow is part of a larger festival that has poetry popping up all over the city in various forms. Last night, I got to see some glorious visual manifestations in ...
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June 16, 2018
Tweet Tweet: writing and publishing as acts of resistance: a continuation in three acts
@erica_mojo: “@poetchelene I really appreciated your participation in the closing panel of #BookSummit18. Commanding, empathetic, supportive. Glad I got to hear you speak.” @poetchelene: “Thank ...
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October 10, 2016
Poetic Inspiration I
Rather than simply providing a list of books that have inspired me, I want to go into a bit of detail on specific poems or series of poems or poetic innovations that have made my synapses crackle, broadened ...
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May 05, 2020Writers As Readers: May 2020 Writer-in-Residence Derek Mascarenhas on His Favourite Books
Told through seventeen linked short stories, Toronto author Derek Mascarenhas' debut Coconut Dreams (Book*hug) traces the lives of a South Asian family through a series of shifting voices and timelines, ...
