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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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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, ...
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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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March 04, 2019Kate Harris wins $30,000 RBC Taylor Prize for Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road
This afternoon, Kate Harris spoke about the "glory and pain" of both the bike trip that inspired her memoir Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road (Knopf Canada) and of the writing process ...
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November 23, 2022Read an Excerpt from Possessed, Jowita Bydlowska's Gothic and Haunting Novel Exploring the Depths of Desire
It's impossible to think of anything else, impossible to focus, and all your friends are sick of hearing about it. Anyone who's ever found themselves in the throes of a romantic obsession knows the broken ...
