Search
-
October 27, 2016
The Journey Prize Writers
The 2016 Writers’ Trust / McLelland & Stewart Journey Prize, the winner of which will be announced on November 2, may be slightly overshadowed by the other prizes given out that night: namely, the ...
-
December 03, 2019
Becoming Bigger Than Ourselves
In mid-November, a few days after I’d returned to Vancouver from the Singapore Writers Festival a week prior, I saw an owl.I was in a jet-lagged haze at dusk, on my way to the convenience store to get ...
-
October 08, 2021
Betsy Warland on Memoir as "the Mother Genre" & What She Loves about the Fluidity of Creative Nonfiction
It's been more than twenty years since Betsy Warland's Bloodroot: Tracing the Untelling of Motherloss (Inanna Publications) was first published, and the revolutionary, genre-bending memoir is still ...
-
August 15, 2016
The Final Days of Summer Reading
As we find ourselves in last gasps of summer (how is it already August?) it’s time to park it on the back porch and really focus on that list of carefully chosen seasonal reads.The summer book really ...
-
July 06, 2016
The Lucky Seven Interview, with Deanna Reder and Linda Morra
Indigenous literature in North America is incredibly diverse and exciting category, so putting together a collection of essays that seeks to comprehensively address the rich themes, identities, mythology, ...
-
June 17, 2024
Lunar Forests, Interplanetary War, and Cyberpunk Heroes Are Just the Beginning in Ben Berman Ghan's Debut Novel
How does an author ponder the important questions of our time while creating a speculative, fictional world that hums with intelligence and humanity? It's a tall order, but one that author Ben Berman ...
-
March 28, 2019
Writer at Work: “Identity is a pain in the arse” (On Zadie Smith)
Last month, Zadie Smith said: "identity is a pain in the arse." She said this at a festival in the context of a discussion about identity politics and her (white) partner, Nick Laird. Here's a snippet ...
-
January 24, 2020
Making Time: Making Randomness & #SSCLUB
When 2020 began, I’d been off most social media for about twenty-two days. My decision wasn’t deliberate. In fact, it was reactive. The night before I went offline, I read a short story: “Innards” ...
-
August 29, 2023
Read an Excerpt from South by Babak Lakghomi, a Disorienting, Dazzling Tale of Totalitarianism & Truth
Babak Lakghomi's new novel South (Rare Machines/Dundurn Press) is set against a bleak totalitarian landscape, following B, a journalist on a search for truth. A dazzling, disorienting addition to Dundurn's ...
-
June 30, 2019
Behind 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 ...