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February 02, 2024Facing (the Failure of) an Empty Event
There’s a particular kind of feeling to describe preparing and planning for a literary event, only to show up and find the room empty, or nearly empty. You keep looking at the door hoping the passers-by ...
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May 02, 2019Facing the Double-Headed Dragon: Perfectionism and Fear
Guys. My last few weeks have been bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, so I hope you will all bear with me this month. There may be some punctuation errors here and there. Even a typo ...
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February 02, 2022Fairy Tale Lovers' Delight: Read an Excerpt from Kat Sandler's Dark & Funny Play, Yaga
The story of Baba Yaga, the forest-dwelling witch who grinds bones in her chicken-legged house, is one of the most enduring, strange, and iconic images from world folklore, and that's saying a lot. So ...
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November 19, 2021Falling in love with audiobooks
I used to have to walk to get my babies to sleep in the stroller. I would walk and walk until they were asleep, loops of the same block, and then I’d sit on a bench, the one bench in my entire neighbourhood, ...
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June 24, 2025Fantasy-Adventure Readers Will Be Enthralled by Tonia Laird's New Novel, Seventhblade
Our featured author today, Tonia Laird, has had a fascinating and unique journey in storytelling, with multiple publications in magazines and journals and a career in the video game industry as a lorekeeper, ...
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September 20, 2024Farzana Doctor's New YA Novel is About Surviving Hardship, the Power of Friendship, and Growing Up
Acclaimed author and psychotherapist Farzana Doctor has explored the human condition in-depth through her adult fiction and non-fiction, and now her latest novel is a richly woven work for young adult ...
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February 18, 2025Fascinating and Notorious Mining Mogul Viola MacMillan Has Her Story Told in Windfall
Canada's history in the mining industry contains many stunning and nefarious stories that most are unaware of. Around many of our Ontario cities and towns, for example, there are streets, neighbourhoods, ...
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June 14, 2018Father's Day at Open Book: Six Unforgettable Fathers in Literature
Just as in real life, there are no two dads exactly alike in literature. From the terrifying to the brave, the disinterested to the inspiring, father characters have been some of the most interesting ...
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October 26, 2016
Favourite Literary Podcasts
I spent much of the day preparing to record a podcast, the third episode of On the Line: Conversations About Poetry (http://www.therustytoque.com/on-the-line). It’s a podcast designed to operate like ...
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April 05, 2014
Fear of Flying
I gave a public performance the other night. It was supposed to be a reading from my recent novel, “The Outside World,” but I thought I’d sneak in a few poems from my “Invisible Dogs” as well. ...