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May 17, 2021
The Writer's Voice: It's Not What You Say but How You Say It
‘It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.’ As a child and teen I heard this simply as a parent’s retort to the self-righteous whine, ‘But I only said…’As a writer I realise it’s ...
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March 08, 2017
The Lucky Seven, with Barbara Sibbald
Barbara Sibbald's The Museum of Possibilities (Porcupine's Quill) was a long time coming, and it was worth the wait. After a career in novels, Sibbald returned to her first love, short fiction, and ...
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August 14, 2024
Author Sita MacMillan Begins an Essential Series Starring Sarah Ponakey, Storycatcher
It's often the case with young readers, and writers, that they simply do not see the stories that they would like to read and write being published with frequency. This is a distinct problem in CanLit ...
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November 25, 2021
Writing + Joy = A Revelation
For years I believed I was only a writer if I wrote every day. I would wake up early and take my laptop to the coffee shop nearby and sit in the corner and write. Words and words and coffee and more ...
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April 07, 2014
Compression
In Stephanie Bolster’s “A Page from the Wonders of Life on Earth,” the writing is acutely compressed, each word standing in for what in another poet’s hands might take pages. There’s no room ...
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April 26, 2014
The Most Important Skill
Someone asks me what’s the most important skill a poet can have and I start to say the power of observation. The world awaits us with all sorts of small truths that can’t easily be seen. When I lose ...
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March 11, 2018
Escape from reality: Conventions, conferences and expos.
I haven’t spoken about it a whole lot, but just a few months before the The Bone Mother’s release, my mother died. While not unexpected, it was unpleasant, and of course brought a lot of memories ...
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June 13, 2017
The In Character interview, with Connie Guzzo-McParland
Connie Guzzo-McParland's The Women of Saturn (Inanna Publications) continues the story of Cathy (formerly Caterina) from Guzzo-McParland's novel The Girls of Piazza d’Amore. Now living in Montreal, ...
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September 28, 2017
October writer-in-residence Canisia Lubrin on Poetry's Vast Possibility, Books She's Loved, and Not Getting Writer's Block
Poet Canisia Lubrin's much buzzed about debut Voodoo Hypothesis (Wolsak & Wynn) is a powerhouse of a collection. Lubrin is endlessly creative in pulling from science, pop culture, news stories, and ...
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December 13, 2017
Lorri Neilsen Glenn on Following a Family Trail to Uncover the Historical Erasure of Indigenous Women
It was a passing comment from an aunt that revealed a family tragedy to Lorri Neilsen Glenn. Once Lorri learned of her great-grandmother's untimely death, she found herself drawn down a path of family ...