FormTag

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 4: I Scream of Benigni

I feel a mounting sense of anxiety that I still haven’t said everything I said I would. I have called my shot and then proceeded to chuck basketballs, tennis balls, darts, arrows, and various other ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 3: "To See Someone Who Does Not See"

So now I have to do what I said I would do and start offering some ways of escaping the individualist narrative conventions of the bourgeois novel. They will by no means be the only ways. Not by a longshot. ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 2: Is the Bicycle Dead?

Before I do anything else, I have to try to say what I mean by fictional forms. I do so with a lot of trepidation, because my sense of these things is idiosyncratic and perhaps wrong. But here goes.People ...

Class, History, Fiction, and Form Part 1

It’s Monday, May 1st. If you’re reading this in Canada or the United States, you are most likely working today. I know I am. At this very moment I am probably guiding a group of adult learners through ...

Vera Constantineau on the Haibun Form & Finding Poetry in Buddhism's 108 Defilements

While Catholicism has its seven deadly sins, Buddhism gets a lot more specific, with a whopping 108 temptations that practitioners seek to avoid. Alternatively translated as impurities, vexations, or ...

Gary Barwin on Form, Social Media, and the "Epistemological Hijinks of Poems"

Known for his humour, creativity, and general up-ending of the peskily staid CanLit stereotype, poet and fiction writer Gary Barwin shows no signs of slowing down with 26 books to his name. His newest, ...

"All Language is Your Playground" Poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek on Chance Encounters and the Power of Poetry

In her new collection, decorated poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek plays with form and expectation, rewriting history both colonial and literary. A Is for Acholi (Wolsak & Wynn) sees Okot Bitek rewriting ...

Form as Home

Every time I sit down to write, I find myself exasperated by the considerations. The considerations of who will be reading it, how it’ll be interpreted, if it’ll hurt someone within or outside my ...