Lindsay Zier-VogelTag

Making a skating rink, and other tricks for stepping away from a work-in-progress

On a particularly cold Friday morning, I piled my kids in a car with snow pants and skates and a pile of books and we headed to a cottage rental. We all were desperate for a change of scenery, and I was ...

A Writer’s Guide to Reading in 2022

I read a lot of books in 2021. More than I ever have, except for maybe the summers when I was eight and would clear out the chapter book section at Humber Bay library. I have always been an escapist, ...

December Gratitude: Check Out 5 of Our Favourite Writer-in-Residence Posts from 2021

This month, as the year winds down, we'll be looking back and highlighting some of our favourite pieces from Open Book this year. Our writer-in-residence posts, our author interviews, our book excerpts, ...

I am a celebrationist

I am a celebrationist.I celebrate big things and small things, all the things, really—kids getting their final molars, the anniversary of my fella and I meeting, the first day of summer (and fall and ...

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 ...

13 Grant Writing Tips

I am not great at a lot of things, but I am great at writing grants. Not my own, particularly, but for others. I fell into grant writing out of necessity—writing my own in my contemporary dancer days, ...

Falling 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, ...

Letters that were never intended for me

It’s no secret that I love letter writing. My debut novel, Letters to Amelia, is full of them, and I even created an entire community arts project based around the power of writing letters. But with ...

An ode to letter writing

Writing Letters to Amelia took a long time—finding the form, and the voice, and then the plot, it all took years. When it was time to write the letters from Amelia Earhart to her rumoured lover, Gene ...

‘AMELIA THANK YOUS.docx’: The single Word document that kept me going

The first thing I do when I start reading a book is read the acknowledgments. I like to know where the book I’m about to read came from, and all the people who helped the author along the way. I love ...