Shazia Hafiz RamjiTag

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” ...

How to Make and Keep Writing Resolutions

Resolutions. I’ve made them. You’ve made them. We’ve broken them the next day, the next week, a few months into the new year. We’ve even forgotten about them. A resolution involves making a decision ...

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 ...

When History and Fiction Collide: On the Necessity of Irreverence

A week before I attended my first writing residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity last month, a historian in Vancouver gave me an envelope containing a strip of negatives. I developed them ...

Writing Through Trauma Is Writing Through Forgetting

A few days ago, I finished writing a short story. A new short story. Because my fiction is drawn from my life, I journalled first, did a freewrite, and then outlined the first half of the story to nudge ...

Why I Don’t Announce My Social Media Breaks

Over the past couple of years, I’ve watched several writers announce that they’re taking a break from social media. Sometimes they edit their profile so that their status, “on hiatus,” is added ...

Contest! Win Essential Poetry from Invisible Publishing!

Invisible Publishing is one of the most innovative presses around, earning their tagline of being "small, scrappy, and [publishing] top shelf books" over and over with their irresistible reads. And their ...

On Synchronicity and Writing: The Path Back to Myself

Last month, I had the privilege of going on a road trip across Northern BC as part of an author’s tour organized by the BC and Yukon Book Prizes, for which my book of poems, Port of Being, was a finalist. ...

Poetry Au Naturel: Poets Tell us About Their Nature-Themed Favourites for National Poetry Month

The theme for National Poetry Month 2019 is "celebrate nature with poetry". While nature poetry might have a reputation as sleepy and traditional, great writers have often mined the natural world for ...

Writer at Work: Criticism is Care

When I began the “Writer at Work” series for Open Book, I wanted to explore what it means for me, a poet and a writer, to be at “work.” As a woman of colour and an emerging writer, I have many ...