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Poetry at Elizabeth House by Dale Matthews
The Writers in the Community workshops mostly culminate in zines (literary magazines of the participants’ work) and readings. Sometimes there are more elaborate performances. Last night I was looking back over the three zines that have come out of workshops I’ve facilitated at Elizabeth House since autumn, 2012 in Montreal. Each poem or short prose Continue reading
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I Can’t Even Imagine Not Being Here by Carolyn Marie Souaid
I can’t even imagine not being here. So ends my third poetry collection, Snow Formations, which, on one level, is about honouring and appreciating the present moment, and about using the senses, fully. About cultivating an awareness for the hushed presence of each and every living thing. I can’t even imagine not being here. I Continue reading
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Writers and Their Readers: In Conversation with William St. Hilaire
William St. Hilaire is artistic director of Montreal’s literary festival Blue Metropolis, but she is also an author. Director and author, reader and writer, she has a somewhat privileged vantage point for experiencing and observing the relationship between writers and their readers. I met up with St. Hilaire to talk about this very relationship. We Continue reading
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Seamus Heaney and I at Midnight at the Ritz by James F. Olwell
In 1984, still well before his 1995 Nobel Prize, Seamus Heaney was already Ireland’s best-known poet. As I hosted an Irish cultural radio show (CINQ 102.5 FM) it was an easy decision to head over from Mile End to McGill to see what the fuss was all about. After his reading, which, once people became Continue reading
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Writing What I Don’t Know by Elaine Kalman Naves
Ever since working at a historical research centre way back I won’t say when, I’ve always wanted to write a novel set in nineteenth-century Montreal. My job at the research centre depended on mining the contents of nineteenth-century Canadian newspapers, which I found to be intriguingly racy, and saucy founts of information. Four years ago Continue reading
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Damn That Story Arc by Lori Weber
I’ve been thinking a lot about story, about the patterns that stories take. When I begin to write a book, I rarely know where it’s going. But go it does, on and on, through a trajectory that is both consciously and unconsciously created. It mainly follows the Western story arc – conflict, rising action, climax, Continue reading
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Take the Train, Eh?: A Mini-Memoir of a Maritime Mentorship by Ian McGillis
Flying, to me, always somehow feels like cheating. When travelling long distances that don’t involve the crossing of an ocean, I try, whenever time, budget and access permit, to take the train. What’s lost in efficiency, I believe, is more than made up in respect – by which I mean a true appreciation and humility Continue reading
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Secrets and Storytelling by Monique Polak
“What I’m telling you I never told nobody.” So says the teenage narrator of Sandra Cisneros’s short story “One Holy Night.” Every school year, I teach this short story. I want my students to see how Cisneros’s narrator draws us in. Sure her grammar is poor, but she understands the power – and privilege – Continue reading
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What Would the Ancient Greeks Think of This? Old-Fashioned Imagination in Newfangled Fiction by Alexander MacLeod
I know the psychoanalysts among us may find this a bit disconcerting, but I’ve been thinking a lot about poor, old Oedipus these days. It’s not Freudian, at least, for my parents’ sake, I hope it’s not; but there is a deeply seated mix of admiration and jealousy at work here. You see, when I Continue reading
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In Solitude by Louise Carson
Over one month last autumn I shlumped around in robe and slippers all morning and part of the afternoon feeling sorry for myself. I was convalescing from a brutal cough. In the evenings I plugged in to the boob tube. (Boob as in booby, but was it me or the characters on TV who were Continue reading