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Alisha Sevigny: Author, Leader, and Mom
Alisha Sevigny is a rising star in the middle-grade fiction world with her new series, The Secrets of the Sands. She is also a yoga instructor and Tarot enthusiast, a wife, a mom, and an instructor/editor for both rookie writers and experienced ones. Anyone that sees this list of attributes applied to one person must immediately think of the Sarah Jessica Parker film, I Don’t Know How She Does It (2011). But, Alisha carries it with grace, enthusiasm, and passion for her work. She sat down with OTD this past week to discuss her experiences as a writer, leader, and mother, and passes on some words of wisdom she has…
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Love Lives Here: A Review
“Exposure is important. If you haven’t experienced something personally and learned about it that way, the next best thing is to learn from someone who has.” When Amanda Jetté Knox decided to write about her family in her memoir, Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family, she did it because she knew there weren’t a lot of positive stories out there about trans families. “We know that that’s not everyone’s story and that’s why we had to tell ours,” she said to the audience at an event organized by Toronto PFlag and the Toronto Trans Coalition Project on Jan. 13. Love Lives Here is about Jetté…
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“Writing helped me discover my parents and my legacy”: An Interview with Alexandra Risen
In a nutshell, Unearthed is a memoir, it’s about a garden, it’s about a family. But as you start to sift through its pages, you come to an easy conclusion that Unearthed, above all, is a love letter, from a child to its parents, from a woman to the garden that ultimately heals her. Alexandra Risen had always loved reading and dreamt of writing books someday. But it wasn’t until the past 10 years, when Alexandra—formerly a seasoned corporate executive and currently one of three co-founders of the non-profit online literary magazine Don’t Talk to Me About Love—took writing seriously. And she finally found the words for her debut novel…
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From Writing to Driving: Craig Davidson’s Journey as a Bus Driver
The author reveals how despite his stellar literary career—one of his books was made into a Hollywood film—he felt he had hit rock bottom. Craig Davidson has published four books of literary fiction, including Rust and Bone, which was made into a Golden Globe-nominated film starring Marion Cotillard, and Cataract City, which was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Trillium Book Prize. The 31-year-old has also written about “boxing and dog fights, zombies and werewolves, vampire and lunatic prison inmates” under the pen names, Patrick Lestewka and Nick Cutter. But rather than being most impressed with his illustrious career, it was an honest confession that won the crowd at…
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How to Read 30 Books in a Year: A New Year’s Resolution
Late December is the time that people start thinking of their resolutions or their goals for the next year, and among the usual suspects of “lose weight” and “eat better” is the ever-present “read more.” But how do you do that? It’s fine to say, to want it, but how do you actually go about reading more than a book or two a year? I’m here to help you. I finished university in April of 2014. I spent four years in courses pertaining to my degree — English Literature. That means that I was either writing essays or reading books. In third year I had five English courses and had…
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“A writer, in some ways, lives and dies with the characters”: An Interview with Madeleine Thien
Says Madeleine Thien, author of the award-winning novel, Do No Say We Have Nothing. I often judge a book by its cover. But when it came to Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing (the book also received the Governor General’s Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), history was not bound to repeat itself. I met Thien during a session organized by Pivot Reading Series late November. As I mustered up the courage to speak to the author, I was soon pleasantly surprised by her honesty and genuine interest. When asked how the people closest to her shaped her into the…
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Of Pirates, Parrots, and Persecution: An Interview with Gary Barwin
Ever heard of a talking parrot? I am assuming you have. Now what about the 500-year-old immortal, gay, and Yiddish-speaking parrot, who has set the literary world abuzz? Oh! Did we mention the parrot is also the narrator of a tale brimming with pirates, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, and the tragic Spanish inquisition from the 12th and 19th centuries? If that just made your head spin, let us direct you to the source—Gary Barwin, a writer, composer, multimedia artist, and the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and books. In his first adult fiction, Yiddish for Pirates, the 52-year-old pulled out all the stops in creating a literary piece…