Author sews together knitting, short yarn

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This article was published 14/02/2015 (4223 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg writer with a love of knitting has found a way to combine her passions.

Joanne Seiff launches a project this month that combines a short fiction story with a knitting pattern, which she calls The Hole Inside: A Yarn Spinner Story + Pattern. The story and pattern — the first of a series — are available through an online knitware pattern site called Ravelry, which has nearly five million members.

The story part of The Hole Inside is a tale of unrequited love involving a woman who travels (with her knitting) on business and comes upon a secret from her past. The pattern part is a stranded mitten that can be made in sizes for pre-schoolers to XXL.

Seiff is a freelance writer and knitwear designer who has written two books about knitting: Knit Green and Fiber Gathering.

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A Winnipeg writer gets in on the dystopian science-fiction scene Feb. 17 with the launch of his novel I Dreamt of Trees. Gilles DeCruyenaere‘s novel is the story of a young man who discovers a deadly secret about the massive city-ship he lives in and must go into hiding in a walled-off section of the ship among outcasts. The first-time author recently worked as film editor for the animated film Emma’s Wings: a Bella Sara Tale. The book launches at McNally Robinson at 7 p.m.

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A former art instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the New York Post this month that he robbed two banks under the influence of 19th-century French poet Arthur Rimbaud.

Joseph Gibbons, who was arrested following robberies in New York City and Providence, R.I., also told the newspaper he planned to film the robberies for an art project about “discovering the disenfranchised portions of society.”

Literary enfant terrible Rimbaud lived a short life on the fringes of French literary society that included just about everything but robbing banks.

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Looks like somebody’s going to have an exciting Valentine’s Day.

The Guardian reports that one of three existing first editions of a 1684 sex manual called Aristotle’s Master-Piece was up for sale last week at an antiquarian book fair in California for a set price of $60,000. The book offers practical advice to lovers, including the suggestion that a husband offer his wife “wanton Kisses and wanton Words and Speeches, handling her Secret Parts and Dugs, that she may take fire and be inflamed to Venery.”

Speaking of antiquarian books (and Venery), the Internet erupted in a collective guffaw this month over a scene in the Jennifer Lopez movie The Boy Next Door, in which the titular boy presents the classics teacher he’s in love with (J. Lo) with a “first edition” of the 3,000-year-old epic poem The Iliad. At least it wasn’t a signed copy.

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A Saskatchewan-based poet and novelist reads Feb. 25 at noon at the Manitoba Indigenous Cultural Education Centre (119 Sutherland).

Garry Thomas Moore‘s books include Discovery Passages, shortlisted for the 2011 Governor General’s Award for Poetry, which explores his mother’s Kwakwaka’wkwa heritage and centuries of Aboriginal-European interactions including the ban of the potlatch ceremony and confiscation and sales of aboriginal artifacts.

His new book, Prairie Harbours, is slated for publication this fall.

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