Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Lena Scholman
Halfway through the process of researching my WWII novel set in Holland, I was reading about Nazis requestioning animals, particularly horses, in the 1940’s, and found myself obsessed with the rescue efforts of Lipizzaner stallions from Vienna. (Yes, I had landed in another country and was seriously contemplating scrapping the whole thing and writing about […]
Danica Longair’s Writing Space
Virginia Woolf famously hoped for a future where all women writers (and, likely, women in general) had “A Room of One’s Own” to create and be themselves, away from the noise and busyness of life. Nearly a century after the publication of her iconic essay, I am a woman sharing a condo in Vancouver, BC, Canada with four […]
What’s Michael Lithgow Reading?
I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle […]
What’s Lena Scholman Reading?
For a long time, I had a quotation on my wall that read “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” I knew a writer named Ursula K. Le Guin wrote it, but I didn’t know anything about her, and had never […]
Finding the Form with Oluwatoke Adejoye
I started writing The Condolence Visit not exactly planning for the interactions between the two major characters in the story to unfold in a single location. However, in retrospect, I think I might have subconsciously known this. After all, when the idea for the story first came to me in the first year of my MFA […]
Finding the Form with Danica Longair
“What is grief, if not love persevering?” – WandaVision Cancer is the same in both languages. At least, in my family of Hong Kong immigrants, who speak a mixture of Cantonese and English when they talk to each other. I don’t know how they decide, subconsciously and on the spot, which words to say in […]
Susan J. Atkinson’s Writing Space
It has been six years since The New Quarterly published my poem “The Dining Room Poem by Another Poet” in their Spring 2018 issue #146. Six years since I last offered a glimpse into the space where I write. I still maintain the same writing routine when I am home in Ottawa. I still start […]
Lori Sebastianutti’s Writing Space
I am not the type of person to write in public spaces. I remember my university days and how I marvelled at the students who could study in loud, communal areas — cafés, cafeterias, and common rooms. How do they do it? I wondered. How do they concentrate? I am lucky to have, as Virginia […]
Finding the Form with Gillie Easdon
Tw: finding a corpse I wrote a list of ten memories that stick. You know the ones you can call up from decades ago that are always all-senses-high-def? Do you have some? It’s a curious exercise I certainly recommend. Especially if you relish productive procrastination. Here are a few from my list: The bus driver’s […]
Finding the Form with Tricia Dower
When I started writing fiction, I went to school on Alice Munro— eleven volumes of her stories sit on my shelves. Although I’ve written two novels, I love the shorter form’s power to encapsulate a character’s complexity in relatively few words as well as the freedom it allows me to isolate a voice and perspective. […]