Month: October 2022

Finding the Form with Ian Mallov

I really like TNQ’s blog topic here. As a writer, asking yourself “what form is my piece going to take?” is the second essential question after “what am I going to write about?”

I knew for years that I was going to write a short fiction piece about hockey, although none of my other fiction has been about sports. By sometime in 2018, I had a particular character in mind. And it started the way pieces often do – a sentence here and there, waiting for the subway or running or anticipating sleep. These first few sentences – most or all of which I eventually cut – had a common rhythm. A common pattern in the emphasized syllables, without quite being metre. And I gradually realized that I wanted to write something akin to a prose poem, as “White Lightning Scar Across the Knuckles” is intended to be. 

As we’ve heard many times, short stories involve voluntarily imposing an arbitrary set of rules on a particular piece. In my case, maintaining the rhythm, sculpting the piece as something towards a prose poem was the set of rules. That decision led to the tone, diction, distance/closeness of the characters, lengths of sentences and paragraphs – those choices which determine form.

As an example, I chose not to use quotation marks for dialogue. This is a choice I usually dislike, because quotation marks are a visual cue for the reader, a road sign: the next words you are going to read are intended to be read in a new voice! Which I think is a good thing, 99% of the time. Why pretend? And obviously, when you make the choice to withhold quotation marks, you still want a reader to realize they are reading dialogue. But I hope my not using them made for a gentler bump in the road, a less abrupt change in the reader’s head, from narrative voice to character voice. I hope this allowed them to read it more as they might read a poem: faster perhaps, with briefer pauses after sentences or lines within the same paragraph. For a piece that was somewhat about how life gets away from you, I hoped this formal choice was in step with the theme.

Having this in mind, I noticed the poetry in the pieces of other writers in this issue of TNQ. A beautiful example is in these sentences from Kristine Sahagun’s “First Movement:” 

Listen to Connie Converse, who crooned for us through the stereo of how sad, how lovely dwindling days become. She sang of sunsets, of how lights in shops made passing lovers glow.

Without excess Sahagun simply puts together the words she needs – poetically, vividly, with even some sly alliteration!

Ian Mallov is a chemist and writer who grew up in Truro, NS and currently lives in Halifax. His fiction has appeared in The Antigonish Review, his science writing in The Nexus. He is working on a short novel. 

Photo by Sam Moghadam Khamseh on Unsplash

Read more

Finding the Form with Rachel Lachmansingh

I’m the type of writer who thrives off of unknowing—if given too much information before I start a draft, I tend to burn out. This has always seemed strange to me as someone who otherwise prefers routine in other aspects of my life. Both of these feelings—a desire for stability and a desire for impulsivity—are central to my short story, “Slaughter the Animal,” both in its themes and its literal writing process.

Finding this story was both a careful and spontaneous experience. In the summer of 2020, I badly wanted to write a short story, but couldn’t come up with an idea. Here came the careful aspect of my brainstorming strategy: I sat in my backyard’s hammock to think. At the time, my dad had put up some wire fencing along the grass so the yard was split into two. I was in one half, and my dog, Liuna, whose favourite hobby is barking at neighbours, stood on the other. Of course, she was barking at me so she could bark at the neighbours. This was the spontaneous aspect of my brainstorming strategy: the image of someone in a hammock with their dog barking on the opposite side of new fencing became the opening of my story.

Like a lot of my stories do, the first few thousand words flew out of me (this is the type of drafting that I describe as subconscious). I drafted this way until I’d almost finished the story, but unexpectedly, the rush of words stopped. It took me two or three weeks from that point to feel ready to tackle the story again.

Again, I returned to the hammock to think, and in another spontaneous moment, a blackbird flew onto the roof of my house. That image alone clicked the story into place nearly instantly, and while the bird central to “Slaughter the Animal” is not a blackbird, but a goose, I’m thankful for that bird for helping me finish the story that would later find its home at The New Quarterly!

Rachel Lachmansingh is a Guyanese-Canadian writer from Toronto. Her writing has appeared in Minola Review, Grain Magazine, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, and The Puritan, among others. She was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Short Story Prize and is currently pursuing her BA in creative writing.

Link Instagram Twitter

Photo by Dea Andreea on Unsplash

Read more

The Wild Writers Literary Festival #11

Welcome to the 11th annual Wild Writers Festival.

I would like to begin by acknowledging that the Wild Writer Festival takes place on the Haldimand Tract, land promised to the Haudenosaunee people of Six Nations, which includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. This is the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee Peoples. We gratefully acknowledge these Indigenous nations for their ongoing guardianship of this land. We agree to peaceably share in responsibility for stewardship of this land, its waters and all of its biodiversity. All those who come to live and work here are responsible for honouring these relations in the spirit of peace, friendship, and respect.

This is our eleventh festival and the first time we’re back in person since our 2019 iteration. We are thrilled and grateful to be able to meet people face to face, to see audience members chatting with writers, to see people compare notes after events.  We’re returning to our format of the readings, conversations, panel discussions, and workshops that will stimulate both readers and writers alike. At The New Quarterly our aim is to bring together a community of writers, showcasing their work in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. We bring this same sense of community and curiosity to Wild Writers, where you can meet the writers, ask questions, be curious.

The festival planning has been an interesting process to say the least as we take stock of what venues are available, which writers to bring to the festival, and generally figure out how to run an in-person event again! I want to thank Carol Motuz, Lillian Bass, Lara El Mekaui, and Evelyn Dekker for their creative input and logistical finesse. Thanks to Taylor Holmes and Sarah Caley, our Volunteer Coordinators. We are indebted to our co-op intern Ivena Yeung who works on marketing and processing tickets, and Carolyn Pegg, our Office Administrator who takes care of finances. A special thanks to Eleni Zaptses, our festival manager, who has been a much welcome asset, and done a stellar job in making sure the operation runs smoothly.

We could not run our festival without our partners at Words Worth Books who helps with programming and takes care of book sales, as well as our partners at the Balsillie School of International Affairs who generously provide their venue for our Friday night reception and the workshops and panels on Saturday.

A special thanks to our sponsors, donors, and volunteers without whom there would be no festival. To all of the writers, TNQ Board members, and to our audience members who come out to events with great energy and enthusiasm, thank you for making the Wild Writers Festival a highlight in the literary calendar.

Enjoy the conversations. Be inspired.

Read more

Kitty Hoffman’s Writing Space

     I have written in many different spaces around the world – from a cafe in Guayaquil to a boat in Kochi, temple steps in Ladakh to gitano cave in Granada,  under the stars in Mpumalanga and beside a tango floor in Almagro. This is testament to a long life of someone who loves travel; but it also symbolizes my creativity, more active when engaging with the eternal world. I need to look outwards in order to go inward. Perhaps that explains my preference for literary nonfiction and the personal essay, forms that integrate inner and outer, the individual consciousness and the wide world.

     The last few years of covid isolation, combined with my own physical mobility constraints (hopefully improving after surgery), have called for a different strategy. I live beside the Lachine Canal in Montreal, and my space has become a book-filled window to the changing seasons.

     I do now have an office, overflowing with books and relics of various travels, personal mementos and imagination-inspiring images. It also holds a large corkboard, currently in use to deconstruct my work-in-progress with colour-coded sticky notes. But mostly I write at my dining table, looking out the front window to the changing seasons of the canal. Or I sit in one of the light-filled spaces, again overflowing with books, letting the views inspire more internal journeys.

 

Kitty Hoffman, the daughter of refugees, is a writer and spiritual director living in Montreal. Her award-winning work has appeared in PRISM, Malahat, Grain, The Common, and Boulevard, as well as several anthologies.

Photos courtesy of Kitty Hoffman.

Read more