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What’s Ronna Bloom Reading?

Usually I have a novel, a few poetry books, and some nonfiction around my bed. I like to move between them.

The novel:

Five Little Indians by Michelle Good. This is a novel about five Indigenous children who were sent to a residential school, what happens to them when they are little, and when they grow up. It is crushing and heartbreaking and full of compassion and love.

The poetry:


Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head by Warsan Shire. I read one short poem by Shire in a magazine years ago, and it blew my mind. She caught the hurt of the whole world in a few lines. This new book was longlisted for The Griffin Prize and I was rooting she’d be shortlisted so I could hear her read in Toronto. Alas not. But I got the book. Her words “No one leaves home unless/home is the mouth of a shark” from the poem “Conversations about Home.”

The nonfiction:


Ordinary Notes: I was introduced to Christina Sharpe through an interview with David Naimon on the podcast Between the Covers. A deep and thorough listening experience. I am tremendously moved by these notes of which there 248 that make up this book on Black living and seeing. I am only on Note 14 because each one is so distilled, it asks for all my attention and I want to give it and then I want to start all over from the beginning. #beautyeveryday.

What Comes from Spirit by Richard Wagamese.
In the fall of 2023, I’ll be doing some poetry workshops for and with health care workers in Northern Ontario: Thunder Bay, Fort Frances, and Kenora. I’m drawn now to read the work of Richard Wagamese. Richard Wagamese was an Ojibwe author born 120 miles north of Kenora, part of Wabaseemoong Independent Nations. This is a book of short essays and meditations. I read it at night because it brings peace and grounding.

Ronna Bloom is the author of six books of poetry. A Possible Trust: The Poetry of Ronna Bloom, selected with an introduction by Phil Hall will be published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press in September.

Header image by Henry Be on Unsplash 

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The 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Winners

The New Quarterly is delighted to announce the winners of the 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award!

Winner

“Bruise and Shine”
by Alex Kitt

Runners-up

“Prepper”
by Meagan Callahan

“Singing to the Gods”
by Deepa Rajagopalan

Honourable Mentions

“Harold”
by Daryl Bruce

“Ms. P’s 5Ds”
by Heather Debling

“Soap”
by Nedda Sarshar

“Lemon Print Scarf”
by Mina Sharif

“Paulina”
by Pamela Hensley

“In the Western City”
by Rishi Midha

“Messier Objects”
by Margaret McCutcheon

What Pauline Holdstock’s Reading

I’ve just finished writing the final short story for a new collection so it feels as if I’ve stepped out into a wide-open space —no need to spend valuable reading minutes researching the price of chicken, or who was in power in Belarus at the time. I can read like a reader—for pleasure. The luxury! 

Anna Burns’ Milkman was first on my list, an immersive experience of another time, another place, a new way of working with stream of consciousness and an astonishing new use of language.

So what could possibly follow that? Well I’m picking up The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy again because Burns’ digressive style and linguistic pranks have been compared to Sterne’s more than once.

Meanwhile, I’m devouring M.A.C. Farrant’s brilliant new book, Jigsaw, which examines the puzzle of conscious existence with ninety-nine pieces of inimitable perplexity—and cows. A book everyone should read if only to know they are not alone.

Finally, I’m re-reading J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals because I’m seeing how some of my short stories are preoccupied with cruelty and I’d like to establish a broader base of investigation of the subject if I return to it, one that goes farther than the emotional reaction of abhorrence. What is it with us humans?

Pauline Holdstock is a Giller-nominated novelist. Her most recent novel, Confessions With Keith, is published by Biblioasis.

Photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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The 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Longlist

The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlist for the 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award. After thorough consideration, we are excited to announce this year’s longlisted writers and their phenomenal stories.

The 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award Longlist

“Harold” by Daryl Bruce
“Prepper” by Megan Callahan
“Ms P’s 5Ds” by Heather Debling
“Paulina” by Pamela Hensley
“Do Not Be a Statistic” by Zilla Jones
“Bruise and Shine” by Alex Kitt
“The Sears Catalogue” by Fraser MacPherson
“Messier Objects” by Margaret McCutcheon
“Ethyl Formate” by Charlin McIsaac
“In the Western City” by Rishi Midha
“Singing for the Gods” by Deepa Rajagopalan
“The Tree” by Margaret Sankey
“Soap” by Nedda Sarshar
“Lemon Print Scarf” by Mina Sharif
“Mehdi” by Emad Talisman

Thank you to all of the writers who submitted their stories to this year’s contest. Stay tuned for our winner announcement!

Finding the Form with Brenda Sciberras

Back in 2013 a dear friend, artist, art teacher, and colleague gifted me a book.  “The Art of Mary Pratt: The Substance of Light,” by Tom Smart. It was a beautiful hardcover with colour prints and the story of a talented female artists’ creative life. This planted the seed for my manuscript, “Riddled with Red.” The title, (Mary’s own words) is taken from a CBC documentary. When I heard of Mary Pratt’s passing in the summer of 2018, that became the catalyst for me to start writing the poems for this collection.

As I studied many of her prints, I began experimenting with the ekphrasis form. It seemed logical to write about what spoke to me in each painting, and what drew me to one over another.

Ekphrasis is a Greek word used for the written or verbal description of a work of art, either real or imagined. It can also be a way to voice the experience of viewing a piece of art or about the artist who created it.

Photo courtesy to purplekey070408 on Flickr

At one point I realized that Mary’s paintings were themselves a type of ekphrasis. Realism was Mary’s form of expression, and she used a camera to capture her subjects in their best light. She would use the developed slides that she had taken and paint her own interpretation of what she saw. One medium transformed into another form of art. I in turn, the viewer of her paintings and prints, used words to convey, interpret, and imagine, what I saw, by creating poetry.

I had read a few other poet’s works written about female artists: Arleen Pare’s collection of poems, “Girls with Stone Faces” and Linda Frank’s, “Kaho: The World Split Open.” Their poetry influenced my decision to write a collection honouring the life of Mary Pratt. It includes a couple dozen poems in the ekphrasis form as well as many more poems inspired by Mary’s life and art. Three of the poems from Riddled with Red appear in TNQ, issue 167.

Brenda Sciberras is an award-winning poet. Her first collection Magpie Days won the Eileen McTavish Sykes Award for Best First Book in 2015. Starland, her most recent book of poetry, was launched with Turnstone Press in 2018.

Header photo courtesy of on Flickr.

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Joshua Levy’s Writing Space

My writing space is full of old things. I have a heavy antique desk rescued from a vintage clothing store in my neighbourhood in exchange for $100 and a bad back. On top of my writing desk sit framed photos that I inherited from my grandmother after she died. The photos used to remind her of me. Now they remind me of her.

Under the desk is a dark green pillow my white cats are determined to turn snow white. The rolling ridged wood acts as a cat forcefield when I’m not at the desk. The writing surface pulls out to create more space.

My chair is also an antique and incredibly uncomfortable, which I like: It’s important that I not become too comfortable when writing.

On the wall above is an oil painting that I painted during those brief three months in my twenties when I painted.

I like to place a photo of a hunched-over Leonard Cohen at his typewriter in front of me when I write. Leonard’s scowl says: “Josh, stop looking at me and get back to work blackening your pages.” The photo is signed on the back by his lover at the time, Dominique Issermann, who took the photo.

I usually place a thermos filled with hot tea on the Portuguese tile coaster on the left — I used to place a mug here but there are only so many times I can spill liquid on my laptop.

I write on my Macbook Pro laptop.

The black Greek fisherman’s cap on the right belonged to my friend, Steven Heighton. It goes on my head when I find myself asking: “What would Steve do to make this story better?” Sometimes I just put it on to feel close to him again.

I tend to keep the inside little compartments empty. A big exception is in the top right compartment where I usually stash a guitar pick or two. During breaks, I’ll often grab my acoustic guitar nearby and begin to strum.

When the writing day is done, I push the extension back inside the desk and roll down my wooden ridged cat forcefield.

Joshua Levy has been published by Oxford University Press, Vehicle Press, Mansfield Press, and numerous literary magazines and was CBC’s Writer-In-Residence. He won the CNFC/Carte Blanche Nonfiction Prize and Prairie Fire Nonfiction Prize, among others. www.joshualevy.net

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Photos courtesy of Yannick Forest.

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Finding the Form with Carousel Calvo

How did you find the right form for “Certainty”?

I wrote the first paragraph like a poem but it didn’t work, so I wrote it as prose afterwards. I wrote a chapbook during my university years and 4-5 of the poems in there, I suppose, was the impetus to “Certainty”. I wrote about leaving a neighborhood, a community, a set of friends, but my memories were too hazy or too muddled for me to recreate as non-fiction. Luis and Rowena gave me a way into understanding everything that happened to me.

Growing up I lived near the dike that Rowena lives behind. That dike was the inspiration for how I wanted to open up about the community I grew up in. Any conflict derives from that setting—be it the typhoons, the derelict squatter houses behind it, the abject poverty of the people living there and the disparity of those who live inland.

How long did it take you to write “Certainty”? What questions, interests, or decisions were you guided by?
A long time. “Certainty” is the first chapter of a novel I’ve been writing for over 10 years. I left Cebu, my home city, when I was 15, with no idea why we were leaving. It was sprung on me and my siblings. I suppose this story is my way of understanding that.

“Luis and Rowena gave me a way into understanding everything that happened to me.”

Are there genres or structures you’ve tended to avoid? Are there new ones you’re currently exploring?
I tried fantasy and science fiction before but I wasn’t very successful. I know now that the fantasy and imagined future I was writing about wasn’t in the stories of my heritage or the imagined future that encompasses my identity and politics. I’d like to try again when I can carve out time. I’m also trying out creative non-fiction. With fiction, there is embellishments and that’s the fun of creating stories. With non-fiction, I grapple with the idea of authenticity, which I don’t really believe in. Memory is never accurate and the history I’m writing about come from sources that are either biased or perhaps also embellished. I’m still thinking about it.

Carousel Calvo, a Filipinx-Canadian writer, has been published in Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, filling station, and Ricepaper. She received her MA in English with Creative Thesis at Concordia University.

Header photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

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Finding the Form with Lisa Alward

My story ideas usually begin with an image, a mental picture of something I witnessed or experienced or that someone told me about. For “Little Girl Lost,” that image was a young girl’s sullen face pressed up against a window.

My father’s family were related, through marriage, to the Saint John artist Miller Brittain. Once, in the early 1960s, when my father was back in Saint John for Christmas, his mother asked him to drive a box of presents to Miller’s house, out near the airport. But when he got there, Miller wasn’t home. Just his nine-year old daughter. Miller’s wife, Connie, had been dead for several years by then and the house by my father’s account was a wreck, but what unsettled him more was how odd this little girl seemed. Not in the least friendly or polite, or worried about being left all alone in a falling-down house while her father was likely out boozing (Miller Brittain was a well-known drunk). My father might have used the word feral, or maybe I thought of that later on my own. All I know is that this tiny sliver of a story, a strange little girl living with her alcoholic artist father, stuck with me.

Ten years ago, when I began writing fiction, I thought about doing something with this material. What if, instead of my father, my mother had been the one to drive out to Miller’s house with the box of presents? Maybe a year or so after their marriage or during their engagement, and possibly in the company of my father’s mother? I made some notes in a computer file. I pictured the sullen face in the window. This, I decided, would be the story’s final image. A moment of ambivalent connection between the girl trapped in her father’s house and a young woman trapped in an engagement or new marriage that she’s worried isn’t right for her. I pictured my mother turning back to look at the little girl in the window as my grandmother drove them away. I gave the story idea a draft title, “The Artist’s Child.”

Years went by. I can see now that I wasn’t ready, that I didn’t have all that I needed, yet for a long time those two or three sentences in my “Stories” folder felt like a false lead. I didn’t like to look at them and buried the file deeper inside another folder. 

Years went by. I can see now that I wasn’t ready, that I didn’t have all that I needed, yet for a long time those two or three sentences in my “Stories” folder felt like a false lead. I didn’t like to look at them and buried the file deeper inside another folder. Then during the pandemic, I made an impulse purchase. I bought a sketch by Miller Brittain. The gallery where I saw it had dubbed this charcoal-pencil drawing, which features a naked couple embracing, “Adam and Eve,” but I instantly recognized my distant relative Connie Starr as the vacant-looking woman being embraced and Miller as the man clutching her rather desperately on his lap, and it struck me that whatever was going on between them had more to do with human love than Original Sin. Around the same time, I learned that Miller’s daughter, Jennifer, had died, sending me down a Google rabbit hole and ultimately to the NFB website where I found Kent Martin’s moody documentary Miller Brittain, which includes clips from an interview he did with her in the 1980s, and to the book Miller Brittain: When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears, with its interesting essay on the influence of William Blake on Miller’s art.

I now had considerably more material than I’m used to having at the beginning of a story, including another haunting image, one that I could actually gaze on as I wrote, since it hangs in my living room. My story’s form, however, still eluded me. I’d initially imagined it as one long scene ending with the image of the artist’s child: her small pale face pressed up against the grimy window, my young fiancée staring back at her. Now, I toyed with a more complex structure. What if the character inspired by my mother were to meet the artist’s child two more times? Her life story punctuated by these three chance encounters? But this began to feel contrived. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to happen between them, especially in that third and final encounter. Then I remembered one of the odd details I’d learned about Miller Brittain in my research. How on bombing missions over Germany, he’d always carried a copy of Blake’s Songs of Innocence in the breast pocket of his uniform. There was something ironic, self-mocking even in this gesture. (His role on the plane was to aim the bomb.) I thought about how in Blake innocence and experience are intertwined, neither state fully as distinct from the other as it appears on the surface. I pulled down my own copy of the Songs and found two poems we hadn’t covered in my third-year Romantics class, “Little Girl Lost” and “Little Girl Found.” Suddenly I had my form. Two scenes, two encounters with a stranger, set seventeen years apart. Innocence and experience.

“Little Girl Lost” is Lisa Alward’s fourth story for The New Quarterly. A past recipient of the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, her short fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Stories as well as journals such as The Fiddlehead, Exile Quarterly, Prairie Fire, and untethered. Her debut collection, Cocktail, will be released by Biblioasis Press on September 12, 2023.

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Matthew Fox’s Writing Spaces

The most important thing is getting the words on the page. The second most important thing is staring.


Every writer needs unrestricted staring time, and that’s what I get at Macke Prinz. It’s a bar-café on Berlin’s Zionskirchplatz, a plot of lackadaisically manicured greenery dominated by a church. Roads pool around it, frustrating drivers. Bright yellow streetcars screech around tight turns. Old dudes play bocce. Sunshine pours through a lattice in the steeple. Bells ring when Jesus is up to something.

On weekdays, parents meet to yak on the benches while their kids play tag among the shrubs. On weekends, Berlin’s partiers come to zone out in the shade, drink beers, and try to remember what they did hours earlier.

So, there’s a lot to stare at as I sit on the café’s terrace with my notebook gaping on the table. I write first drafts by hand to keep from revising as I go, which means long periods of stare-thinking cut by bursts of scribbling. At Macke Prinz, there’s just enough stimulation to be inspiring when I need it, but it’s mundane enough to ignore everything when lightning strikes.

That’s half of my writing space. The other half is my living room.

Since the pandemic, “hybrid working” has turned part of my home into an office—and not a writing office. It’s now where I do my day job as a marketer, which means it’s associated with corporate strictures, revenue projections and brutal, data-driven decisions.

My domestic space is now where I practice the kind of professional tactics that staunch the unrestrained creative flow I need to create the kind of glorious, sloppy, exploratory first draft I scrawl at Macke Prinz.

But those business tactics are useful when transcribing, rewriting and editing: be cutthroat, chop the faff, drop the pretense, hit the deadline. Prioritize for effect, not romance. Don’t get married to your ideas.

This bifurcated set-up isn’t for all authors. If you’re like me, though, give it a go. I have a full-time day job and must be discipled about setting aside time to write.

By leaving my home for this designated purpose at Macke Prinz, I can squeeze out the magic of a first draft between long staring sessions, and then focus on shaping and sharpening it in a zone calibrated for making effective choices.

Matthew Fox is the author of the collection Cities of Weather and the novel-in-stories This Is It, forthcoming in fall 2024. He grew up in Ontario, before moving to Montreal, London and New York, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing from The New School. His work has appeared in Grain, Toronto Life, Maisonneuve, Big Fiction and The Windsor Review. He lives in Berlin.

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What’s Rea Tarvydas Reading?

Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke my Heart is a house book, and I love house books. By this, I mean books that are centered about houses, in which the house represents the whole world. Even when the main character moves away from the house, her life still revolves around it.

Jen Sookfong Lee grew up in a house in East Vancouver. It’s a Vancouver Special, ubiquitous, with its long central hall and small rooms scattered to each side, and the layout reminds me of a train car. This image fits for a family who is both on a journey and shuttled to one side. Train cars are a form of housing, too.

Anyway, the house is haunted by her dead father, who died of nasopharyngeal cancer at aged 40, and left a household of five daughters to deal with their fierce, fierce mother. Family life is difficult. The youngest child, and lonely, Sookfong Lee immerses herself into pop culture, a way to fill in the gaps, to assimilate into the white world, and to fit in at school. Afterall, facts about pop stars and pop songs are a kind of currency in school hallways.

“Here, her curiosity about why people are who they are extends to herself, revealing layers and layers of character traits”

Superfan is a book of essays that represents Sookfong Lee at her writing best. Her writing shows her as curious, but not self-conscious. Here, her curiosity about why people are who they are extends to herself, revealing layers and layers of character traits. It’s brave, in terms of its attitude towards sexuality and its attitude towards race and its attitude towards female rage. The language is accessible and sentences stretch from one to the next, affording the reader time. It’s controlled writing, but not controlling.

The book is fragmented, but whole. This is an accomplishment. Adrienne Rich once wrote that poetry is “connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves.” I like to think of these essays as long poems that create strong emotional connections.  It’s not a particularly long book, but in the end, you feel as if you’ve gone on an important journey.

Back to the Vancouver Special. I picture a room in this house, full of tacked up posters and pegged with blurry photos of friends. Ticket stubs, talismans, in a shoe box stuffed under the bed. Somehow, it’s my room, even though I grew up in a cedar A-frame in a tough small town in the interior of BC, a town pinned to the CPR.

Rea Tarvydas’ debut book of short stories, How to Pick up a Maid in Statue Square, was published by Thistledown Press (2016), and long-listed for the 2017 ReLit Award.

“Vancouver Special” photos credit to Richard Eriksson from Vancouver, Canada, CC BY 2.0, accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

Cover image for Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke My Heart accessed via penguinrandomhouse.ca.

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