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Finding the Form with Joe Davies

When I write I’m often drawn to that spot where the mundane greets the absurd, and for the mundane aspect I sometimes draw quite heavily on personal experience. “Fifty Dollars” very much fits that pattern. The camping, the uncooperative weather, the feelings of melancholy that can crop up after a holiday, and most importantly, the book from the thrift store with $50 dollars in it – these are all personal experiences I enlisted to become the germ of my story. The rest is the work of fancy. 

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After cobbling together a re-imagined version of events leading-up to the discovery of the $50, I waited to see what sorts of ideas might come along. I like writing this way, rendering a situation, then allowing myself to be open and responsive to what could happen, being sensitive to nuances that might already be on the page, and not knowing exactly where things are headed from there. It’s a strategy that doesn’t always lead to a successful piece of writing, but for me, having it be at least somewhat an act of discovery helps to sustain and elevate my curiosity.

Joe Davies‘ short fiction has appeared in The Dublin Review, eFiction India, Prism, Grain, Descant, Exile, Stand, Rampike, The Missouri Review, Queen’s Quarterly and previously in The New Quarterly.  He lives in Peterborough, Ontario.

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What is Scott Armstrong Reading?

Author: Bret Easton Ellis
Novel: The Shards
Published: 2023

Bret Easton Ellis is an author whose very name can bring on an almost immediate distaste, even though few can remember why. And, then, when we, followers of his works, remind them of several titles he has published to remarkable acclaim, and several movie adaptations, ‘American Psycho,’ is always the book that people nod at, and remember why they do not like him. Usually, never having read the book. His newest novel, after years of saying he was no longer going to write fiction, is a return to classic form, but with a maturity that makes his writing even more compelling, and at times morbidly honest. That being said, the narrative is a twisting of the author’s own remembrance of his last year of high school, when a serial killer hunted his neighbourhood, killing people he knew, but somehow only he is able to understand all of this, going mad on his own writing his first novel, which he actually did do in real life. His use of his own name takes the story to strange places, and nothing is ever quite taken as reality. Not for everyone. But for me, an achievement by an author I had missed.

Scott Armstrong has previously been published in The New Quarterly, as well as Front and Centre, The Windsor Review, and The Antigonish Review. His latest story is published in The Nashwaak Review 2021/22 issue.

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Finding the Form with Kate Cayley

My story, “A Day,” is about a young girl going to visit her relatives on the East side of the wall in Berlin in 1989, just before the end. She narrates the story as an adult, now living in another country, looking back. It’s a spare story: we don’t get much of what she’s feeling. The story, which took me a short time to write (four days) and a long time to edit and rewrite (two years, intermittently of course), seemed to demand a pared back approach. Whenever I added in emotional flourishes or asides it felt like the melodramatic pitfalls of historical fiction that deals with totalitarianism, that I was making the characters into types, which is disastrous. When you view people as types you engage in your own private totalitarianism, in which individuals become moving parts in your argument. So I had to keep pulling back.

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Another reason it took me a long time to shape this story was that it’s loosely based on a story from my wife’s life. My mother-in-law defected from the East in 1968 (though from Prague not rural Germany) and ended up in West Berlin. When my wife was a child, they were allowed a one-day pass to visit their cousins, who travelled to the East side of the wall for this reunion. All the details are quite different, but that was the spine. Except her memory of shyly holding her cousin’s hand as they walked in the rain, and my mother-in-laws nervousness around the raincoats because the bright colours showed they were capitalist scum. And of course, that the whole thing was almost over, but they had no idea. So that probably made me feel extra cautious as I approached the story, because it was told to me, part of my family but not mine.

Kate Cayley has received a Trillium Book Award, an O. Henry Prize, and the Mitchell Prize for Poetry. Her third poetry collection, Lent, is published by Book*hug.

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What’s Bernadette Rule Reading?

Recently I have read several books that I can heartily recommend. The first is Foster (faber & faber, 2010) by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Her work is extremely spare, resulting in very short books which are all but short stories produced as novels. I cannot recommend all of her work, as some of it is just too relentlessly dark for my taste. That being said, Foster is exquisite, peopled with three-dimensional characters. It has perhaps the strongest ending I’ve ever read in a work of fiction.

Jeffery Donaldson’s Momento: On Standing in Front of Art, just out from Gordon Hill Press, is another short work, this one of brief essays that often left me breathless. It is astonishing where Donaldson goes with this concept of looking at art.

At Green Heron Books in Paris, I had the serendipity to pick up Sarah Bakewell’s delicious 2021 biography, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Other Press, NY). Bakewell tells the story of Montaigne’s life very engagingly, using lines & stories from his famous essays as illustration. A wonderful read!

Bernadette Rule‘s books include, most recently, the poetry collection Deep Breath (Frog Hollow Press, 2021), and the creative nonfiction novel Dark Fire (lulu.com, 2021). Forthcoming books include The Arithmetic of Color (lulu.com), and The Window Washer of Chartres (Paradise North Press).

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Alanna Marie Scott’s Writing Space

I write nomadically, and I write by hand. I carry at least one notebook and at least three pens with me and I write wherever I’m taken by the impulse:

– Hunched like a gargoyle in bed
– Lying on the couch
– Around my food at the dining table
– Sitting on the floor
– On an airplane
– At my desk on my lunch break at work

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And so on.


As a child I remember writing on the floor, tucked behind my bedroom door, on stapled sheets of lined paper that I hid under the dresser whenever anyone came close. This is characteristic of my writing posture today: hunched, twisted, close to the page. After a back injury a few years ago, for six months I couldn’t sit down at all, so I got quite good at writing on a notebook that rested on my stomach while I lay flat in bed.

Keyboards are a tool of revision for me, not one of composition. The most uninterrupted route between my brain and the page has always seemed to be through the glide of ink on paper. There is a silvery callous on the side of my right middle finger where my pen rests. This has liberated me from a desk or a room.

Immediacy is more important than geography, in the end. Follow the idea when it comes. The space, the noise, the people, none of the rest of it matters. Put the words on the page.

Alanna Marie Scott is a lifelong Torontonian who has lived in Edmonton for almost 10 years. Her work has appeared in Prairie Fire, Grain, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the University of Victoria’s writing program and the Dungeon Master for her D&D campaign.

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Finding the Form with Kelsey Andrews

I know flowers can seem overdone and easy to write about, but to me they mean sex and death, and nothing much is easy about that. Sex when they’re bright with pollen and attracting insects, then death when they, you know, die.

The first stanza of my poem “Peony” came from a moment in the garden, amazed by the sheer size of the peony blossoms that were so heavy they bent toward the ground. I wrote several partial poems in my notebook, coming back to that moment again and again from different angles on different days, but there was no feeling of completeness, just an image.

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That year (and I’m afraid I forget what year it was, but it was before the pandemic) was a good year for peonies, and we had some in a vase on the dining room table. I wrote that part quickly, thinking about my dad who was dying at the time, and my own death which felt nearer now that I was seeing it up close in someone I loved. It, too, felt incomplete.

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Possibly a year later I decided to see if I had a whole poem in all those snippets. I looked back through my notebook for the bits on live peonies, and found the one with ants. It felt shadowed to me (although the ants are actually helpful, keeping away aphids and other insects while they eat the flower’s nectar), and the doll’s head image echoed for me with memory and loss. These two snippets seemed to fit together.

They were still somewhat separate, though, so I numbered them 1 and 2 and gave them each a title. They feel a bit like before and after pictures, though before and after what I’m not sure.

Kelsey Andrews has been published in Prairie Fire, PRISM International, and The Dalhousie Review. Her first collection of poems, Big Sky Falling, was published by Ronsdale Press in 2021.

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What’s Bobbie Jean Huff Reading?

I find it risky to read when I’m writing intensely. When I do read, I sometimes find that my writing sounds like Molly McClosky for a few pages, then Sally Rooney for another few before, maybe, Ian McEwan takes over until the end of the chapter. You get the picture.

But often books just sneak their way into my life and demand to be read. This was the case with the novel I just finished reading, Yellowface, by R.F. Kuang, It’s about a struggling novelist who steals the plot of her smashingly successful novelist friend, who has died suddenly. The novel takes a satirical look at current notions of race and cultural appropriation, and provides a scathing—yet, I fear, accurate— critique on the modern day publishing industry. If I had known, before I took up writing, what I learned in this very funny book about publishing, I might have picked a more lucrative and steady field of work like—perhaps—baton-twirling?

The New York Times, in its weekly “By the Book” column, asks well-known writers what they are reading. As I wait to be asked (and I’m sure it will happen at any moment) I’m happy to tell you that I’ve just started Act of Desperation by Megan Nolan. And the stack of books in my study, which I hope to get to next, includes: Collected Works by Lydia Sandgren, Snow Road Station by Elizabeth Hay, and Rosewater by Liv Little.

But before I get to these, I’m planning to read, when it comes out shortly, my friend Amanda West Lewis’ new novel called Focus. Click. Wind. It takes place in Toronto during the VietNam war era—the era of deserters and draft dodgers and political protesters, many housed at Rochdale College. I lived in Toronto at that time (in fact, the commune I lived in took in a deserter) and I’m looking forward to revisiting the period in Amanda’s book, which is already being called a brilliant thriller.

Bobbie Jean Huff ’s poems, essays and stories have appeared in Canadian and US publications. In 2022 her debut novel, The Ones We Keep, was published by Sourcebooks.

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What’s Andrew Westoll Reading?

I just finished reading The Peregrine, by J.A. Baker, that 1967 classic of nature writing that I had somehow overlooked until now. A friend who had taken a film course from Werner Herzog two decades ago had told me that the great German filmmaker had loved The Peregrine and had quoted from it by memory in class, and that was all I needed to hear. I bought the book the next day. Immediately upon opening it I was swept away by the prose, by Baker’s limitless ability to cast each moment in the swamps and fen lands of Essex, England, in a singular, sacred light. Everyone who reads this book heralds the quality of the writing, but no praise is really enough to encapsulate what Baker is doing on the page. 

He uses language as a child at play might, as a collection of “spare parts” to be repurposed in whatever form or fancy he dreams up, and the resulting prose is full of delightful invention, words placed on the page in ways no one has ever quite placed them before. Baker turns the drudgery of ethology, of following animals through the wild day after day, into a poetic manifesto, a reminder that our attention is all and everything we have to give. My son was having trouble going to sleep, so I started reading The Peregrine to him in the hopes it would calm his mind. Soon he began asking for it by name, listening and not listening as Baker pursued his birds through field and wood. I would continue reading long after my son had begun to snore. The book put both of our minds to rest in such an eloquent way.

Andrew Westoll is the author of two books of literary nonfiction and a novel. His next book, The Zoo and You, is forthcoming from Knopf Canada.

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Finding the Form with Nayani Jensen

Sometimes I’ll tinker with a poem for ages, and sometimes it arrives nearly whole, which was the case for Woodland Ghost.

It was written at the height of the pandemic—I was living in the UK, and attending a virtual writing workshop set in the local woodland, which had been closed for lockdown. I wanted to capture something about the fluid feeling of time at that point, and the melancholy of not-quite being part of a place. I write prose more often than poetry, and for me poetry often feels like a sketch—a little creative treat, usually with a single idea or image.

I always write poetry longhand first (and generally do the same for prose)—it feels freer, and even though I end up tinkering with the words, there’s something special about their first handwritten form. I was surprised, going back to my notebook, to realize how little the poem had changed from its earliest draft. I was dissatisfied with the original ending, and tried many options before realizing that a better ending was already there, floating around partway through the poem. I cut the final stanza, and rearranged the end. The rest of the poem remained nearly unchanged, aside from minor edits.

It’s sometimes embarrassing to accept that almost everything significant in a piece was created right at the start, and everything else has been miniscule adjustments. But it also reminded me of the value of revision—work where it often looks like nothing much is happening, but in which the entire piece becomes tighter and sharper and closer to its original intention.

Nayani Jensen is a writer and historian of science from Halifax, Nova Scotia. Initially a Mechanical Engineer, she received a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to study English Literature and History of Science at the University of Oxford. In both her academic and creative work, she is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to history, climate, and fiction. Her work has appeared in Augur Magazine, The ASH Oxford Journal, and on bus routes around Halifax as part of the Poetry in Motion project. 

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The 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Results

After thorough consideration, The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the results of the 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest.

First Place

“Not nothing, but everything” by Monica Kidd

Second Place

“The Words of Strangers” by Judith MacKay

Honourable Mentions

“Black Hammers Falling” by Christopher Banks

“Cantonese Lessons for a Foreign Daughter-in-Law” by Danica Longair

 

Congratulation to all of the winners and honourable mentions. We look forward to publishing these essays in future issues.