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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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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. 

Photo by PiggyBank on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Art Lasovsky on Unsplash

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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.

Photo by Zaini Izzuddin on Unsplash

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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.

Photo by Morgana Bartolomei on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

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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).

Header photo by Asal Lotfi on Unsplash

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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

Photo by Kamila Maciejewska on Unsplash

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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Header photo by Hannah Olinger on Unsplash

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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.

Photo by Ashley Levinson on Unsplash

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.

Photo by Jaroslava Petrášová on Unsplash

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.

Header photo by Mike Tinnion on Unsplash

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