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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. 

What’s Kim June Johnson Reading?

This is a terrible thing to admit – just awful—but my favourite books are ones I stole from the library. Which is to say: they became my favourites as I was reading them, and then, because I loved them so much, I couldn’t bear to take them back, so I just . . . kept them.

I didn’t mean to. What happened was this: I underlined things in pencil and scribbled notes in the margins, assuring myself that I would simply purchase a new copy of the book and, when it arrived, transcribe all the pencil markings into the new book and erase them from the library book. But at some point—say three quarters of the way through—I realized this would take a preposterously long time. So I kept reading, kept scribbling in the margins. I switched to pen. I brought out the coloured hi-lighters.

When the library finally asked where each book was, I claimed I’d lost it. I apologized. I paid the thirty-five dollars to replace it, with the knowledge that I could have bought it cheaper online. I didn’t care. I had my personal notes all over the book now. My asterisks and hearts and double underlined sentences. Each stolen book was a map of everything I’d thought and felt when I’d read it and loved it too much to return it.

Here is a list of the favourite books I have (sort-of-accidentally) stolen:

“Latent Heat” by Catherine Hunter 

Tell me about Heaven, I said. I lay flat on my back in the grass while the cumulous clouds revolved in the hot blue sky.

It was the first time I’d read poems about toxic religion, and as a recovering evangelical and new poet, this was extremely liberating for me. I couldn’t write without Catherine Hunter at my side. For years I’ve kept this book on my writing desk as a reminder to risk writing from my own experience.

“Healing Through the Dark Emotions” by Miriam Greenspan

When I started reading this book I began underlining things, but soon realized if I kept that up, 90% of the book would be underlined. This guidebook is technically self-help but many sections read like a moving memoir. I tell every single person I know about this book. I bring it to the yoga classes I teach and make my students promise me they will buy it. I quote from it constantly in the online writing community I host on Sundays. I’m sure people are getting sick and tired of hearing me mention it, but I am not going to shut up about it. It’s a book that goes deep, aims to unpack the wisdom of difficult feelings —despair, grief, fear, loss of meaning, to name a few—and teaches us how to do the difficult but important work of alchemizing them.

“The Long Hello” by Cathie Borrie

This lovely and emotional memoir is crafted in tiny fragments of scenes and snippets of conversation that move back and forth between the present and the past. No matter how stuck I am in my own writing, every time I open this book, I start writing again. I couldn’t take it back to the library because I needed it to get my work done. Also, I dropped it in the bath.

“Women Who Run With the Wolves” by Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Through the telling of rich intercultural myths and fairy tales, Estes examines the female psyche and the ways society unconsciously or consciously attempts to muffle the deep, life-giving messages of women’s souls. I keep this book on my bedside table and flip through it whenever I’m feeling wobbly in the world.

“Refuge” by Emily Rapp Black

This is what I’m reading now. I’m nearly done. I haven’t stolen it yet, and I think I might not have to. I’ve grown wise to my neurodivergent ways and have developed a new method: instead of writing on the pages of the book, I write on Post-it notes and stick them to the corresponding page. Duh. When I realized I adore this book—a gorgeous meditation on grief and rebuilding a life after loss, full of exquisite, original metaphors—I ordered it from my local book shop. When it arrives, I will transfer the sticky notes from the library book to the new book (my book!) and then transcribe the margin notes when I’m ready.

My book stealing days are over. Though I’m a bit disappointed that I won’t be able to glance up at my bookshelf and quickly locate my favourite books by their defining characteristic: the catalog number on the spine.

Kim June Johnson’s poems and micro nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Fire, Arc Poetry, FOLKLIFE and River Teeth’s Beautiful Things blog. She lives and writes on the wild west coast of British Columbia where she also works as a singer-songwriter, a composer of tiny piano songs, and an embodiment coach. She is nearing the finish line on a manuscript of poems. 

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Nancy Huggett’s Writing Space

As a full-time caregiver, my most constant office is my clipboard—something I can carry around with me. Upstairs supervising a shower, downstairs problem-solving technology, on the road as uber-mum, in the car waiting, in the doctor’s office waiting. Waiting. Little bits of waiting. Which is probably why I also write poetry. I have the poet Danusha Lameris to thank for this. In some lovely Poetry of Resilience workshop (with James Crews) she held up her clipboard and I coveted it! It seemed like the solution to my writing challenges. That, and poetry.

I do have a desk in an office that I share with my husband in the basement of our house. I’m a piler and he’s a filer and that’s probably all you need to know about the “office” dynamics. I always thought I was a filer, until I started writing more complex work, and now my office is a mess. I keep collecting words, ideas, talismans, bits of tamarack tree that have fallen on the ground (I am working on a longer meditation on a trio of tamaracks in our park that I visit daily), acorns and prickly chestnut shells. There is a window, and I face it. So that is good. And as soon as the weather warms up a bit, I tend to take over the front porch, so I can write with the birds and wave at families dragging kayaks and dogs to the river at the end of our street.

Front porch in Maine

I do admire other authors’ offices (because we get to see so many on Zoom!), filled with lovely artwork and bookcases that look like they were purchased to match and not scrounged from friends’ and neighbors’ decluttering detritus. I sometimes plan and daydream about having a “real” writer’s office, but that is always before bed when my mind wanders before settling down to sleep. When I wake, the work of it all seems a bit much and expensive, and I’d rather be walking or writing or, better yet, going somewhere else to write! Away from anybody calling down the stairs for a bit of help or a major disaster. Best sometimes if I am many kilometers away.

Still Point House of Prayer

So let me share with you some of my favourite desks. Desks I have known. Desks that have supported some of my best work.

1. A two-week stay in Florida, ostensibly to declutter and sell my mother’s condo after her death, but hey, 3 hours of writing each morning with the rising sun.

2. A small room with a bed at Still Point House of Prayer, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph on the Madawaska River, food lovingly prepared, total silence, great writing.

3. Front porch of the cottage right on the ocean in Maine, where I’ve been writing since I was 10.

4. Black Squirrel Books & coffee shop a block from our house where the barista would bring me my usual big red cup of half decaf as soon as I arrived with my laptop and notebook.

Florida

Nancy Huggett is a settler descendant who writes, lives, and caregives on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people (Ottawa, Canada). Thanks to Firefly Creative, Merritt Writers, and not-the-rodeo poets, she has work out/forthcoming in The American Literary Review, Citron Review, The Forge, Literary Mama, and Prairie Fire.

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Finding the Form with Natasha Sanders-Kay

“Daffodils” is not the kind of poem I’m used to writing. I joke that it’s my “white-guy-friendly” poem because it’s not particularly political or feminist, as most of my work is.

 Structurally, it was unusual for me too. The childhood memories have been with me for decades, but the writing process began on the second page, where I talk to my grandma on the phone during lockdown. She asked if I’d seen any daffodils and we laughed because I hadn’t, because they weren’t by the trash. I was going to use that dialogue in a suite of funny pandemic poems, which I ran by a trusted first reader; she felt I was scratching the surface of something, that there was more to be unpacked, “more funny” to be shared. 

Thinking about daffodils, I remembered my grandpa teaching me the Wordsworth poem on the way to school, how for a long time I’d wanted to write a poem about that. I thought, too, about the morbid sense of humour I’ve inherited from my mum’s side of the family in addition to an appreciation for words. I mentioned all this to my trusted friend, wondering aloud if I could make a cohesive piece or suite out of those connections. I was afraid I’d be trying to address too much, juggling the pandemic part with my grandma and that memory of my grandpa, who died of cancer when I was in my teens. “I don’t know,” my friend replied. “You’re writing about humour and illness and elders . . . I bet you could do it.” 

So I wrote down those memories, and started weaving in the etymological bits. I find etymological hunting to be a great way of feeling closer to my ancestors, always finding surprising and meaningful connections. Dwelling in the origins and variations of words like humour and melanoma allowed me to crack open more symbolism around sunshine and darkness and more.

So that’s how “Daffodils” evolved from a conversation with my grandma in a pandemic suite to a six-part poem about my grandpa. I’m happy the different threads wove together successfully, and that I have this tribute to him, which is also a tribute to humour out of hardship, to my family and the written word.

Natasha Sanders-Kay (she/her/hers) is a neurodiverse author of Irish Catholic and Jewish ancestry writing from the unceded and ancestral lands of the hən̓ qəmin̓ əm̓ and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh speaking peoples in what is colonially known as Burnaby, BC. Her chapbook poem Postmodern Mutt is available for free from Light Factory Publications at ReadingtheMigrationLibrary.com. Other work has appeared in Arc Poetry, Poetry Is Dead, subTerrain, PRISM international, untethered, Spacing, and MONO.; new poems are forthcoming in EVENT and the anthology Quae Nocent Docent (Secret Handshake Books). Her poem “Activist Anonymous: I’ve Made Mistakes” won an honourable mention in the 2022 Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize. Natasha is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at SFU and a member of the editorial collective and reviewing team at subTerrain magazine. Over the years she has worked on numerous initiatives around social justice and the arts.

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The 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist

After thorough consideration, The New Quarterly is pleased to announce the longlisted submissions to the 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The longlisted writers and their essays are as follows:

The 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest Longlist


  • “Black Hammers Falling”
  • by Christopher Banks

  • “Every Possible Way”
  • by Adèle Barclay

  • “Staying Power”
  • by Gayle Belsher

  • “Threads Rumbling Softly”
  • by Christine Bissonnette

  • “Jailed in a Flawed System”
  • by Virginia Boudreau

  • “Release”
  • by Emily Cann

  • “Vigil for the Vigilant”
  • by Adrienne Gruber
  •  
  • “Not Nothing, but Everything”
  • by Monica Kidd

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

  • “The Words of Strangers”
  • by Judith MacKay

  • “A Trail of Depression”
  • by Karen Moore

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

Benjamin Lefebvre’s Writing Space

I can sum up the state of my home office, the room in which most aspects of my writing life occur, in one word: piles. They are multiple, if not multitudinous—books and papers for the most part, as well as receipts, USB keys, pens, paperclips, electronic device chargers, and discarded teabag tags. My desk, so heavy and cumbersome that we needed two extra people to help us lug it upstairs when we moved into our house, has a double drawer for file folders. These folders are likewise covered in piles.

My laptop—the device I use to do the writing—can likewise be described in a single word: files. Most days, my virtual environment has as much clutter as my physical one, judging by the numbers of folders and subfolders with names like “Files—Sort Out” and “Documents from Old Laptop Sort Out.” My downloads folder has so many files that it can no longer sort them all by title or by type.

When I need to look for something in my office, I start by determining how long it’s been since I’ve seen the thing in question so I know how deep in the piles to rummage. The search function on my laptop is helpful, and sometimes it reveals that I’ve downloaded the same attachment multiple times. A few times a year, I make a point of imposing some order in both spaces by finding more permanent homes for the items in these piles and in these files. But then, inevitably, the avalanches soon return.

No doubt what I’m describing is most people’s idea of hell.

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That’s why, for all my writing needs, I use Scrivener. Scrivener is an app that allows me to create order out of chaos by making it easier to organize all parts of writing—drafts, outlines, spade work, character sketches, research notes, and discarded bits—under one roof, so to speak. Each project file mimics the structure of my computer’s hard drive in that it consists of folders, subfolders, and files, yet somehow, the streamlined yet flexible visual layout gives me the illusion of freedom (and therefore a decrease of writer’s block) that’s lacking in the seemingly more formal space of my word processor.

I don’t mean for this to sound like a commercial for one particular app, but as a writer who struggles with keeping my writing spaces organized and tidy, I appreciate what Scrivener offers me: a contained virtual environment in which the writing can get messy when it needs to and can be cleaned up to conform to standard formatting conventions once I’m done. Perhaps most importantly, Scrivener has a full-screen view that allows me to block everything else out.

For fellow writers who need help keeping track of both the forest and the trees of a particular project, an app such as Scrivener might be a game changer in your writing practice. It certainly has been for mine.

Benjamin Lefebvre lives in Kitchener. His most recent books are In the Key of Dale
(Arsenal Pulp Press) and Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939
(The L.M. Montgomery Library/University of Toronto Press). Visit him online at
https://benjaminlefebvre.com.

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John Vardon’s Writing Space

When I look through the dozens of other writing-space pieces, I am most impressed by, and slightly envious of, those writers fortunate enough to write from rooms overlooking gorgeous gardens or the shores of the “ramshackle sea,” to use a phrase by Richard Outram quoted in the blog post of Luke Hathaway. My writing and reading space is much more mundane but I’m proud to say that it has one thing in common with a poet I admire, Susan J. Atkinson, from Ottawa, who writes that her writing day begins on the corner of her brown living-room couch. Like hers, my couch is brown (leather) and it allows me to look out the front window. And perhaps I should say the the “couch” isn’t really a couch but “a love-seat commandeered as an armchair,” to use my wife’s words. Unlike the more dignified-looking piece of furniture on which Susan so photogenically sits, my couch is a more cluttered and untidy spot, often covered in newspapers, magazines, notebooks and novels, the foam in one of the love-seat pads compressed into a permanent depression contoured to my body. My wife, only half jokingly says she is waiting for me to get up so she can have it reupholstered.

From Susan J. Atkinson's Writing Spaces blog

From this vantage point I can see our low, glass-fronted bookshelves beneath the window containing art books and reference works along with now ancient VHS movie tapes and CDs. On top are ceramic bowls, various glass-art-objects and framed photos of family members. The window allows me to see the limbs and branches of the large red maple tree on our front lawn where squirrels and sparrows squabble and where, a few months back, a red-tailed hawk perched one afternoon, munching on a songbird whose feathers floated down to form an untidy pile in the driveway. The window is also at a height where I can see only the passing heads of tall delivery people, mail carriers, occasional Jehovah’s witnesses (always in pairs, one silent and one non-stop talkative), various solicitors for charities both well-known and unheard of, plus various itinerant charlatans, one of whom said he needed to see copies of my hydro bill.

At one end of the couch is a standing lamp with one very bright bulb and another special reading bulb which mostly doesn’t’ work but which in poltergeist fashion turns itself unexpectedly on and then just as unexpectedly off. Beside the not really a couch are stacks of books, read and unread. (Shelf space in our house was filled long ago.) Also within reach is grocery bag to be filled with dull or disliked books or surprisingly discovered duplicates headed for thrift shops. There are also various writing aids like pencils, pens, and pads of paper because I still sometimes write in longhand.

I have never  been a creative writer, at least not a poet, novelist, or short-story writer. My only foray into fiction was a parody published in TNQ (under a pseudonym) only because editor Kim Jernigan had a good sense of humour.  Perhaps not surprisingly, most of my attempts at fiction when I was younger began with sentences Bulwer Lytton would have used to start his own contest  for the most atrocious opening lines to imagined novels. Curiously, the only literary contest I ever won  was Books in Canada’s version of that same infamous competition, in this case for the worst first sentence in a Canadian novel. Mine began:

“As she watched her ex-husband’s head roll woodenly down the stairs of her front porch, the indoor-outdoor carpet turning quietly crimson in the senseless sunlight of another heedless dawn, Jessica was seized by the realization, as sudden as crows startled from a garbage bin, that today would not be the best time to have her toilet repaired.”

But I also do most of my reading in the same couch-potatoish location, whether it’s the hundreds of poems submitted to TNQ each year or the many books that retirement has freed me to read, now recorded in my book journals, which I began about three years ago when I realized how thoroughly I had forgotten what some of these these books were about and even what they looked like. Fortunately, my summaries and assessments are usually enough to jog my memory of their merits or shortcomings. At the very least, this habit reminds me of how many books I read in a year on average, much fewer than some and far more than most, if the annual depressing statistics on reading are to be believed. I think I am now on pace with my late mother, who read about two books a week.

One of the constant comments I encountered as I read through TNQ’s Writing Space archives is that these spots also facilitate thinking—reflection, contemplation, inner argumentation, writerly and non-writerly wool gathering, all of which are essential to the creative imagination and sustained sanity. Another thing I can see through the window is the weather, and today the snow is falling faintly through my universe, inducing a sense of peacefulness and calm, interrupted too soon by the loud buzz of my neighbour’s snowblower, a sound James Joyce, quite thankfully, may never have heard.

After about 35 years of writing, interviewing, and editing for TNQ,   John Vardon has had an article accepted for an upcoming issue of Canadian Notes and Queries. 

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