Uncategorised

What’s Alex Mackay Reading?

I am not imaginative, unfortunately. Neither creative nor inventive. Begrudgingly infertile with ideas. I envy the writer who wastes ideas like the autumn maple wastes leaves. Perhaps ideas are like anything else; they take practice. But perhaps too, I am not willing to put in the effort. You see, what I read, what inspires me to write, I do not choose for the story. It is for something else.

Hemingway wrote a book about a man trying to catch a fish. Salinger wrote one about a kid, wandering the city at Christmastime. These are not necessarily stories built to enthral, yet enthralled are their readers!

I like pretty writing more than pretty plots. Some magic mix between lavish wordplay and simple meaning. Writers who make poetic that which is mundane. If you can at all empathize with such a perspective, then perhaps you’d be interested in some of the favourites from my past year as a reader. Thomas Wolfe’s Letters to His Mother. Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth. Norm MacDonald’s Based on a True Story. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

Just don’t ask me what they’re about. “It doesn’t matter,” I’ll say.

Photo by Anthony Rossbach on Unsplash.

Read more

Julie Paul’s Writing Space

My writing space changes from day to day, just like what I eat for breakfast: routine is not my default. When it’s nice outside, I often take my notebook and/or laptop out, even if it means squinting at the screen. The historical, parental voice in my head that tells me to “get outside and play” must be heeded. (And most of the time, writing does feels like playing. Except when it doesn’t…)

I also take my notebook or printed pages to cafes—rarely do I bring the laptop—and find the general din and mayhem feeds my work. The photo below was taken at a bookstore / café / garden in Tepoztlan, Mexico, six years ago, when I took myself on a month-long writing retreat. This brownie made me cry, it was so good—or maybe I was missing my family? In any case, this setting turned out to be a perfect spot to write.

We’ve recently moved into a townhouse, our own, after renting a house for years, and I’m still figuring out the best writing spot; I’m like the container of succulents I keep moving from window to window, trying to find the best light. Today it was sitting by the big patio window, in Goldie Hawn (our Seventies armchair). Often it’s at the dining room table, a Sixties “fruitwood” table that shows every drop of moisture as a white spot but then miraculously heals back to brown.

Sometimes it depends on what I’m working on, too; when I need to organize or sort, I take things to a bigger surface, to get the lay of the land—sometimes a hotel bed, like when I was wrestling my novel into chapters. Or my previous kitchen table, when I needed to figure out the order of Meteorites, my latest story collection.

I have a new desk in the new spare bedroom, and a corkboard filled with photos, quotes and a quilted wall hanging made by a friend, but honestly, the kitchen table, with a view through the living room to the garden beyond, will likely be my most common place to create. I’m an empty nester now, too, so when my husband is at work, and I’m not at my day job, I have the luxury of a quiet space. Until the parental voice in my head becomes too loud to ignore, and I’m out there beside the rosebushes, squinting away.

Photos courtesy of Julie Paul.

Read more

What is Glenna Anne Turnbull Reading?

I don’t think my grandfather knew he was creating an addict when he plunked a copy of Anne of Green Gables into my seven-year-old hands, but by the time I’d sounded my way through the pages, one word at a time, I was hooked on literature. And now, like any good addict, I have stashes on the go hidden all over my house.

Currently in the bathroom, nestled beside the spare roll, sits a half-read copy of The Best of Canadian Poetry 2015; and tucked in between the bubble bath and Epson salts by my soaker tub is A Journey Through Labrador by Bernie Howgate that I purchased when he was going door to door selling them (now there is an interesting man!)  On the kitchen table beside the pepper grinder is Keith O’Brien’s non-fiction Fly Girls (my step-daughter is a pilot so I wanted to read this), and by my bedside lamp, keeping me up late these nights, lies Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six along with the short story collection Zolitude by Paige Cooper.

I initially picked up Daisy Jones & The Six because I was intrigued by its form. It’s written as a series of fictional interviews, stripped down to mostly dialogue and offering multiples points of view. It won’t last more than another night or two as it’s one of those books you can’t help but gulp straight down. As for Cooper, I absolutely adore her style and find the stories in Zolitude to be among the most exhausting, yet rewarding, pieces of short fiction I have ever encountered. Like the darkest of chocolate truffles, I find them too rich to stomach more than one piece at a time, so I slowly savour one at the end of every novel.

If I’d been asked what I was reading earlier this year, it would have been Dania Tomlinson’s Our Animal Hearts, Ondaatje’s Warlight, Alix Hawley’s My Name is a Knife, or Shelley Wood’s debut, The Quintland Sisters, which I had the privilege of work-shopping in a small writers group we both belonged to for many years.

Ever since reading Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro back in first year university, I’ve been obsessed with Canadian literature. I hope one day my debut novel will appear on someone else’s reading list.

Photo courtesy of Glenna Anne Turnbull.

 

Read more

What is Robby MacPhail Reading?

I usually have several books in progress at any given time. The result is a pile of half-finished paperbacks on my bedside table. My wife periodically removes this pile, places the books into a drawer. She hates clutter. Afterwards, I come behind her and take them back out. I also hate clutter, but we disagree on the word’s definition. She bought me a Kobo once, but I couldn’t adjust to it. I missed my pile.

This has been a year of revisiting old favourites. I recently picked up a new copy of Great Expectations to replace the tattered and yellowed copy I’d owned since I was a teenager. It’s my favourite Dickens’ novel, probably my favourite novel ever, and I reread it every ten years or so. The characters are wonderfully grotesque – caricatures, really – as so many of Dickens’s characters are. And yet, they are infused with an undeniable humanity. The story is filled with humour and pathos and scenes that stay with you forever – a young, terrified Pip encountering Magwitch for the first time on the moors; the heartbroken Miss Havisham forever reliving her worst day; the beautiful but cruel Estella making Pip cry over his own commonness. It’s just all so good. Sure, the theme may be simple – that money can’t buy happiness – but sometimes the simplest truths are the most profound.

Right now, my son is reading To Kill a Mockingbird for his grade ten English class. I was so excited for him – much more excited than he was, I’m afraid – that I picked up a new copy for myself to read along with him. I’ve spent subsequent evenings getting reacquainted with Scout and Jem and Dill and their schemes to make Boo Radley come out. I recently read a quote from Flannery O’Connor in which she disparages the novel, calling it a “children’s book.” Maybe she’s right. But then again, simple truths . . .

I’ve also been reading some short story anthologies. I just finished the 2018 Journey Prize collection, which I thoroughly enjoyed, especially Liz Harmer’s “Never Prosper.” I recently read The Dead are More Visible, a Stephen Heighton collection, after attending a reading by the author at U.P.E.I. I’m also in the middle of The October Country, a collection of early Ray Bradbury stories. For me, Bradbury is a master of the short form and belongs in the same company as Hemmingway and O’Connor in that regard.

As for non-fiction, First Man, the Neil Armstrong biography by James R. Hansen, is a good, no-nonsense history of Armstrong and the Apollo program. Unlike the movie it inspired, Hansen’s biography doesn’t try to find or invent emotional depth in its phlegmatic subject. Keith Law’s Smart Baseball demystifies many of the new statistics emerging from major league baseball’s Big Data movement. Finally, I’m slowly working through a single-volume biography of FDR by Jean Edward Smith. I’m not sure what drew me to it. Perhaps I’m nostalgic for a time when leaders asked us to overcome our fears, instead of fomenting them for their own advantage.

Photo by Jan Mellström on Unsplash

Read more

In Conversation with 2018 Peter Hinchcliffe Award Winner Katie Zdybel

Katie Zdybel was the winner of the 2018 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award for her story “The Last Thunderstorm Swim of the Summer” a coming of age story where a teen struggles with her late-blooming sexuality, feeling the weight of the cozy and perhaps stifling upbringing by her single mum, an academic who was more concerned with matters of the mind, and the inadvertent influence of a vivacious family friend they visited over several summers.

This is a story deeply rooted in place, and the characters’ connection to it. Can you talk about how the landscape influenced the development of this story?

Place is very, very important to me, and I find that most of my fiction starts there. I see place as an extension, or realization, of self. A lot of that has to do with colour palette, textures, and shapes — and the emotional resonance of these colours and shapes. I like exploring place in my writing via character, and character via place.

In this story, Ginny is caught between a place where she finds herself with her mother and where she wants to be, with her friend’s mother. Those two different mothers are represented by the nature of the different places (northern Michigan and western Michigan). Particularly, I’m so fascinated by the almost exotic nature of Sleeping Bear Dunes in western Michigan, where most of this story takes place. You don’t think of turquoise waters and white sand beaches when you think of Michigan; it’s an unexpected moment of paradise. I love that surprise pop of tropical colour and lushness in an otherwise pretty urban and industrialized state. And I love how our actions change when we find ourselves in different places. A certain colour palette calls for different moods and actions.

The relationships between Ginny, the teenage daughter and her mother is complex and evolving, one that seems disorienting to both. Can you talk about this relationship that is both fraught and loving?

This story is part of a collection (Equipoise) in which most of the stories involve a mother-daughter relationship. This is probably because I became a mother while writing them. I feel like I picked up that relationship dynamic like a crystal in my hand and just kept turning and turning it over, studying each facet and writing down what I could see, all the little notches and corners, and surprising ways that light is caught or muted in them.

To me, Ginny and her mother Margot have a strong and quite beautiful bond, but Ginny’s at that stage in her life where she needs to create some distance between herself and her mother, almost so that she can see it better, and then decided how deeply she will dive into an adult relationship with her mother — or not.

The way that Ginny and her mother are connected to their family friends is complicated as well. They seem so close, and has been a supportive place for them, but also claustrophobic, perhaps. Why did you want to explore this form of friendship in the mothers and in the daughters?

I don’t generally go into a story consciously wanting to explore one thing or another, but in this case, I actually did want to explore exactly that dynamic: how young women interact with the mothers of their friends. Our friends’ mothers offer an alternative model of a mother or of womanhood to us. When we’re feeling immature or insecure, or when we have a true need, we can idolize other mothers, as Ginny does. I think there’s a feeling of wholeness that can come from seeing the wholeness of your own mother — maybe I’m lucky to be able to say that because the wholeness of my own mother is quite loving, empowering, and inspiring.  But still, I remember this kind of curiousity or fascination about how mothering was happening in the families of my friends — the different languages and belief systems my friends were learning from their mothers.

What themes were you interested in exploring in this story?

Ultimately, the story, to me, is about women and their relationships to their sexual bodies. I like that it evolved that the four female characters in this story each have their own approach to this relationship — one is at peace with it, one is perhaps a little afraid, one might use it for power — and Ginny is at this moment in her young adult life where she’s trying to figure out how she wants to shape that relationship for herself. I like that she does this in relation to the women in her life, as opposed to the men.

As a late bloomer, she almost has this extended moment in which to really examine the female body before exploring her own sexual self. She doesn’t quite have the maturity to recognize this yet, but my hope for future Ginny is that she becomes aware of this extra beat in time she’s been given.

Now for a more general question, can you tell us a bit about your writing life, what you’re working on, any rituals in the process, the best advise you’ve ever received.

I’ve just submitted a fresh revision of my short story collection, Equipoise, to my agent (it’s still feels new and miraculous for me to use the words ‘my agent’), and will be focusing some attention on my SSHRC-funded thesis for UBC — a creative non-fiction book titled Cold Dark Joy. I’ll be traveling to Copenhagen soon to do some research for this book about how humans can thrive — and not just survive — in cold, dark landscapes.

All my rituals evaporated when my children were born. I just write when I can, in crowded closets, in bed, at the kitchen counter. If I could have a ritual it would be to meditate before I write, but my schedule doesn’t really allow for rituals at this phase in my life, though I do have faith in rituals. I try to just function in a somewhat meditative, or creativity-ready state as I change diapers, play dinosaurs, grocery shop. I’m about 40% successful at that.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received came from my oldest sister’s boyfriend when I was probably 15 or 16. We were standing in the garage with the rest of my family, getting out of the rain. He was a writer of some kind and I told him I hoped to be a good writer someday too. He said it wasn’t a matter of being good, but rather a matter of being honest. That was it, and they didn’t date for very long, but I think of this often.

What authors do you like to read? What book or books have had a strong influence on you or your writing?

I am wholly satisfied as a reader when I read Alice Munro. I just keep going back to her again and again. I take a break, then go back. My favourite moments in her writing are the exactness in her descriptions of weird, elusive, uncomfortable, contradictory emotions. I also love Lauren Groff, Annie Dillard, Annie Proulx. Marilynne Robinson’s books have had a profound effect on my understanding of what fiction can do, and of what humans are capable of. They have transformed me so profoundly as a person. The truths of humanity she uncovers are so reassuring and mystifying. Lila is maybe the fictional character I love the most in the world. And John Williams’s Stoner is a perfect novel, in my opinion.

As an emerging writer can you comment on the experience of winning the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award?

I was at my mom’s when I read the email and I came running up the stairs and told her I’d won, and I just had this feeling that things were going to change. A week later I learned I’d been shortlisted for the UBC/Harper Collins Prize for Best New Fiction, and a couple months after that I signed with Transatlantic.

I think that, more than anything, knowing the editors at TNQ had faith in my writing made me want to just work all that much harder. I love the feeling of people discussing my work and wanting to talk to me about it. This is fairly new for me outside of a workshop scenario, and it is breathing new life into my writing process. I’m extremely grateful, and I want to give back by producing my best, and most honest, work.

Read more

Finding the Form with Marilo Nunez

Welcome to the latest installation of “Finding the Form.” In this new series, contributors share how they found and developed the creative form for their recent work in The New Quarterly. You can find Marilo Nunez’s “We All Want to Change the World” in Issue 150.

I am a new short story writer. I am in my final year at Guelph, doing my MFA in Creative Writing. My main focus going into the program was playwriting because that is what I do for a living, I work in theatre. Playwriting has been my primary genre since I was in my twenties. But secretly I have always wanted to write novels and short stories. I took the creative writing masters instead of a playwriting master because I wanted to be exposed to the other genres. Broaden my horizons.

I found myself in a class with Michael Winter, novelist and fiction writer, in my first year. It was one of my favourite courses during my time at Guelph. He introduced me to short story writing and learning how to use emulation, imitation, to write our stories. Not plagiarism, but emulation. Being inspired by writers who came before and dissecting their craft, word by word, then using that as a jumping off point. My story We All Want To Change the World was crafted after studying The Swim Team by Miranda July. The two stories have absolutely nothing in common except for, the story began as an exercise in using the past and the present in the same story. My first draft was just that- it was about a woman (me), now in her forties, describing to her husband about the first time she fell in love with a boy named Pablo, and the Jukebox and the camping trip. I went back and forth in the story, from the present to the past, young girl to older woman. The story evolved with each draft until it became one told through the young girl’s perspective only, about this particular moment in her life, when she had her first crush on a boy and experiencing the feelings that all young adults begin to feel when they are growing up, that of a loss of innocence.

It was essential for me to capture my experience of growing up the daughter of Chilean exiles because I haven’t read any stories about this experience. It is a very unique perspective and as a child I always felt torn between the politicized world my parents carried with them and the world in which I liked boys and played with Barbies. I tried to capture that sense of being torn in two while still wanting to be a girl who likes a boy. And of course, the boy is himself politicized. In the exile reality, it is difficult to get rid of the nostalgia that one carries over from the country which one was forced to leave. My father still lives in this world, a limbo between Chile and Canada, which I find heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.

In terms of genres or styles, I am new to short story writing. All of it is exciting to me. I am a playwright, so my work is created through dialogue alone. It was refreshing and scary to have to create a world using inner dialogue and long passages of description. I loved it very much, and I look forward to doing more of it. And for me, it is essential to tell the stories of the people who can’t tell their stories, either because they lack the language or are no longer here. My Chilean exile experience is a unique one, but seeing how the world is turning right now, I know that there are children arriving from places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan etc., who, like me, came here to Canada as babies or young children, and who will one day want to see themselves in the stories we tell. I am forty-five years into that story of exile, and I want to have it told in the stories we create in the Canadian milieu because this is where I call home. I want my children and my grandchildren to read about their culture and their heritage in the pages of books published in Canada.

Photo by Pablo García Saldaña on Unsplash.

Read more

What is Richard A. Johnson Reading?

Horizon by Barry Lopez (Random House Canada, 2019)

Few books have harnessed my insatiable wanderlust and stimulated my consciousness of the natural world as much as Lopez’s 1986 masterpiece, Arctic Dreams. And certainly no writer has so eloquently placed me at the distant edge of a wild place I had never visited and made me feel so welcome, so familiar, and so much a part of his journey. (I could spend endless days and nights camped inside his symphonic chapter on the formidable muskoxen of Banks Island and their almost unbelievable endowments of survival.)

So when I read (in tantalizing reviews in the NY Times and Outside magazine) that Lopez, now an elder statesmen of environmental science writing and a cancer-fighter to boot, had a new book on the way—itself a formidable muskox of a tome, at 550 pages—a little literary drool formed in the corner of my mouth. Part memoir, part travelogue, Horizon is “a reverie and an urgent appeal” (the Times) and a “sublime [and] bracing masterpiece for a broken world” (Outside). I wanted to go camp inside it.

When an inquiry at my local library branch revealed I might have to wait months to obtain the book, I tried to talk myself into spending three weeks’ worth of my beer budget on the hardcover, but I put it off, reasoning that my bedside book stack was already casting a long, ominous shadow.

In late April, among the throng of Amazon boxes—diapers, office supplies, and other sundries that two work-from-home new parents need to survive—that typically arrive each week at our front door in Victoria, B.C., was a mysterious box with Barry Lopez’s Horizon inside. I checked the “Purchases” folder of my Gmail inbox—had I ordered the book some late, carefree evening, under the influence of fatigue or a craft IPA, and forgotten? Had some anonymous Random House editor, also perhaps a bit drunk, tapped me to write a review? Or had Barry Lopez himself, word having reached him that I tend to carpet-bomb his name into almost any conversation on the arctic or the genre of nature-writing, decided to send me one of his very own author-copies?

A week later, the mysterious bibliophile revealed himself, but only after I straight-up asked him during an unrelated FaceTime call. My father-in-law is a man who takes sincere pleasure in facilitating the rich experiences of others. (As you might imagine, this quality makes him a natural-born grandfather.) His quiet demeanour and stay-at-home satisfaction with life mask a passion for the natural world and the places that our literary heroes take us. Doubtless he’s listened to me wax enthusiastic for Barry Lopez, and Arctic Dreams is one of his all-time favourites, too. “I’m glad it arrived, hope you enjoy it,” he said plainly of Horizon, with a knowing smile. Then he turned the conversation back to his grandson.

•

The Carrier, My People by Lizette Hall (self-published, 1992)

During the winter of 1807 a young Dakelh (Carrier) First Nation chief named K’wah saved the lives of the explorer Simon Fraser and his voyageurs encamped at McLeod Lake, B.C., by supplying them with 30,000 dried salmon to ward off starvation. The following summer Fraser completed his journey down the river that now bears his name and (pardon the brevity) the rest is history.

This summer I am travelling to the Cariboo region of eastern British Columbia to paddle (no, not the 1375-km Fraser River, good heavens!) the famous Bowron Lake Canoe Circuit with the same friend, Mike, whose wit and moose-spotting acumen grace my recent TNQ essay “Canoeing with Thoreau.” Having already devoured Fraser’s letters and journals as well as secondary histories of the region from the North West Company fur empire to the Cariboo Gold Rush to modern times, I found myself still lacking—as so many of us are—an Indigenous perspective on the living history of the land we mean to explore.

Enter the late Lizette Hall—historian, community leader, and great-granddaughter of Chief K’wah—whose compilation of oral histories of the Dakelh nation reveals not only stories of generations of Indigenous lives that often remain in the shadows, but also an implicit presentation of this land (or wilderness, in our Western romantic sense of it) as a responsibility, a privilege, and a continuous story.

While Mike and I are unlikely to face deprivation on the scale of Simon Fraser and his oft-luckless band of explorers (in addition to worrying about bears, hidden waterfalls and starvation, they also spent most of their days not canoeing but repairing broken canoes), neither are we travelling without a perspective on what lies beyond the horizon.

(If any TNQ readers out there know of other literary perspectives on the Cariboo region (Indigenous or non-), please knock on my Twitter door @writing_richard)

Photo courtesy of Richard A. Johnson.

Read more

What is Moneesha R. Kalamder Reading?

Reading Rumi: Selected Poems, translated by Coleman Banks

I’m currently reading a translation of the work by the Persian poet Rumi. Jelaluddin Rumi was a 13th century mystic and an islamic scholar. His poetry speaks of love, passion, spirituality, and being human. I was raised in the islamic faith myself, regularly observing daily rituals but always more interested in the spiritual aspect of things. Discovering Rumi has been a delightful surprise – it holds meaning for me in the context of the faith both the poet and I were raised in, and it still remains meaningful when that faith is no longer present.

I recently read an article in the New Yorker that criticizes Coleman Banks’ approach to the translation, insinuating that this version of Rumi’s poetry is more of an interpretation than an actual translation. I am of the opinion that all translators put something of themselves in the work they translate. Banks was also accused of removing some the context, or “westernizing” his translations, which is a pity, but he will have to suffice for now. I can’t deny that I am thoroughly enjoying the poems I’m reading. The tragedy of not being able to understand every language is never knowing how the original author meant to say things, and the blessing is that sometimes we are gifted with translators who create something special.

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash

Read more

What is Sadiqa de Meijer Reading?

Welcome to the latest instalment of “Who’s Reading What.” In this series, contributors to The New Quarterly share their reading list and recommendations.
You can find Sadiqa de Meijer’s “True Places” in Issue 150. 

I’m reading a book right now that was written by a 6-year-old in Oregon in the early twentieth century. I’ve never read anything quite like her perspective and wording – the work is funny and moving, and I already wish it wouldn’t end. It’s called Opal: The Journal of An Understanding Heart (adapted by Jane Boulton), and if the subtitle instils the same aversion in you as it did in me, please overcome that feeling and proceed to read it soon.

I’ve also been reading White Blight – a translated poetry collection by Swedish-Iranian poet and playwright Athena Farrokhzad. It’s an amazing work, a long poem in the voices of five of the speaker’s family members, spanning three generations. In phrases that I find both clinical and lyrical at once, the writer delves into the complexities of writing as a brown immigrant in northern Europe in this decade, and of being an immigrant anywhere at all.

What else is here on the pile… Looking for Lorraine – Imani Perry’s biography of Lorraine Hansberry. John Berger’s A Fortunate Man, which I’ve wanted to read for a long time, and is an interlibrary loan that happened to still get processed while the Ontario program shuts down. The library is crucial to my own reading, and the current provincial gouging of their funding is so wrong – books are life-giving things, on the practical and spirit levels, and it’s both unsurprising and infuriating that the cuts threaten access to reading in Indigenous and remote communities in particular. There’s a petition to the government here.

Sadiqa de Meijer’s poetry has appeared most recently in The Walrus, and the anthologies The Next Wave and Beyond Remembering. “True Places” is for Anne-Marie Turza.

 


Cover image by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

Read more

The New Quarterly Nominated for Five Literary Awards

It was announced in early May that The New Quarterly earned five nominations at this year’s National Magazine Awards. Nominations included two in Poetry, two in Personal Journalism, and one in Fiction.

The competition was strong as more than 185 Canadian print and digital magazines put forth submissions in both official languages. In the twenty years that it has participated in the National Magazine Awards, The New Quarterly has won ten gold, seven silver and forty-three honourable mentions. The National Magazine Awards winners will be announced on Friday, May 31, 2019 at a gala in Toronto.

The New Quarterly’s five nominees at this year’s National Magazine Awards are:

David Huebert writes fiction, poetry, and critical prose. He has won the CBC Short Story Prize, the Sheldon Currie Fiction Prize, and the Walrus Poetry Prize. His debut short fiction collection, Peninsula Sinking (2017), won the Jim Connors Dartmouth Book Award. Huebert’s “Six Six Two Fifty” from Issue 146 (Spring 2018) of The New Quarterly has been nominated as a finalist in the Fiction category for the 2019 National Magazine Awards.

Lisa Martin is author of One Crow Sorrow (2008) and co-editor of How to Expect What You’re Not Expecting: Stories of Pregnancy, Parenthood, and Loss (2013). She teaches literature and creative writing at Concordia University of Edmonton. Martin’s “The Good Death” from Issue 146 (Spring 2018) of The New Quarterly has been nominated as a finalist in the Personal Journalism category for the 2019 National Magazine Awards.

Erin Noteboom has published widely in literary magazines. She has won the CBC Literary Award, the K-W Arts Award, and Acorn/Plantos Award for Peoples poetry. She is also the author of The Mongoose Diaries (2007) and Seal up the Thunder (2005). Noteboom’s “Too Strong to Stop, Too Sweet to Lose” from Issue 145 (Winter 2018) of The New Quarterly has been nominated as a finalist in the Poetry category for the 2019 National Magazine Awards.

Meaghan Rondeau also won TNQ’s 2018 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. She mostly writes poetry and short fiction, but her first play, “Cassandra in the House,” was produced at the Brave New Play Rites in Vancouver. Rondeau’s “Half-Thing” from Issue 148 (Fall 2018) of The New Quarterly has been nominated as a finalist in the Personal Journalism category for the 2019 National Magazine Awards.

Terence Young is a retired teacher of English and Creative Writing at St. Michaels University School. “That Time of Year,” a story from his second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age, was selected for the annual Best Canadian Stories in 2012. Young’s “The Bear” from Issue 148 (Fall 2018) of The New Quarterly has been nominated as a finalist in the Poetry category for the 2019 National Magazine Awards.

About The New Quarterly

The New Quarterly (TNQ) is a non-profit Canadian literary magazine that has been publishing the best of Canadian writing—short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—since 1981. TNQ also holds three annual contests: the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The magazine hosts the Wild Writers Literary Festival and manages the Write on the French River Creative Writing Retreat. TNQ is housed at St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo and acknowledges that its office is located on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

Photos courtesy of the National Magazine Awards. For the latest award updates, follow them on Twitter at @MagAwards.

Read more