Online Exclusives
What’s Stephen J. Price Reading?
My 2025 goal is to read books I should have read by now. The first three installments are 100 Years of Solitude, The Woman in White and The Fifth Season (this one ended up on the list because I found it at a thrift store for $3.00 and I’ve always wanted to read it.) But before getting […]
Finding the Form with MJ Malleck
Penance took six years to reveal itself to me, and because it kept me at the drafting board, it also taught me about my personal writing process. I notice, now, my reflex tendencies, and can choose to follow or subvert them with each new piece. I began writing the story in 2018. I’d visited Getty […]
Celebration of Love: Reading Recommendations
To celebrate Valentine’s day, TNQ has collected a variety of works from our latest issues, 171, 172, and 173. The chosen stories focus on love and relationships in all of their varieties and complexities. These reads will be available, regardless of subscription status, until February 21 for our audience to enjoy! Poetry “Swan Dive” by […]
Christina Wells’ WritingSpace
Writing space. Just saying these two words out loud gets me a little agitated. They bring up vague but strong feelings around securing space, fighting for space, sharing space, paying for space — hard work, guilt, scrambling, trying to settle. I like Mary Oliver’s gentle prodding in her book, “A Poetry Handbook.” She writes about […]
Braedan Houtman’s Writing Space
My desk is against a wall—actually, two walls. I used to have it against a window. That didn’t work well. I don’t understand how people can have desks against windows. My apartment is on the third floor and looks directly across at another (much nicer) building. There is a parking garage, a sidewalk, and an […]
TNQ Mourns the Tragic Death of Longtime Board Chair, Alister Thomas
Alister was a bright beacon in the Canadian literary community and one of TNQ’s greatest champions, serving as Chair of the TNQ board from 2016-2024.
What’s Braedan Houtman Reading?
My reading is never habitual. I have moments of insatiability and others of fasting. Working at a bookshop last year, reading and completing were separate entities. I read widely: the first half of Millhauser’s Disruptions, fragments of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and nearly all of Tokarczuk’s Flights—the last of which I loved until I […]
Finding the Form with Candice May
I started writing this story a few years ago, immediately after I’d heard of a psychological term called ‘the dead mother complex.’ I was absolutely enthralled by this concept and knew I had to find a way to write about it. In psychology, a ‘dead mother complex’ describes an emotionally unavailable or absent mother, which […]
Finding the Form with Geoff Martin
“The Isabel Letters” found its form super late in the drafting process. Which made it feel exactly right—the sudden realization that each short section should begin with a salutation of some sort, should gesture to the exchanges I’d been having with the writer Isabel Huggan for several years and that she’s been having with far […]
Finding the Form with Laurie D. Graham
They arrive in two ways. Either suddenly present before me, there in full, kablammo, and I’m scrambling to get it all affixed before it disappears or dissipates or morphs or whatever it does by its nature, that nature being beautifully fleeting. Or via a glacial (though I don’t think that adjective means what we hold […]