Online Exclusives
Where I Write.
“My first published story was written on our dining room table with my sons playing noisy war games around my feet.” I am a peripatetic writer: I have no one special writing space where functional fixedness reduces distraction. Instead, I have several but they all resemble each other: all present a large surface—I’m an inveterate […]
What is Marilo Nuñez Reading?
“I seem to be reading a lot of books about craft and creation of work lately, which is always the case when I am in the middle of a writing project.” I’m currently reading a few things. I don’t think I have the time to just focus on one book at a time, nowadays! Signs […]
Virginia Boudreau’s Writing Space
“I’m grateful for this hallowed spot that has inspired and contained so many pleasurable hours of wordplay and growing into the writer I’ve always wanted to become.” I wish I had “a room of one’s own” but for now, my preferred writing space is a shared one. I have it all to myself first thing […]
What is David Waltner-Toews Reading?
Let me begin with what I’ve been reading in the last two months which, now that I look back, is typical. I am writing this on May 23rd, so from March 23 until today the books I’ve read were Moon of the Crusted Snow (Waybgeshig Rice), My Last Continent (Midge Raymond), Toronto the Wild: Field […]
Finding the Form with David Waltner-Toews
When I was younger, I always wrote poetry, usually for occasions such as birthdays. In college I aspired to write great novels, and finished a couple that ended up in a drawer or a box somewhere. I never properly trained myself in the skills of long-fiction. This was the sixties. Didn’t the skills just happen? […]
Jennifer Lynn Dunlop’s Writing Space
This is the place I set up to be my writing nook. I love the elegant secretary, its curves and secret compartments. But I will admit it, here is where I usually write, with my laptop on my lap. Being comfortable and writing with a tea beside me on my bedside table– that’s the best way. Jennifer Lynn […]
Natalie Southworth’s Writing Space
I write in my home office that doubles as a guest room (thank goodness we don't have many guests), a TV room and a place to dump the laundry. The room contains a desk with a computer, a low chair (I cut down the legs of the desk to deal with this), two windows, a […]
What is Natalie Southworth Reading?
Lately I’ve been reading Offshore by Penelope Fitzgerald. The novel is based on a particular time in Fitzgerald’s life when she was raising two independent, slightly feral girls alone on a sinking houseboat on the Thames. Nenna, the heroine, is unsentimental and hard-scrabble and her reflections on her dying marriage are packed with the richest kind of […]
Finding the Form with Tanis MacDonald
I came to nonfiction via a route that made sense to me, though many find it a bit mysterious: from poetry to scholarly writing and then to creative nonfiction. This path is not unheard-of, but I’m aware that more people bounce back and forth between fiction and nonfiction, working both sides of the prose street, […]
Richard A. Johnson’s Writing Space
It’s daybreak in Victoria, mid-spring, which means the dawn light creeps through the gaps in the window shade at 5 a.m. and by 5:30 I’m sitting at my desk next to a steaming cup of black coffee. With any luck, our 22-month-old son has slept solidly through the night and won’t be jumping in his […]