Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Emma Williamson
“You, On Your Thirty-Fifth Birthday” is both deeply personal and yet not about me. To be honest, it also makes me uncomfortable to read again, and to write about, because while I vividly recall the singular moment that eventually inspired the piece, it now feels like it happened to someone else. But first: the ending. Don’t they […]
What’s Alex Pugsley Reading?
A BOOK I READ recently was The Mystery of the Emeralds, Trixie Belden Mystery #14, credited to Kathryn Kenny. Such pulpy offerings—series for young readers like The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Cherry Ames Student Nurse—were everywhere when […]
Finding the Form with Lena Scholman
Halfway through the process of researching my WWII novel set in Holland, I was reading about Nazis requestioning animals, particularly horses, in the 1940’s, and found myself obsessed with the rescue efforts of Lipizzaner stallions from Vienna. (Yes, I had landed in another country and was seriously contemplating scrapping the whole thing and writing about […]
Danica Longair’s Writing Space
Virginia Woolf famously hoped for a future where all women writers (and, likely, women in general) had “A Room of One’s Own” to create and be themselves, away from the noise and busyness of life. Nearly a century after the publication of her iconic essay, I am a woman sharing a condo in Vancouver, BC, Canada with four […]
What’s Michael Lithgow Reading?
I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle […]
What’s Lena Scholman Reading?
For a long time, I had a quotation on my wall that read “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” I knew a writer named Ursula K. Le Guin wrote it, but I didn’t know anything about her, and had never […]
Finding the Form with Oluwatoke Adejoye
I started writing The Condolence Visit not exactly planning for the interactions between the two major characters in the story to unfold in a single location. However, in retrospect, I think I might have subconsciously known this. After all, when the idea for the story first came to me in the first year of my MFA […]
Finding the Form with Danica Longair
“What is grief, if not love persevering?” – WandaVision Cancer is the same in both languages. At least, in my family of Hong Kong immigrants, who speak a mixture of Cantonese and English when they talk to each other. I don’t know how they decide, subconsciously and on the spot, which words to say in […]
Susan J. Atkinson’s Writing Space
It has been six years since The New Quarterly published my poem “The Dining Room Poem by Another Poet” in their Spring 2018 issue #146. Six years since I last offered a glimpse into the space where I write. I still maintain the same writing routine when I am home in Ottawa. I still start […]
Lori Sebastianutti’s Writing Space
I am not the type of person to write in public spaces. I remember my university days and how I marvelled at the students who could study in loud, communal areas — cafés, cafeterias, and common rooms. How do they do it? I wondered. How do they concentrate? I am lucky to have, as Virginia […]