Online Exclusives
Rachel Panico’s Writing Space
When the world stopped in March 2020, there was an awkward pause in my education involving constant mass emails from Wilfrid Laurier University about moving online that basically all said the same thing: “We’re working on it!” All my professors gave open-ended extensions on upcoming assignments because none of them knew what was going on […]
“Write What You Know” with Rachel Panico
The title is in quotation marks because this is what we say to young people who are interested in writing. Here’s the problem: as a young person, my first thought is, “But I don’t know anything yet. I don’t have as much life experience as you.” We feel we don’t have anything valuable to contribute […]
Poisonous If Eaten Raw: An Interview with Alyda Faber
This interview is following John Vardon’s poetry review of Alyda Faber’s Poisonous If Eaten Raw. John Vardon: An online image of your collection is still advertised as Rain, In All the Ways It Falls, your original title for the book before Poisonous If Eaten Raw, which suggests that the change may have been relatively last […]
Finding the Form with Donna Seto
I started writing “Generation Congee” after my father was diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer. My father doesn’t speak English. Or he pretends he doesn’t, especially when I’m around to translate. But I’m not fluent in Cantonese either. I’m pretty sure my fluency is equivalent to a three-year-old’s. People often ask how I manage to communicate […]
Tamas Dobozy’s Writing Space
It is very important for a writer to work in a public space, where disturbance is continual. With the current plague, e.g. C19, I have taken advantage of collective quarantine to situate my desk at the veritable crossroads of my home. This dining room location also happens, not incidentally, to be the site of my […]
Donna Seto’s Writing Space
When I think about my writing space, I think about a space constantly in flux, a space that is neither permanent nor temporary, a displaced space, one that can be shared and occupied. My writing space has never truly felt like my own. It was in a coffee shop, lunch hours in a busy library, […]
Finding the Form with Carla Hartsfield
Pencil and Ink During the winter of 2017, I was revising a poetry manuscript and had begun exploring different poetic forms. I wondered if some of my older poems could be spruced up by turning them into sonnets, villanelles, ghazals? My muse, being supportive said, “Sure, give it a go.” I began by using a […]
The Ethical Standard of TNQ
When you are a co-op student, you can feel like a commodity. It can seem like we are just a staple of the university that is not given our own choice in the matter because we are just looking for a job to help us fund our education. The horror stories that have been told […]
Finding the Form with Yohani Mendis
After a decade-long hiatus from the writing practice, I didn’t think too deeply about craft and structure when I began this piece. I focused on the characters and scenes, as one might do with fiction. Several years ago, I took a Diaspora and Transnational Studies class, and a concept from an academic paper I read […]
Linda Light’s Writing Space
My writing space is rather like my life – crowded, messy, and often full of noise. I write at a funky, old veneered plywood desk of my Uncle Ebe’s. It’s too small for my needs but fits well into the too-full, multi-purpose living room/playroom/study in which it sits. It serves as a divider between what […]