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 […]

Lori Sebastianutti in

Finding the Form with Gillie Easdon

Tw: finding a corpse I wrote a list of ten memories that stick. You know the ones you can call up from decades ago that are always all-senses-high-def? Do you have some? It’s a curious exercise I certainly recommend. Especially if you relish productive procrastination. Here are a few from my list: The bus driver’s […]

Finding the Form with Tricia Dower

When I started writing fiction, I went to school on Alice Munro— eleven volumes of her stories sit on my shelves. Although I’ve written two novels, I love the shorter form’s power to encapsulate a character’s complexity in relatively few words as well as the freedom it allows me to isolate a voice and perspective. […]

Terry Doyle’s Writing Space

My writing space is what would have been the master bedroom in this house. When I moved in, I immediately knew I would sleep in the tiny room at the back of the house and use this big, bright bedroom as my office, where I can put my desk in the middle of the floor […]

Michael Lithgow’s Writing Space

When I think about a writing space I think about a desire for what is absent. My writing spaces for a time have been a shifting, nomadic occupation of ‘here’ when I can get the moments to write – waiting at my daughter’s sport practices or art classes, a few free moments in the lull of an evening, […]

Michael Lithgow in

What’s Carol Bruneau Reading?

Needing a palate cleanse after feasting on Michael Crummey’s The Adversary and Magda Szabo’s The Door—two intensely immersive allegorical novels—I gravitated to the nonfiction section of my favourite bookstore. A bit of backstory: as winter set in, I’d recently bought a treadmill and soon discovered the best way to make myself use it was by […]

What’s Terry Doyle Reading?

Lately I’ve been reading novels with first-person, unreliable narrators who are not very likable. This form really interests me because it’s something I’m trying to emulate. I’m interested in how a writer convinces the reader to stick with a narrator like this, one who we know is kinda shitty. Why does the reader care to […]

What’s Melinda Burns Reading?

Lately, as I’ve been writing poems about my brother who died in December, I’ve been re-reading Marie Howe’s book of poems, “What the Living Do”. The collection, written in 1998, is largely about her brother who died some years before of AIDS-related complications. As a poet I am instructed and inspired by her deceptively simple, […]

Carol Bruneau’s Writing Space

My writing space is a sunroom with windows for walls, flowering plants, a mess of books and papers, and a great ground-level view of our street. This room of my own is quite a step up from the dark little bedroom where I started writing fiction. These days, I often share it with my three-year-old […]

Carol Bruneau in

Finding the Form with Megan Callahan

The idea for “Prepper” came to me during the early days of the pandemic. That spring, fear was at its peak. I remember watching the people around me—at the grocery store and pharmacy, in parks and cafés—turn furtive and suspicious. Panic buying and hoarding, behaviour that would’ve seemed paranoid and extreme just a few weeks […]