Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Noriko Hoshino
I often start writing about the things or the people I know. Occasionally it works, but I usually end up producing lame stories. I suck at writing autobiographical stories or something that is related to my family because I tend to make me look like the nicest person on the planet living with an ideal […]
What is J.R. Patterson Reading?
On a recent journey through Morocco, I read André Gide’s short novel Strait is the Gate. The story of two adolescents, Jerome and Alissa, on the Normandy coast falling in love and failing to court one another was at odds with my surroundings—dirty souks, rattling trains, the call of the muezzin. The discord was comforting; […]
Finding the Form with Jessica Moore
One day in the second lockdown winter, when my twins were nearly three, I was walking to the office – my office is a small room in a brutish 70s building downtown, with very thick walls and one window that looks out onto a tree and a patch of sky. It takes me about an […]
Jamaluddin Aram’s Writing Space
I once met Colm Tóibín and asked if living in Spain helped with writing Homage to Barcelona. No, he said, there are so many problems in the world that the last thing people need is a writer complain he can’t write. Give me a pair of headphones, he said and pointed at a table in […]
What is Joe Davies Reading?
I’m a very poor reader these days. I’m slow about it and have several books on the go, including the King James Bible, which I’ve never read and feel as though I ought to have a better sense of. But the book that’s currently making the biggest impression on me is a collection of poetry […]
What is Margaret Watson Reading?
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971). Not that Elizabeth Taylor. This Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was an English writer who published 12 novels and also wrote short stories, many of which appeared in the New Yorker. She was championed by friends like Kingsley […]
Finding the Form with Susanne Fletcher
I wrote the first draft of “Ghosting” in 2017 and thought I had the final version by the fall of 2018. My husband, who edits most of my writing, advised he did not buy the flirty on-line relationship between grieving Rhonda and Richard, the potential buyer of an elliptical trainer she was selling. I ignored […]
K. R. Segriff’s Writing Space
I write where I live, in chaos. I steal small moments of inspiration. There is no time for set-up. The moments are so easily lost. I fall on my bed with my laptop and tell myself that if I get up from the one clear space in the room before laying down my idea in […]
What’s Sandhya Thakrar Reading?
I am packing up the house where I have lived for the past twelve years—where I wrote my dissertation, had my son, published my first short story, spent the last days of my cat’s life—andall around me are half-filled boxes of what my now six-year-old son calls “all our precious things.” We do not know […]
What is K.R. Segriff Reading?
Right now I am reading “Shut Up You’re Pretty” by Téa Mutonji which is an interconnected collection of short stories about a young Congolese woman coming of age in Scarborough andToronto. I picked up this book because I live on the edge of Scarborough and I like experiencing characters who navigate physical spaces I am familiar […]