Online Exclusives
John Steffler’s Writing Space
I’ve written in various places, travelling and at home, indoors and out. I wrote much of The Grey Islands, the first drafts of the pieces, outdoors, wandering around the island with a clipboard and pads of paper in a backpack. I’m doing some outdoor writing again in the countryside around where I live. As for […]
Exposed: An Interview with Sarah Ens
“It’s possible that I hoped when my hair was ripped away so too would be my sense of shame. My disappointment, always, in what my body is or isn’t.” Sarah Ens, “Entangled” TNQ’s 2019 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest winner is Saskatchewan-based writer Sarah Ens, for her provocative essay, “Entangled.” You can read the […]
Finding the Form with Glen Huser
Back in the 1970s—were any of you alive then?—as I worked on an Education degree at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, I had the good fortune to study creative writing under the guidance of W. O. Mitchell and Rudy Wiebe. In our seminars we worked on shorter pieces for discussion. Mitchell, in particular, encouraged […]
Finding the Form with Kathy Page
I knew from the beginning that this piece would be something different: it would not involve character development or dramatic events unfolding but was more a matter of exploring an emotional predicament in a personal way, using a set of interconnected images. I’m far more confident and experienced as a fiction writer than I am […]
What is Avi Sirlin Reading?
Florida. How about that title, huh? One state. Maybe also a state of mind? Think, for example, swampy, super-heated air; overwhelming fecundity, raging wind and water. Conjure up condos, freeways and malls, economic insularity and frayed race relations. Consider the short-sighted slaughter of our precious planet. Given these connections, who wouldn’t despair? And in Lauren […]
What is Frances Boyle Reading?
As usual, my to-be-read pile grows more quickly than I can keep up with it. Here are a few that recently made it to the top of the stack. I read Winter Willow by Deborah-Anne Tunney (full disclosure: she’s a good friend of mine) in one or two sittings and it’s likely you’ll want to […]
Finding the Form with Deb O’Rourke
The Kindness of Port Angeles was made the hard way. No incident, dream or inspired line sent me running to the computer. I built the poem brick by brick, in response to a news story that had haunted me for years. I began by collecting images and quotes from the article. I researched the orca […]
The Best of Both Worlds
When I started my co-op placement at The New Quarterly (TNQ), I remember how nervous and excited I was. I was nervous because I felt unprepared—I didn’t know what to expect. My co-op teacher reached out to TNQ for my placement because of my interest in literature – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I […]
Unexpected Directions
Before the UCEP program led me to do co-op at The New Quarterly (TNQ), I had a very vague and largely inaccurate notion of what literary magazines were. Online forums, newspapers and writing contests were the three publishing platforms that came to mind—I wasn’t aware whether other platforms existed. A week or two into the […]
Finding the Form with Credence McFadzean
The real-life “Log Cabin” thrift store is not located in Banff, AB, or some plains, but firmly in the heart of Regina’s North Central neighbourhood. It’s a few blocks east of where painter and diner-owner Roger Ing coined his Rogerism movement—the eminent New Utopia Café, a locale for Regina artists or those seeking orange gravy […]