Online Exclusives
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]