Online Exclusives
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 […]
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 […]
What’s Liz Harmer Reading?
I have just finished a book that a dear friend recommended: Faces in the Water by New Zealand writer Janet Frame. Published in 1961, Faces in the Water is a novel narrated by a woman living in a psychiatric asylum in the 1940s and 50s (I think), and has only the barest plot: she enters the hospital at around […]
Kathy Mak’s Writing Space
Like the way inspiration spontaneously emerges from a single grain of existence, my writing space is a simple, makeshift corner of the kitchen table. Sandwiched between a wall of house plants in pottery vases, and boxes of scribbles, doodles, scraps dating back from my childhood days, I work under the same fluorescent lights and clang of running water […]
John Adames’ Writing Space
The most interesting aspect of my writing space is a comfortable couch where I meditate before writing or revising my poems. I am a huge fan of Eckhart Tolle and every morning listen to one of his guided meditations that help to still the mind and allow for creative thoughts to come from a deeper place of pure […]
Deepa Rajagopalan’s Writing Space
Orhan Pamuk said in an interview with the Paris Review that he thought that the place where he sleeps, should be different from the place where he writes. That the domestic rituals and details kill his imagination, and so he always had a little place outside the house. I sometimes imagine having a space like […]
