Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Carousel Calvo
How did you find the right form for “Certainty”? I wrote the first paragraph like a poem but it didn’t work, so I wrote it as prose afterwards. I wrote a chapbook during my university years and 4-5 of the poems in there, I suppose, was the impetus to “Certainty”. I wrote about leaving a […]
Finding the Form with Lisa Alward
My story ideas usually begin with an image, a mental picture of something I witnessed or experienced or that someone told me about. For “Little Girl Lost,” that image was a young girl’s sullen face pressed up against a window. My father’s family were related, through marriage, to the Saint John artist Miller Brittain. Once, […]
Matthew Fox’s Writing Spaces
The most important thing is getting the words on the page. The second most important thing is staring. Every writer needs unrestricted staring time, and that’s what I get at Macke Prinz. It’s a bar-café on Berlin’s Zionskirchplatz, a plot of lackadaisically manicured greenery dominated by a church. Roads pool around it, frustrating drivers. Bright […]
What’s Rea Tarvydas Reading?
Superfan: How Pop Culture Broke my Heart is a house book, and I love house books. By this, I mean books that are centered about houses, in which the house represents the whole world. Even when the main character moves away from the house, her life still revolves around it. Jen Sookfong Lee grew up in […]
Finding the Form with Joe Davies
When I write I’m often drawn to that spot where the mundane greets the absurd, and for the mundane aspect I sometimes draw quite heavily on personal experience. “Fifty Dollars” very much fits that pattern. The camping, the uncooperative weather, the feelings of melancholy that can crop up after a holiday, and most importantly, the […]
What is Scott Armstrong Reading?
Author: Bret Easton Ellis Novel: The Shards Published: 2023 Bret Easton Ellis is an author whose very name can bring on an almost immediate distaste, even though few can remember why. And, then, when we, followers of his works, remind them of several titles he has published to remarkable acclaim, and several movie adaptations, ‘American […]
Finding the Form with Kate Cayley
My story, “A Day,” is about a young girl going to visit her relatives on the East side of the wall in Berlin in 1989, just before the end. She narrates the story as an adult, now living in another country, looking back. It’s a spare story: we don’t get much of what she’s feeling. […]
What’s Bernadette Rule Reading?
Recently I have read several books that I can heartily recommend. The first is Foster (faber & faber, 2010) by Irish writer Claire Keegan. Her work is extremely spare, resulting in very short books which are all but short stories produced as novels. I cannot recommend all of her work, as some of it is […]
Alanna Marie Scott’s Writing Space
I write nomadically, and I write by hand. I carry at least one notebook and at least three pens with me and I write wherever I’m taken by the impulse: – Hunched like a gargoyle in bed – Lying on the couch – Around my food at the dining table – Sitting on the floor […]
Finding the Form with Kelsey Andrews
I know flowers can seem overdone and easy to write about, but to me they mean sex and death, and nothing much is easy about that. Sex when they’re bright with pollen and attracting insects, then death when they, you know, die. The first stanza of my poem “Peony” came from a moment in the […]
