Finding the Form with Susan Glickman

When I taught creative writing, I always said that poetry and prose are built of the same elements: the horizontal axis of narrative time, in which events succeed each other according to causality, and the vertical axis of lyric time, in which a single moment expands infinitely as one explores it. The difference between the […]

Bobbie Jean Huff’s Writing Space

I started my first novel when I lived in Canada, working on it in the Ottawa library. When I moved to the US I found myself with an extra room in the house, the perfect place for a study. Still, I wrote in the library, where I was one of a number of serious people […]

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Richard Owen’s Writing Space

Where I do the writing, the putting of words on the white space, is unremarkable, a bedroom turned into an office in our sixties-era bungalow. But that’s not where the real work happens. I do that in Odell Park, 320 acres of woodland in the heart of Fredericton, on the great sloping side of the […]

Emma Hooper’s Writing Space

Some people don’t like a window where they work; they point their desks away from them. If I don’t have a window it’s kind of like not being able to breath. I point myself straight at mine and keep tabs on the birds. Sometimes I see groups of young teenagers too. We’re on some kind […]

The 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest Longlist

Thank you to all of our 2023 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest entrants. After thorough consideration, we are excited to announce this year’s longlisted writers and their phenomenal poetry. The longlisted poets and their poems are as follows: Susan Atkinson, “Kiss Me Again Like The Second Time “ Lisa Borkovich, “The Love Song of Grindstone Marsh” […]

Finding the Form with Janeen Werner-King

 “Migrations” was inspired after I witnessed a field full of trumpeter swans covered in snow beside the Courtney River in British Columbia. After returning to Calgary, I didn’t write about my experience for several months, and then, in a Wordsworth-like moment of tranquility, I recalled my excitement and amazement of seeing so many swans all […]

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What is Kayal Vizhi Reading?

What initially led you to pick up the book, and what kept you hooked?  I’m reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I picked it up a few years ago and I put it away without finishing it. But the writer and poet Ocean Vuong talks about Moby Dick as one of the books he needed to […]

Joe Davies’ Writing Space

My writing space is a disaster – a happy disaster. My desk is home to all sorts of things. There are assorted piles of paper and various notes scribbled on envelopes. There are a couple of Hot Wheels and toy soldiers and a few small gifts people have given me, which include a ceramic nose […]

Book Review: A knife so sharp its edge cannot be seen by Erin Noteboom

It’s been a while since Erin Noteboom’s last book of poetry, eighteen years in fact. It’s not as if she and the muse of poetry were not on speaking terms as in the interim her poems have appeared in the anthologies Best Canadian Poetry (2018, 2020) and journals like Fiddlehead, Grain, The Malahat Review and, […]

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Finding the Form with Jamaluddin Aram

I grab coffee with a writer friend whenever she is in town. The conversation is always about writing; that it is hard, that finding an agent is hard, that a book contract would be great. Then we envy authors whose agents brag about them and their six-figure deals, authors who attend galas and go on […]

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