Online Exclusives
What is Margaret Watson Reading?
I couldn’t tell you how many times I’ve read Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor (1971). Not that Elizabeth Taylor. This Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) was an English writer who published 12 novels and also wrote short stories, many of which appeared in the New Yorker. She was championed by friends like Kingsley […]
Finding the Form with Susanne Fletcher
I wrote the first draft of “Ghosting” in 2017 and thought I had the final version by the fall of 2018. My husband, who edits most of my writing, advised he did not buy the flirty on-line relationship between grieving Rhonda and Richard, the potential buyer of an elliptical trainer she was selling. I ignored […]
K. R. Segriff’s Writing Space
I write where I live, in chaos. I steal small moments of inspiration. There is no time for set-up. The moments are so easily lost. I fall on my bed with my laptop and tell myself that if I get up from the one clear space in the room before laying down my idea in […]
What’s Sandhya Thakrar Reading?
I am packing up the house where I have lived for the past twelve years—where I wrote my dissertation, had my son, published my first short story, spent the last days of my cat’s life—andall around me are half-filled boxes of what my now six-year-old son calls “all our precious things.” We do not know […]
What is K.R. Segriff Reading?
Right now I am reading “Shut Up You’re Pretty” by Téa Mutonji which is an interconnected collection of short stories about a young Congolese woman coming of age in Scarborough andToronto. I picked up this book because I live on the edge of Scarborough and I like experiencing characters who navigate physical spaces I am familiar […]
A Conversation with Hollay Ghadery, Winner of the 2022 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest
Kim Jernigan: The poem is in the form of a letter home from a soldier at Fort Henry, Kingston in 1837. Can you provide our readers with the historical context for the poem? I’m also interested in your choice of an epistolary form, a letter home from a man at war. It opens with the […]
thom vernon’s Writing Space
Probably because I come from a big family in a small house or because I’m an actor and well-versed at finding privacy in public, I can write almost anywhere. I do have three favourite places to write: the open road, hotel or motel rooms, diners or bars or pubs, and my workspace at home. The […]
An Interview with Callista Markotich
Kim Jernigan: Can you tell us how the form of the poem came to you? Callista Markotich: In Fugue, a poem written in a recognized poetic form called a fugue, Saint Stephen marches around a dimmed room in ICU with a silent nurse, trailed by Wenceslas, my sister’s choir and my own jumble of thought […]
Kerrie Penney’s Writing Space
I write in an open loft, the area between my bedroom and my daughter’s. The only door, a glass one, opens to a small west facing balcony. Today bare crab apple branches scratch the sky; in three full moons they will be transformed, aching under the weight of fragrant white blossoms. In any season, squirrels […]
A Conversation with Grace Vermeer
Kim Jernigan: I’m curious about the timeline implied by your poem—how long an interval was there between hearing the stories and the wise healer’s “It is finished”? The last verse takes us back to the old story…Are we to see that as the ache from the old wounds? Grace Vermeer: I heard the stories as a […]