Online Exclusives
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 […]
Finding the Form with Tristan Marajh
Like my protagonist Sofiya Shirazi stifled and suppressed herself before finding her true form in Sofiya’s Choice, so too did I stifle and suppress my tale before The New Quarterly let its full form be expressed. Short fiction writers will attest that they often omit and edit in order to have their work fit […]
Hollay Ghadery’s Writing Space
Where do I write? You name it! The kitchen table, the bed, the bath, on walks or runs, riding shotgun in the car on the way to swimming or piano or drama lessons, or in my actual office: there’s no place I don’t write, which isn’t to say I don’t have favourite places to write […]
What is Amber Fenik Reading?
I just finished Ducks by Kate Beaton. I retreated to my bed – my perpetual happy place especially throughout the neverending pandemic quarantine and lockdowns – reading it from cover to cover all in one go. It was one of those fingertip-gripping, page turning, blurry-eyed, I-don’t-think-this-is-good-for-my-back, all nighters. I loved the author’s long running online […]
Finding the Form with Sarah Totton
“To Break the Liquid Moon” was inspired by a true story told by Kate Bottley on the BBC Radio 4 program “Three Vicars Talking, Death” (www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0007qb0). This was a very consciously structured story. I made a rough outline, and I knew what the last line would be before I started writing. This isn’t my normal […]
What is Ferrukh Faruqui Reading?
I recently culled my bookshelves. It wasn’t a one-off event, more a drawn-out process like someone crouching on wet ground, half-heartedly scooping a toy net into an overflowing bucket of water, half-hoping the canny fish, their scales flashing silver in the sun would continue to elude the snare. There’s something about owning a book, the […]