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 […]

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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 […]

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Finding the Form with Janice McCrum

For me writing starts with an image I can’t get rid of, or a group of words that keep repeating themselves and won’t let me be. I have no idea where I’m going when I put the image into words, or when I record the line that’s almost become a mantra in my head. But […]

Finding the Form with Alexander Hollenberg

The germ of “Surgeon’s Knot” came, from all places, a lecture I was delivering on Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. If there’s one central, broken-record theme to all my teaching, it’s this: think hard about the relationship between form and content. On this particular day I was making my case for Pope’s sophisticated […]

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