Online Exclusives
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 […]
Basma Kavanagh’s Writing Space
When the best seat in the house isn’t in the house: in praise of makeshift spaces It’s a long story, but the big drafty room with plastic covering its large, unfinished windows is sometimes a difficult place to write. Perhaps it’s too dense with possibility—my messy piles of textiles, paper, and art projects. Books overflow […]
Finding the Form with Anne Hopkinson
“Testimony, March 3 2011” I attended the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Vancouver. It was overwhelming; the survivors, the stories, the crowd of indigenous people, the tears. At home I wrote pages and pages, all raw writing, a flood of sentences. I wrote by hand in a semi-legible scribble, drew arrows to connect ideas, doodled, […]
Finding the Form with Traci Skuce
I’m always teetering on the edge of fiction and non-fiction. Trolling my own life for stories and then spinning them into fiction. Sometimes this means combing through images or events that happened long ago, but other times it means opening to a story that presents itself in real time. “A Chorus of Injuries” is one […]