Online Exclusives
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 […]
Finding the Form with Callista Markotich
Fugio – I flee. I flee two thousand years back in time to Saint Stephen, first Christian martyr, and in distance, a good league hence, in the footprints of Good King Wenceslas. I run away. As if compelled, I circle back again to the realities: Boxing Day, the quiet nurse, the room in ICU, and […]
Finding the Form with Hollay Ghadery
My poem, “Rebellion Box”, is a sestina and the title piece of my debut poetry collection, which is due out with Radiant Press in spring 2023. I first learned about rebellion boxes while attending a lecture by historian Allan McGillivray at the Uxbridge Museum. These boxes were carved out of stove wood by men who’d […]
What is Kelly Pedro Reading?
Black Dove by Colin McAdam What is an airplane if not a story about people who wanted to fly? As a writer (and I’m sure I’m not alone) I spend a lot of time living in my head, building alternate realities, processing my emotions on the page. And so, when I picked up Black Dove […]
Lindsay Zier-Vogel’s Writing Space
There are not a lot of doors in my house. It took me until the pandemic to really notice this, but with two kids at home, I quickly learned the value of doors. In March 2020, I started writing in my bedroom, but all those sleep experts are onto something when they say that working […]
What is Pamela Porter Reading?
I’ve spent some time thinking about how to answer the question, “Who’s Reading What?” And I’ve concluded that, as a poet, what I read is predominantly poetry, and what spurs me often to begin to write is the cadence in the poems I read from the work of others. For many months I read Linda […]
