Online Exclusives
How to Write in a Broken World
“The Creative Life” Keynote for the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus Writer-in-Residence Program “The Creative Life: How to Write in a Broken World” Virtual Keynote Address It’s impossible to speak of the creative life without speaking to the moment we are living in. Without speaking to the unbearable beauty and pain coexisting in this very […]
Finding the Form with Frances Boyle
The title of my poem “Rounds” gives a solid clue as to how this piece and its form came to be. It started with a two-pronged prompt: to write about “things that go in circles”, and “an escape scene that includes a bowl of fruit”. So, what goes in circles? In addition to the requisite […]
What’s Elliott Gish Reading?
Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio An unhappy marriage. A troubled life. A lonely death. This is the story of the woman behind Anne of Green Gables. L. M. Montgomery has fascinated me since I was nine years old. As a child, her books made me aware of my own […]
Finding the Form with Jeremy Colangelo
The skeleton of “Hearth” is the life of Lee Miller (1907-1977), a photographer affiliated with the surrealist movement who became a photojournalist during the Second World War. She covered, among other things, the liberations of Paris and the Buchenwald concentration camp. Like the character Vanessa, she found the experience of covering the War traumatizing, and […]
Finding the Form with Mark Foss
My last two books have been novels, but I’ve struggled to write long fiction since the beginning of the pandemic. I’ve been too restless to focus on the demands of a larger story. It didn’t help that I already had two unpublished novels in slush piles. I wanted to concentrate on the space between words, […]
What’s Suzanne Stewart Reading?
With new curiosity, I recently began to reread Jane Austen’s Emma, her second last (major) novel, which she completed in 1817, two years before her death, at age 41. Like most of Austen’s readers, I instinctively guard a list of my favourite books, which hadn’t included Emma, following my first encounter with the novel four […]
Finding the Form with Tom Wayman
On Nov. 22, 2020 I was shocked to receive an email from the wife of a very good friend, the California author Dennis Saleh, stating that he had died suddenly of a massive brain bleed that day. Dennis and I had met when we enrolled in the same graduate writing seminar at the University of […]
Mariam Pirbhai’s Writing Space
My Writing Space, in Ginger, Green and Gold My writing space is nothing fancier than a second bedroom-turned-home-office in a suburban home. Perhaps to offset its builder’s-beige-ordinariness, I repainted the walls an earthy shade of “ginger,” but now this colour only makes me think of dhal, the lentil curry that is a culinary staple in […]
Finding the Form with Jannie Edwards
On Writing “All-Night Mirror: Notes Toward an Elegy” After my older sister died and I went to Wales to help my nieces arrange to bring her body back from Turkish Cyprus, plan her funeral (or in her terms, a FUN-eral) and sort through her chaotic affairs, we discovered in her papers that she wanted a […]
Ringing Changes: Steven Heighton on Sound and Sensibility
It was with great sadness that I heard of the pending death, from cancer, of Steve Heighton, one of TNQ’s initial “Wild Writers”, though I was grateful to have the opportunity to let him know how much I admired him, as a person and a writer. He responded with his usual good grace. A kind, […]
You must be logged in to post a comment.