Online Exclusives
The Avocado Tree
The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop about. stories. join. team. contact. donate. The Avocado Tree by Peggy Plet I am ten years old. It is recess at school and I’m walking with Mieke, my best friend. We met last year in grade four. We like each other just because. I accept Mieke, as she is. […]
Gravity
The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop about. stories. join. team. contact. donate. Gravity by Lindsey Carter I grew up in suburbia, a patchwork of neighborhoods stitched together by malls, shopping centers, gas stations, and churches. A place in Northern Virginia valued mostly for its proximity to the city—and the people whose self-importance can be measured […]
Launched: Fast Commute by Laurie D. Graham
Laurie D. Graham grew up in Treaty 6 territory (Sherwood Park, Alberta). She currently lives in Nogojiwanong, in the territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg (Peterborough, Ontario), where she is a writer, an editor, and the publisher of Brick magazine. Her first book, Rove, was shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award for best first book […]
On Writing and Vulnerability with Sarah Caley
The first time I participated in a creative writing workshop was in my final year of undergrad at Wilfrid Laurier University. I had finally gathered the courage to take the creative nonfiction course, after years of telling everyone around me that “I am not a creative writer.” I came to the workshop prepared with my […]
Mark Foss’ Writing Space
For the past ten years, I’ve lived in an early twentieth century triplex in Mile End–Plateau in Montreal. It’s the kind of neighbourhood where a writer might easily spend an afternoon in a café with a coffee, a notebook, and a sharp pencil. Yet it’s not something that comes easily to me because I don’t […]
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, […]
