Online Exclusives
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, […]
Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal’s Writing Space
How to Make a Desk Feel Like Home The writing desk I miss most is the one I sold for $50 when I moved to Tkaronto in 2017. I posted it on Craigslist and sold it to a German guy who had just moved to Commercial Drive. My Shavinder Auntie gave me that desk when […]
Finding the Form with Allan Serafino
Hare A white hare has been living in my back yard all winter in his home in the cave under the fir tree. He thumps the snow from his feet against the house Perhaps just to sound his hundred names. The imprint of those feet is white on white, small scrim and blush on the […]
Finding the Form with Alex Merrill
Yelling Fire was born of frustration and confusion and being fed up with my own writing. Unlike most of my work, this essay came out fast and in chunks, like an explosion at one of my dad’s mines. At the time, I was working on a book-length memoir about my dad and my childhood in an […]
Finding the Form with Brian Henderson
So, this poem, bent water light something: Does it ever happen to you that a feeling, seemingly out of nowhere, will sweep through you, an awareness of something but you’re not quite sure what it is? Standing at the kitchen window looking out into the sun-splattered cedars one spring morning while making coffee, that kind […]
Finding the Form with Emira Tufo
The Wisdom of Titles – and Onions Once I’ve got the title, I’ve got the story. Sometimes, the title comes from thin air because it knows the story that is ready to be told. This always intrigues me: that the title knows before I know, as if arising from the unconscious where some story, unbeknownst […]
