Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Rachel Laverdiere
Year after year, I told my students this modern-day ghost story that also happened to be true. Even the high schoolers, who feigned disinterest in pretty much everything, were rivetted to their seats—predicting the origins of the mysterious light, betting on whether there really had been a ghost or whether I’d missed a detail on […]
What’s Grace Lau Reading?
I just finished reading Angela Davis’ Freedom is a Constant Struggle, which was just an incredible read. To be honest, I picked it up because of the current white supremacist occupation in Ottawa and blatant complicity of the Canadian police forces. The book’s subject seemed timely. I’d read Mercedes Eng’s poetry collection, Prison Industrial Complex […]
Ken Victor’s Writing Space
My writing space is messy. It doubles as a home office, so work and writing are hopelessly intertwined. My ancestors watch all of this without commenting. Photographs of my parents, grandparents and great grandparents at different stages of their lives decorate the walls. A few quotes and poems taped to the wall talk to me: […]
Finding the Form with Suzanne Nussey
I’ve always wondered when it was that I first became aware of the passage of time. How do we recall something that wasn’t actually an event, was more of a transition? Does this awareness depend on our ability to describe it? Is this a classic, epistemological issue, or just a bee in my own tiny […]
Finding the Form with Alison Stevenson
The idea for Mud Angels came from a visit to Florence at the end of 2016. A few months earlier was the fiftieth anniversary of a devastating flood there. Photos and information about the flood and its aftermath were posted around the city. Online you’ll find staggering images from the 1966 flood. That information formed […]
Finding the Form with Kari Lund-Teigen
Reading it now, it strikes me that The Octopus feels like a pandemic story. Not about a pandemic, but emerging out of the conditions familiar from it: the isolation, the octopus from the Netflix documentary everyone’s watched, the sourdough bread! But the first draft emerged in the winter of 2017-2018. The spark for this story […]
What Richard Brait is Reading in his Writing Space
I’m a corporate lawyer, living in the Toronto area. Four years ago I decided to make a serious attempt at writing poetry, and ultimately enrolled in the MFA program at Bennington College. It’s a low residency program (five 10-day residences over 2-1/2 years) and because of the pandemic three of my first four residencies have […]
Finding the Form with J.P. Letkemann
A couple of days ago, my sister sent me a link to a recent CBC interview with John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Koenig’s project, according to host Piya Chattopadhyay, involved coining new words to fill in the “blind spots of our emotional vocabulary.” Describing his rationale, Koenig explains how new words […]
Bruce Geddes Writing Space
Here’s a stat that will surprise no one: The capacity of the average writing space is one. This has nothing to do with square footage or furniture This is about the simple needs of most writers: quiet, solitude, and enough space to stow junk. Most writing spaces are like toilets that way: designed to be […]
A Conversation with Kieran Egan, Winner of the 2021 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest
Kim Jernigan, former Editor and current Special Projects editor, interviews Kieran Egan whose poem “Latin Classes” won first prize in the 2021 Occasional Verse Contest. Kim Jernigan: “Latin Class” is an elaborate joke, the humour a consequence of the Latin teacher’s pretense of secrecy and of the exaggerated importance given to the pluperfect, a little […]
