Poisonous If Eaten Raw: An Interview with Alyda Faber

This interview is following John Vardon’s poetry review of Alyda Faber’s Poisonous If Eaten Raw. John Vardon: An online image of your collection is still advertised as Rain, In All the Ways It Falls, your original title for the book before Poisonous If Eaten Raw, which suggests that the change may have been relatively last […]

John Vardon with Alyda Faber in

Finding the Form with Donna Seto

I started writing “Generation Congee” after my father was diagnosed with stage-3 colon cancer. My father doesn’t speak English. Or he pretends he doesn’t, especially when I’m around to translate. But I’m not fluent in Cantonese either. I’m pretty sure my fluency is equivalent to a three-year-old’s. People often ask how I manage to communicate […]

Tamas Dobozy’s Writing Space

It is very important for a writer to work in a public space, where disturbance is continual. With the current plague, e.g. C19, I have taken advantage of collective quarantine to situate my desk at the veritable crossroads of my home. This dining room location also happens, not incidentally, to be the site of my […]

Donna Seto’s Writing Space

When I think about my writing space, I think about a space constantly in flux, a space that is neither permanent nor temporary, a displaced space, one that can be shared and occupied. My writing space has never truly felt like my own. It was in a coffee shop, lunch hours in a busy library, […]

Finding the Form with Carla Hartsfield

Pencil and Ink  During the winter of 2017, I was revising a poetry manuscript and had begun exploring different poetic forms. I wondered if some of my older poems could be spruced up by turning them into sonnets, villanelles, ghazals? My muse, being supportive said, “Sure, give it a go.” I began by using a […]

Carla Hartsfield in

The Ethical Standard of TNQ

When you are a co-op student, you can feel like a commodity. It can seem like we are just a staple of the university that is not given our own choice in the matter because we are just looking for a job to help us fund our education. The horror stories that have been told […]

Giuseppe Femia

Finding the Form with Yohani Mendis

After a decade-long hiatus from the writing practice, I didn’t think too deeply about craft and structure when I began this piece. I focused on the characters and scenes, as one might do with fiction. Several years ago, I took a Diaspora and Transnational Studies class, and a concept from an academic paper I read […]

Linda Light’s Writing Space

My writing space is rather like my life – crowded, messy, and often full of noise.  I write at a funky, old veneered plywood desk of my Uncle Ebe’s. It’s too small for my needs but fits well into the too-full, multi-purpose living room/playroom/study in which it sits. It serves as a divider between what […]

What is Susan Olding Reading?

I’ve long admired Leona Theis’s nonfiction and often recommend it to others. She’s always doing something interesting with structure or point of view. Her recent novel in stories, If Sylvie had Nine Lives, shows similar strengths. The conceit is simple. Each chapter follows the protagonist, Sylvie, on one of her possible life paths—a bit like […]

What is Linda Light Reading?

I just finished reading Brian Doyle’s One Long River of Song, a book of exquisite essays with the appropriate sub-title of Notes on Wonder. One of the lovely things about this book is how Brian Doyle finds wonder in the most ordinary of things: his twin sons eating dirt, sturgeons, fighting with his brothers, the […]