Online Exclusives
Finding the Form with Pamela Hensley
For me, the seed of a story is often the question: what if? Something I see or read or become suddenly aware of sparks a feeling that I cannot shake. My mind begins to wander. I reimagine the situation, only worse, the worst it could possibly be. I slip into another life and push it […]
Under Review: Derek Webster’s National Animal
Derek Webster’s name is not new to the editors of The New Quarterly, his poems first appearing with us in the Spring issue of 2000. Nor is it new to the editors more than a dozen other literary magazines and anthologies in Canada and the United Kingdom. He is also an editor himself, most notable […]
Finding the Form with Heather Debling
Flipping through some old notebooks recently, I came across the very first notes I made for the story that would become “Resilience.” The page is dated 2017, and there’s a working title of “Ms. Thrashings Grade (4s-5s?) Prepare for the Coming Apocalypse,” then a couple of paragraphs half-covered with a post-it, a scribbled note to […]
Indigenous History Month Reads
To commemorate Indigenous History Month and Indigenous Peoples Day, TNQ has collected a variety of works from across our publications which centre Indigenous stories and voices. These reads will be available, regardless of subscription status, until August. In Conversation “Keeping Good Company: A Profile of Richard Wagamese” by Bruce Johnstone Richard Wagamese is a living, […]
Finding the Form with Mark Anthony Jarman
This story comes out of very rough notes I wrote 40 years earlier, flimsy onionskin pages I recently found in a folder when cleaning out my UNB office (an extremely slow exit). The notes were from the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was at the Iowa Workshop, then Yaddo, an artists’ colony in […]
On Hope: A TNQ Community Poem
Can we be freer than we ever thought? With the wink of a child’s moon, bright stones wink from the sidewalk. I dream they are diamonds. A clock rings, dreams shatter and emerge, but I pull myself up and carry on.
What’s Kasia Jaronczyk Reading?
What is your escapist read? What do you keep re-reading, perhaps in secret, because you are embarrassed to admit to loving a certain book to friends with a sophisticated literary taste? Every novel is escapist in some way, so I prefer to call them comfort books. We turn to them when we are anxious, depressed, […]
Launched: Cocktail by Lisa Alward
Lisa Alward’s first book, Cocktail, was published by Biblioasis last fall. Alward’s stories have won The Fiddlehead Prize and the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award and have appeared in Best Canadian Stories as well as The Journey Prize Stories. She grew up in Halifax and worked for several years in literary publishing in Toronto before moving with her young family to […]
Carolyn Smart’s Writing Space
38 years ago when my husband and I bought this house in the middle of the woods we added on two rooms: a bedroom in the attic, and my writing space. It’s a large and airy room, filled with light, and has now become a sort of greenhouse for which I am especially grateful in […]
Mina Sharif’s Writing Space
I do love to write at the library, but I can only do that if the high school kids aren’t hanging out in the study section. Otherwise, I hear the sound of a considerate teenager next to me, trying to eat chips quietly, torturing my nervous system in the process. When I’m home, I sit […]