Virginia Woolf famously hoped for a future where all women writers (and, likely, women in general) had “A Room of One’s Own” to create and be themselves, away from the noise and busyness of life. Nearly a century after the publication of her iconic essay, I am a woman sharing a condo in Vancouver, BC, Canada with four boys: my husband, two young sons, and our elderly cat. Though privileged to have stable housing in this city/world, I do not have a room of my own. I did apply to put a shed on our patio to turn into my writing space, but strata, unsurprisingly, said no ..read more

I have a few books on the go — Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro, is first-person from the perspective of an AI robot friend (Klara) for a young girl, set in some unspecific time in the future. The young girl who suffers from a serious illness has a complicated life, and Klara must struggle to make sense of the complications. In particular, it is her relationships with her mother, with “friends”, and with her one true friend that Klara struggles to understand. Partly what makes this story so compelling is Klara’s observational clarity. In so many ways, the indifferent logic ..read more

For a long time, I had a quotation on my wall that read “Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; re-made all the time, made new.” I knew a writer named Ursula K. Le Guin wrote it, but I didn’t know anything about her, and had never read any of her books. I just really liked the quote because I am a romantic. I am now remedying my ignorance and have begun “Conversations on Writing”. It feels as though I’ve inherited a long lost, very wise, California grandmother. Also, for the first time in my life, I have multiple books on the go at once. I attribute this to ..read more

I started writing The Condolence Visit not exactly planning for the interactions between the two major characters in the story to unfold in a single location. However, in retrospect, I think I might have subconsciously known this. After all, when the idea for the story first came to me in the first year of my MFA program, it was simply an image of two women who were simply next-door neighbours, not friends, in a house. This is not to say that the story, which is set against a backdrop of grief and reminiscing, does not venture beyond the confines of the house. In fact, it is through the ..read more

It has been six years since The New Quarterly published my poem “The Dining Room Poem by Another Poet” in their Spring 2018 issue #146. Six years since I last offered a glimpse into the space where I write. I still maintain the same writing routine when I am home in Ottawa. I still start my morning sitting on my brown couch, composing first thoughts and ephemera in my journal, in the hopes that something will gel and be the beginnings of a poem. Nothing much has changed there but since then I have created a second writing space. As a child, there were two things I dreamt about being when I g ..read more

I am not the type of person to write in public spaces. I remember my university days and how I marvelled at the students who could study in loud, communal areas — cafés, cafeterias, and common rooms. How do they do it? I wondered. How do they concentrate? I am lucky to have, as Virginia Woolf said, “ a room of my own” in my family home. It is where I spend my days reading and writing essays for the collection I’m assembling. It’s closed off from the rest of the house by a very important feature — a door. However, an opportunity came up in the fall of 2022 to write in a setting ..read more

When I started writing fiction, I went to school on Alice Munro— eleven volumes of her stories sit on my shelves. Although I’ve written two novels, I love the shorter form’s power to encapsulate a character’s complexity in relatively few words as well as the freedom it allows me to isolate a voice and perspective. In Complicated, I use a close third person point of view to portray Ladonna’s gumption as she recovers from her husband’s suicide and her own troubled past. She hasn’t knuckled under to life, despite all she’s suffered and, for all her toughness, she has a decency that makes you wa ..read more

My writing space is what would have been the master bedroom in this house. When I moved in, I immediately knew I would sleep in the tiny room at the back of the house and use this big, bright bedroom as my office, where I can put my desk in the middle of the floor instead of pushed against a wall. It’s got a glass patio door leading to a small, sketchy deck where I can gaze toward the East White Hills in St. John’s—a place where I went to walk and mentally edit my first two books—or I can sit out there on the sketchy deck and have a coffee during the 3.5 months of the year when the weat ..read more

When I think about a writing space I think about a desire for what is absent. My writing spaces for a time have been a shifting, nomadic occupation of ‘here’ when I can get the moments to write – waiting at my daughter’s sport practices or art classes, a few free moments in the lull of an evening, on airplanes and in airports. I routinely write in cafes, using the solitude of a crowd like a studio, turning up my playlist to help withdraw from this world into the ones I am visiting in my stories. I have a home office, but I moved out of it a while ago. It’s in the&nbs ..read more

Lately I’ve been reading novels with first-person, unreliable narrators who are not very likable. This form really interests me because it’s something I’m trying to emulate. I’m interested in how a writer convinces the reader to stick with a narrator like this, one who we know is kinda shitty. Why does the reader care to keep turning pages? What is it that convinces them to stick with the narrator long enough for them to be redeemed (or not)? Of course, the classic example is Lolita. But I crave something a little more contemporary, and a little more achievable. Two examples that I’ve been r ..read more