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I Didn’t Want to Write This Book by Elise Moser
I didn’t want to write this book. I first heard Milly Zantow’s story in Sauk City, the small Wisconsin town where my sweetheart lives. Someone from the local historical society mentioned that the woman who invented the recycling symbol was from there. A woman did that! A woman from Sauk City! I figured everyone else… Continue reading
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QWF Writes featured on WordPress Discover
QWF Writes is featured in WordPress’s Discover blog. WordPress selected their favourite articles from the QWF Writes archive to share with readers. They also took the time to ask QWF Writes editor Crystal Chan a few questions about writing and reading in Quebec. Do you want to learn more about the QWF Writes essay series? Read the piece here. Continue reading
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Finding Perspective: Writing in the Dark at Berton House by Shelagh Plunkett
On the wall above my desk in Montreal is a photograph taken in February at the Arctic Circle. The print is four feet wide by almost three feet high and foreground takes up most of that space. The horizon line is high on the print and marked by the Richardson mountains: white and treeless. It… Continue reading
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Healing, One Story at a Time by Licia Canton
In 2012, a driver pulled up behind me while I was putting a box in the trunk of my car. He crushed my legs between the two bumpers. I was bedridden for four months, and then I started physiotherapy. Within a year I was able to do 95 percent of the activities I had done… Continue reading
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Saying Yes by Monique Polak
I am bad at saying no. As part of a better-late-in-life-than-never self-improvement exercise, I try to turn down extra work—especially the non-paying variety. Continue reading
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Gadfly at the Festival by Peter Richardson
In the hospitality room at the Hôtel Gouverneurs in Trois-Rivières, you are greeted by two perky volunteers whose first question after introductions is: “Will you three be reading the French translations of your poems yourselves, or will you be requiring the services of a French reader?” Oh, my, you think. What translations? The hotel carpet… Continue reading
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From the Underground: A Writer’s Life with Zines by Jeff Miller
It wasn’t reading the classics that convinced me to become a writer. My gateway drug to the world of letters was zines—cheap, photocopied, self-published magazines filled with their authors’ reflections on the world. Continue reading
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That Sense of Not Belonging by Adam Leith Gollner
Author Adam Leith Gollner meditates on how a writer seesaws between isolation and community, and on what it means to be a writer, right here, right now. Continue reading
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Hello Baby, Bye Bye Books by Mike Steeves
My daughter was born on August 25, 2014, and during the interminable lead-up to her birth I was, like all new parents, subject to a deluge of unsolicited advice, warnings and thinly-veiled threats from family, friends and complete strangers about what I could expect as a new parent. One of the warnings I heard most… Continue reading
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Bye Bye Darlings: The Editing Gauntlet by Alice Zorn
You’ve finished your novel manuscript and you even – finally! – get a publisher. It took ten years. You have Neanderthal muscles across your brow from frowning at the computer screen. But now you’re home-free. Bingo! Then you get the first slew of comments from your editor… Continue reading