The Alchemists- Lee Lai

I feel like my creative practice has been this kind of secret wife on the side where I’m committed and betrothed to this person (my practice) who takes all of my energy and all of my time, but then I leave her at home and do my personal life elsewhere and bring information and energy back from these exchanges to put into this secret wife relationship with my work. With Tommi, I feel like we both understood this. We had these other personal relationships outside of creative practice, and then these intense relationships to work. So there was a kind of funny polyamory there that we could share.

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The Alchemists- Sheryda Warrener

I suppose the main thing I love about the process of making things is defamiliarization. It feels critical to the act of paying attention in the world, this investment in what I call “aliveness,” and it disrupts your self-making too, right? It’s like, oh, I can see myself anew because of this artwork, or this poem, or because of someone else’s experience of, and response to, something I’ve made. It’s this beautiful circular thing.

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The Alchemists- Gabe Maharjan

I’d say right now that I write to resolve the big questions or conflicts I’m contending with. It’s really about how I’m looking at the things I can’t really change. The things I feel powerless with. I tend to then focus on this in writing because I’m not good at letting things go. I write because I can’t let things go, but when I write it, it helps me to let it go a little bit.


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The Alchemists- Jessica Bebenek

Jessica Bebenek is a writer & interdisciplinary artist currently based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). In 2021 she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Her recent chapbooks include Fourth Walk (Desert Pets Press, 2017), k2tog (Broken Dimanche, 2018), and What is Punk (2019). She recently completed her first full collection of poetry, No One Knows Us There.

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Walking the Dark Road

by Kama La Mackerel
What 18-year-old me did not know is that ultimately, there is nothing you can quite fully escape, nothing you can quite fully repress or run away from; one day or another, the ghosts living inside of you start rattling the bones of your present self, demanding that you listen to them and to their grief.

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QWF Writes: On Best-of Lists and How We Actually Read

I am a big believer in lists. Grocery lists. To-do lists. Lists on phones and bits of envelopes and bills. Lists are satisfying to write, and even more satisfying to work through. But best-of lists, the kind of lists which flood journals and newspapers towards the end of each year, summarising “The 10 Best Books of 2019” or “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century”—even though we’re only a fifth of the way through that century—are a pet peeve of mine.

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QWF Writes: Living and Writing in the Country

“We’re thinking of moving to the country,” I told mystery writer Louise Penny when I bumped into her at the Knowlton Literary Festival in 2010, adding that my husband and I weren’t sure if it was the right thing for our writing careers. Penny was enthusiastic: “Do it,” she said, “while you can!” A few months later, we bought a 200-year-old farmhouse in the tiny hamlet of Hatley.For Penny, living in the country proved no hindrance to her career. Her depiction of the fictional village of Three Pines and the eccentric characters who inhabit it launched her to international success. Now on the sixteenth volume of her Inspector Gamache series, she has sold over six million books worldwide.

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QWF Writes: Writing After a Concussion

The first year after I had a concussion was a blur. I was dead to the world for three months, going in and out of sleep, exhausted. I had vertigo and difficulties with light, sound, and language. No reading. No computers. No writing. Definitely no multitasking. I had to rest for far more hours than seemed viable and consequently had to suddenly quit a few organizations I led, with no succession plan in place. I closed my small press, or as it turned out, put it on hiatus. I simply had no choice.As with a stroke or cancer, a traumatic brain injury can be an opportunity to reexamine one’s life and priorities.

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QWF Writes: “Hi, I’m ______ ”: Choosing My Author Name

“What do we call you?” is a question I’ve gotten used to hearing, especially in the writing world. I write now as K.B. Thors, but up until the end of 2017 I was publishing poetry, translations, and essays under the name K.T. Billey. My legal name is Kara Billey Thordarson. If I meet you, I’ll introduce myself as Kara.That might seem all over the place, but the evolution of my nom de plume mirrors the development not just of my writing but of my self. I’d encourage any writer to experiment with their own creative license, no matter what a brand expert might say.

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PROTECT, REACT, RESIST

In November of 2019 I spoke to Nyla Matuk about colonialism, activism, and resistance poetry for the Fall issue of the Montreal Review of Books. Matuk's book, Resisting Canada, was just about to come out from Véhicule Press, and I for one was excited to see such a revolutionary book in the Canadian literary milieu.The book is beautiful and searing, an anthology of voices championing defiance against a settler state that silences and abuses its population while simultaneously praising itself for its image as a progressive and liberal melting pot.There is never a bad time to honestly discuss Canada's oppressive tactics and colonialist heritage. But right now, as the federal and provincial governments, RCMP, and Coastal GasLink/Transcanada flagrantly violate Wet’suwet’en, Canadian law, and international law, it feels particularly relevant. To quote Erica Violet Lee, the land defense currently being carried out is "an enactment of Indigenous law and an affirmation of Indigenous life." As we witness Canada's assault on Indigenous rights, we must take action.

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QWF Writes: Why You Should Apply for a Canada Council Grant Every Year until You Die

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a writer in possession of a good idea, must be in want of a grant. Last year I was on a Canada Council granting jury, and it not only enlightened me as to how the whole process works, it also renewed my faith in the Canada Council in general, and in the granting process in particular.Over the years some of my writer friends had gotten the distinct impression that the Canada Council was this edifice of insiders. Those who got grants kept getting them, and those on the juries awarded grants to their writer friends. And this bitter conviction stopped many of them from applying. “I’m not going to win anyway, so why try?” It doesn’t help that by default, a writer’s life is an incessant litany of rejection.But after having been on the jury, I’m now convinced we all should apply annually.

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QWF Writes: The Honeymoon Phase

Someone with two decades of experience getting critiques of their writing shouldn’t curl into a ball after an editor’s comments, right?Then why, after receiving a developmental edit on my first attempt at a novel, did I find myself in such a pit of despair? (Yes, that pit, that ball; I was every cliché imaginable.)

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A Xiákè in Jiānghú: Wǔxiá Fiction, Translations, and #RacismInCanLit

“I’m writing a novel in English that’s inspired by wǔxiá fiction.”As I finished speaking in Mandarin, forty middle school students stared back at me with stunned eyes. It was as if I had suddenly transformed into a xiákè, a wandering warrior, who had stepped out of the pages of a wǔxiá novel and into their classroom in Chóngqìng, China. In reality, I was only a visiting writer and translator, with no martial arts skills or supernatural powers, recently returned to visit the land of my birth.Gasps and questions continued, becoming louder and louder.Mrs. Hé shushed her students and turned to me with awe. “Wǔxiá fiction is so rooted in traditional Chinese literature and culture. How can you write wǔxiá in English?”

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