Category - Writers’ Room

Interviews Rachna Contractor

An Interview with Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

 Interview by Rachna Contractor Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer femme sick and disabled Sri Lankan/Irish/Roma writer, performance artist, educator, and hellraiser. The Lambda and ALA Stonewall Award–winning author of Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home, Bodymap...

Prompts Trenton Pollard

Confronting Secrets in Poetry, with Trenton Pollard

What effect do negatives (“I did not come with a clean slate”, “I do not want to be my father”) and double negatives (“I do not want to not be my father”) have in poetry that confronts secrets and confessions? Lately I’ve been thinking about the photography of Diane Arbus, and how her work has a...

Prompts Suzette Mayr

Character in Detail, with Suzette Mayr

How do you develop character through detail? I think it’s so interesting how different writers use detail differently in order to convey character. Ernest Hemingway in a short story like “Hills Like White Elephants” portrays the two main characters almost entirely through dialogue, and through no...

Rachna Contractor Writers’ Room

Eight Tips for Writing a Thorough Book Review

by Rachna Contractor As reviews editor I receive many inquiries about how to write a book review; here’s a list of eight tips which I presented at the Plenitude magazine co-sponsored Queer Night of the Brockton Writers Series in July 2016. If you have more suggestions or questions feel free to...

Jes Battis The Query Project Writers’ Room

Jes Battis, Regina

Lizards and Brokenhearts: Reading in the Teenage Wasteland As a teenager, I was terrified of the letters HQ. That was the call number given to gay literature at the public library, with its murky koi pond and drug dealing after dark. I’ve since come to love those two letters in tandem—a few of my...

Marcus McCann The Query Project

Marcus McCann, Toronto

How could it be otherwise? I can’t keep a copy of Stan Persky’s Buddy’s: Meditations on Desire in the house. I make the same mistake: lending it to lovers—should I even call it lending?—and then, once I come to my senses, buying a replacement copy for myself. Lather, rinse, repeat. I feel like...

Rita Wong The Query Project

Rita Wong, Vancouver, Coast Salish Territories

“All this shouting and hollering won’t solve anything—it will only make us tired and enemies. We all have to live together in this village…” —from Her Head a Village by Makeda Silvera. Press Gang was a feminist press whose closing I still mourn to this day. Before it shuttered in 2002, it published...

Cathleen With The Query Project

Cathleen With, Vancouver

When I was younger there were three books that had great influence on me, for different reasons. The Handmaid’s Tale was one. And when I read it, I immediately started reading it again. Because there was a lesbian in it. Never mind she wasn’t the main character (though I often made the main...

Carrie Mac The Query Project

Carrie Mac, Vancouver

It’s cruel to ask a writer to pick just one book, ever, for any reason. And so, in this case, I’m going with two—a particular pairing at a particular time. When I was sixteen, I gobbled up Anne Cameron’s backlist until I came to The Journey. I slowed down then, because I never wanted it to end. A...

Nicola Harwood The Query Project

Nicola Harwood, Vancouver

Romeo, Romeo, Where Art Thou? Before. I wander through the women’s bookstore in Toronto. My eyes fall on a title, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I read the description, dip into the first chapter, and buy the book. My discovery of Jeanette Winterson comes early in her ascendancy and, really, it is...

Ron Schafrick The Query Project

Ron Schafrick, Toronto

I first read Denton Welch a few years ago. Actually, that’s not completely true. I read his short story “When I Was Thirteen” in Alberto Manguel and Craig Stephenson’s anthology Meanwhile, in Another Part of the Forest a good decade or so ago. It’s probably Welch’s most anthologized story, and it’s...

Sarah Ellis The Query Project

Sarah Ellis, Vancouver

Rose and Dorothy, by Roslyn Schwartz (better known for her “Mole Sisters” books), tells of a mouse and an elephant who are taken by one another: “Dorothy was larger than life to Rose and twice as charming.” Dorothy moves into Rose’s house. Dorothy is big in every way, loud, open...

Jodi Lundgren The Query Project

Jodi Lundgren, Victoria

Sub-Rosa & Other Fiction, Catherine Bennett’s collection of poetic prose, couldn’t be more aptly titled. Sub–rosa means “in strict confidence, privately” and comes from the Latin for “under the rose,” an ancient symbol of secrecy. Not to mention female genitalia. Most contemporary English...

Casey Plett The Query Project

Casey Plett

Charlotte is crying and she looks up at me with big watery eyes. She says something really quiet. What? says Kate. Say it, Charlotte. You didn’t have a problem saying it ten minutes ago. Tell her. Charlotte cries and looks up at me and she is like a bird I saw once with a broken wing, hopping...

Craig Takeuchi The Query Project

Craig Takeuchi, Vancouver

In addition to the compelling storytelling, something I particularly admire about Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy is the structure of how the story unfolds. It slowly unfurls, chapter by chapter, from the politics within the microcosm of a children’s world to conflicts on the national level, and...

Daniel Allen Cox The Query Project

Daniel Allen Cox, Montreal

The Hard Return, a book of poems by Marcus McCann, is a lover that confesses into your mouth during sex. It creates space inside the reader; spelunkers through you, cool and disconnected, then suddenly seizes something precious. It creates a new and almost extrapolated kind of literary criticism...

Anna Nobile The Query Project

Anna Nobile, Sechelt

I was in a magic realist phase, reading a lot of Latin writers, mostly women, in translation. I loved the way these writers defied North American literary conventions. Anything could happen: a broken hearted lover’s tears fell into batter and made all those who ate the cake sob inconsolably;...