Author Archives: Kim

New Quarterly Road Trip

While Melissa was enjoying the hot tub in wine country and learning about circ, I made the trip to Ottawa (28 below plus wind-chill factor) for the launch of our winter issue. I flew on Bearskin airlines, a small (16 seater?) prop plane with a ceiling so low you have to bend at the waist [...]

The Star in P.K. Page

It seems appropriate that I learned about the death of P.K. Page [The photo of her is by Barbara Pedrick, courtesy of Porcupine's Quill Press.] from Barbara Carter, TNQ’s chief poetry editor, whom I ran into when out to lunch—a rare outing for me—with poet Erin Noteboom. We were a trio for whom that death [...]

A Christmas Eve Fable

I offer the following as a holiday gift for our readers but also in remembrance of my father, Nicholas Blatchford, who wrote it. It was published 50 years ago today, in the pages of The Washington Daily News, where he spent much of his career as a journalist. My father was not a particularly religious [...]

Congratulations to Annabel Lyon!

I was so pleased to see her debut novel, The Golden Mean, short-listed for the Giller yesterday. I happened to be reading it when the long-list was announced. It had been a birthday gift from my daughter Amanda (who co-edited our “Wild Writers” issue in which Annabel Lyon was one of 20 featured writers). I [...]

How We Choose Stories and Other Mythical Beasts, Part 2

In my last post, I talked about where TNQ stories come from and described the procedure we follow in reviewing fiction submissions. Today I want to say something about our editorial criteria. That’s the “mythical beast” of my title because, though we often note in full confidence of being understood that such and such doesn’t [...]

How We Choose Stories and Other Mythical Beasts

Fiction writers, take note: this is the first in a series of posts on how the editors choose stories for publication in TNQ.
To begin, how is it stories come into our purview? The bulk of them are chosen from our general submissions at editorial meetings which happen three or four times a year. There are [...]