Category Archives: TNQ Insider's Guide

TNQ How-to: Save on your subs

I subscribe to a handful of Canadian mags, for two reasons: love and principle. The love part needs no further explanation; as for principle, well, as a publisher, I understand how important subscriptions are, particularly to small magazines. I realize that our fates are being decided by the length of our mailing lists, though I’ve [...]

Writing Pays: Apply now for Writers’ Reserve!

The New Quarterly is pleased to be a Recommender of Ontario Arts Council Writers’ Reserve grants again this year. We are accepting applications in fiction and poetry categories, both as general reserve funds and in the freshly-minted ‘regional’ category. Regional is defined as “outside Toronto.” Yes, really. Regional means the rest of the province. [...]

How to Endear Yourself to your Publisher at Press Time

I’ve fallen off my posting schedule in the past few days somewhat due to the stresses of press time, the final stages of putting an issue together before delivering it to our printer. It’s my job—one of my favorite jobs, actually—to layout each issue of TNQ in Adobe InDesign. One of my last steps in [...]

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 [...]

Killer Cover Letters

The TNQ Insider’s Guide
While I can’t tell you what our editors are looking for in a poem or story, I can tell you what they are looking for in a cover letter.
First things first: it seems that many writers are under the impression that the cover letter should inspire the editor to read the work, [...]