Anne StoneTag

Writing/Not Writing

Some language cracks the shell of a thing open, so we can newly see what’s being described. And some language forms a perfect egg shell around what it aims to describe, obscuring more than it reveals. ...

Monster

When I walked in, the four of them were seated at a folding card table. Behind a cardboard screen, the Dungeon Master sat shuffling his stack of wrinkled maps and notes. I pulled up a chair, though the ...

Decoder ring

In Girl Minus X, there are choices made by the main character, Dany, that seem more legible and logical to people who’ve experienced trauma and understand the way, afterwards, a person is forever scanning ...

A love letter (to libraries)

(—and other public places I once wrote to escape violence.)My life is very different from what it was when I began writing. While working on my latest novel, Girl Minus X, I often wrote in public ...

Permission to dream

When I started writing, I didn’t understand the invisible work. The models of labour I was most familiar with—whether in a coffee shop, at a hotel, in a firehall, or at a construction site—were, ...

A love letter (to books)

The first quote-unquote serious novel I read was One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn. My eighth grade teacher set down a box at the front of the classroom and, in a seemingly ...

Writing Time

When it comes to writing, I have a hard time wrapping my head around some of the basics—namely space and time. I find it easy to imagine myself into a character’s head—to project myself into a character’s ...

Writing violence (again)

On violence and trauma and repetition...When I was nineteen, I went to dinner at a friend’s, and afterwards, her father invited us all upstairs to see his attic art studio.There were so many canvasses ...

"A Sustained Think... on Trauma" March 2021 Writer in Residence Anne Stone on Writing a Pandemic Novel Before COVID

Sometimes an author's imagination dovetails so perfectly, and unexpectedly, with the outside world that the prescience seems almost chilling. Such is the case with Girl Minus X (Wolsak & Wynn) by Anne ...