desk blog count: rounding up to 20!

In the Canadian poetry world, there are a few things you can set your watch by: every day rob mclennan will post to his blog, every week Dina Del Bucchia will mention farts on social media, and every year Garry Thomas Morse will publish a new book.

In the peculiar corner of the CanLit world devoted to Desk Blogs, however, chaos reigns. There's no predicting where the next blog will appear, or why (god, why???) a flourishing desk blog might shutter its operations overnight.

But perhaps that is changing. For, my fellow deskblogmaniacs, I have discovered a pattern squirreled away within the noise: writers-in-residence at Open Book Toronto. Every month, a new writer is selected as Open Book Toronto's WiR, and is charged with producing a month's worth of online content for the site. And invariably, as pressure makes diamonds, every couple years an OBT WiR will decide to post on Writers Desks. And all of us are the richer for it.

Sofia Mostaghimi's Desk
(w/ retreating laptop)

Of the fifteen desk blogs we've tracked here in the desk blog count, three now have come from Open Book Toronto, all since 2012. The latest, curated by Jess Taylor (author of Pauls) is entitled "Tiny Rooms of One's Own". It is, to be honest, more of an open-concept interview than a full-blown desk blog. Still, it features a number of the desk blog hallmarks: photos of writers' desks (obviously), detailed author bios, and the obligatory Virginia Woolf reference.

So, desk blog #15 it is!

Here are the ardent fifteen:

On My Desk [Defunct: Archived Here]

Desk Space

Sitting Pretty Magazine

Writers' rooms (Guardian Newspaper)

What Is Your Ideal Space to Create? (Ploughshares Lit Journal)

"Workspace" Section (Branch Magazine)

At The Desk (Open Book Toronto)

Writers' Rooms (VIWF)

Good Places to Write

On The Writer's Desk (Open Book Toronto)

Where Do You Write to My Lovely?

10 Stunning Writing Studios (Flavorwire)

Writing Spaces (The New Quarterly)

3 Room Editors Share Their Writing Rooms With Us (Room Magazine)

Tiny Rooms of One's Own (Open Book Toronto)

Can 20 be all that far behind? Not if Open Book Toronto has something to say about it!

Keep hunting, Deskblogmaniacs!