Liz Johnston on being an editor at Brick: it’s been a kind of masterclass in literary writing.

Why I Write: Q & A with author Liz Johnston

LIZ JOHNSTON grew up in Revelstoke, B.C., and now lives and writes in Toronto. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Poets & Writers, The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Cardiff Review. Johnston is an editor of Brick, A Literary Journal. The Fall-Down Effect is her debut novel.

Describe your writing space. What do you love about it?

I’ve got my desk set up straddling the living room and kitchen of the apartment where I live with my partner and two needy cats. This spot puts me between two big south-facing windows, and that’s my favourite thing about having my desk here. I can gaze out over the building at treetops and sky. I get a lot of light when I need it most in the winter.

How important is it to have ‘a room of one’s own’?

Despite my desk being in the communal space of the apartment, my partner, who also works from home, is generally set up in our second bedroom/office, so for all intents and purposes, during the workday, the rest of the apartment is my space. That said, he does have a lot of Zoom meetings, and our cats abhor a closed door, so to focus I often wear headphones to create a sound barrier. But I’ve done a lot of work in libraries and coffee shops, especially when I was younger, so I don’t require a room of my own. It is nice, though, to have my usual setup, with reference books, my calendar, my to-do list, etc., all close at hand.

What is your writing practice like? 

Every morning, before I move to the desk, I write a couple pages longhand in my journal on the couch. Sometimes this is a “morning pages”-style clearing of the head, full of banalities that might otherwise take up mental space when I want to get down to working on my fiction. Other times, the journal is where I think through aspects of that fiction, plot or character ideas I’d like to work out before going to my Word document. Once I move to my computer, the routine can be a bit more scattered. Say I don’t have any editing to do for clients or grant applications due or anything, if I have time to just work on whatever novel or short story I’ve been drafting, I’ll probably start by reading over whatever I wrote the day before, fiddling with it as I go, before picking up to start drafting new material. So yes, I edit as I write, against Anne Lamott’s good advice to just try to get down a “shitty first draft.” I’m certain I’m squandering my time this way, honing sentences when whole storylines might yet be axed. But so far I’ve had no success in changing this process.

Do you quantify your process by word count or hours spent writing?

I go through phases where I record my word count every day, to get some sense that I’m progressing on a draft. For a time I did this with a friend, an “accountability partner,” and we’d record word count or notes about whatever we’d worked on that day in a shared Google Sheet. Now, I’ll sometimes just jot that word count down in my day planner so I have something to look down at and assure myself things are coming along.

What is your creative process like?

In that classic, oversimplified plotter-pantser binary, I’m more of a pantser. I’ve never been able to outline. (I remember in high school having to hand in an outline as step one in a larger essay assignment; I had to write the essay first in order to come up with an outline I could turn in.) I have to get down in the weeds to understand the larger story I’m telling. I can’t see much of a scene before I start putting words on the screen. And a lot of the big-picture structure, plotting, and pacing stuff happens for me in the editing process, in revisions, once I can step back from all of these scenes I’ve written and see how they work together as a whole.

What is the easiest and most difficult part of the process for you?

The easiest part for me is editing my sentences, which is probably part of why I do so much editing as I go. The most difficult is either drafting in the first place or cracking a manuscript back open to make substantive changes once I’ve spent so much time refining and refining.

Why do you write? What do you love about writing?

I write because I love living in stories. To a certain extent I think I never grew out of make-believe. My favourite characters are alive in my mind. What I’m most interested in, as a reader and writer of fiction, are characters and relationships. I think sharing the stories I make up is also a way to connect with other people. I feel I can often express myself better in writing than I do speaking. I like the time and space writing can give you to express yourself.

How do you manage writing with other demands on your time?

Not well. I spend a lot of time not writing. Though I once imagined I could do both, I’ve found that when a big editing project comes in from one of my clients, like a developmental edit for a novel, I set whatever I’ve been writing aside and let the editing work get priority. I tend to write in the gaps between freelance editing projects.

What has influenced you most as a writer?

My work at Brick has had a huge impact on me as a writer. It’s broadened my reading tastes and given me space to think more deeply about just about everything. Regularly reading the caliber of writers whose work appears in the magazine, editing that work, getting to listen to my brilliant fellow editors think about that work—it’s been a kind of masterclass in literary writing.

What books are you currently loving?

I’m reading The South by Tash Aw (Hamish Hamilton, 2025), and it’s so lovely. Set in Malaysia, it is in part a coming-of-age story about a teenage boy, Jay, falling for the property manager’s son on his family’s trip to the dying farm they’ve inherited. It’s full of these beautiful aimless summer vacation moments—swimming in a lake, eating and drinking at a night market—but painfully tinged by the reality of land devastated by climate change and reckless development. As one character says, “Bulldozing forests just so that rich people can go on vacation.” I’m also enjoying Hollay Ghadery’s The Unravelling of Ou (Palimpsest Press, 2026) and Kate Cayley’s Property (Coach House Books, 2025).

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Thank you Liz.

The Fall-Down Effect was published April 21, 2026 by Book*hug Press

"The novel, examining the nature of survival-personal and environmental-is both small and epic. Through tight and relatable dialogue, Johnston captures deeply entrenched family dynamics and profound truths about relationships." -The New Quarterly

Exploring protest, climate change, and fractured family relationships, Liz Johnston’s eagerly anticipated debut novel, The Fall-Down Effect, asks what we really owe people in our lives when we are fighting for a greater cause.

As a child in the late 1980s, Fern is the wild heart of her tree-hugging family-quick-tempered and yearning to spend every minute in the woods of the small Pacific Northwest logging town where they live. She is also most like her environmental activist mother, Lynn, who chafes against the demands of motherhood and yearns for the protests of her youth. As tensions escalate, Lynn leaves her partner, Tom, and their three children, telling herself she will devote her life more fully to fighting for the earth.

At nineteen, Fern commits her own radical act of protest, which authorities label ecoterrorism. When Fern goes underground, her parents and siblings-responsible grad student Sylvia and budding artist River-struggle to make sense of her actions while also trying to cover up her absence. Fern’s secret proves impossible to keep, and when she becomes a wanted woman, the rest of the family trades blame. Years later, when Lynn takes shelter from a forest fire in the home she left so many years before, the family is forced to confront their regrets during a fraught, baggage-filled reunion.