The Porcupine's Quill

CONTACT US

The Porcupine’s Quill is located in two nineteenth-century brick storefronts on the Main Street of Erin Village in Wellington County, about an hour north-west of Toronto on a branch of the West Credit River. The millpond in the back yard dates from 1826, give or take. Read on for further information about the press and its environs.

 

Mailing Address

The Porcupine’s Quill 68 Main St., Box 160 Erin, ON Canada N0B 1T0

phone: 519 833 9158 fax: 519 833 9845 email: pql@sentex.net

Connect with Us

• Facebook: @theporcupinesquill
• Twitter: @porcupinesquill
• Instagram: @porcupinesquill
• YouTube: The Porcupine's Quill
• Newsletter: Sign up on our website

Ordering & Administration

For administrative inquiries, contact Tim or Elke Inkster.

For ordering information, visit the Ordering Books section of our website, or email Tim or Elke Inkster.

Submissions

If you would like to submit your work for consideration, please send a query letter, synopsis, and writing sample to: pqlporcupettes@gmail.com.

Submission Rules:

1. Submissions should be 35 pages max.
2. The manuscript must have page numbers that appear on each page.
3. The manuscript must have a header that appears on each page and that includes: author name, title, date of submission.
4. File name should be thus: AuthorSurname_Title_MonthYear.
5. Please include "Submission to Porcupine's Quill" in the subject line of your email.

Consult our blog for hints, tips and tricks for writing a synopsis and for navigating the submission process at the Porcupine's Quill.

Due to the large volume of submissions we receive, please be patient as we consider your manuscript.

Artistic Odes to PQL

The Porcupine’s Quill

An AI Poem by Marcel Gagné
in collaboration with GPT-3 software

I write for you and for myself

and for no one else

not for money or for fame

or to impress those who don’t know me.
So I try to write the way I would speak,
if that were still possible—direct and true,
without false modesty or bravado.
Without fear of being misunderstood.

I want my poetry to be a windowpane,
a view through which you can see yourself clearly:

your strengths; your weaknesses. Your loneliness. Your joys.

Your anger—at injustice, at how things are, at those who hurt
you.

Your struggles with self-esteem and self-loathing.

Your failures and disappointments; your griefs and losses;

your love affairs. The people in your life—family, friends,
co-workers.

The places you’ve been and are going—places where you live;
places where you’ve traveled;

places where you’ve never been.
The books you love and the ones you don’t like; the movies,
music and art that nourish you.
The things that make you feel alive or dead inside.

I write for myself, but I also write for you.

Reposted with permission from marcelgagne.com

 

A watercolour portrait of Tim Inkster by Norman MacDonald. October 2009 at the Busholme Inn, Erin Village, Wellington County.

The Porcupine’s Quill is remarkable in Canadian publishing in that most of the physical production of our journal is completed in-house at the shop on the Main Street of Erin Village. We print on a twenty-five inch Heidelberg KORD, typically onto acid-free Zephyr Antique laid. The sheets are then folded, and sewn into signatures on a 1907 model Smyth National Book Sewing machine.

To take a virtual tour of the pressroom, visit us at YouTube for a discussion of offset printing in general, and the operation of a Heidelberg KORD in particular. Other videos include Four Colour Printing, Smyth Sewing and Wood Engraving. Photographs of production machinery used on these pages were taken by Sandra Traversy on site at the printing office of the Porcupine’s Quill, December 2008.