We chatted with 2025 Prairie Grindstone Prize recipient Rona Altrows about her work, her routine, and her early years as a writer.

Prairie Grindstone Prize: How did you get started with writing and what did those early days of the writing look like?

Rona Altrows: Those days looked like a small kitchen table in a modest Montreal flat. A little kid sits there and prints with an HB pencil on a letterpad. Meanwhile a woman stands at the counter preparing the next family meal.

I have been making up stories since before I learned the alphabet.  I knew how to print my first name, though.  I always had a story in my head and every day I would write and write until I was done, and then my mother would ask me to read the story to her. It was a real story, with fictional people and anthropomorphized animals, snappy dialogue, wild action, weird settings, the works... even though in reality I had not put anything on paper except my name, printed over and over. My mother always accepted that I had written a story and she always had good questions afterwards. Those were the first experiences I had with a Q&A with an audience.

Then I put writing into the corners of my life for a few decades, only committing to it for serious in my early forties. But once I’d made that commitment, I knew instinctively it would hold for the rest of my life.

Prairie Grindstone Prize: What are you working on presently? Are there works in progress or upcoming publications that we should keep an eye out for?

Rona Altrows: Please Don’t Interrupt, a 30-writer anthology I co-edited with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike, on the theme of interruption, will appear in bookstores any day now. I’m pretty excited about that.  People can already pre-order online through the publisher, Griots Lounge Publishing Canada. Uche and I have assembled work from some writers who’ve been around for a while and some who are newer to the writing scene. There is one piece and one piece only per contributing writer, so readers can truly savour each beautiful literary offering. Also coming out within a few days is the winter issue of the Queen’s Quarterly, in which I have an essay called “Walks with Lulu.” In addition to being in QQ, “Walks with Lulu”  is the first piece in my book of essays coming out next fall, Anxious Kid Makes Pretty Good (Now or Never Publishing).

There are other projects afoot too. I have a manuscript to review for one of the writers’ organizations I belong to, I am about to mentor an emerging writer through another organization, and I am editing a book for someone who wants to self-publish. I continue to write and revise short stories for my next collection, and I have a one-woman play struggling for its turn to emerge from my brain and make its way onto my laptop screen. I’m busy.

You’d think, with all that going on, that I’m a great manager of my time, but I am so not. I am maximally ADHD! I just put in the extra hours needed to compensate for the buckets of time I lose to distraction. Luckily, I really like to work. Always have.

Prairie Grindstone Prize: Do you follow a daily writing routine, and has that changed since you won the Prairie Grindstone Prize?

Rona Altrows: I fall in and out of a daily writing routine. I certainly do work every day, whether it’s writing, revising my own work, editing a client’s manuscript, mentoring, or administration for all the above. I think of myself as an arts sector worker running a literary practice. Doing what I can to encourage other writers and unearth opportunities for them is part of that practice.

What has changed since I won the Prairie Grindstone Prize is that I don’t have to worry about applying for grants this year. That’s a relief.  I am meticulous with grant submissions, I take the time to be thorough, and also I know that many worthy artists with excellent projects are looking for money that is apparently in insufficient supply. So sometimes I’ll get a grant but to be honest, usually I don’t. It’s discouraging, for sure. I don’t blame the funding organizations, which do their best. For what it’s worth, my belief is that we should have universal basic income in Canada, but since we don’t, the grant world matters to me. Not this year, though, thanks to the Prairie Grindstone Prize.

Prairie Grindstone Prize: I know you have a theatre background in addition to having written a number of plays. I’ve also had the pleasure of hearing you perform/read your fiction to an audience; it’s spectacular. Can you tell me about how your fiction might have been influenced by your work in theatre, if at all?

Rona Altrows: Where to start? I’ve been putting on informal improvised performances for friends and family, especially during mammoth walks, since early childhood. In high school I officially caught the theatre bug. Over the next ten years or so, I did a lot of acting and a bit of directing, at McGill and in community theatre of various sorts. I got to play Lady Macbeth, Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell, Jean Anouilh’s Joan of Arc, Bertolt Brecht’s Mrs. Peacham, and other fascinating roles in classic and contemporary theatre. As an English Drama major at McGill, I’d had the great fortune to study Stanislavski under great directors. I learned to go ever deeper, to merge the character I was playing with the self, to embody the character.             

Years later as a writer, I couldn’t believe the parallels between acting and fiction writing. In the early 2000s, while sitting on the board of a small local theatre company, I attended workshops and participated in drama exercises that convinced me even further that, at least for me, the dividing line between acting and writing is somewhere between fine and non-existent. I must respect all the fictional people who present themselves to me as a story emerges. I’ve got to listen closely to them, to see them, to represent them as faithfully as I possibly can, no matter how I may feel about them personally. A fictional person may belong in a story even if I would never choose that person for a friend. Even if I find the fictional person repulsive, I still have a duty to listen, to learn what drives that person.

I also have a strong belief in rehearsal, because that is what leads to good performance. A reading of any length is a performance. So once or twice a day for at least a week, sometimes two weeks, before a reading, I rehearse the work. A bonus of being well-rehearsed is that I too can usually enjoy the reading.

Prairie Grindstone Prize: In addition to writing fiction, essays, and plays, you are also an accomplished and experienced editor, with several anthologies under your belt including You Look Good for Your Age (University of Alberta Press), an exploration of women, aging, and ageism; Please Don’t Interrupt, which you co-edited with Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike (Griots Lounge Publishing Canada) comes out this fall. Can  you speak a bit about working with other writers’ words and how that experience informs your own writing, if at all?

Rona Altrows: Put the person first. That is my approach to all kinds of collaborations, including editing someone else’s work. For sure, I will help the writer as much as I can by pointing out issues that, in my opinion, should be addressed, but I do that in ways that do not diminish or put down the writer. For example, no sarcasm (as a writer myself, I know that sarcasm from an editor can sting). Also I like to make suggestions in ways that are grounded in respect for the writer’s style, natural cadence, thematic preoccupations. I let a writer know what does work in the manuscript, not just what doesn’t. That is not to say I let writers off easy. I’m a stickler, especially for clarity, so I will always call for a writer to revisit a sentence or paragraph that is unclear, unless obfuscation is being used as a deliberate literary device. If I’m not sure, I’ll ask. It’s paramount to keep the lines of communication between writer and editor open and mutually respectful.