Liz Johnston: Read lit mags to see where writing fits in the literary ecosystem

Liz Johnston lives and writes in Toronto. Her stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, The Humber Literary Review, Grain, The Antigonish Review, and The Cardiff Review, among other publications. She is an editor of Brick magazine. The Fall-Down Effect (Book*hug, 2026) is her first novel.

Author Liz Johnston

OCW: Has your writing evolved over the years? If so, how? Through writing experience? Reading a lot? Writing courses or communities? A combination, or something else?

Evolution through a writing group and craft

LJ: Yes, my writing has certainly evolved over the years. I’ve become more confident in my voice, and I’ve gotten better at various elements of craft through so many experiences: I’ve taken writing courses; I did a mentorship about novel writing with an established novelist; I have a writing group with friends where we regularly workshop each other’s work; I read a lot. My involvement with Brick magazine has taught me so much about what kind of writing I like and want to emulate, and editing other people’s work has also helped me hone my craft.

The pantser's process

OCW: Are you a plotter or a pantser? (For writers or short stories and novels).

LJ: I am a pantser. Writing is how I find out the story I want to tell. Even writing academic papers in university, I was practically incapable of outlining. In order to figure out what a character wants, what they’re up to, what might happen to them, to see beyond the first hazy image of a scene, I have to start putting words on the page.

Navigating the literary ecosystem and the AI threat

OCW: If you’ve been published, how did you find your first publisher?

LJ: My first published short story appeared in The Antigonish Review in 2014. I’m almost sure that I submitted a hard copy by mail.

I had bought copies of the The Antigonish Review before (when I first started submitting I would almost randomly pick up different titles from the Arts and Literary Magazine sections at bookstores), and while I was working at Brick we had a reciprocal subscription with The Antigonish Review, so I had a good sense of the kind of work they published before I sent in my story.

It’s probably unrealistic for a writer to keep up with every publication they submit to, but for me, reading an array of different lit mags was necessary to develop an idea of where my work might fit in the literary ecosystem and to submit with more purpose than just selecting a title from a list of places accepting work.

OCW: Do you see generative AI as a threat or benefit to writers?

LJ: I see generative AI as a threat to humanity, not to be too overblown about it. I understand there are writers experimenting with gen AI in thoughtful and creative ways, but even then, I can’t help thinking about the environmental costs of energy and water consumption.

To me, the harms of these technologies outweigh whatever artistic discoveries these writers are making. If you want to just remix language, maybe get into flarf poetry instead—I don’t know. I also think it’s one thing for writers who’ve already had long careers thinking and crafting for themselves to engage with LLMs in a spirit of exploration and inquiry, and another for those who are just starting out to use these technologies. We know even those folks who have been writing for years are not immune to the cognitive effects of outsourcing thinking to a machine, but I worry more about those who grow up with the habit, I guess.

OCW: Do you edit as you write, or write and edit later?

LJ: I edit as I write. I’d like to be able to write a shitty first draft, as Anne Lamott advises in Bird by Bird, and then go back to revise once I’ve got the whole story down on the page. I just can’t do that. I feel completely stuck when I try to push myself forward knowing that what I’ve written is crap. And so I stall forward progress by revising, polishing up a scene or a sentence, even though there’s a good chance that scene or sentence might need to be reworked yet again—if not cut—once I have a full draft to review and start editing. It’s an inefficient way to work, I’m sure, but for the life of me, I can’t do things another way.