"Inspiration is a fickle lover, a player on a date with another while you wait for the call. Don't wait, just write. The way to court it is one word at a time. If you're lucky on your writing 'date' you'll have generated a spark of momentum or expressed a true and original sentence or learned a few details about a compelling character. Everything else is revision."

Una McDonnell's writing has appeared in Musings: An Anthology of Greek-Canadian Literature and Decalogue: Ten Ottawa Poets, Arc and the New Quarterly among others. She was a finalist for the 2008 CBC Poetry Prize and this year she was named to the CBC Short Story Prize longlist.