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#Featured Reads3

Issue 172

Swimming Lessons

I wanted to spend time with Dan too. I wanted to be wild and fun while I still could. I wanted Dan to look at me and see me in my bathing suit and feel immense regret that summer had to end. Read more.

Samantha Jade Macpherson in
Issue 172

Not an Elegy

No flowery words,
no birdsong, no bright
blossoms, no prayers— Read more.

Kirsteen MacLeod in
Issue 172

Because of the Postcards

All regret dissolves when I reach Baku. It’s dark but the air is warm and the city lit and I’m met by the transport arranged by the tour company and no longer on my own. How beautiful the city is on the drive to our hotel, how glamourous in the lights of the night, modern buildings in gorgeous curvy shapes and old stately ones, and tomorrow there will be mosques and the Old Town with its wall, and I feel, in my tired but relieved touristy way, that I’ve arrived to a sense of belonging. Or recognition at least. Baku has been called Dubai on the Caspian and also the Paris of the East. Perhaps it never chose between Asia and Europe as Ali and Nino argued it should; perhaps it’s both. Read more.

Dora Dueck in

#Online Exclusives3

The Writer’s Corner

January 23, 2025

Finding the Form with Kristeen Macleod

I have a digressive brain. The tangential, undisciplined, and wandering-spirited in language attracts me. But my current poetry project is requiring a brevity that’s uncharacteristic for me. How to find new concision? I’ve been inspired in part by a martial artist-writer friend who strikes people in the gut with incredible force, using both Krav Maga […]

Kristeen Macleod in
January 21, 2025

What’s Samantha Jade Macpherson Reading?

Over the past year, I’ve been working my way through Yoko Ogawa. I started with Hotel Iris, an uneasy read about an unsettling relationship, then moved onto The Memory Police, about an island where inhabitants slowly lose their memories under a fascist police government, and have just finished her collection Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales. I’ve […]

Samantha Jade Macpherson in
January 17, 2025

Finding the Form with Amber Fenik

I feel that for myself, being a writer is akin to madness – or, the closest I’ll ever get to a permanently altered state of mind. I’ll be on my way to get groceries and suddenly the image of a man in a blue coat running through the woods during a thunderstorm will flash into […]

Amber Fenik in