Issue 146

IF ON THE WAY YOU WANDER:

in which we come to terms with our daughter’s sexuality, suffer a visit from our mother, wreak havoc on our child’s toy, and get naked to spy on our neighbour.

FICTION Kerry Clare, David Huebert, Sara Mang, J.R. McConvey, Sheila Murray, Kathy Page, Ron Schafrick, Mary Thaler, Wayne Yetman POETRY Madhur Anand, Susan J. Atkinson, Sue Bracken, Rachel Laverdiere, Carole Giangrande, Rebecca Papucaru, Richard Teleky ESSAYS Marion Agnew, Dora Dueck, Lisa Martin, Christopher A. Taylor, Anne Marie Todkill, Isabella Wang

“Maybe the core thing is the broken-openness we feel at times of loss: willing to try anything, we go beyond ourselves. We tiger-crawl our way out of our isolation so we won’t die. Or we live with our hearts blown apart until one day we notice that in our rawness we are as vulnerable to being touched by beauty and goodness as to being abraded by crisis and loss. At the end of the process, we are more – other – than we were before. From an evolutionary perspective, the pain must exist for a reason. Maybe it is to motivate us to get ourselves away from the intolerable place where we are, to arrive somewhere else instead.”

– Lisa Martin, “The Good Death”

“It gets hard thinking of yourself as a hockey player when you get one non-fighting shift every five or six games, which is why I like practise. Shooting pucks at pro goalies who know I can snipe my portion. I get a sweat going and gradually forget about Stacey and Coach and just get into the rhythm of active sticks and hard strides and crisp passes. Coach hollering his mantra: ‘It’s all about economy of motion.’ Yelling ‘economy of motion’ over and over until I start hearing it as a story about a girl named Connie Demotion, a girl I have to dig deeper and deeper to resist.”

– David Huebert, “Six Six Two Fifty”

“The love of writing poetry came much later, a decade later. I wrote my first poem while writing my PhD thesis in theoretical ecology, immersed in the language and thinking of computer programs, ecological datasets, recovering farmers’ fields, and complex systems theory. Writing poetry came from a completely perpendicular direction in my life, and it wasn’t until then that I became a voracious reader of poetry, a self-didactic.”

– Madhur Anand, “Angles Where the Grass Writing Goes On”