Issue 149

POINTS OF DEPARTURE:
in which we study Kabbalah with our father, search for the trickery in magic, visit Niagara Falls to save our marriage, and flee Aleppo with our family.

FICTION Lisa Alward, Scott Armstrong, Sonal Champsee, Valerie Compton, Cynthia Flood, Fiona Foster, Adan Jerreat-Poole, Richard Kelly Kemick, Mohamad Kebbewar, Aviva Dale Martin, Robert Shaw, Carrie Snyder, Sarah Totton POETRY Jody Baltessen, Marilyn Bowering, Jenny Boychuk, Moneesha R. Kalamder, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Nathan Mader, John Pass, Bernadette Rule, Terry Watada, David Yerex Williamson ESSAYS Gena Ellett, Christine Pountney, Sigal Samuel, Brent van Staalduinen PLUS David Huebert in conversation with Tom Cull

“Maya Angelou said that cynicism in the young is a tragedy, because you go from knowing nothing, to believing in nothing. Both knowing and belief shape who we are, but our knowing is empirical. It can change. It changes every time we make a mistake, or learn something new. But our beliefs are what determine what we allow ourselves to know in the first place – what we can see and hear and feel. They are far more deterministic than our knowing. They are the invisible forces that limit us, or give us our freedom, cloud our eyes with cataracts, or peel them off.”

– Christine Pountney, “Ceremony”

“His father came back outside in a flurry of movement. He was dressed in full marching regalia now and swept past them with a terrible urgency. The bright red jacket hung loosely off his shoulders, and even with all of the buttons done right up to his neck, he still seemed shrunken and frail beneath it. His glengarry was angled roguishly off to the side of his forehead and his shoes were freshly polished, nearly glinting as he clicked across the wooden boards. The tartan was faded and slightly frayed after years of washing and Brady thought that some of the pinnings were wrong.”

– Scott Armstrong, “Too Late a Soldier”

“Those poems and those of many other poets along the way seemed to strum invisible strings deep within me, awakening some essential, questing part of me. Neruda’s ode was like a sunbeam, arriving at precisely the right time. Transtromer’s luminous poems were also a necessary tonic. Not only was I leaving behind a marriage and a career as a lawyer, I was returning home to deal with my mother’s advancing dementia. Negativity, apprehension and loss had occluded my vision.”

– Fiona Tinwei Lam, “The Eye of the Ode”

$5 plus HST