Issue 145

WHAT LIES AHEAD:

in which we eradicate fear through curiosity, ride an articulated bus, take stock on a fish farm, and tell our own kind of fairy tale.

FICTION Frances Boyle, Lynn Cecil, Jann Everard, Christine Higdon, Jerri Jerreat, John Gould, Kari Lund-Teigen, Lisa McLean, Jena Schmitt, Beverley Shaw, Laura Schwager POETRY Janet Barkhouse, Julie Bruck, Degan Davis, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Nancy Holmes, Carol L. MacKay, Kirsteen MacLeod, Dave Margoshes, Erin Noteboom ESSAYS Melinda Burns, Linda E. Clarke, Sue Goyette, Laura Legge, Jane Munro, Alison Pick, Alissa York PLUS Sally Cooper in conversation with Krista Foss and Tasneem Jamal in conversation with Jael Richardson and Ayelet Tsabari

“He just wants to know whether the woman who helped him select a perfect pair of frames is happy. In fact, he’s been obsessed by the thought. Why? He’d be hard pressed to tell you. Existential angst, perhaps. He’s also been thinking about Ivars, an always depressed high school friend who has recently been in touch on Facebook. Ivars’s Facebook philosophy is clear: no one should be happy unless everyone is. Fair enough, thinks Burn.”

– Christine Higdon, “Dysplastic Man!”

“I am trained as a scientist – a physicist, specifically. The rune poem struck me as a kind of science: it encodes deep knowledge in compact form. And science, too, is a kind of rune poem: it encodes assumptions, histories, peculiar and particular moments, far more than some of its high-minded practitioners would like to admit. They are both systems of knowledge.”

– Erin Noteboom, “Afterword”

“Often poetry emboldens these shifts because it so plainly removes itself from the arena of the real. The poet may articulate her assault through the body of a rose bush. The poet may exorcise his incarceration through a metaphor of a migrating swallow. And there is no delusion, by writer or reader, that the two are completely understanding one another. Or rather, there is no delusion that the two will understand one another consummately or immediately. Q-Tip: the rhythms will lurk into people. And this is where patience enters, our most effective tool as we learn to live again.”

– Laura Legge, “Culling the Wild Words”