Issue 155

FICTION Scott Armstrong, Sue Goldswain, David Huebert, Colette Maitland, Margaret Nowaczyk, John O’Neill, Kathy Page, Andrew J. Simpson, Deb Stark, Meg Todd, Deborah-Anne Tunney POETRY Kelsey Andrews, Nicholas Bradley, Wendy Donawa, Aris Keshav, Dave Margoshes, Terence Young ESSAYS Nadine Bachan, Eva-Lynn Jagoe, Marilyn Gear Pilling, Nicole Leona Smith, Carolyn Veldstra, Terence Young

“Three years ago, when Dad and Mum broke up, I had a choice. I didn’t like Toronto, wasn’t big on Queens West or dreadlocked suburbanites or TTC tokens. Dad works too much anyway, and my friends are in Sarnia, and when I think of Elsewhere it’s a lot of places but it’s not the fourth floor of the Etobicoke condo building looking down onto the grey walls of the Queensway, the perpetual Christmas of throbbing tail lights.”

— David Huebert, “Swamp Thing”

“So he made us paella and invited bohemian artists and scattered large stone and iron sculptures on the grounds of the estate. We liked this version of ourselves: a charming degenerate bourgeois family who summers in the decaying splendour of a villa decorated with taxidermied animals, larger-than-life oil studies of flamenco dancers, dark carved furniture, and Andalusian coloured tiles. Merchant Ivory meets Salvador Dalí, with Nino Rota music animating it all.”

— Eva-Lynn Jagoe, “The Finca”

Before I fell in love with poetry, I fell in love with a poet. There is no question which came first. My love of the poet preceded my love of poems. The relationship between the two may even have been causal: I came to love poetry only because I loved the poet first. It is even possible that without the poet, I may not have learned to love poetry. Such a question is not worth pursuing, however, because it asks me to entertain a life without the poet, which I refuse to do.

— Terence Young, “Falling in Love with Poetry”