Welcome To This Issue

I am not a “techie” person, but I have taken to reading John Naughton’s column in The Observer newspaper because in so doing I learn what I need to know of that world in focussed commentaries. And because he seems wise at a time when wisdom is in short supply. Recently, when writing of “these times,” Naughton quoted Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, jailed by Mussolini. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci wrote about what he called an “interregnum”—a period of crisis “which consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms occur.”

I think we can all see the connection to this particular period in history but the idea of seeking the new while being held back by the old played over in my mind this past week, not as it relates to world affairs, but rather to us, as thinking and feeling humans. What happens when we go through a period of crisis? I was somehow buoyed by the fact that when experiencing a difficult time, there will be a period where the “dying of the old” takes place before something else emerges. That there is a trajectory, a period of stasis before moving forward. The hope implied in this pithy quote might just get one through the “morbid” symptoms one experiences.

As it happens, carrying these thoughts around led me to find connections to the writing in the issue, beginning with the winner of our Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award “Alert” by Leslie Palleson. Here the crisis of escaping a marriage and a fire is allayed by a moment of sharp clarity, a hint that the old might be dying, and with it the possibility of something new. Our Edna Staebler essay contest winner “Perhaps a Wolf & a Lamb” by Adèle Barclay is well past the crisis stage in this looking back at domestic abuse through the eyes of a younger sibling. Still, I kept wondering in reading it: when was the moment things got better for her, when did the “new” become “born”? In our Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse, the crisis is more pronounced in Callista Markotich’s first place poem “Holiday in France.” Here the narrator, while visiting the cemetery, muses about that moment of interregnum, those traumatic moments when the soldiers could not imagine anything beyond the tragedy of the moment.

Elsewhere among our contest material we have our runner up to our Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, Pardis Parker, considering the merits of helping his fellow citizens in “Good Person,” while runner up to the Edna Staebler Personal Essay contest, Shane Neilson writes an homage to his son in “No One Afraid.” In the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse contest our second-place winner is Terence Young’s “May Day Coronation, 1929,” while third place goes to Callista Markotich’s “Did You Know Our Mother Read to Us of You.” The shortlist comprises Richard Brait’s “Quadri and Florian” and “What Kurt Vonnegut Wrote to Ms Lockwood’s class at Xavier High School,” Dagne Forrest’s “Initial Conditions,” Susan Haldane’s “Scattering my father’s ashes,” Nancy Holme’s “Granada,” Sneha Madhavan Reese’s “Varkala, Early Morning,” Rose Maloukis’s “Walking Past the Local Garage,” Callista Markotich’s “Love and War at Dieppe” and Anthony Purdy’s “When an Old Man Dies.”

In fiction Mark Anthony Jarman returns to our pages bemoaning the trials of being a tourist in “The Cutpurse of Venice,” and Colette Maitland explores a teenager’s grief in “You and I”. Atma Frans examines the power of memory in “The Silt Between the Reeds,” while Trent Lewin tackles familial responsibility in “Snake-Proof.” Kaitlin Ruether finds a solution for climate change in “The Dimming,” while in Theressa Slind’s “Aftermarket,” a woman fears being sidelined in her life, and in “Ever Been Roast” Shelley Wood finds a new way to grieve.

In nonfiction we welcome back Anita Lahey in an insightful conversation with Rob Taylor on how recent forest fires in Cape Breton mirror those she wrote about in her book Fire Monster.

In poetry we have Gillian McKee with “Blackstone Still Life,” Jean Eng with “Museum Girls,” and Ingrid Dolan with “Snow Mobiles.” Sandra Davies brings us three poems including “Monsoon,” “The Wall,” and “Their Eyes,” and we have three by Florence Treadwell including “Hiking with My Five-Year-Old Grandson,” “Deflection,” and “On the Waiting List.” Chantel Lavoie is in our pages with “BOB,” “The Frazzle,” and “Burning Bright.”

Our Spirit Ink writer this round is Kikki Guerard with her poem, “Prayer I Forgot I Knew.”

Our contest material, along with our regular submissions as always, make for a stellar combination in this issue. Each of the winning pieces explore the human condition at its worst, and yet each unfolds through rich and contemplative writing that hint at something other, something new. That’s that best we can hope for.

—Pamela Mulloy