Welcome to this Issue

We live in fast times,” the editorial began, “and too often we feel as if time is slipping away from our grasp.” I read this while perched on the tiniest of stools in a record story in Porto, Portugal. The magazine I was reading, a sumptuous doorstopper from Barcelona, kept me occupied for an indeterminate amount of time, so that when I went back and read the editorial, where they argued that magazines “can expand your perception of time, slowing it down and even stop-ping it.”, I thought, yes! What magic this is.

Going on holidays in the midst of the production cycle is not ideal but the break allowed the kind of dreamy thinking that I don’t always get at my desk. Having finished the copy editing, I could clear the way to ruminate on my editorial. And time, in its fluid and flexible way would play a part. This is our forty-fifth year operating as a magazine so I could easily lean into that old adage about time flying, but it is time as something given, as a gift, that I want to consider, an invitation to enter the magazine in order to warp time.

I have been editor for only fifteen years and during this period we’ve gone from bundles of paper manuscripts sent by post to digital ones submitted through an online portal. Many of our systems and our archive have been digitized and, of course, we entered the world of social media. Would those at the helm back in 1981 have imagined a world so frantic, our days spent answering emails, scrolling the unimportant, our attention span dwindling, while trying to wade through the ever-growing submission database.

But time is fickle, and some things don’t change. The founding editors wrote in that first issue that they started the magazine to “fill a need for a new Canadian literary journal” since the numbers had been dwindling, and a place where writers “may hope to appear in this era of shrinking markets, shrinking publications…” So nothing new on this front. From that sixty-four page staple-bound first issue to our 144 page current iteration, we’re still providing space for those writers looking to publish their work.

In this issue you will find stale beer, cockroaches, a tire swing, cigarettes, a Taliban rocket, a rubber bath toy, a chicken coop, and a long toe. In reading the material here, it will expand your mind, and slow down time. You might land on something familiar or prise out a long dormant thought. And the words will linger like it was 1981.

In fiction Brandon Nadeau delves in to the impact of war in “The Call of the Void,” while Susan Mockler’s “Letting it Happen” takes us into an inappropriate student teacher relationship. Patrick Cunningham explores teenage sexuality in “Domestic Pigs” and in Elfermin Mallari’s “Here and There” we see the relationship fault lines when a young man comes to Canada to be with his lover. Ryan Turner exposes domestic tension and past desires in “The Next Mile” and in Calvin Lantz’s “The Diagnosis” we see the impact of ill health on a marriage. The desire for love is poignantly told in Sandra Campbell’s “Alice’s Yearning” while an outing in 1980s Ottawa hints at forbidden love in Paul McKeague’s “Downtown”. The cracks in a marriage are displayed in “The Love Language of Roaches” by Brittany Amos, and the uncoupling continues in Nour Abi-Nakhoul’s “Landlord”. A young girl learns life lessons from her grandfather in Rhema Sara Varkey’s “The Shadows Asleep” and Jennifer Falkner proves that the show must go on in “The Storytellers.”

In nonfiction we have the shortlist for the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest with a homage to a grandfather in “Mary Jain’s Last Dawn” by Sierra Jain-Lalande. In Deborah Ostrovsky’s “Known As” a wrong address triggers a chain of events that leads to memories of Poland. Scott Randall reveals the connection with his daughter through wordplay in “What Has Gone Away, What Remains,” and Leona Theis revisits her family’s challenges in housing over the years in “Shelter: A Person History.”

Elsewhere in nonfiction Denise Unrau examines how we ward off waves amid the flood in “Safekeeping” and Ian Roy returns to a time in his youth in “The Cabin.”

We return to our Dispatches series with Alice Burdick’s “Solidarity from the extant diaspora,” and Ziyad Saadi’s “How the Intersections of Queer and Palestinian Identities Swipe at the Achilles’ Heel of Zionism.”

In poetry we welcome the return of Susan Glickman to our pages with “At Dawn, the Mist.” We also have Veronika Gorlova with “impossible demands,” Kat Cameron with “A Beauty in Silence,” John Morris with “The Embrace” and “Labour of Love,” Angela Waldie with “A Drop of Water,” Lynda Monahan with “to be, at last,” Nicole Boyce with “The Surfeit,” and Preeti Kaur Dhaliwal with “Haptic Mirror”. We also welcome Tiffany Morris as our Spirit Ink contributor with “Wapoqsit (Sunbleached),” “Where They End,” and “Trees But Not Just Trees.” 

That day on the little stool with the magazine in Porto I pushed pause on time and bonded with the words and letters that originated in Barcelona. It made me realize the role of magazines as connector, and as well as a community. They transmit ideas and images across all who take part, and as art can do, leaves us all the better for it. When a magazine such at TNQ survives forty-five years it holds all the writers and readers in its grasp, the idea of it too precious to let go.

—Pamela Mulloy