Fall 2026, Volume 47, No. 3

$14.95

Cover of Canuck the Crow by Shawn Bergman

Fiction
Tim Carlson
Alison Frost
Murgatroyd Monaghan
Jade Wallace
Terence Young

Poetry
Lara Chamoun
Olive Dempsey
Solomon Goudsward
Katharine Lange
Patti Lott
Erin Noteboom
Jade Palmer
Anton Pooles
Paula Turcotte
Cara Waterfall
Erin Wilson

Creative Non-Fiction
Uzma Kadri
Brian Philip-Whalen
J. Jill Robinson
Deborah Vail

Fiction Preview

Lost by J. Jill Robinson

Along with more than 123,000 others I’ve been following Vancouver’s Canuck the Crow and his human friend Shawn Bergman on Facebook. I joined the page just as Canuck and his mate Cassiar had built their second nest—the first had been raided by a predator. Intrigued by the human/crow relationship, enchanted by the two different creatures’ mutual regard and respect for one another, I checked in on the FB page every day—okay, several times a day—perusing the photos, reading the posts I’d missed. Canuck having a bath. Canuck eating a peanut. Canuck hanging out with Cassiar. With his buddy, Junior.

The second nest had better camouflage, and everyone was hopeful and excited. Then, oh joyous early June day, the new batch of babies hatched, and Shawn watched Canuck and Cassiar flying back and forth feeding their young. Everyone looked forward to seeing photos before long. But then misfortune struck again: another predator, a fellow crow this time. One lone baby survived only by happenstance, when Shawn heard a ruckus and came outside to see the large crow carrying something away from the nest while being aggressively chased by Canuck. The would-be murdering crow lost its grip about a foot from the ground and dropped what looked like a rag but turned out to be a baby crow, naked, and limp, which had fallen directly onto Shawn’s lawn. Canuck flew down beside it; Shawn approached and knelt; Canuck looked hard into Shawn’s eyes, and Shawn into Canuck’s. Shawn picked up the chick. Canuck hopped along beside him to the house; inside, Shawn wrapped the naked morsel in a towel, showed it to Canuck one more time, then took it to the Rehabber refuge. The baby, which Shawn named Gord after Gord Downie, was later adopted by a crow family in Maple Ridge, where he has thrived.

Canuck the Crow’s followers breathlessly follow each narrative thread, the crow life, the man’s life, as they unfold. Simultaneously, too, we are all brought much closer to crows than I for one have ever been. Crows are black and noisy. Sometimes they steal shiny objects. Sometimes they dive-bomb humans walking along the sidewalk during nesting season. Period. Until now.

Other plot twists have occurred, taking Shawn away from the faithful followers on the “Canuck and I” FB page, while we wait politely but impatiently, eager for the story to resume. There was the death of Shawn’s beloved grandmother; there was a car accident in which Shawn was injured. There were hassles by a woman who seemed to like stirring up trouble. But then things calmed down a bit, and I didn’t check in on Canuck and Shawn for a while: I was getting ready to depart from Banff and head for the coast, to our cabin on Galiano Island. Packing my car with supplies, with my dog Ringo’s bed and food and ball, with my summer clothes. …

Poetry Preview     

The Hudson Bay Blanket: A Counter Archive by Cara Waterfall

GREEN

Ledger. 1779—the counting begins in wool. Four black points
record size—mark a blanket, not a body—stitch replacing sinew.

In Witney, Oxfordshire, mills turn sheep’s breath to arithmetic.
One Made Beaver equals one winter of warmth, pelt become
currency. Record endorsed in frost and faith—an ossuary

of trade goods. The ledger learns the texture of desire: green

for land surveyed into sale, indigo for night unmeasured, red

for what the hand cannot unmake. The record speaks but not for
the hands that fed it. Margins unkempt with labour’s ghosts.

Loom. Points, they insisted, denote dimension, not value—yet every
thread remembers an animal, every pattern a name erased by trade.
French weavers called it empointer—to pierce, to stitch sense

into cloth. Thus, the fabric found its first mouth. In the mill’s dark
belly, gears hummed slow as confession—an endless rosary of wool.
Shuttle and treadle kept tempo, bearing wound and weather.

Selvedge. Dream the blanket before colour, only the phantom heat
between fibres. The first woman to cut one into a coat heard

the forest sigh inside the seam. She folded that silence against her
ribs. The edge refuses to fray — it knows what it holds.

four points become scars /

my hand forgets what the needle remembers  …

Creative Non-Fiction Preview

Oracle by Sarah Enns

Sleeping in the hospital bed, my dad’s face is grey but luminous. All night it glows, and mine too, I think, from where it rests on his bed’s plastic railing. Three a.m. and I imagine my face looks just like his, my cheeks paper-thin but pulsing under my hands.

I didn’t touch my dad’s face when the doctor told us he might die because I have no memory of ever touching my dad’s face and I was afraid it would mean I was saying goodbye. I was trying to make sure of what everything meant and understand all the signs. My mom kissed his forehead and stroked his hair. I held the top of his hand below the skin sprouting IVs and my dad murmured that he was happy I was going to have a baby. “Me too,” I said, not pregnant, but not knowing what he might, in the end, foresee, drifting as he was between here and the holy place.

The ancient Greeks believed in miraculous dreams, in lying down on sacred ground and, unconscious and unwell, following the gods into purification and prophecy. I learned this on my honeymoon to Greece, just two months earlier. After acclimatizing in Athens, my husband Jonathan and I arrived at the ancient amphitheatre of Epidaurus. We went early, sunrise, so the site wouldn’t be crawling through the nose and then one short puff of air through the mouth. Am I remembering my grandmother, ten years ago, snoring like this when I was at her deathbed? My cousins and I sat in a circle around her room singing quietly while my dad held her hand and cried out when she stopped breathing.

Behind the curtain to our left a man calls “I’m in pain!” and “Hello?” every few minutes. Anemic light spills over the plastic curtain blocking off the hallway where nurses in pastels hurry back and forth. They crinkle the curtain open in half-hour intervals to check my dad’s vitals and change the bags of fluids swaying above us. If he lives through the night, he’ll be out of immediate danger. That’s what everyone administering the medicine says, and I repeat it to myself, reading my dad’s face. During the crisis, hours before, they’d improperly inserted one of the IVs giving him new blood and now it hurts him. He winces in agony, his mouth opening and twisting but making no noise, and he tries to pinch shut the plastic. The machine beeps in alarm and I get up and move away from the bed. A nurse comes and tells us the bag is almost empty. My dad says he can’t stand it anymore but the nurse pushes a button and opens the tube anyway. When I hear my dad whimper, I turn away, an attempt to protect us both.

Before my grandmother died, my sister-in-law told her that she was pregnant. She wasn’t, but she knew saying it would make my grandmother happy. My nephew was born nine months after my grandmother died, so it was like my grandmother, in her last sacred sleep, dreamed him into being. …