Winter 2025-26, Volume 46, No. 4

$14.95

Cover photo of Matthew-Ray Testament Jones by NiLLa
Cover design by Tetro

Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture
Matthew-Ray “Testament” Jones

Fiction
Maya Lorey
Nadine McInnis
Callen S. Sor

Poetry
David Barrick
Danielle Hubbard
Morgen Jahnke
Eve Joseph
Diane Massam*
Yvon Mills
Kate Reider Collins
Mike Sluchinski

Creative Non-Fiction
Genia Blum
Patrick Friesen
Fig Mulder

*Note: Diane Massam’s name does not appear on the back cover of the issue. This was an error, for which we sincerely apologize.

Fiction Preview
Visitation on the Mountain by Nadine McInnis

We create a small outpost in the wilderness, strangers sheltering for the night in a hut high on Mount Garibaldi. The couples keep to themselves. One even brought some tealight candles that they’ve lit and set on the corner of the wooden table, the light creating a protective golden ring around them that others in the cabin do not breach. I’m sweaty from the eleven-kilometre snowshoe up the mountain and strip down to my merino layer.

All the way up here, the afternoon was still, with thick snow on the fir boughs hanging motionless as clouds. Now I can hear the wind starting to rise, whipping snow around the shelter, a hissing and ticking against glass and steel roof. The sounds of winter can be almost industrial. The low creaking sound of snow being pressed down beneath snowshoes, thumps and muffled percussion, the sandy rasp of skis on dry snow as they zipped by me, and now this intermittent roar of wind and the little clicks as the windows bow inwards slightly. What part of the machine are we? Here, in our couples and threesomes and in my case, a lone cog.

A fascinating array of dinner items have been unfolded from backpacks. Stew and couscous, smoked oysters and goat cheese, figs splayed open. The threesome over there is making martinis, having sent the tall man out into the snow to look for ice. He came back with an icicle that he cracked into pieces like crab legs. Ingenious wineglass stems have been screwed onto plexiglass bowls and the colour of the wine poured is garnet and rich in the dim firelight.

Creative Non-Fiction Preview
Camouflage by Fig Mulder

It wasn’t tenting in bear country that put me off. I wouldn’t mind the camping-in-January part either. For as long as I could remember, I’d wanted to learn more about foraging, carving, basket-weaving and friction fire, and this nine-month course promised me that. What scared me was the dress code.

Cotton kills, the welcome package had said. I’d read it over three times, especially the part about wearing wool and synthetics because cotton gets wet and stays wet, which could lead to hypothermia. For my entire adult life—which had included a 6000-kilometre cycling journey, trekking in the Andes and living in a Dominican village in monsoon season—I’d worn plain cotton T-shirts, denim and nondescript hoodies. They were as much a part of my identity as my short hair, red cycling jacket and the books I’d written in the Before Times.

In the two years since my parents died, I’d been living in a world that was too loud, too bright, and moving too fast. I didn’t write anymore. I didn’t coordinate volunteer projects. Often I couldn’t stop crying, or I forgot to eat. But I still rode my bike daily (and wool was too hot for cycling), and when I thought of buying synthetics, I still imagined them decades from now, floating in little bits, filling the bellies of turtles who later died of starvation. This course was the first thing I’d been excited about in years, yet now I was tripping over the welcome package. Did learning to forage for plants have to mean killing turtles, too? If I didn’t do this course, would I lie on my living room rug for the rest of eternity?

Poetry Preview
Cento iii by Eve Joseph

About semantics, too much has been made of the difference between
mourning & melancholia. Not everything that breaks needs to be
replaced or repaired. Everyone sees visions, you too, but no one admits
to it. I hear the books in all the rooms breathing calmly. I know not
these hands and yet I think there was a woman like me once had hands
like these. A blink of an eye, and all things pass. Here’s something I’ve
learned: The more birds, the more likely they will leave a tree at the same
moment.

lines & phrases by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Jason Heroux, George Seferis, Denise Levertov, Adelaide Crapsey, Najwan Darwish, Charles Rafferty