Humber Literary Review: vol. 11, issue 2

VOLUME 11 ISSUE 2 fall + winter 2023/24

WAUBGESHIG RICE // interview R AYMOND G ARIÉPY // 2023 CNFC/HLR creative nonfiction prize winner G ARY BARWIN & C ATHERINE AUS TEN // fiction JESSIC A BEBENEK & C ATHERINE S T. DENIS // poetry HE ATHER BABCOCK & LÉ A TAR ANTO // creative nonfiction K AREN SHANGGUAN // comic HE ATHER GOODCHILD // art

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VOLUME 11 ISSUE 2 fall + winter 2023/24

CONTENTS FROM THE EDITORS

3

// FICTION CATHERINE AUSTEN GARY BARWIN LARRY BAER ELI MUSHUMANSKI

5 16 30 43

Welcome to the Margins My Father, Nazi Ventriloquist Dinner Hospital Beds

// POETRY JESSICA BEBENEK CATHERINE ST. DENIS PATRICIA ARHINSON

15 [Two Poems] 28 [Three Poems] 51 [Two Poems]

// CREATIVE NONFICTION RAYMOND GARIÉPY HEATHER BABCOCK KATE BIRD LÉA TARANTO

11 22 40 47

The Unborn Dead Are Yet Among Us Fifty Dollars for the Powder Room About Face Why Juk Makes Me Cry

// COMICS KAREN SHANGGUAN

32 Wind

INTERVIEWS // REVIEWS WAUBGESHIG RICE REVIEWS

52 [Interview] 58 FAITHFULLY SEEKING FRANZ

REBELLION BOX MUSICAL REVOLUTIONS: HOW THE SOUNDS OF THE WESTERN WORLD CHANGED

CONTRIBUTORS HEATHER GOODCHILD

62 64 [Featured Artist]

MASTHEAD PUBLISHER Patrice Esson EDITORS Eufemia Fantetti D.D. Miller FICTION EDITORS Sarah Feldbloom Kelly Harness Matthew Harris Alyson Renaldo CREATIVE NONFICTION EDITOR Leanne Milech POETRY EDITOR Meaghan Strimas REVIEWS EDITOR Angelo Muredda ART/ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Cole Swanson COMICS EDITOR Christian Leveille COPY EDITORS Tanya d’Anger Andrew Drager Claire Majors Andy Scott Suzanne Zelazo PROOFREADER Claire Majors DESIGNER Kilby Smith-McGregor

Humber Literary Review, Volume 11 Issue 2 Copyright © December 2023 The Humber Literary Review All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission.

All copyright for the material included in Humber Literary Review remains with the contributors, and any requests for permission to reprint their work should be referred to them.

Humber Literary Review c/o The Department of English Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning 205 Humber College Blvd.

Toronto, ON M9W 5L7 humberliteraryreview.com Literary Magazine.

ISSN 2292-7271 Layout and Design by Kilby Smith-McGregor Cover Image and Portfolio by Heather Goodchild Humber Literary Review is a product of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning’s Department of English Printed and bound in Canada

by Paper Sparrow Printing on FSC-certified paper Opinions and statements in the publication attributed to named authors do not necessarily reflect the policy of the Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning or its Department of English.

ADVISORY Vera Beletzan Senior Dean, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning, Humber College Bronwyn Drainie Former Editor-in-Chief of the Literary Review of Canada; author Alison Jones Publisher, Quill & Quire Joe Kertes Dean Emeritus, Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts; author Antanas Sileika Former Director, Humber School for Writers; author Nathan Whitlock Program Coordinator, Creative Book Publishing Program; author

FRONT COVER | HEATHER GOODCHILD OLD FRIENDS (DETAIL), 39" x 52", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP AND WOOL), 2021–22

Photo: LF Documentation. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

FROM THE EDITORS IN HER PIECE OF CREATIVE NONFICTION “ABOUT FACE,” KATE BIRD REFLECTS ON HOW PEOPLE’S REACTIONS TO HER DON’T ALWAYS REFLECT HOW SHE’S FEELING: “For years, I’ve been told I look one way, when how I feel inside is another,” she begins. This feels like a common enough preoccupation, but she takes the question to another level: “And I’ve wondered—is my face a disembodied entity with a life and mind of its own?” It is, mostly, a rhetorical question, but one that speaks to greater concerns about perception, about how identities are constructed, by ourselves for ourselves and also how others construct identities for us through subjective interpretations.

Questions of identity and how identities are shaped weave their way through the pieces in this issue of the Humber Literary Review. In “Fifty Dollars for the Powder Room,” Heather Babcock looks back at a life-changing moment from her youth while reflecting on how the neighbourhood she grew up in has changed as well, shifting from the rough, unsafe area it once was to the gentrified, manicured area it is today. Léa Taranto explores food and identity in “Why Juk Makes Me Cry,” where an attempt to recreate one of her grandmother’s dishes becomes a process of coming to understand her Poh Poh as well as an examination of the intersection of food and culture.

In terms of fiction, Eli Mushumanski’s “Hospital Beds” is a coming-of-age tale of sorts that looks at identity and relationality through the lens of a young girl coming to understand her place in her family and community, while Catherine Austen’s “Welcome to the Margins” tells the story of a librarian whose discovery of notes written in the margins of library books leads to a growing obsession with

marginalia and the identity of the person who is leaving the notes.

The comic featured in this issue also picks up on these themes, albeit through an inanimate entity.

Haunting in its use of colour and the washed-out images on the page, Karen Shangguan’s “wind” charts the wind’s growing understanding of self and place in the world: “i am the wind and this is my only constant,” the comic opens as wind defines itself by what it is it not. But then there is a shift in understanding: “yet i found myself part of the objecthood of everything.” In this issue of the HLR, even the wind is reckoning with its identity.

An insightful and illuminating interview with Waubgeshig Rice about his new novel Moon of the Turning Leaves examines what it means to write while “trying to be as authentically Anishinaabe as possible.”

The interview explores what differentiates this sequel from its best-selling predecessor and how the new book attempts to depict a decolonized landscape that allows space for a reclamation and revisioning of Anishinaabe culture and ways of being, knowing, and doing.

For all of the thematic echoes in this issue, there is also so much variety, both in terms of content and form.

The fiction, for instance, provides a fascinating range of styles, from the restrained storytelling employed in Larry Baer’s deceptively simple “Dinner,” which depicts a couple having dinner in their home, to the virtuosic formal play of Gary Barwin’s “My Father, Nazi Ventriloquist.”

All of this adds up to an issue that will both challenge and comfort you—a perfect combination for another long, dark, and increasingly unpredictable winter.

Best wishes, The HLR Collective

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 4 AT SANTA MARIA DE OLEARIA (PROCESS PICTURE), 2018 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist.

CATHERINE AUSTEN

W

hat an ass, the book said—not the text, but a scribble in the margin beside the author’s defence of the pronoun “he” used to represent “all mankind.”

What an ass. Lorna spotted the blue ink when she riffled the book at check-in. Sometimes people marked their places with money. She’d found a five-dollar bill in a John Grisham novel once and a Starbucks gift card worth $6.12 in a contemporary quilt collection.

The ink—royal blue from a Sharpie fine point—appeared in the next book Lorna checked in, too, a lyrical mystery according to the jacket copy. A previous reader had marked the text in pencil, crossing out the letters s-e-a from the word seagulls. In the margin beside the strikethrough was the blue note, Though there’s no species called “seagull,” the word can refer to any species of gull—common, herring, ring-billed, etc. “Seagull” is correct and more common than just “gull.” So what’s your deal? It was that last line, squished at the bottom of the page, that captured Lorna’s interest. Why ask a question of a previous reader? Who was she—Lorna was certain the blue-penner was a woman—really talking to?

Consulting the computer, Lorna found that both marked books had been returned by a Belinda Workman, whose borrowing history spanned the Dewey decimal system. She had forty-three books out on her card, twenty-four holds, and a “for later” shelf of 658 titles. She’d returned three books today, and the third—from the 613s, the health section—contained another blue note. Next to a paragraph claiming that exercising twice a week could extend your life by 60 percent was the response, Seriously? I’ll die at 50 or live to 80 because of aerobics? Learn math. A note to the author this time. By someone under fifty, Lorna presumed. Someone possibly still in the branch, in the stacks, taking a deep breath and uncapping her pen.

Lorna recalled a day from university, forty years ago, in the reference room of Douglas Library, signing

out documents for three hours at a time, reading them on the premises in a designated carrel. The silence was suffocating and only a looming deadline kept her awake. Flipping a page of American Foreign Policy in the Early 20th Century, she’d found a statement pencilled in capitals in the upper margin—MY NAME IS KAREN. I’M NOT WEARING ANY PANTIES—and she’d jerked to attention. Her eyes returned to those words as she took her notes, depression settling into her bones. There were bolder lives out there, the marginalia said—a cadre of whisperers who cracked each other up, breaking the rules to have their say, while timid souls like Lorna suffered through dry books and dry panties, keeping thoughts to themselves.

“I can’t find my holds.” An elderly man teetered beside Lorna’s desk, his hand shaking around the handle of his cane.

Lorna drew back from the faint smell of decay.

A steady stream of inquiries kept her busy for the next half hour. Nothing fun, nothing like “What were the various means of execution in Roman gladiatorial rings?” or “What percentage of countries use public funding for religious schooling?” or even “When was the skateboard invented?” Lorna hadn’t been asked a juicy question in years. People googled everything. All they asked of librarians was where to find things.

A young woman approached hesitantly and hovered several feet from Lorna’s desk, a baby in her arms and a toddler clinging to her trousers. Lorna remembered them from an orientation session for recent immigrants—the baby had vitiligo, and Lorna had mistaken a white patch on his chin for spit-up and offered a tissue. The urge to wipe the baby’s face was still with her. She was almost grateful when another patron mistook the family for simply hanging around and stepped in front.

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 5

WELCOME TO THE MARGINS

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 6

The bolder patron looked like a 1940s film star: young, white, slender, Katharine Hepburn in a blue pencil skirt. “I’m looking for a history book,” she said in a dusky voice with a smile at its edges. “She-Wolves.

It’s supposed to be on the shelf.” She handed Lorna a slip of paper on which she’d written the call number.

Lorna nodded at the crisp clear penmanship in royal blue. “Do you have your library card?” she asked.

She took the card from a manicured hand and typed in the user ID: Belinda Workman of the blue marginalia.

“Did you drop these off today?” she asked, holding up the three graffitied books.

“I did.”

They stared at each other for several seconds.

Lorna rose to her feet. “Let’s have a look.”

She located She-Wolves several decimal points past its rightful place. “Should I check it out for you?”

“No thanks,” Belinda said. “I have more to find.”

Lorna returned to her desk alone. “I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she told the young mother still hovering nearby. “What was it you needed?”

“They’ve only underlined the lesserknown myths,” the clerk said. “I think the marks show the reader’s surprise in discovering that other myths exist.”

Forty minutes later, Lorna’s desktop held eleven books that Belinda Workman had borrowed over the past eight weeks, each open to a page marked with blue ink.

“Whatcha doin?” asked Chelsea, a young co-worker whose refusal to enunciate annoyed Lorna to no end.

“I’m looking at these marginalia. Some libraries set aside a small section of books they allow patrons to write in. Their conversation becomes as interesting as the text.”

“Emilia would never let us,” Chelsea said.

“She might be open to a display,” Lorna said. Chelsea loved displays.

“They look like they’re all from the same person.”

“These are, yes. But I’m sure there are others.

Should we look?”

They headed to the shelves, Chelsea overtaking Lorna and talking over her shoulder. “We’ll find

the best stuff in the 100s, dontcha think? Philosophy?

Paranormal? For sure.”

Chelsea stayed in the stacks skimming books while Lorna grabbed an armful and returned to her desk. “Please leave those!” she shouted, jogging the last few feet.

Emilia, her supervisor, examined the blue-penned books. “Don’t shout! It’s special needs today.”

At the computer bank behind the desk, a boy held his hands over his ears.

Lorna quietly explained that she was considering a project on marginalia. “Perhaps just a personal study,” she said, setting down her new stack of books. “But maybe a display or a blog that other libraries can participate in. Found in a Book or something like that.”

Emilia squinted. “We can’t have people writing in library books.”

“Of course not. Although I have heard of libraries that offer a small selection—” “Yes, it’s a terrible idea.”

“But that’s not my idea,” Lorna argued, her voice rising. “I’m making a study of the physical interactions of our patrons with our books.” She liked the sound of that and started spewing phrases. “The impact of the borrower on the book … Things we leave in the leaves….”

She paused to let that one sink in. “Dog ears—” “I hate dog ears. It’s vandalism.” Emilia gestured to the marginalia. “All of this is vandalism.”

“Yes, but it’s an interaction between people and texts that we assist unintentionally.”

“Isn’t it super interesting?” Chelsea said as she approached with six books in hand. “Like this whole other level of reading.”

“An underground,” Lorna said, straying so far from her original interest that she felt like a different woman.

“Should we include bookmarks?” Chelsea asked.

“Someone left a feather in this one.”

Lorna shrugged. “It’s the residue of a reader, I suppose.”

Emilia stared at the elegant owl feather in Chelsea’s hand. “We can’t encourage writing in books. But I like the idea of an underground.”

“Who doesn’t?” Chelsea smiled at a client approaching the desk, a middle-aged man led by a service dog.

“Found in a Book,” Emilia repeated, nodding.

“A blog?”

“And a display,” Chelsea added. “I’ll do the display.”

“We could go beyond a display into essays or articles,” Lorna said. “We could take on the issue of what people do with the thoughts that reading inspires.”

“Reading as the instigator!” Emilia shouted.

The boy at the computer bank began to moan and the special needs aide sighed.

Emilia’s face changed utterly with her smile, no longer hanging like an empty pocket but filled with dreams and memories. “I wonder if anyone left a note in Proust. That could be the centre of the display.”

“Where are your washrooms?” the man with the service dog asked.

“S

“S

o this is our brand,” Chelsea said, holding up a sketch created by an artist friend she’d met online. The logo, Found in a Book, sat between bookends in Century Schoolbook font. “The display will have eight rows of open books, set up like lines on a page. At the sides we’ll have enlargements of what we found in the margins, plus a stack of post-its for people to add their own scribbles.” She beamed at Lorna. “Isn’t it brilliant?”

C

helsea was attaching blue and green streamers to the ceiling tiles in the children’s section when Lorna arrived. Topher, the journalist, was at her side— whether to cover the reading or on a date, Lorna wasn’t sure. “Are those butter tarts from Heavenly Hearth?”

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 7

ixty-two employees at twenty-seven branches are in,” Chelsea announced the following Tuesday, spreadsheet in hand. She was running with this project, clutching it like a football the biggest men couldn’t tug from her skinny arms. She giggled at a copy of the Dalai Llama’s Art of Happiness marked with the margin note, What a fraud. “I so needed this.”

“What about this?” said Joseph or James—there were two clerks with biblical names and beards that Lorna could never keep straight. He opened a volume of Ovid’s Metamorphoses with underlined stanzas and stars in the margins.

“What are we supposed to do with this?” Chelsea asked. She flipped to the back cover.

“They’ve only underlined the lesser-known myths,” the clerk said. “I think the marks show the reader’s surprise in discovering that other myths exist.”

“That’s a lot of supposition,” Lorna said. She looked past him to the self-checkout by the stairs, where Belinda Workman was scanning a pile of hardcovers.

“Look for something bolder.”

She considered passing Belinda casually but settled on a direct approach. “Hello again. There’s an author talk on Elizabeth the First next month. Since you were interested in medieval women….”

“You remembered me!” Belinda exclaimed. She passed her books under the scanner in piles of three.

“I don’t do author talks, actually. Unless they’re handsome.” She winked.

Lorna laughed far too loudly. “No luck there. But in the children’s section this Saturday, we’re hosting a graphic novelist who’s handsome.”

Belinda laughed back. “I don’t read children’s books.”

“It’s exciting,” Lorna said.

“The hardest part is choosing which scribbles to include,” Chelsea said. “We’ll have to save most of them for the blog.”

Lorna scanned the books Chelsea had flagged for display. There were too many shallow insults and weird objects—a condom packet, a maple seed casing—but there were several examples of readers deeply engaged with reading, stirred up as though the text had prodded a nest of wasps inside them.

She laid a hand on Chelsea’s arm. “You’ve done a magnificent job with this. I’m glad you’re having fun.”

Chelsea hugged her, squeezing tightly. “You’ll help me make the final decisions tomorrow, right?”

Lorna was so surprised by the embrace that she found herself on the verge of tears. “Of course.”

“I called the press,” Chelsea said. “D’I tell you?

There’s a reporter coming in this aft. Topher Something. Not TV, but still.”

The reporter arrived carrying a take-out coffee and moved with the comfort of a heavy weed habit. “It’s not an original idea,” he told Lorna as he glanced at the sketch, “but we loved Chelsea’s enthusiasm on the phone. Are these the marked-up books?”

“Some of them.” She pointed to a marginal rant on animal cruelty next to a casual hunting scene in a historical novel. “Reading stirs thoughts and feelings so strong that readers aren’t sure what to do with them.

Many have nowhere to put them except in the margins of the book.”

Topher picked up a book on time management that recommended exercise as a reward for time well spent. This guy is a tool, the margin note read. “You don’t think the reader could have kept that to himself?

It’s not like the author’s going to see it.”

“So who are marginalia for?” Lorna responded eagerly. “It’s a conversation among readers, isn’t it?”

Topher shrugged. “Is graffiti a conversation among passersby?”

Lorna’s eagerness faltered, but only briefly. He asked how the project had started, and she told him of the blue pen marks. “I began to riffle every book I picked up,” she said. “I wondered if there was freedom to be found in the margins.”

“Is Chelsea around?” he asked.

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 8

Chelsea asked. “Oh my god. They’re too good for the kids. Set one aside for Jimby.”

Jimby was the visiting author, a graphic novelist for children with a crossover following among teens and adults. The room filled up twenty minutes before his arrival and burst into applause when he walked in carrying a duffel bag of props. Lorna hoped he would put the bag down before anyone took photos. Jimby was a young Lebanese Canadian, tall and fit and handsome, a publicist’s dream. He set his bag on the table beside the podium and unzipped its full length, then carefully extracted rod marionettes to animate the reading of his latest book, in which two aliens stranded on earth collect butterflies to pollinate their home planet. Most of the children already knew the story and many had brought their own copies to be signed. Jimby dazzled them all with his smile and theatrics.

They lined up after the reading, their parents at their sides. They barely looked at Lorna as she pencilled their names in block capitals on slips of paper she passed to Jimby. He welcomed each reader by name, asked if they created stories of their own, drew butterflies on the endpapers of their books beside his signature. “Authors are the only ones allowed to write in books,” Lorna whispered to the next boy in line.

Belinda Workman stepped through the glass doors, wearing a checkered miniskirt and high heels. She joined the line to buy a book and caught Jimby’s eye just by existing. “Someone’s attacking your photocopier out there,” she shouted to Lorna with a smile.

Lorna hurried out of the children’s section.

She recognized the man at the copier as a regular who studied onsite for hours each day, reading books like Etruscans read the entrails of birds, comparing unrelated texts and getting so excited by his findings that he sometimes accosted other patrons and had to be asked to leave. Tonight he was focused on the copier, shouting, “Not double-sided!”

“I can fix it,” Lorna assured him. “Please don’t hit the machine.”

While she changed the copy settings, he told her about pyramids and pi and how the answer was on page 314, he just didn’t know which book. “So I have to study them.”

“All of them?” she asked.

“All of them.” His smile was so earnest, like a child’s, Lorna wondered what had gone wrong in his life.

A burst of giggles came from the children’s section. Belinda held one of Jimby’s puppets while he

danced with another, the two of them shuddering with laughter.

Lorna fetched her purse from the back room and pulled out a greasy napkin from a side pocket. She ate the butter tart she’d saved in three bitter bites.

“T

he cleaners complained about the mess,” Emilia said in the morning. “Apparently there were cookies squished into the carpet.”

Chelsea shrugged.

“Were they not able to clean it?” Lorna asked.

“Of course they cleaned it.” Emilia looked over the marginalia display, rows of vandalized books which from a distance looked like a single page of text in revision. “It’s excellent, Chelsea. Are you ready with your vlog?”

Chelsea nodded. “We’ll still share the blog,” she said with a glance at Lorna. “But the vlog is just me.

Once a week. So that’s an afternoon of my time, FYI.” Lorna turned away from the display. It held no sense of yearning or failing to communicate. “There’s a pile of books on my desk I should attend to. Excuse me.”

No, read a black scribble in the margin of a dictionary of clichés which claimed that “forge a bond” was the same as “form.” James or Joseph had flagged it. Further along in the book, another No was penned beside the claim that “grind to a halt” was equivalent to “stop.” This time a second word had been written in the margin: Nuance.

Exactly, Lorna thought. She chose a purple pen, lowered the book to her lap, and wrote in tiny cursive: Grind to a halt implies weight and power, wheels in motion toward an end, desire or momentum thwarted, a slow cumbrous cessation in the middle of things. It’s not just stopping. This took up most of the white space on the page. She stared at the mess she’d made and thought, Who cares?

She set down her pen in defeat. She was like the assholes in the comments section of every online article she’d ever read, pitching their two cents at each passing target. The anonymous disappointed—she was one of them now. She closed the book bewildered.

“You look sad today,” a man said. Lorna looked up into the face of a client with Down’s syndrome. She might have assisted him last week in finding a book on scorpions; she wasn’t sure if this was the same man or a different one with the same condition. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “Your hair looks nice.”

She patted her hair. “You’re very kind.”

He patted his own hair, smiling. “My hair looks nice too,” he said.

On the bus home, she shared her seat with a man wearing a Bluetooth speaker who ground his thigh against hers and yapped at full volume for the entire thirty-minute ride, swearing and repeating “Fun stuff” four times and shouting “There are no rules!” as if that were a good thing. Lorna shrank into her seat. An old Indigenous woman across the aisle caught her eye and smiled, and Lorna smiled back, clutching her purse to her chest.

C

“Y

ou could use a vacation,” Chelsea told her. Found in a Book was a fledged community of readers and librarians, soaring beyond anyone’s hopes. “What do you want to add to the acknowledgements section of the book?”

“I don’t care,” Lorna said.

“What about the woman who did the first notes you found?” Chelsea asked. “Do you want to thank her?”

“God no.” She looked around the library, her vision glancing off each individual and finding nowhere to settle.

“Have you thought of putting a book proposal together?” he asked Lorna.

“You and Chelsea. You’re like the two sides of librarians.”

F

ound in a Book was published the following spring and launched with a party at the central branch.

Emilia gave Lorna a lift over. Chelsea waved from the podium. They kept the reading brief and let the marginalia speak for them. Over 200 people milled around the displays, muttering in multiple languages. It was a proud celebration, full of hip, pretty people eating a second slice of cake and hesitant, poor people splitting a slice among their children.

Lorna had no appetite. She watched from a corner, in a position of little power or influence, not in the picture but in the frame, certain that she did not belong there, though surely someone did. ///

CATHERINE AUSTEN // 9

helsea looked fetching on her vlog. An agent called the library looking for her. “Have you thought of putting a book proposal together?” he asked Lorna. “You and Chelsea. You’re like the two sides of librarians.”

The vlog went viral for two days and garnered attention from attention-seekers. In the Longmire branch, two college girls desecrated the gardening books, two entire shelves tucked away from view. They filmed themselves stumbling upon the mess and acting horrified. “It’s like a massacre!” one exclaimed. They were fined two thousand dollars plus public shaming.

“No one cares why people feel the need to write in margins,” Lorna muttered.

Chelsea laughed. “This is the most fun I ever had at work.”

Some patrons stopped to read the display, but most ignored it. A few were outraged by the vandalism and perplexed as to why it was in the spotlight. “It’s not like they have anything interesting to say,” an old man said.

“I don’t get it,” his wife agreed.

Lorna slacked off for half an hour and looked up Belinda Workman on Goodreads. Her reviews were mean, in every nuance. This book needed another edit.

This is nowhere near as good as the first in the series.

Let’s hope this writer takes up another profession.

Let bad books die, Lorna had been taught. You don’t have to murder them.

She spent another forty minutes googling marginalia and concluded that the people who write in margins are not marginalized people.

She left work wishing she’d never started this project. She picked up McDonald’s and brought it to the beach. Seagulls crowded the shore, one alpha squawking nonstop and swooping in on the fries Lorna tossed to shyer birds. They didn’t complain, the shy ones. They would die young, and quietly. This was the nature of life. Who was she to argue with evolution?

She was surprised to see the client with the page-number obsession sitting at the edge of the sand with his head bowed, reading a book. He raised his eyes as she approached.

“What a nice surprise to see you here,” she said.

“You didn’t bring your photocopies?”

He drew back, his stare fixed on her box of fries.

“I work at the Cedarview Library,” she explained.

He tucked his book under his thigh and clasped his hands.

“Anyway, have a nice day,” she said, eager to leave.

There was no trace of a sweet smile on his face.

He reminded her of a cornered insect, a walking stick clinging to a window screen hoping it hadn’t been spotted.

RAYMOND GARIÉPY // 10 TAKE UP THE MANTLE (DETAIL), INSTALLATION (PORCELAIN, WOOL, CARDBOARD SUB-STRUCTURE), 2012 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist.

RAYMOND GARIÉPY

T

his narrative’s bullet is stillborn.

The sonographer’s probe slid across my wife’s abdomen; the transducer’s sound waves captured images from inside her body. The ultrasound monitor was not a portal to light, love, and life made visible. Black, white, and grey interstellar residue appeared. Is the baby okay? was the entry to darkness at midday that left my wife and I, like Job, to “grope in the noonday as in the night.”

I have seen the rings of Saturn at high noon. Walking past the city’s planetarium one day in summer, I stopped to peer into telescopes set outside. I can’t believe I just saw its rings, I said. An astronomer described how the lenses magnify the sky, even in daylight. Saturn is about 1.2 billion kilometres from Earth, yet telescopes detect starlight and sunlight reflecting off it. The light you see now was emitted over forty years ago! he said.

A scope, directed at the sun, a mere 150 million kilometres away, revealed a restless star whose eruptions resembled ostrich plumes quivering in a breeze.

Their prominences rose 240 thousand kilometres from the surface. The sun’s immense fury left me momentarily estranged from Earth. I was insignificant. I was alone, the last human to see and feel sunshine.

Deep space rewarded me with celestial radiance alive from the past cast Earthward. The difference between the waves pulsing toward me and the blurred images cast upon the ultrasound monitor was the absence of a pulse. The revelation was a stellar corpse, no longer gravitationally bound to its star.

Night at noon became our ghost. The baby stalled and died at seven months. My spouse would be hospitalized the next day. We did not sleep. We slept. When she turned on her side to face me, the deadweight within her not only nudged me awake, it awakened a mashup of grief and melancholy and failure. A part of us was gone for good.

T

he attending nurse asked me to wait in the corridor. I left my wife. Oxytocin, administered intravenously, induced slow labour. Alone, she would drive out our lifeless child.

I nail-gunned my shoulders to the hallway’s pukegreen wall. I lost all focus and disengaged from a future that had promised something new. I entered a space cratered from an absence of clarity. What the hell went wrong? My repertoire of anxiety and insecurity was intensified by my lack of sleep and cravings for nicotine and caffeine. I did not want to be part of the exodus playing out. Everything, and everyone, clawed at my nerve endings. I wanted to be in the room with her.

I looked at the faces of the expectant mothers waddling past, hoping to see my wife’s face among them as she made her way to the delivery room, our healthy baby about to enter the world. The parade of so much pregnancy weighed on me. I filtered the surrounding sounds and targeted my wife’s staccato breathing and the nurse’s urgent urging. New mothers shuffled along, many on the arms of their partners. Bycatch noises distracted me. The Parkinson shake of a food trolley’s wheels, the emphysemic air-conditioner, and the metronomic slap-stick-slap-stick of rubber soles against linoleum muffled the acoustics of the closest I’d been to labour and birth.

Across from me, a wall of windows looked into the nursery, where chirping and wailing newborns were cocooned. Two years earlier, our son had been born by C-section in this hospital, and the nursery was where I saw him for the first time and made my first promise: I’ll always be here for you.

T

he nurse called me back. My wife had drained and hidden her tears. Blood and tissue, the colour and texture of crushed cranberries, stained the bed. The nurse had deposited the stillborn body in an

RAYMOND GARIÉPY // 11

THE UNBORN DEAD ARE YET AMONG US

RAYMOND GARIÉPY // 12

aluminum bedpan she’d covered with a white towel.

Placing the receptacle on the floor, she shoved it aside with her foot, like a dog’s food bowl.

She left it for you. Look at it! my wife said. What she could not carry kept her from looking. She expected me to put my eyes into words for her. A pugilistic heart pommelled my chest wall. My anxiety slugged its way toward what finish I did not know. Turning my back to the metal coffinette, I cheated us of words.

We argued over a dead baby.

Sometimes cowardice has its rightful place. I knew that fearing our fear was the greater fear. I did not have the balls to look at death in miniature. I willed myself to pass by, not pause. I had no wish to see a deceased self. Easier to pretend to look and lie. A made-up story would be the antidote to the horror we’d conceived.

The corpse was not ours. It belonged to another child who’d deviated from its expected trajectory. It had turnips for limbs, and its eyes, ears, and nose were larval. The creature was an aberration crowned with a grotesque Francis Bacon head, a worthless blob of potato brain sprouting fur and possessing a tumour-filled maw of gnashing teeth. Gorging upon itself, the slobbering organism had gnawed through its umbilical cord. That’s what damned it to hell.

Had the alcohol, pot, and hash enjoyed in my youth, or the one-time hit of LSD dropped in high school, lingered all those years inside me like bullets in a handgun’s chamber? Did my excesses contribute to manufacturing defective and abomination-creating sperm?

I knew that fearing our fear was the greater fear. I did not have the balls to look at death in miniature.

Scientists have discovered toxins in the umbilical cord blood of newborns. The industrial stew passes from mom to baby. Throughout the pregnancy, the fetus mainlines bug killer, household cleansers, mercury, steroids, non-stick spray, and carbon monoxide.

Maybe that killed it.

Who was responsible? My spouse? Her parents?

My unknown birth parents? (I’m the son of who knows who.) Do I have defective genes? Attributing blame would not solve the riddle as to why my wife and I botched making a whole and healthy child.

The post-mortem report stated: “The specimen showed no signs of abnormality. The vascular loss was evident. Spontaneous abortion. A failure to thrive.”

Jettisoned gestation. A stillbirth. Life terminated itself at seven months. Dissected, analyzed, bagged.

Following its autopsy, the creature was stuffed into a biohazard container and incinerated with human tissue, amputated limbs, malfunctioning livers, kidneys, and hearts. (Late at night, did the villains from folklore, who rob children of their innocence, sneak into the biohazard storage and steal the brains, legs, arms, bones, organs, and eyes from the doll-sized corpses, repurposing them to create the monsters of our nightmares?)

M

y wife and I did not inquire about our broken infant. We did not ask for its body, leaving no proof a reasonable facsimile of us existed. We didn’t discuss a memorial, nor hold a candlelight vigil for the unbaptized baby. My mother paid for a Catholic Mass for the repose of its soul.

Some people believe the souls of the unborn choose their families in advance. Greedy kids pick wealthy and doting parents, while a child with low self-esteem selects abusive ones.

Taiwanese fetus spirits of the aborted and miscarried wander the Earth in search of their parents’ love and care.

Scandinavian folklore says the northern lights are the spirits of dead young women. Greenland’s Inuit imagine spirits travel to the upper world or the underworld. The Jews say old souls attach themselves to new individuals. Did our son or daughter find its way into another person?

I wanted a second child (half-heartedly). Does the soul of a ditherer get a pass?

In elementary school, the nuns and priests taught that unbaptized spirits travel to limbo, a “blind world” between heaven and hell. This holding cell denies its residents the sight and warmth of the sun. Here, observed Virgil in Dante’s Inferno, “the anguish of the souls” utter “no lamentation other than the sighs that kept the air forever trembling.”

In catechism class, we drew pictures to celebrate Lent, the period of penance and reflection leading to Christ’s death and rebirth. My drawings depicting the souls of the dead ascending to heaven were Valentineshaped hearts with angel wings. Pious spirits were yellow, and impious ones were coloured black to represent binge sinners, pagans, the unbaptized and illegitimate, their feathery appendages tattered and singed, their fate a fait accompli.

My wife and I were each in the middle of the other’s unmerited suffering. Our spirits splintered. The shards fled our bodies, leaving exit wounds.

After reviewing the autopsy report and our respective medical histories, a geneticist concluded that stillbirth was not an indicator of inherited abnormalities or underlying birth defects. He could not explain why the baby did not survive to term. Angst kicked in, goaded as always by the mystery in my life. Adopted, I knew nothing of my origins, except that I was an accursed bastard whose soul was saved through baptism.

My wife and I did not heed suggestions to try as soon as possible to get pregnant. We didn’t believe the level of our grief to be in its infancy and that another child would temper our sorrow. I do not recall talking

with my wife about the sum of our fears and feelings.

The stillbirth did not strengthen our marriage nor influence its demise.

I view life through a prism of losses—the death of our mothers and fathers, our lost children, broken relationships, squandered friendships, and the time lost reliving loss. Rather than sunlight refracting into a multicoloured spectrum, the emerging light is spectral and distant, as though viewed through the opposite end of a telescope. ///

FM RADIO AFTERNOON, 22" x 30", GOUACHE ON PAPER, 2021 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

RAYMOND GARIÉPY // 14

PINK LEMONADE, 22" x 30", GOUACHE ON PAPER, 2021 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

JESSICA BEBENEK

And what will I do if at the end of all this I am not led by the hand to understanding?

Well, you don’t have to do a single thing with your life but wait by the window and wonder how you have been so mistaken There is no end-of-all-this Your one brief light flashes amidst the billion, billion sparks as the Universe rises, dizzied with expanse, and tumbles forward into Creation

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE everybody alone with their little jobs making their little monies alone in co-working spaces alone at work wearing a blazer alone on an escalator in the eaton centre downtown in montreal or toronto or alone with my resume being interviewed alone as I rock to sleep someone else’s child with a man in a blue windbreaker alone on his bike making a buck alone at a café behind the counter or at a table alone with his macbook in the rain walking to work with one hand on the umbrella the other on alone with a customer laying patiently as I press clammy electrodes to her bare chest, wrists, ankles, and alone as I sit to roll-up my pant cuffs to share my new socks with alone with a tripod with mounted ring light with the whole world as I do my little clapping rolling dance of alone with today’s sponsor with something on in the background while I write my little emails alone and remote with a headset taking the call of alone while committed to offering exceptional service because we value the alone you feel while you sit at your desk while I sit at mine alone with the fear of being more afraid to visit the alone the external empty of alone in the cave of alone with the moss and shadows of alone creeping in to fill-up the inside walking alone like a monk in saffron robes towards the sea towards the desert towards the mountainous great range of alone ///

JESSICA BEBENEK // 15

TWO POEMS

THE END

GARY BARWIN // 16

GARY BARWIN

MY FATHER, NAZI VENTRILOQUIST ROUTINE 1 DUMMY:

A Nazi ventriloquist is onstage and like always, he’s wearing his black leather trench coat.

VENTRILOQUIST: Like me.

DUMMY: Exactly. And of course, the dummy on

his knee is also wearing a little black leather trench coat.

VENTRILOQUIST: Just like you.

DUMMY: Right.

VENTRILOQUIST: So the two of them start going through

The man, of course, not the dummy.

The dummy was more like a favourite son, for in the years my father was in hiding, Fritz—that was his name—was my father’s constant companion— after my mother, after his parents were captured.

Long afternoons, my father trying not to move his lips, while I stayed quiet, while Fritz made up things to remember. And then their routines. Fritz and my ventriloquist father. Two old friends, slave and master, Inquisitor and Jew. Patsy and straight man.

Dogshadow and hand. Or maybe just two shadows.

Son and father.

Why am I writing this? I’m a dummy, too, trying again to speak with my father now that he’s gone.

ROUTINE 2

their usual act.

DUMMY: DUMMY: Then this guy from the audience stands

up and begins shouting.

VENTRILOQUIST: He says, “I’m a Jew and I’ve had enough

of your racist jokes.”

VENTRILOQUIST: Speak!

DUMMY:

DUMMY: The ventriloquist starts to shout back at

the man for interrupting—I mean who wouldn’t—but the man says—

to that little shmuck on your knee.”

NARRATOR How does it begin? Snow-covered pines. A barn.

A trapdoor. Man in a Nazi uniform, a ventriloquist’s dummy on his knee. Hershel. My father.

No.

VENTRILOQUIST: Sprecht!

DUMMY:

VENTRILOQUIST: “You stay out of this, Klaus! I’m talking

Snow-covered pines. A barn. Man in a Nazi uniform, ventriloquist’s dummy on his knee.

Nein.

VENTRILOQUIST: We haff vays of makink you talk….

DUMMY:

Knew you’d say that.

VENTRILOQUIST: It’s been a long time since we had new

material. Or a stage.

DUMMY: Tell me about it … Scheisse!

GARY BARWIN // 17

AND THE MORNING AND THE EVENING, 36" x 60", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP AND WOOL), 2018 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist.

VENTRILOQUIST: What?

DUMMY: You’ve got me talking.

think we should end this routine. It’s enough for one day.

VENTRILOQUIST: What else can you do?

DUMMY: Chicken.

DUMMY: Follow orders. I was just following orders.

VENTRILOQUIST: I said it’s enough for one day. It’s time

VENTRILOQUIST: That’s what they all say.

DUMMY: That’s not dummy. I mean funny.

GARY BARWIN // 18

VENTRILOQUIST: That’s good. That’s sehr gut. So now I

to put you away.

DUMMY: Oh please no. Don’t put me in the

suitcase.

VENTRILOQUIST: Sprecht!

VENTRILOQUIST: Chicken.

DUMMY: No.

DUMMY: Don’t put me there.

VENTRILOQUIST: Speak.

VENTRILOQUIST: What, afraid of the dark?

DUMMY: Nein.

DUMMY: No, your gatkes. Your underwear.

VENTRILOQUIST: I order you.

VENTRILOQUIST: I’ve heard that before.

DUMMY: What do you think I am?

VENTRILOQUIST: A Dummkopf.

DUMMY: Technically, all of me is a dummy, not

just my head.

VENTRILOQUIST: I know you are but what am I? DUMMY: Schutzstaffel-Oberst-Grup … Ober-

Grup … Oberstgrup….

VENTRILOQUIST: Say it, you little fist-mouthed block-

head. You stutterer.

DUMMY: Schutzstaffel-Ober-Gruppenffer … füh

… Oberst-Gruppen….

VENTRILOQUIST: Ach, it’s “Schutzstaffel-Oberst-Gruppen-

führer”—colonel—you dundertongue.

DUMMY: Schicklgruber.

VENTRILOQUIST: Vermin. That was never even Hitler’s name.

DUMMY: Schwanzlutscher.

VENTRILOQUIST: Nazi.

DUMMY: You wish. You’re nothing without me.

Or worse.

SOLO FOR DUMMY 1 This is how I became a real—doy—boy. Almost able to say etherything. Everything. No longer just good. I mean wood. A plank. A floorboard. Under where we were hidden. Ha. I just said underwear. But we were silent until they were dawn. I mean gone. Not the patter of little feet but great boots. Then my tater—pater— familias. I mean my familiar patter. A Frenchman, an Irishman, and a Jew….

But what was I first?

A dummy. A real dummy.

Wooden. At least my bread. My head. Open to the stairs sure, I mean stars. Dormice, insects, the wind through the dave of my brain. I mean the cave. But with strings. And a handle. How else could I shake my head no, no no. [shakes head] Or wink? Like this. [winks] And a mouth. A real moving south. I had a meal moving mouth. Or the mechanism for one. After all, one’s lips have to move. Speaking being my raisin—my raison—d’être.

Speaking of which. Why a dummy? Not a real boy after all? Hidden away. Not speak to the hand, listen to it.

You, too, might turn to wood after what I’d been through.

You might make everything routines. Like this.

It’s a relief just to pink—I mean—think. Okay so it’s no relief but it’s a stain, a strain off the tongue. Some time alone where I can be inside my wooden head as if it were a quiet room, an empty search—church. Each thought a foottap echoing as it gets closer then passes.

I have these quiet dimes—times—inside my box, silent and remembering.

We said nothing under the gore—floor. Herschel and me and the family that remained. Now just Herschel, his son, and me. A dummy, I roused—mouthed— the words to pass the time. They say that thunder is the Gods stomping around the sky. Or farting in the clouds. But we were in the basement and these Nazis were stomping above us.

SOLO FOR DUMMY 2

ROUTINE 2 DUMMY: So a Nazi ventriloquist is onstage.

VENTRILOQUIST: Understage.

DUMMY: He’s been hiding for weeks.

DUMMY: He hasn’t said a word.

VENTRILOQUIST: He only breathes every other time.

DUMMY: Not even his dummy speaks.

VENTRILOQUIST: Except now.

DUMMY: And anyway, he’s not so Nazi.

VENTRILOQUIST: He’s only a little Nazi.

DUMMY: More an agnostic.

VENTRILOQUIST: A survivor.

DUMMY: A Jew. VENTRILOQUIST: For now.

DUMMY: For now?

VENTRILOQUIST: He’ll be a non-Jew soon.

DUMMY: Discovered.

VENTRILOQUIST: Ash. DUMMY: A cloud.

VENTRILOQUIST: Gone over the mountains.

DUMMY: Become history.

VENTRILOQUIST: What kind of an act is this?

DUMMY: A desperate one.

SOLO FOR DUMMY 3 So I’m a dunny. Dummy. In a hole in the floor. Vunny.

Funny. Because I need him like a hole in the head. I have holes in my head. Ears, Mouth. North and South.

Nose holes, too. But he’s the one that has the bent. Vent.

What makes a real boy? Tragedy plus time. Jokes plus a much longer time. A vather. Father. I’m the dummy on his knee. Who does his routines without him now he’s the only one underground and with an audience of terms. Worms.

GARY BARWIN // 19

Gook. Look. Without the ventriloquist, the dummy doesn’t mispronounce. Believe me, it is the ventriloquist whose got the south of garbles.

Right? I am not here without you. Without you filling my head with your fist. Filling my mouth with language. A puppeteer from the inside, pulling my strings.

Let’s say I live from hand to mouth. Or maybe you do.

Because it is your language not mind. Mine.

When I’m held by someone else, there’s another voice in my head. New words. A new kind of stuttering.

Who is it that is speaking? Who is it that is speaking now? And whose thoughts are these?

I’m a hole in the floor where you can come to hide.

A kind of wooden trumpet, a megaphone you shout into. Echo. Echo. I’m not here right now but if you’d like to leave a message.

Or we’re milk and milkbucket. Radio and wave.

Words and an empty page.

Here I am.

I’m only here when you hear me. But it’s not me, it’s you. Me and my shadow. Ask yourself this: If you’re not me, then you must be my shadow.

So where were we? Right. Under the floor and the soldiers were doing the search dance. The shouting song. A foreign language from across the border of sense, except we knew what they were saying. We knew what they wanted.

Us. But our yellow star shone only in the dark. Except it didn’t shine. We’d hid ourselves where even the sun don’t.

VENTRILOQUIST: Silently.

GARY BARWIN // 20

NARRATOR

NARRATOR

We were under the floor for weeks. Two soldiers searching but me, my father, and his dummy were silent. We heard the boots, the scraping of the table, the carpet pulled back. Maybe other voices. Two local girls, giggling. One says to one of the soldiers, come round back, I’ve something for you. Wait ’til you see. And so they went. Then damped by floor and wall, by the barn, its hay, a gunshot. One girl pulled off her shirt, went down on her knees, one soldier with pants to his ankles. The other girl creeping behind him, slipped a gun from forgotten holster and fired. Then the second soldier ran and, as he rounded the barn, he too was shot. Both buried in a hole under the straw in the barn. A pit to position a car over instead of hoisting it up to repair it.

Then covered up. Fritz, my father, and me in the house beside at the same depth, all of us underground. But only Fritz, my father, and me shaking, babbling.

For years my father in the family cabin in the Laurentians. Snow falling over trees. A living postcard, the snow, my father, the mountains. Fritz on his knee.

Maybe the same Fritz, maybe another. Looking out the window as if on stage. Hatless. Uniformless. Jewish.

ROUTINE 3

DUMMY: You make me do everything.

VENTRILOQUIST: W-w-w-hat was that?

VENTRILOQUIST: Remember our old routines?

DUMMY: It’s okay. They’ve taken care of it.

DUMMY: That’s your job.

VENTRILOQUIST: The gunshots?

VENTRILOQUIST: But we practiced and practiced.

DUMMY: The girls.

DUMMY: You were always a Nazi about it.

VENTRILOQUIST: It’s okay.

VENTRILOQUIST: So were you. Just smaller.

DUMMY: We’ve taken care of it.

VENTRILOQUIST: The gunshots?

DUMMY: One in the head, the other in the chest.

VENTRILOQUIST: And they didn’t find us.

DUMMY: Yet. What did the Nazi say to the broken

clock?

VENTRILOQUIST: I have no idea. What did the Nazi say?

DUMMY: We haf vays of makink you tock.

VENTRILOQUIST: That’s my line.

DUMMY: Exactly.

ROUTINE 4 VENTRILOQUIST: Are you crying?

DUMMY: I’m made of wood.

VENTRILOQUIST: Thought you were crying.

DUMMY: It’s thap. Sap. Maybe it’s you?

VENTRILOQUIST: Me?

NARRATOR My father, a ventriloquist. My father and Fritz, both Jews. My father and Fritz and their Nazi routine, hiding in front of Nazis. The Nazis didn’t know until they knew, then they had to hurry off stage. Flee. Fritz wasn’t the only one who had to improvise.

Hidden, he was worried Fritz would betray him, that Fritz would betray me. Maybe Fritz felt guilty.

Maybe Fritz would try to save himself at my expense.

But after the girls killed the two Nazis, we three—son, father, dummy— hid in the woods. (Among pre-Fritzes, Fritz said.) And then we made it out of the country.

ROUTINE 5

VENTRILOQUIST: You mean in.

DUMMY: When you’re dead, what about me?

DUMMY: Don’t I know it.

VENTRILOQUIST: You’ll say nothing.

DUMMY: If I do, they should get a spade.

DUMMY: I want to speak at your funeral.

VENTRILOQUIST: Me too.

VENTRILOQUIST: You’ll be the one snoring.

DUMMY: If you do, I’ll wake you up.

NARRATOR

Night at the cabin. Candles. Some lamps. My father playing a Bach LP, Fritz tilted beside him on the sofa.

Did I ever sit close to my father? My father, doing his old routines. Pretending to be German. His wife, parents, pretending to be alive.

Summer. So hot I wore a bathing suit all day though we had no pool. My father was gone. Only Fritz was left.

His box under my father’s bed. I was afraid of the dark, like Fritz. Unclasped the box, lifted him out, limp.

Fritz, I said. Fritz. I put my hand into the space in his head. Opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

Opened his eyes.

ROUTINE 6

ROUTINE 7

DUMMY: You’re on the Fritz.

SON: Fritz, I said. Wake up.

///

AND THE MORNING AND THE EVENING (DEATAIL), 2018 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist.

GARY BARWIN // 21

NARRATOR

DUMMY: One night when you’re sleeping….

HEATHER BABCOCK // 22

HEATHER BABCOCK

CO N T EN T WA R N I N G : sexual harassment

FIFTY DOLLARS FOR THE POWDER ROOM T

oday, Alderwood is nice and green, a slice of South Etobicoke where everyone says “hello” to each other and where the Vietnam War–era houses sell for over two million dollars.

It wasn’t always like this.

When I was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, the neighbourhood was blue collar, bitter, and hard.

Alderwood was a middle-aged man in a white pickup truck making Tarzan calls and sticking his tongue out at an eleven-year-old girl.

Alderwood was hearing the word “slut” for the first time and not knowing what it meant but knowing— from the way it was shouted at me from across the elementary school playground—that it was something bad.

Alderwood was factories and strip clubs and women who never got to be girls. Alderwood was sex— and sex was everywhere. It was the busty Sunshine Girl every morning on the Toronto Sun’s page three and Married … with Children on TV. Sex was the rewind button when you were alone and the fast-forward button when your parents got home. It was Phoebe Cates emerging from a swimming pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and whatever Betty and Lewis were up to in the “Moon Room” in Revenge of the Nerds.

To my preteen eyes, sex was as much of a tease as the sea-monkey ads in the back of my Archie comic books that promised attractive mermaid-like water fairies but delivered crustaceans that looked more like tiny, bug-eyed sperm. Both titillating and disappointing: a long kiss before a quick fade to black.

before Wi-Fi, hashtags, and Google. If you were an average, horny thirteen-year-old in 1991, getting your hands on pornography of any kind required more than a little effort. It took skill. It called for an imagination.

Surreptitiously crouched between the stacks in my junior high school library, I’d meticulously scan V.C. Andrews novels—whose illustrated peephole covers of doe-eyed, rosy-cheeked teenage girls belied the disturbing tales of incest inside—for the words “bosom” and “manhood.”

I’d drop my two-dollar weekly allowance on issues of True Confessions and True Romance magazines at the corner fruit market, seeking out the headlines that dared to scream previously whispered secrets, such as “MY HUSBAND CALLS ME A TRAMP—AND IT’S TRUE!” and “THOSE GAMES MY SEXY NEIGHBOUR PLAYS.” My attempts at sex education, however, were constantly met with frustration: the “manhoods” in Andrews’s novels rarely got past the “throbbing” stage, and I had to confess—with regret—to my concerned father that the steamy headlines on the True covers were a bait and switch. The actual stories within were pretty tame. My innocence was such that when I watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the first time at age seventeen, I couldn’t figure out why men gave Holly Golightly fifty dollars for the powder room. Maybe if I’d had access to the internet, I would have understood.

And maybe I wouldn’t have put myself in a potentially dangerous situation.

I

O

was born in 1977. A good year for movies: Saturday Night Fever. Star Wars. Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

I am the last of the children who came of age before the internet (or the World Wide Web, as it was first introduced to me) moved itself into our homes. I feel a sort of unearned pride at having gone through puberty

ne of the most popular movies during the summer of 1995 was Clueless, starring Alicia Silverstone as the spoiled but lovable LA fashionista Cher, a sixteen-year-old “virgin who can’t drive,” a description that also aptly described me, although I had just turned eighteen. In Alderwood, a girl’s virginity was a sign of

MID NIGHT ENCOUNTER, 32" x 52", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP HEATHER AND WOOL), BABCOCK 2022//| HEATHER 23 GOODCHILD

Photo: LF Documentation. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

HEATHER BABCOCK // 24

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pride—perhaps a pre-twentieth century holdout from the days when brides were offered up with a dowry. For poorer families unable to offer monetary incentive, an intact hymen was worth its weight in gold. Whatever the reason, I would openly brag to anyone who listened about being a virgin, which in retrospect probably only ensured that I’d stay one as long as possible.

Clueless had a volcanic influence on fashion and pop culture. B.C. (Before Clueless), my peers and I were all buying three-dollar Levis in Kensington Market and stealing our dad’s plaid flannel shirts, but after Cher washed the grunge out of our eyes, we traded in our flannel in favour of her feminine, girly-girl style. My favourite dress was short and tight, like the famous white Calvin Klein dress that Cher wears for her date with Christian, except that mine was bought on sale at Le Château. I got a lot of attention in that dress, but being eighteen, pretty, and reliant on public transit, I always got a lot of attention.

Something had happened shortly after my birthday of that year—something more than just my new “Rachel” hairdo and chunky platform shoes. Life had magically morphed into a movie set, and suddenly every man, no matter how shabby or shlumpy, was my director.

“Smile! Give me a smile!” they’d shout, rolling down the passenger-side windows of their cars as I waited for my morning bus.

“Look over here! Don’t pretend you don’t see me!” they’d admonish as I trudged home in the evenings.

I’d answer back with my best Norma Desmond sneer, the traffic lights providing my Garbo soft focus.

The bolder men would stop their cars and sharpen their demands.

“It’s time for a suntan! Have you ever thought of going blond?”

They grinned at me, their faces full of teeth and their arms laden with red roses.

One creative would-be suitor gave me a postcard with a photo of a peach on it and a handwritten poem on the back dedicated to “The Super Sexy Bus Stop Girl.” It was all a rather heady experience for a young woman who up until then had been told that she was passable at best, ugly at worst. It felt like power, but it wasn’t really power because I couldn’t control it.

O

wing more to my lack of employable skills than to any thespian ambition, I decided at eighteen that I was going to be an actress. I could cry on cue, I had really good hair (thanks to the aforementioned “Rachel” cut), and in spite of the fact that I lived on a diet of pizza and peanut butter, I weighed barely one hundred pounds. (“It’s going to catch up with you

someday,” an ex-boyfriend once warned me ominously, as if a giant jelly donut was chasing me down the street screaming, “Hey, Heather! Wait up! You forgot your cellulite!” Spoiler alert: it eventually did catch up with me, but by that time, I no longer gave a damn.)

There was a hotline back in the late ’90s that listed audition calls. The listings were recorded by a stern, middle-aged woman with a nasally voice. Most of the calls were ACTRA, the actor’s union, only, but a director named Dean, who was looking for an “ingénue type” to star in his independent movie, was open to non-ACTRA talent; in fact, he preferred it.

D

ean lived in North Etobicoke, so I had to take two buses to get to his condo. I didn’t know anyone else who lived in a condo—when I was a kid, we called them “condom buildings,” even before we knew what a condom was—and as I stepped off the bus in my stacked platform sandals, I was disappointed at the ordinary blah-beige tower bouncing up against the early morning clouds. As I approached the front entrance, hesitation tugged at my heart and slowed my feet.

No one knew where I was. I didn’t have a cell phone because only doctors and drug dealers had mobile phones in the mid-1990s. You know that scene in Clueless when Cher and Dionne are walking down

I

n his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote describes society girl Holly Golightly as having a face “beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.” It is a description which could also describe Audrey Hepburn, the actress who portrays Holly in the Hollywood movie version. But Hepburn was thirtytwo years old when she played Holly. In the book, Capote writes that Holly is two months shy of her nineteenth birthday.

There are many discrepancies between the novella and the movie, but one of the few scenes that plays on screen almost exactly as it does on the page is the introduction of Doc Golightly, Holly’s ex-husband. In both the book and the film, Doc is portrayed as an innocent

He smelled of drugstore cologne and unwrapped condoms.

Confidence and nameless sex.

country bumpkin in his early fifties. In the movie, the gentle, red-faced Doc comforts himself with a box of Cracker Jack as he reminisces about finding Holly as an orphan stealing milk and turkey eggs from his backyard when she was thirteen years old, but—he seems to stress this point as if it makes a difference—she was going on fourteen. Sad strains of “Moon River” accompany this adult man’s tale of marrying an abandoned child. We’re supposed to feel for him—the country clown in the big city, searching for the skinny minx in the black dress who left him because she read too many movie magazines.

The melancholic melody plays for him. Not for her.

D

ean’s condo unit was spacious and brightly lit, with a Cinemascope-esque skyline view. Walking one step ahead of me, he showed me to his office, which was accessible through the kitchen. A couple of pornographic VHS tapes were on the counter—Little Squirt-

HEATHER BABCOCK // 25

I

wore my Clueless dress to meet Dean at the big Second Cup, which used to be at the corner of Royal York and Bloor before it was swallowed up by the Shoppers Drug Mart next door. Coffee houses were big in 1995—thanks to Friends—and I spent most summer afternoons there. Dean bought me a fuzzy peach lemonade and told me that I looked like Sydney from Melrose Place. He gently knocked his knee against mine as he told me about his movie. It was going to be a film about auditions—a drama or maybe a comedy, he hadn’t quite decided yet. I’d play an innocent ingénue who’d do anything to get the part.

“Wear that dress,” he said, giving me an appreciative elevator stare.

Dean was about thirty, and he was kind of cute in a creepy sort of way, with intense forest-green eyes and a smile that looked more like a smirk. He smelled of drugstore cologne and unwrapped condoms. Confidence and nameless sex.

I had just been fired from a crappy waitressing gig, and Dean asked me if I could type. In addition to an ingénue, he was looking for an administrative assistant. He said he’d pay me seven dollars an hour, which was fifteen cents higher than minimum wage. I’d work out of his home office.

the school hallway chatting on their phones? That was meant to be a joke.

“Do I look nervous?” Dean asked, grinning as he ushered me into his apartment. “If I do, it’s because I was afraid that you wouldn’t show up.”

ers, one title read, its cover showcasing a woman, clad in nothing but lime-green high heels and a fluorescentyellow scrunchie, pouting and spreading her long legs for the camera—and Dean made a big production about trying to hide them.

“Whoops!” he chuckled, trying to act embarrassed as he shoved the tapes under the sink. “Nothing to see here!”

HEATHER BABCOCK // 26

O

nce, when I was fourteen, I cut class early, but when I arrived at my house, I realized that I had forgotten my key and that no one would be home until after six. There was a playground less than a block away, and I wandered around it for a bit until a twenty-something guy in a Volvo pulled up and began shouting at me.

“Hey kid! If you’re going to skip school, you should have a destination!”

A destination? I’d lived in a dreamy movie world for so long that I’d become nothing more than a fragment of a dream myself. A ghost. Ghosts don’t have destinations. Ghosts get left; they don’t leave.

Not even when their host is kinda nasty. Not even when he’s got a stack of hardcore pornography lying out on his kitchen counter and it’s barely 9 a.m.

Not even then.

“What’s the matter?” Dean laughed.

“You’re still on the clock. I’m still gonna pay you.”

D

ean’s “office” was a room only slightly larger than a walk-in closet. There was a small folding chair, some manila file folders, a bunch of boxes, and an unplugged word processor on the floor. The boxes were full of bills and receipts, and Dean handed me a fat black magic marker and instructed me to file them by company name.

I kicked off my sandals, opened up the boxes, and began to sort through the mess. It was tedious, boring work and, as it turned out, superfluous. When I was halfway done, Dean poked his head in to see how I was coming along. He looked sharply at my bare feet.

“Do they hurt?”

“No,” I replied, blushing. But he’d already left the room. When he returned a few minutes later, he had a

bucket of soapy water in his arms and a big shit-eating grin on his face.

“Take a seat,” he directed, nodding at the folding chair. “I’ll give you a foot rub.” I shot up, trying not to topple sideways as I frantically pulled on my platforms.

“What’s the matter?” Dean laughed. “You’re still on the clock. I’m still gonna pay you.”

Nervously, I laughed too because that was me: smiling while skirting danger. Pretending that I didn’t get the joke when all along I knew that the punch line was me.

“It’s only a foot rub,” Dean said, his lips curled up in that little smile-smirk. “C’mon, it’ll make you feel better.”

He shut the door.

D

ean wanted me to stay for lunch, but I said I had to get going and my parents were expecting me somewhere. He didn’t try to stop me. At the door, he swung a small, white envelope before me playfully, the way you’d twirl a string of yarn for a kitten.

“Are you going to come back?” That smile-smirk again. I wanted to yank it off his face and crush it under my feet.

“Here,” he shoved the envelope at me when I didn’t answer. “Take it.”

W

aiting at the bus stop, I opened the envelope and pulled out a crisp fifty-dollar bill. A young woman sat on the bench beside me, all teeth and legs, her thin hair scraped up with a cheap plastic claw clip.

A chubby, sticky little boy sat on her lap, his cheeks as bright and ripe as raw cherries. She handed him a Happy Meal box, and the child joyfully shoved his hand in, a thick stream of saliva oozing from his toothless mouth.

I tucked the fifty dollars into the pocket of my jeans and looked up at the Art Deco clock above the old bank tower across the street. It was almost noon.

Too late for breakfast at Tiffany’s. ///

S TAY I N TO U CH:

@HumberLitReview HumberLiteraryReview.com

Image courtesy of the artist.

MID NIGHT ENCOUNTER, 32" x 52", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP LARRY AND BAER WOOL), // 2022 27 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Photo: LF Documentation. Image courtesy of the artist.

MID NIGHT ENCOUNTER SKETCH (DETAIL), 2022 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

CATHERINE ST. DENIS // 28

CATHERINE ST. DENIS

THREE POEMS HE GAVE ME OLIVE OIL

SAYFISH

in a plastic bottle for my birthday that his mom had picked up at Costco and he regifted to me, unwrapped, while we were sitting in the car and I was ten weeks pregnant with his child, the child who had me throwing up in showers and crosswalks and flower pots each day, reality heaving through me like a train heaves its way through a tunnel and out towards the light.

sayfish: n. a sincere emotion that seems to wither into mush as soon as you try to put it into words — FROM THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS BY JOHN KEONIG

You’re going to ruin it with language. The moment your newborn tears through you, ecstasy of blood pouring onto the bed, your shaking arms, the wet, dark-haired infant on your chest, the cries that mean, we’re okay, we’re okay.

Your shaking arms, your eyes sifting the shadows, the voice of the doctor chiding the midwife— her fingers, he barks, too close as he stitches.

Your shaking arms, the baby within them, the rumbling earth, the smell of copper, the coming avalanche, a torrent of white blossoms crashing against you, your breath skiing the surface of breath, your shaking arms, the child you cannot hold.

See? You’ve ruined it.

There is a moment the string within the pearls frays, the heat oversears the Wagyu steak, the container ship leans by the last degree before the freight gives in to its inexorable weight. Calamity arrives by increments.

Here is my child, a cirrus cloud, a ribbon, hair rising and falling to the circular rhythm of a white horse named Mouse, the smell of crushed hay, the chok-tok of hooves grazing trot poles.

Already, at seven, the fraying: part way through lessons, their body struck rigid, eyes sliding wildly, gripped by a riptide of anxiety that pulls them out and away.

Here is a bouquet of mental health professionals with disarming smiles and gentle lashes, such dismay as my child bolts again and again, blossoms rolling in their wake.

Here is a mother in chronic pain.

Here, a grandfather, his atrophying brain.

Here, us all soaking in the brine of a virus that rises to lick past our upturned chins.

Now twelve, my child’s face has become an empty page, an echoing hall, a haze.

Here are the foods they will no longer eat, their 28 slowly rotting teeth, the bed languished on like foam on sea.

Here are some friends with ricin tongues, ricin thumbs tapping out ricin texts.

How the cold earth must feel under my child’s bare feet as they hide behind a bush and watch me, then the police, pass by in the night as if a carousel.

Three hours, they are missing.

Waiting, I look out to the black ocean and think of stones and anchors and diving birds, trapped under the weight of their own wet wings.

Here is my child, returned, in my bed, my arms around them, me sobbing and wailing at the back of their neck, my fear bleeding up the walls like ink.

In the morning, near the beach, a cormorant stands on a seaweed-strewn rock, splaying dark wings in two inverted vees, saturated feathers hanging from light, angled bones, its muscles straining.

There it waits, wide, vulnerable, faithful it has lost nothing. ///

CATHERINE ST. DENIS // 29

DIVING BIRDS

LARRY BAER

LARRY BAER // 30

DINNER B

en asked Sam if he enjoyed dinner and Sam said it was good, which was true because the food was tasty but also not true, but Sam knew it would be too complicated for him to explain why. The word good satisfied Ben and gave him the compliment he deserved and let Sam off the hook and Sam knew that by tomorrow he would have mostly forgotten about it anyway.

The word good is a signal that comes in handy between two people because it’s one that can be so conveniently misread without arousing suspicion.

Sam was going to make fish for dinner. He had biked to the fish store uptown and come back with halibut, stopped at the market around the corner and picked up some green beans and sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes because they were watching their carbs. He missed white potatoes but knew they were better off without them and, really, the sweet potatoes were pretty good, the way he had learned from Ben to prepare them. Then Ben came home and announced that he was going to barbecue steaks for dinner and Sam said he’d picked up fish that morning and Ben said the fish would keep for a day, he’d picked up these steaks and also fresh corn and it’s a beautiful night, let’s barbecue and Sam said okay, sure and Ben said he’d start the barbecue, could Sam put the steaks and the corn out on a platter, and opened a bottle of that wine they liked, the red from California.

Sam set the wine glasses down on the kitchen counter, a polished slab of emerald-green granite with flecks of black and pearly grey. Sam had stood his ground on this one. He knew Ben had better taste and finally said okay to the black-and-white tile backsplash even though he wanted something more colourful but didn’t know how to match colours and figured he’d make a mess of it, but the emerald-green granite was something bigger than Sam and bigger than Ben. It seemed to Sam that the whole universe was explained in its arrangement of colours and shapes; it was all there laid out before him if only he could slip under its polished surface and figure it out. He would never say this to anyone but sometimes thought it.

Sam poured wine into the two glasses and brought them out to the patio. Ben kissed him as Sam handed him his glass and the muscles in Sam’s jaw tensed as his lips reflexively puckered to meet Ben’s. Sam went back into the kitchen, returning with the steaks and ears of corn. He started to tell Ben about his day—the joke he made that had everyone laughing at the meeting that morning, the new unrealistic deadline from his manager—and Ben said things like “Yes” and “Oh” but Sam could tell Ben was focused on seasoning the steaks and getting the barbecue going so Sam went back inside to put the salad together, the salad they’d agreed to have instead of green beans. He rinsed curly purple-green leaves of lettuce under water and then put them in the salad spinner and yanked the cord on top way too hard so that the spinner took on a life of its own, dancing on the kitchen counter. He watched it go until it got too close to the counter’s edge and then put his hand on it to calm it.

He sliced up radishes and tomatoes and a cucumber and a couple of carrots and dumped everything into the big wooden salad bowl Ben’s sister had gotten them.

Sam could smell the steaks grilling. He stepped back out onto the patio, carrying the salad and some dressing. As Ben tended to the barbecue, Sam sat at the nearby table sipping his wine. He heard Ben talk about his day and occasionally responded by saying things like “Uh huh” while looking at his phone. When the steaks were done and they started dinner, they both admired the seared meat on their plates before cutting into it. As they chewed their first bites in unison, they smiled at each other, Ben’s eyebrows raised and Sam’s eyes momentarily fluttering closed, as the rich taste filled their mouths. “So good,” one of them said and they reached across the table to touch hands.

During dinner, Ben and Sam watched the news on Sam’s phone, propped up against the salad bowl, each of them commenting about the stories. Ben said he thought one of the reporters was really hot and Sam said he wasn’t really his type but he could see it, then Sam thought about the guy he’d been having sex with the last few months and started to get hard.

up after years together, but then he thought about another couple they knew who stayed together but he knew they were pretty unhappy because one of them confided in Sam, but then he thought about a lot of couples they knew who seemed pretty happy most of the time. Sam leaned over to kiss Ben and that was when Ben asked if he enjoyed dinner, and after Sam said “It was good,” Ben said how about they walk over to the ice-cream parlour down the street for dessert and Sam said okay. ///

LARRY BAER // 31

THROUGH TO PARADISE, 43.5" x 63.5", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP AND WOOL), 2023 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

At one point, they smelled cigarette smoke, which made them whisper complaints to each other about their neighbour Tyler, leaning into each other as they did so, and Sam could feel Ben’s breath and smell its scent of wine, as Ben asked how Tyler could live with such an unkempt lawn and Sam said that Tyler was bringing down the value of their property. They both became more conversational after that, mostly putting their phones down.

As they brought the dishes back into the kitchen and put them on the emerald-green counter, Sam thought about how a couple they knew had just split

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 32

i am the wind and this is my only constant there is never a thought that stays, or an emotion that stains i never return to the same place, or recognize a passing face, rarely do i remember the same things

COMICS

yet i found myself a part of the objecthood of everything in that space the room, the girl, and i it was like a dream of something that wasn't meant to be KAREN SHANGGUAN // 33

it began with limpid eyes that blanketed everything with endearment,

as if they were watering us, so that we could bloom, in some life-like way

WIND // KAREN SHANGGUAN // AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRAPHIC NOVEL QUIET THINGS

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 34

and the small things, such as how papers and inks were subtly alive in stillness,

and how steam formed as i flitted through air,

became small expressions and accretions to a beautiful, harmonious existence

COMICS

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 35

it was a full life, and everything in that room was full of life

WIND // KAREN SHANGGUAN

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 36

but now, something is slipping, i can feel it, gravely,

a creeping fatal awareness and a palpable coldness, where i touch

as if everything once alive is dying and becoming ambiguous

COMICS

and now i feel like i can't control myself,

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 37

everything i feel, i feel infinitely deeper, as if another language born of unhappiness transcends everything real

le h

in the end, it was as if i was destined to feel this way

WIND // KAREN SHANGGUAN

KAREN SHANGGUAN // 38

but finally, slowly, I'm forgetting everything, perhaps for the best, and soon there will be nothing to think about

since this is the pleasure of forgetting

COMICS

as i feel everything waving in the distance KAREN SHANGGUAN // 39

WIND // KAREN SHANGGUAN

KATE BIRD

KATE BIRD // 40

ABOUT FACE F

or years, I’ve been told that I look one way, when how I feel inside is another. And I’ve wondered Is my face a disembodied entity with a life and mind of its own? Do I have a mood ring of a face, obscured by dark storm clouds of anger and sadness? In photographs, my default face often looks serious and pensive, and I’ve learned that my introverted social awkwardness can read as unfriendly, stern, or aloof.

“Cheer up, it’ll be okay,” a stranger with kind eyes and a sympathetic voice once said. I felt perfectly fine at the time. Perhaps a little tired. Encounters like this have plagued me for decades. There’ve been times when someone’s comments hit the mark, when, in fact, I was angry or sad. But on many other occasions, I’ve felt betrayed by my face, misrepresented by it, and, at times, deeply misunderstood because of it.

My husband has remarked that at times my face looks scary.

Other times, he’s accused me of being angry when I’m not.

tions on gender, race, identity, and aging. The author observes that “as [she gets] older, [her] expressions seem to have gotten more exaggerated and severe.” She writes that on book tours she’s frequently photographed and notes, “I’m often caught with really frightening expressions on my face—expressions that look like disdain, or disapproval, or contempt, when I’m probably just thinking about what I want to eat for dinner.”

Like Ozeki, my inside and outside selves often feel incongruous and out of sync. Each of us, our faces at odds with whom we feel ourselves to be.

Ozeki also discusses the Zen koan “what is your original face?” She writes that our original face is the undivided self, before the duality in our natures—the Jekyll and Hyde within us all—intrudes. In Indian mythology, the duality of the individual is addressed in the many manifestations of its gods and goddesses. The Hindu mother goddess Parvati is nurturing, compassionate, and benevolent, while Durga, a manifestation of Parvati, is a terrifying, protective, and destructive warrior goddess. The masks of comedy and tragedy symbolize the extremes of human experience, the push and pull of duality, the gap between the people we are and the people we wish to be.

POKER FACE

FACE FACTS

A

pparently, I’m not alone. In The Face: A Time Code, author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki conducts an experiment in immersive attention in which she explores her own reflection in a mirror for a period of three hours. The book documents Ozeki’s observations as she examines the physical features of her face, the memories of her family that arise, and her reflec-

D

uring the 2016 presidential debates, a Newsweek article noted that Hillary Clinton used “her grandmother smile” to avoid what is known as “resting bitch face,” a default facial expression that unintentionally makes people appear angry or annoyed. In the article, psychologist and body language expert Elizabeth Kuhnke states that women are expected to smile more than men and are often told to cheer up, noting that “no man would ever be at fault for having a serious look on his face … the resting bitch face doesn’t exist for men because it is simply a face of authority.”

Women with this type of default facial expression include Queen Elizabeth, Kristen Stewart, Victoria Beckham, and Anna Kendrick, all, I suspect, who are like me: shy or reserved at heart.

GAME FACE

M

IN YOUR FACE

B

ut there’s a part of me that occasionally wants to rebel against the pressure to smile when I don’t feel

FACE DOWN

I

was walking with a friend one day when a car made a sharp left turn at high speed, wheels squealing, and almost ran us over. The driver parked, and when the four young guys in the car jumped out, three of them were laughing. My friend was quiet, in shock, but I reacted with anger.

“You’re laughing?” I yelled. “You could have killed us.”

The driver looked me in the eyes.

“I’m not laughing,” he said.

His obvious contrition conjured a kind of magic trick, and in an instant my fiery anger calmed, disappeared in a puff of smoke. Later, my friend told me she was nervous when I confronted them. That she’d never seen me like that.

“I get angry when I’m frightened,” I said.

Like a skunk, mild-mannered until threatened.

BLUE IN THE FACE

T

here’s sadness in me, too. There always has been.

Recently, after looking through an album of childhood photographs, I mentioned to my sister that I rarely smiled.

“You weren’t very happy,” she said.

There’s a self-portrait I took when I was in my early twenties. Weighed down by worry over my alcoholic parents and in the wake of their divorce, I remember struggling to remake myself into the carefree young woman I thought I should be. All the photographs from this period have the same sorrowful eyes and hauntingly impassive look that gives nothing away, that seems hard to penetrate. That I recognize still.

KATE BIRD // 41

y husband has remarked that at times my face looks scary. Other times, he’s accused me of being angry when I’m not. A woman I was travelling with once called me ferocious, a remark that so stunned me I spent the next several hours examining why I came across that way. What is this anger that others see in the unpredictable mask of my face?

“You look like you’d like to rip someone’s head off,” someone at work once remarked. I wasn’t particularly annoyed right then. Or maybe a little.

Of course, there is anger in me, plenty of it. Perhaps more than I realize. A sediment of ancient pain that swirls up when disturbed.

A friend once commented that at times she felt like a skunk. I understood it to mean that she caused a stink by voicing an unpopular opinion or giving off a bad vibe that caused people to steer clear. When I express a level of intensity that others find too extreme, that makes them uncomfortable, that is somehow unacceptable, I, too, feel like a skunk.

Solitary and mellow, skunks move slowly and are easy prey for predators. Reluctant warriors, they’re confrontational only when threatened. They issue repeated warnings before spraying a noxious odour, their only security, their lone weapon, used only as a last resort.

I’ve worked hard, learned to control my temper and soften my emotional responses for the sake of my loved ones and to make my life easier. The anger that flares up, sometimes unexpectedly, must be managed, must be forced down like an overstuffed suitcase, sat on ’til it’s squeezed down tight, clasps snapped shut, bulging at the seams but contained. No one deserves to be on the other end of my anger because it has nothing to do with them. Perhaps I’m a skunk even if I don’t spray anymore, marked by an invisible white stripe down my back.

like it, that rails against having to tone down my emotions for public consumption.

In Tim Burton’s film Alice in Wonderland, the Mad Hatter tells Alice, “You’re not the same as you were before. You used to be much … muchier. You’ve lost your muchness.” I, too, have lost my muchness. And there are times when I want it back. When I long to bust out of the social constraints on my behaviour and become the version of me that I don’t allow myself to be. To be exactly as angry and ferocious as I sometimes feel.

What would happen if I let out all the anger? What harm would it do to unleash it? I fear that it would hurt me more than anyone else. The guilt of it like lava, incinerating me to the core.

FACE PLANT

KATE BIRD // 42

T

wo months after 9/11, when we were all trying to adjust to the new normal, my beloved mother died suddenly and unexpectedly, catapulting me into a period of impenetrable darkness. It was in those years of profound grief and illness that I came to a life-altering realization—that although I might be happy again, I would never again be as happy in this world without my mother. Although the dark cloud of grief eventually lifted, the belief that I would never again be truly happy persisted for a time until, with intense effort and faltering steps, I crawled back into the light and learned that I could be.

A few years ago, when I lost three loved ones to cancer, multiple organ failure, and old age, someone remarked that I took people’s deaths very hard. Do some people find it easier? Perhaps, for me, the loss of one of my inner-circle folks feels like having a brick removed from my foundation, an erosion of a stable base that leaves me teetering. Perhaps the remoteness of grief has not yet left me, will never leave me, and it’s gone underground, hovering just below the surface of my skin. Perhaps that’s what has been written on my face all these years.

FACE TIME

O

ur faces are masks that we can’t remove at will.

Or can we? What would I look like if people could see me as I am inside? There’s something different about photographs of me taken by my son. In them, my expression is open and soft, my smile warm and wide, lit by love. I find myself wanting to look that way more of the time.

My eyebrows tend to furrow when I concentrate.

The facial feedback hypothesis postulates that a person’s facial expression directly affects their emotional experience. Just as your brain notices when the zygomatic muscles of your smile are flexed and thinks you’re happy, the corrugator supercilii muscle, which furrows your brow, tells your brain you’re angry, worried, or other negative emotions. I wondered, if the facial feedback hypothesis is correct, instead of smiling because I’m happy, could I feel happy because I smiled?

Several years ago, I decided to be more mindfully aware of my facial expressions. I began by consciously relaxing my furrowed brows and smiling at the people I passed when I was out walking, at shopkeepers, or while driving. Most people smiled back. I travelled to the western border of the state of Gujarat, a region of

India not frequented by tourists, and where I could only communicate non-verbally. Each morning, I reminded myself to smile with my teeth, a bigger and broader smile than usual. The results were remarkable.

People smiled back with disarming warmth and directness. When I parted from my travelling companions a few weeks later, one man said, “It was lovely to see your smile every day.”

FACIAL RECOGNITION

I

n the early days of the pandemic, when I first wore a mask, I didn’t bother to smile on my long walks around the neighbourhood, as no one could see it.

Then I discovered that just as smiling with your teeth conveys a message of friendliness, smiling with your eyes works too, and I smiled at passersby with my teeth and my eyes as I said hello, good morning, good afternoon, nice day. Sometimes I received an uncomprehending stare or a wary retreat, but, more often than not, I encountered folks whose smiles suddenly lit up their faces, whose eyes expressed an acknowledgement of shared experience, a brief and transitory and welcome moment of human contact in a frightening and unfamiliar world.

FACE TO FACE

O

ver the years, I’ve grown more comfortable with the duality my face expresses, embraced the discomfort at having my lived experience exposed to the world. I know and understand that we can’t have happiness without knowing sadness, see the light without struggling with the dark, know non-anger without feeling angry.

And although it happens less frequently these days, those times when a disconnect occurs, when my face becomes a stranger, remains a puzzling mystery.

It may be that my face has a default position it reverts to, an out-of-date habit of expression that has not yet been unlearned. What’s most frustrating to me about that face is that it doesn’t reflect the work I’ve done, the progress I’ve made. It doesn’t honour how much more light is in me now. All I can do is continue to seek congruity between my inside and outside selves. Strive to close the gap between how I feel and how I look. Revise the story my face tells. In the mirror, mirroring. ///

ELI MUSHUMANSKI

HOSPITAL BEDS he hospital waiting room was blue, and the carpet was green, and there was a tank with great big tropical fish in candy colours in the corner. The whole room was like being underwater, the girl thought. She felt very clever for thinking it.

The girl wanted to see the boy. He’d broken his neck snowmobiling with one of his friends. Mostly she wanted to see if the cast looked as funny as when her friend broke their leg. Plus, he was her friend too. They hung out at his house all the time. Someday they were going to be married, the girl had decided, because he

was the only boy she knew other than the boys who played hockey in her class, and they’d all shaved their heads for a tournament so she couldn’t marry them. He was eleven and she was eight, but she didn’t think this was a problem.

Apparently the boy wanted to see the girl, too, and the boy’s mom thought it would be good for him. The boy’s mom’s name was Angela, and she talked fast and had a pink streak in her hair but wouldn’t let the girl have one, too. She wasn’t the girl’s aunt, but she was as good as, the closest thing the girl and her mom had to relatives.

ELI MUSHUMANSKI // 43

T

VIEWPOINT, 16’ x 20’, OIL ON PANEL, 2017 | KEITA MORIMOT GHOST DOGS, 61" x 40", HOOKED RUG (BURLAP AND WOOL), 2022 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Photo: LF Documentation. Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

Image courtesy of the arti

ELI MUSHUMANSKI // 44

The girl’s mom thought seeing him would be too scary for the girl. She’d visited him before and said, He looks bad. Real bad. I don’t want her having nightmares. Angela had gotten upset that the girl’s mom didn’t want the girl to see the boy. She said the girl was too sheltered. The girl’s mom put her hands on Angela’s shoulders and steered her away after promising the girl that they would be back.

The waiting room was very boring, as it turned out. There were other people but no kids to play with.

She watched the fish for a while until someone walked up to the counter and said they were looking for Cindy Lewis, please and thank you, and the woman at the counter said, Room 164.

She hadn’t known you were allowed to do that. The girl walked up to the counter and said, The Boy, please and thank you, just like the person looking for Cindy Lewis.

The woman said, There’s a toy room just around the corner.

The girl stomped back to her chair and flopped down. It was weird, not seeing the boy or his mom all

He had black thread poking out of his lip. It looked like ants crawling out of his mouth.

the time. The girl didn’t have a dad to stay with, so Angela was supposed to be in charge while the girl’s mom worked evenings at the sawmill. She didn’t always like to do it. She’d ask if the girl could keep a secret and then say she had a man friend to see. The girl never told her mom because she liked those nights best. When it was just the boy and girl, they’d go to 7/11 to get Slurpees and he’d make butter noodles and they’d watch TV for hours. The girl wondered if having a broken neck meant that the boy couldn’t be the grown-up anymore.

Her mom had told her that the hospital was letting Angela sleep in the boy’s room with him because their town didn’t have a hospital and it was a two-hour drive to get here. For now, until the boy got better, the girl was spending nights that her mom worked with a woman from church whose kids were all grown up. Her house smelled like cat pee.

A very old lady with hair like a Q-tip shuffled in, and the woman at the counter said, You can’t be in here. The old lady croaked something that didn’t make sense, and the woman at the counter said, I’m going to call someone to come get you.

As the woman dialed the phone, the girl slipped out of the waiting room into the hospital halls where the person looking for Cindy Lewis had gone. The woman didn’t follow her. She didn’t notice that the girl had left.

The girl got lost after a couple of turns. The rest of the hospital wasn’t nearly as nice as the waiting room.

The walls were supposed to be white but the floor was yellow and that made everything look kind of dirty.

There were no more fish tanks. She kept an eye out, just in case.

A long time ago, the boy’s dad bought the boy a fish and moved to Alberta. It was a beta fish. It lived in a little glass bowl, and the boy was supposed to clean the tank every week but never did. He wanted the fish to have a friend, but Angela said that beta fish were too mean for friends.

One day, the girl went over to the boy’s house after kindergarten and found him crying. His fish was dead.

When Angela found them in his room later that night, way after the girl’s bedtime, she asked what he expected. He hadn’t cleaned the tank. He had to be more responsible, she said. They flushed the fish down the toilet, and afterwards Angela made popcorn for them while they watched a movie with explosions in it.

A doctor stopped her and asked what she was doing. The girl lied and said she was coming back from the bathroom and got lost.

The doctor said, What room are you looking for?

The girl said, My friend broke his neck.

The doctor crouched down in front of her and asked how she was doing, seeing him like that.

The girl said she was fine, she just didn’t remember which way his room was.

A walkie-talkie the doctor was wearing beeped, and he said shit. That was a word the hockey boys liked, so the girl knew it was bad. The doctor said she had to go right at the next turn in the hallway and wished her the best of luck and said he hoped her friend got better fast. The girl nodded and scurried away.

The girl was good at lying. She knew this because Angela had told her that when she was looking after her one time, said she could tell the girl was lying even though the girl hadn’t been. She said, You might be good but I’m better. The girl thought the boy had ripped the head off one of Angela’s old Barbies, but

cast hanging from the roof, and that couldn’t be him.

The neighbours on either side were both old people, so not them either. It must be his room. Which meant the thing in the bed had to be him, too.

The girl took a deep breath in like her mom always said to when she was scared and went back in. When she got closer than before, the girl saw that his hair was black and flopped across his forehead, just the same as always. But his face was swollen and stretched out in all different directions than she was used to.

Last summer, she’d fallen down the stairs and hit her back so hard she couldn’t walk right for days. She had a bruise then, one big splat.

His bruises were different. They were all colours, reds and purples and yellows and blues and blacks, and they burst across his skin in patches and little spatters.

He had black thread poking out of his lip. It looked like ants crawling out of his mouth.

Boy, she said loudly. He didn’t wake up, even though he’d asked for her.

The girl looked around the room. His mom’s stuff was piled up on top of a suitcase in the corner. There was a little bed, much lower than his, set up in the corner with the blankets all tangled. She went and sat on it. The sheet had pulled away from the corner, and the mattress underneath felt like plastic. It wasn’t half as good as her bed back home, and the girl felt sorry for Angela.

His room had its own bathroom. When she turned on the light, it was big with a shower that had no tub and a seat on one side. She bet he hadn’t showered in ages, his hair looked so gross.

There were two toothbrushes in a little plastic cup she recognized from the boy’s bathroom back home and a black bag with things spilling out. Brushes with big fanning bristles and little tubes with red and black inside of them.

Angela always took ages to get ready for her dates.

Sometimes she let the girl watch her put on her face.

Sometimes she put a little blush or mascara on the girl and would say, Beautiful! Magnifico! Stupendous!

Never eyeshadow, though. Angela had two whole plastic cases of just eyeshadow, and she loved them dearly.

One of them was all pinks and browns, and the other was bright colours like the fish in the waiting room.

It took the girl a lot of work to get them open. She took one of the little brushes and patted the blue with it, like she’d seen Angela do. She put it in a dot over her eye. Except she didn’t look any prettier like she did when Angela did her makeup, she just looked like she had a bruise.

ELI MUSHUMANSKI // 45

maybe it had been her after all. The girl guessed that she was the best liar of all, to not even know she was lying when she was doing it.

Angela loved those Barbies a freakish amount.

The girl didn’t like Barbie that much, especially not the old ones. They all had blue eyeshadow, like the girl’s neighbour. The girl’s mom said that neighbour was white trash, walking around in zip-up sweaters with fur around the hood and zebra-print leggings. But then Angela had worn blue eyeshadow and a fur coat to a party and the girl’s mom said she looked pretty.

Anyway, Angela had cried when she saw that her Barbie’s head had been ripped off. She’d had her dolls since she was a kid. She said it was like the girl had killed her baby.

When the girl’s mom found out, she went very quiet and then told the girl to pay Angela no mind. Angela was very sad sometimes and didn’t always direct it at the right places, she said.

Places? the girl had asked.

People, her mom said.

The girl peeked her head around the corner. The women were standing together in the middle of the hall across from an open door. Her mom was hugging Angela, and Angela was crying.

Not like with Barbie. When Angela saw the headless Barbie, she cried so loud it sounded fake, like how the girl cried after the boy didn’t want to watch Sleeping Beauty, again, for Chris’sake, Girl. In the hospital hallway, Angela cried like she couldn’t help it. She had her whole weight leaned against the girl’s mom, face buried in her neck. The girl hid before they saw her.

When she peeked back round the corner, her mom was watching an old man in a housecoat shuffle by. She said, Maybe we should find somewhere a little more private.

Angela made a sound like, Mm. The girl’s mom readjusted Angela in her arms so they were both facing forward. The girl wondered if they were going to go find her now since they thought she was still in the waiting room. At this point, she was starting to feel left out, but instead the two of them stumbled down the hall like a three-legged monster in the opposite direction.

As soon as they were out of sight, the girl shot into the boy’s room.

The boy was sleeping. He had a big, white collar on, and it hid most of his face.

The girl crept closer. She stopped when she saw him.

She turned around and went across the hall just to make sure she hadn’t picked the wrong one, but that one had a family visiting a woman with her leg in a big

ELI MUSHUMANSKI // 46

The girl swirled the brush in the purple square next. It was dust, not paint like she’d thought. When she smeared it on her eyelid, it fell on the skin below in tiny little dots.

It was a mess. She added some pink and yellow until her face was a smudge. The girl pushed her fingers into her dimples and stretched her cheeks out to make herself even uglier. She looked like the boy in his hospital bed.

Sometimes the girl lay in her bed at Angela’s house while the boy played video games with his friends one room over. She would close her eyes and imagine how if she was dying, all her classmates and her mom and Angela and the boy would come see her in the hospital and tell her how good she was. It was the best story she told herself at night.

He made a low groan in the other room, and the girl rushed in to see if he’d wake up to see her. He didn’t though.

The girl crawled into bed with the boy and turned on her side to watch him. He breathed in and out steadily. The bruises moved back and forth across his

skin. She picked up his hand and pressed it against her cheek. She guessed that breaking his neck made him sleep a lot, because he almost never slept when she was at his house. She’d stay up as late as she could, so late that she’d be falling asleep in class the next day, but she never beat him. He was the boy who was always awake.

Sometimes when she and the boy watched movies together late at night while Angela was out on dates and her mom was at work, she’d peek as the light from the TV changed his face. He liked movies that were full of bad people doing bad things to each other. When he caught her watching him, he’d shove her and say, Man, stop it.

Out in the hallway, she heard her mom say, Have you seen Girl? She wasn’t in the waiting room.

God, it’s just like her to hide at a time like this, Angela replied.

The girl rolled away from the boy and closed her eyes. She waited for the women to find her. ///

GHOST DOGS SKETCH, 2022 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist and Clint Roenisch Gallery.

CO N T EN T WA R N I N G : eating disorders

LÉA TARANTO

and obsessive-compulsive disorders

E

verybody has one: that certain food that encapsulates the best of their childhood. The precious, edible essence of their soul. To taste it transports you across time and selves to a moment of delicious, transcendent grace. My precious essence is juk. For Proust, the French literati, it was madeleines. Just the taste of this simple, elegant cake dipped in tea elicited in him “the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence.” An essence he recognized as “not in me, it was myself.” When I ladle a warm, soft, savoury spoonful of juk onto my tongue, I welcome myself home.

Juk is the Cantonese word for rice porridge, similar to congee but more specialized. While congee can be made from other grains, juk is always made with rice, and with an eight-to-ten-part liquid-to-rice ratio. My poh poh would make juk for me whenever I was sick.

The way my white friends thought of chicken soup as liquid penicillin, I had the Guangdong province version. To sip porcelain spoonfuls of juk was to swallow warmth, comfort, and wholeness. As much liquid hug as it was medicine. My love for juk surpassed eating it only when I was ill; I craved it constantly and begged Poh Poh to make it for me during our weekend sleepovers.

Part of why juk is so great is that it makes use of the rice at the bottom of the pot, leftovers from what our family didn’t finish at dinner. Using leftover rice is ideal because it wastes nothing and takes less time than boiling fresh rice to alchemize to the thick, silkysmooth consistency that makes juk, juk. Poh Poh would boil old bones, most often poultry, with fragments of meat still on them to make broth. Then she’d dump in the leftover rice (or a couple cups of fresh Chinese long-grain white rice) to boil for two or so hours, stirring every now and then to make sure nothing burned.

Another staple was dried Chinese mushrooms, dung gwoo. While stir-ins like green onions, salted turnip, chicken, dried shrimp, scallops, cha siu, or laap cheung

would appear based on availability and Poh Poh’s mood, the mushrooms were a must. When the whole thing was finally ready and served, another must was a spattering of hou yau to taste.

“Mom, what other things would Poh Poh put in her juk?” was the fateful sentence I uttered a few days

To sip porcelain spoonfuls of juk was to swallow warmth, comfort, and wholeness.

ago that inspired my latest juk recipe hunt. At thirtyone, I’ve been grieving Poh Poh for over a decade now.

Juk is something I’ve never made myself, but I want to. Making juk isn’t hard, yet for ten-plus years I’ve refused to until I had Poh Poh’s recipe.

“I doubt she even had a recipe,” Mom said as we rifled through piles of newspaper clippings and every recipe card in Poh Poh’s vast collection. “Not for something that basic. It’s like asking, how do you make tea?” I grunted and continued searching through notes in Poh Poh’s precious printing, tracing the simple but elegant lines and curves of her script. Simple and elegant, just like Proust’s madeleines, just like Poh Poh’s sense of style and Poh Poh herself, just like a perfect spoonful of juk.

It’s not common to have recipes in Chinese cooking, but Poh Poh had an extensive collection of any world cuisine that caught her fancy. We found several recipes of apple cheese crumble pie, another favourite, and a whole Ziplock bag full of dim sum recipes like

T R A N S L AT I O N N OT E: Cantonese anglicized using Sidney Lau’s Cantonese-English Dictionary

LÉA TARANTO // 47

WHY JUK MAKES ME CRY

LÉA TARANTO // 48

siu maai, but no card with instructions in her careful, half-cursive printing on how to make juk.

The internet is a poor substitute for Poh Poh’s recipe collection. I scour webpages anyway, searching for her in the posts about how short-grain rice is actually better than long-grain rice for creating that soughtafter creamy texture. Not if you’re too poor to waste food scraps and long grain is all you have, it’s not. As one sister of eleven, mother of six, and grandmother of twelve, Poh Poh had to feed a myriad of mouths on a minimal budget. Since she’d starved as a child, she was fiercely proud of how her offspring never went hungry.

The not-so-subtle subtext here is that to impoverished immigrant families, food means love. To a granddaughter yearning for her grandmother, a childhood meal replicated exactly means resurrection.

Juk was the last thing Poh Poh ever made me before she got too sick to cook, too sick to live with us even, and went to the hospital to die. That’s why whenever I go to Congee Noodle House with friends or pick

Yet, while I could eat food and sometimes even enjoy it, I still couldn’t bear to make it.

up the rice pot after leaving it to soak, tears sting the corners of my eyes. I miss her, hunger for her presence, her bird-thin arms around me, the excitement in her voice when I would come to the kitchen and she would say, “Léa, I’ve made your favourite, juk.”

All that changed when I was twelve and food went from being a treat I looked forward to, to the enemy.

One of the only things about my life at the time that I had power over. Instead of seeing food as love, that “precious essence,” I saw food as the thing that made me gain weight. Something to hate as much as I did myself. Eating equaled indulgence, equaled defeat; restricting equaled discipline, equaled victory. As my BMI shrunk, my hair fell out; I lost my period and sometimes consciousness. This terrified Poh Poh. She would try to tempt me with delicious desserts that made my mouth water and my shrinking stomach grumble. Deep pits of hurt would fill her eyes when I

guzzled down Diet Vanilla Coke and didn’t show up for meals. I knew that if I did, I’d have to push food around on my plate while the temptation to eat doubled with each passing minute. During our weekend sleepovers, the hours I used to spend helping Poh Poh with chores or watching Jeopardy with Gung Gung were replaced with endless cardio and sit ups, my first manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

As a child, what was endless for Poh Poh was cabbage soup. Her ma ma, my great-grandmother, would boil cabbage and serve it to her family. Day in, day out.

Meagre spoonfuls of subsistence. On certain special occasions, they might have a few bites each of meat. How different our starvations were. Hers, involuntary, the result of systemic racism and class oppression, utterly out of her control. Mine, self-inflicted, only possible because of privilege, something I did to have control. Until I didn’t.

Then, like Poh Poh when she got her pacemaker in 1998, I too, had to go to the hospital. In fact, several of them.

For years.

During those years away, Poh Poh sent me letters.

“Get Well Soon” and “Praying for You” cards with little surprises, like Sailor Moon stickers, inside. I would trace over her simple, elegant printing that always ended with “Love, Poh Poh” and bite the inside of my cheek to keep from tearing up. If I got the flu or a cold, I had to make do with medications and cafeteria chicken soup.

When I finally came home at eighteen, Gung Gung had died and Poh Poh was next. She’d moved in with my mom and stepdad during my absence. Gastric cancer had robbed her of her stomach. Her body was so weak that eating pained her. I now knew what it was like to live with and love someone so emaciated, that every time she fell, we feared her bones would break.

I remembered the vitality that even ten more pounds had gifted her with. Yet, while I could eat food and sometimes even enjoy it, I still couldn’t bear to make it. Around the time of my first overnight visits home, Mom and Poh Poh would rotate cooking duties. Over the year it took me to fully move in, Poh Poh reduced her cooking from on the weekends to maybe once every two weeks to only on special occasions. She would spend most of her time sitting or in bed. Large, hacking coughs would wrack her body so deeply that we could hear the fluid in her lungs.

“Why are you gurgling?” Mom would half-snap half-wail. Around that time, in November 2009, we all got the flu. Through sniffles, I spoke longingly of Poh Poh’s juk being the cure we needed, how maybe one day I’d make it. The next morning, I woke up late to the wholesome aroma of juk cooking in a pot on the stove.

reason Poh Poh had such sparse eyebrows and lashes was because she had singed them in a kitchen fire.

When it comes to juk, I’ve learned a lot of things.

That it’s not just congee—it’s got its own special steps and Cantonese flavours that distinguish it from other porridges. But also, that most Chinese folks don’t cook with a rigid set of instructions, this many pieces of chicken, that many bones for the broth. While each meal is a reinvention, the soul of juk is the same, whether it’s made for you for the first time or the last.

One part rice to many more parts water. One part longing to many, many more parts love. Add various stirins like empathy and insight as you see fit. Juk is juk, is my Poh Poh, is me. ///

I S S U E N O. 5 OUT NOW! SUBSCRIPTIONS & BUNDLES AVA IL A B L E O N L IN E

Reading for pleasure.

Writing for everyone.

The A mp er sandReview.c a

LÉA TARANTO // 49

When I tasted it, it wasn’t the same as I’d remembered.

But that didn’t matter; it was still liquid love. It was the last meal Poh Poh ever cooked.

To this day, I don’t cook unless I must. If I ever do anything elaborate, it is an act of love for family. When cooking for myself, I stick to the basics: sandwiches, canned soup, something you can heat up in the microwave. I’ve come to peace with the fact that I’ll never find Poh Poh’s juk recipe, probably because it doesn’t exist.

I will never be able to resurrect Poh Poh through a dish because I don’t have enough information. The same can be said for Poh Poh as a person. It’s too late to ask her how many dried Chinese mushrooms to put in a pot of boiling rice. It’s too late to ask her the flavour of her dreams. What I have left is an imprecise version of Poh Poh based on my memories and information gleaned from family. Like the tidbit from Auntie Rose that the

LÉA TARANTO // 50

END OF EMPIRE (AUCTIONS), 22" x 30", GOUACHE ON PAPER, 2020 | HEATHER GOODCHILD

Image courtesy of the artist.

PATRICIA ARHINSON

HOUSE PLANT Why do you wilt wherever I move you?

Not enough sun—you wither in on yourself.

Too much sun and you droop, slow down; life seeps from you like sap and you look like a willow tree. Weep like a willow tree.

Your eyes water at the lightest wind—why? You cry at the slightest provocation, shrivel up your brown-tipped leaves. Please.

Don’t be so fragile, so, so … sensitive.

We all steep in stress sometimes.

Haven’t you heard? You’re not supposed to bury your body in bed like you’re already dead. C’mon, girl, find some soil more fertile and take root.

Someone sang to you, actually played Beethoven for you; flower, you fucking baby.

THRIVE. You’ve got 10,000 lux shining down on you, you suck up ketamine and clomipramine like rain.

What more do you want—the grace of your parents’ God? You disowned him all those years ago; like granddad said, “You’ve got darkness in your soul.”

Small pot, root rot, black spot, shot hole, gray mold.

Your mother’s coaxed 30 different plants to life just this year; her every room is verdant.

And yet, there’s you.

IF (A LOOSE SHAKESPEAREAN SONNET)

What would I do if I was well, which is To say, what sort of person would I be, What works of art, oh! what fantastic bliss, A tranquil heart, a still-lake mind, so deep A peace. Relief?

Good cheer, be mine!

Operatic joy, contented hum, the thrum Of life within my bones—I’d feel this kind Of thing, if I was well; these things, then some.

I tire of trudging through this mire of dark, Disquieting thoughts, this dance with sadness as My master. Bring me wellness, coat me with bark— Tough sheath of ease and health that lasts, at last.

Give me repose, give me unending rest, Give me solace, or give me death.

PATRICIA ARHINSON // 51

TWO POEMS

[INTERVIEW]

WAUBGESHIG RICE: AUTHENTICALLY ANISHINAABE

HLR EDITOR D.D. MILLER TALKS TO WAUBGESHIG RICE ABOUT HIS NEW NOVEL MOON OF THE TURNING LEAVES, THE IMPORTANCE OF FAMILY IN HIS GROWTH AS A WRITER, BEING EDITED BY A NON-ANISHINAABE EDITOR, AND MORE. PHOTO CREDIT: JAMES HODGINS

W

1. SURVIVING APOCALYPSES

W

hen asked about the novel aligning with this concept of a post-apocalyptic utopia, Waub Rice pushes back against the word. “I’m reluctant to use the term utopia because that can be as subjective as dystopia. It could mean one thing to somebody and then an entirely different thing to somebody else, right?”

Instead, he says, he prefers Vancouver-based Cherokee scholar Daniel Heath Justice’s concept of “wonderworks,” because it provides “an opportunity to wonder about our existence [in a] post-colonial state and what we can bring from the past into the future. And then create these new environments for ourselves and our families and communities.” He explains: “[Writing the book] really was an opportunity for me to wonder in a really hopeful way rather than speculate, which sounds kind of formal and maybe like hypothesizing— you think of that as something based in science, but

[INTERVIEW] // 53

aubgeshig Rice’s acclaimed 2018 novel Moon of the Crusted Snow ends with Nicole Whitesky gathering her family to follow her husband, Evan, who has gone into the bush to forge a new community. In the midst of a mysterious apocalypse, they are leaving their Peoples’ reserve in northern Ontario to return to a more traditional way of living. The final sights that Nicole takes in before leaving are “the band office, the shop, and all the other community buildings,” noting that “there was no use for any of it.”

T he sequel, Moon of the Turning Leaves, begins twelve years later and opens in a birthing lodge during a childbirth. There is a fire in the centre of the bark-walled “small domed structure,” with cedar boughs “boiling on the blackened grill.” The young woman giving birth does so on blankets made of “soft rabbit fur.” It could be a description of a pre-colonial Anishinaabe birth, including a traditional naming ceremony. Those derelict rez buildings left behind have been replaced with traditional structures, housing traditional ceremonies, in a community that rose organically from the land.

Often, out of the smouldering ruins of an apocalypse rises a dystopic future, but one person’s dystopia is another person’s utopia. Unlike the post-apocalyptic apprehension, fear, and distrust that was so prevalent in the first book, Moon of the Turning Leaves is full of hope, even in the face of continued challenges and heartbreaking losses. It is a remarkable story of decolonization and of the resilience of the Anishinaabe People in the face of yet another apocalypse in a line of apocalypses. As prefaced in the beautiful opening scene of the book, the sequel is a novel of rebirth.

wondering about the future based on lived experience and family history […] is, I think, more beneficial to the storyteller and to the reader.”

Justice introduced the concept of wonderworks in a 2017 article, “Indigenous Wonderworks and the SettlerColonial Imaginary,” that appeared in Apex Magazine, and then expanded on it in his landmark work, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. In the original article, he claimed that “for Indigenous writers of speculative fiction, the fantastic is an extension of the possible not the impossible,” so to capture this difference he coined the term “wonderworks.” It is “a term that gestures, imperfectly, to other ways of being in the world,” noting that the word wonder is one “rooted in meaningful uncertainty, curiosity, humility; it places unsolvable mystery, not fixed insistence, at the heart of engagement.”

This method of engagement inspired Rice to craft his particular vision of the future. “I felt empowered to try to be more regenerative after the reset button has been hit … Now that everything’s fallen away and there is no obligation to the government or state, there is total autonomy on the land, and there are no barriers any longer to practicing culture or language or whatever else.”

While the end of Moon of the Crusted Snow hinted at autonomy, in Moon of the Fallen Leaves the characters embrace it fully. The Anishinaabe characters have “stabilized,” Rice explains. They are more empowered and

[INTERVIEW] // 54

can “focus on some of those traditional things … They can offer something a little more wholesome and authentic to themselves as Anishinaabe, something that’s been denied them for generations and generations.”

This reclaimed authenticity is introduced through the Whitesky family and the remnants of their community and is seen later in other Anishinaabe communities as well. Over a decade into this new world, with the resources in and around the lake upon which they’ve built their new community diminishing, Evan leads an exploratory party to their traditional ancestral territory further south to survey a potential move. Along the way (and at their destination), they come upon other Anishinaabe communities that are similarly thriving.

In a thrilling and fascinating contrast, the only surviving white settlers they encounter are members of a group called The Disciples, a desperate, violent group that is struggling in the new reality. This contrast deconstructs what Daniel Heath Justice points out is the “savagism vs. civilization binary that has so deformed colonial understandings of Indigeneity” and that is “the world-building template” in most fantasy and speculative fiction.

The disparate responses to the post-apocalyptic world allude to the precarity of the settler-colonial enterprise: when only the land remains to commune with and live off of, the settler communities crumble, resorting to violence, theft, and intimidation, while the Anishinaabe communities thrive. In many ways, this is a celebratory vision of decolonization.

When asked if he thinks that it will take an apocalyptic event like the one presented in his novel to attain true decolonization, Rice hesitates before answering.

“I don’t hope for catastrophe or death and destruction, but in some ways....” he trails off with a hint of a smile.

“Ultimately,” he says, gathering his thoughts, “the purest form of decolonizing, for lack of a better term, is to get back out onto the land and do things as they had been done for thousands and thousands of years prior to colonialism and industrialization. “[Colonialism] is just the past few centuries, and […] from that spectrum of time, it’s puny compared to the history that we’ve all come from as Indigenous people on this land […] So if the world doesn’t collapse, if this state doesn’t dissolve, hopefully we can have the resources and the time and the effort to get back out to the lands, and I think once that happens, other elements of who we are as Indigenous people will start to flourish again, like our language, like our customs, like our birthing or even our death customs, and really having that tangible connection to that will hopefully restore some of those things that have been damaged

or even lost. So, yeah,” he concludes, “I do think it will take some sort of detachment from our current obligations in this capitalist, technological society … Maybe a shake-up is what’s going to help restore our old ways.”

He points out that this reclamation is happening now, citing a slow return to traditions and ceremonies that first began during his childhood in the post–Red Power movement 1980s. “I am inspired by the community efforts I see happening around me,” he says, describing a recent hunt that he and his family went on organized by the Shkagamik-Kwe Health Centre in Sudbury. “The whole point was to get kids out of school and get families together to go out into the bush and re-engage with those traditional hunting practices because that’s what families have done since time immemorial.” He says this engagement with his children “inspires [him] to try to be a little more hopeful when it comes to writing end-of-world stories. Because [he believes] we’ll make it out of our next apocalypse, whatever it may be.”

As Anishinaabe, he concludes, “we have ‘surviving apocalypse’ in our lineage.”

2. MAKING REAL PEOPLE CARE ABOUT MADE-UP PEOPLE

T

he impetus for the Moon books was The Northeast Blackout of 2003. “I was home in Wasauksing when that happened,” Rice explains. Living in Toronto at the time, he’d returned to the rez on Parry Island in Georgian Bay along with his two younger brothers to house-sit for his dad and stepmom, who were away on vacation, when the lights went out. Bored and wondering how widespread the outage was, he and his brothers headed to town, “and we started getting a little worried,” he remembers, when they realized the extent of the blackout.

“So, we went back to the rez, back to our dad’s house and made this whole comprehensive survival plan. We started going through the cupboards and counting all the cans of food, and we started gathering firewood in the backyard because we’re like, well, that electric stove is useless now. And we’re settling in for the long haul because it just seemed like a world-ending event.”

He confesses that on that first night, he and his brothers, despite their “tough facades,” were scared and decided to sleep in the living room together. But, he says, “as we’re settling in, we started talking about what we’re going to do tomorrow, and we start thinking of all the people around us, like our cousins who are good hunters or our aunties who could go get medicine from the bush.” He recalls how comforting that

At that point, however, he’d already begun his journalism career. “I got into journalism,” he says, “because it seemed like the best option for me in terms of the communications and writing I was interested in.”

He ended up working in the field for nearly two decades, first freelancing and then with the CBC in both Winnipeg and Ottawa. He acknowledges that journalism was a huge benefit to his creative ventures. “I’m not sure I would have been equipped with the tools and experiences to jump in full-time without having spent almost 20 years in journalism. It was like having a frontrow seat to the human experience. I met all kinds of people in all kinds of situations, and I really got a sense of how different people respond to different situations.

There are just so many different chaotic situations that humans end up in, and I felt very fortunate that I was their conduit,” he says. “It was a huge honour, obviously, every time, but it was also a major responsibility, not just in getting it right, but in ensuring that viewers, listeners, readers understood that human experience.”

He estimates that over the course of his career, he has conducted upwards of ten thousand interviews.

“When I’m sitting down to write fiction, I can draw upon those memories and those specific experiences of people in specific situations and hopefully be inspired to write specific things in fiction, and that’s not to say I would take their experiences and write about it, but I would find these little moments in those stories that I could draw out and maybe write in my own way, like responding to a tragedy or the elation of some sort of triumph.”

Even as a journalist he didn’t stop writing fiction, publishing his first novel, Legacy, in 2014, and then Moon of the Crusted Snow four years later. “I found fiction a really liberating playground because it wasn’t confined by time or space,” he says about his love for writing fiction. After the success of Moon of the Crusted Snow, he decided to dedicate his life to creative writing.

When asked if he faced any particular challenges shifting between journalism and fiction, he refers to a favourite analogy he’d used in the past: “I would say that one is like swinging a baseball bat and the other one’s like swinging a golf club. You have similar motions, you’re using similar muscles, but you’re using different implements for different results.” He admits that he’s evolved his thinking on the duality. “How I see it now,” he explains, “is that journalism is about making real people care about real people through writing and storytelling, whereas fiction is about making real people care about made-up people, and there are different challenges to both; it’s just a matter of understanding my place as a storyteller and my responsibility as a storyteller, as someone who is the conduit in many ways for different stories and experiences.”

[INTERVIEW] // 55

discussion was, and how they concluded that they were not too bad off. “We’re on this island where people were removed from the mainland and forced onto, but they made the most out of being here, and they’re [already] post-apocalypse.” By the time they’d gone to sleep, they were convinced that no matter what, they were going to be all right. Rice knew that if he were to ever experience anything like that again, he’d head back to rez. He also knew that he wanted to write about it someday.

Wasauksing was where he first nurtured his love for writing. “I grew up in the ’80s, obviously before the internet,” he explains, “and we didn’t have cable TV on the rez, and I think movies were few and far between in my childhood, so I spent a lot of time with family and hearing the old Nanbush stories, other creation stories, and community history. I think that’s where it really started.” Later, in high school, he studied creative writing more closely. “But, you know, that was in the ’90s before anybody really knew anything about Indigenous writers or publishers.” His aunt was one of his teachers in the community, and she introduced Indigenous writers like Richard Wagamese (particularly his 1994 debut novel Keeper’n Me), Lee Maracle, and Jordan Wheeler. Another novel that stood out during that time was Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed, a book about young boys navigating teenage life in a Dogrib community in the Northwest Territories.

“I read that and was like, holy shit! That was very close to my experience,” he remembers. “I think examining those contemporary realities and just being able to place myself [in them], that’s what really pulled me towards that way of storytelling because, I didn’t realize this at the time, but I realize it now, that contextualization is something that’s hard to find elsewhere.

Fiction or literature can really go deep into that, and it can open up those windows a crack to really get in and find something relatable and identifiable.”

Next, Rice entered Toronto Metropolitan University (then called Ryerson). While studying journalism, he read Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach and Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water, in which the humour King evoked felt so familiar. “Even though these stories weren’t Anishnaabe-specific, there were obvious threads; you can connect with them and within your own culture’s story. So once that cracked open for me, I saw how Indigenous writers navigated placing ourselves in a current context, while at the same time reaching back and paying homage to our ancestors and the stories that enlightened and guided them.” He soon dabbled in writing his own stories, short-fiction pieces that would eventually be gathered in the collection Midnight Sweatlodge, published in 2011 by Theytus Books, the country’s oldest Indigenous-specific press.

While grateful for his experiences as a journalist, he’s content with where he’s ended up. “I never imagined making an entire career out of [creative writing],” he admits, “so I feel very fortunate to be in the position that I am today, for sure.”

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3. AUTHENTICALLY ANISHINAABE

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he editorial process has been important in shaping him as a writer. “I don’t have an English degree or an MFA in creative writing, so I don’t think I’m as attuned to some of those canonized methods,” he explains, saying that he’s learned from reading and is guided by “trying to be as authentically Anishinaabe as possible.” He’s also quick to point out that he’s had “really great editors every step of the way.”

While his first two books were published by an Indigenous press, Moon of the Crusted Snow was published by ECW and edited by Susan Renouf. It was Renouf who encouraged him to explore and utilize the skills and insights he’d gained through journalism and who, he says, “opened [his] eyes” to what would be his style. “Susan and I were able to develop a rapport before we got into Moon of the Crusted Snow,” he says in explanation of his relationship with the ECW editor.

“She originally reached out to me a couple years before that because she wanted me to write something nonfiction for ECW and that just never worked out. We’d had these ongoing conversations about Indigenous issues, about who I am, where I’m from and so on. So when that nonfiction project stalled, I said, well, I do have this fiction manuscript that I’ve been chipping away at over the past couple of years, and she said she was interested in seeing it. And she read it, and she liked it and wanted to take it on. So we had a personal relationship by then already, which I think was really helpful, and when it came down to her actually editing it, she was very hands-off with all the culturally specific things and the language. She just wanted to help it to be a better story, which she saw her job being and which she ultimately did.”

This included encouraging him to include Anishinaabemowin without explicitly translating it for the non-Nish audience. “Don’t spoon-feed them,” he says she told him. “Don’t hold their hand through it all, just figure out a way to write it so that they can tell what’s going on.” Advice that Rice calls “empowering.”

Along with editorial guidance, he also cites feedback from family and friends in the literary community, including Indigenous writers like Richard Van Camp and Cherie Dimaline but also Midland-born

writer Kevin Hardcastle, who writes about the rural experience from the settler side of things. Overall, he says that he’s evolved from the admittedly expositoryheavy writing of his earlier works: “I think I’ve found a way to be a more efficient writer, but not at the cost of detail or emotion, and I think I’ve learned how to work all that in while writing at a good pace.”

His family supports him as well, and not only with encouragement. Rice’s brother is fluent in Anishinaabemowin and helped with the language used in the texts, and his father is his “cultural reference point,” who has been key in helping him develop the cultural elements of the books and navigate what’s appropriate to include.

He also notes one other thing that his community in Wasauksing has been important for: keeping him humble. “Coming from rez, people have different ways to compliment you and they also try to humble you, too. There will be playful teasing here and there,” he says with a laugh.

4. WHAT CAN COME NEXT

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he Moon stories are built around contrasts. First, the contrasts between the two books themselves.

The first is about Anishinaabeg on rez dealing with a crumbling society that was not of their making to begin with; it’s familiar in many ways, and tropes of the post-apocalyptic genre are recognizable. The sequel is about Anishinaabeg back on the land, rebuilding communities, picking up where they left off prior to the establishment of the settler-colonial state. This makes the second book feel somehow more unique and certainly more Anishinaabe-focused than the first.

“The [first] book was about the moment of catastrophe, the immediate aftermath, and the very basic struggle between good and evil that arises in that immediate aftermath,” Rice explains in response to this idea. “With [the second], by setting it farther into the future, I saw it as an opportunity to explore some moral nuances and look at the agency that comes with being able to set one’s own future after collapse.”

He says the Anishinaabe priorities that arose during the planning helped shape the writing process.

“I was really inspired by Anishinaabe knowledge and what exists today after the various catastrophes that our people have endured and survived, so by focusing on that survival of culture and customs and really taking pride in what still exists, it became more of an Anishinaabe-centric story.” Part of this shift, he explains, was in who he imagined as the readers of the texts. He says that for the first book, he saw the audience as “whoever wants to read the book,” but with the sequel, Rice says

larger settler society and] repercussions of residential schools. So yeah, I wanted to make sure a bit of that was in there, too.”

He’s quick to add that he isn’t commenting on anyone specific in his community, and that some of this tension is even self-reflective. “I want to do better,” he says, “better land-based knowledge, better language speaking, more ceremonial activities with my kids and so on.”

Children and youth play a significantly larger role in the second novel as well. This is another reflection of Rice’s life, as having three children of his own has shaped the way he approaches life and writing. “When you have kids and they’re experiencing certain elements of the world for the first time, it reminds you of that wonder and joy that you had when you were a kid. And in my opinion, that can only be heartwarming and inspiring, and in some ways that helps, like writing about a certain detail about the world around you. Like seeing a daisy bloom for the first time.” He pauses and notes that this happened with his middle child in 2021. “He was blown away by seeing that,” Rice remembers. “And I thought what a precious way to appreciate the world. You know?”

Although there was a sense of hope at the end of Moon of the Crusted Snow, it was, ultimately, a far bleaker story than Moon of the Turning Leaves, which despite its setting and subject matter, is astonishingly hopeful. This was a conscious decision on Rice’s part.

“Thinking about the future with my kids in mind inspires me to try to be a little more hopeful when it comes to writing end-of-the-world stories,” he admits.

“It reminds me of the strength of the next generations and what can come next.”

Our conversation, despite sometimes veering into uncomfortable and challenging subject matter, similarly turned more hopeful near the end. “You know,” Rice concludes, reflecting on the state of his community and the Anishinabek Nation as a whole, “our future is more in our hands now than it ever has been.”

WAUBGESHIG RICE IS AN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST FROM WASAUKSING FIRST NATION. HE’S WRITTEN FIVE BOOKS, INCLUDING THE BESTSELLING NOVEL MOON OF

THE CRUSTED SNOW, PUBLISHED IN 2018. HE GRADUATED FROM THE JOURNALISM PROGRAM AT TORONTO METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY IN 2002 AND SPENT MOST OF HIS JOURNALISM CAREER WITH THE CANADIAN BROADCASTING CORPORATION AS A VIDEO JOURNALIST AND RADIO HOST. HE LIVES IN SUDBURY, ON, WITH HIS WIFE AND THREE SONS. ///

[INTERVIEW] // 57

he “felt more of an obligation to speak to Anishinaabe readers and Indigenous readers more broadly.”

Second, the contrasts that shape the story build from this foundation. There is the contrast between the settler survivors and Anishinaabe survivors first and foremost, but more powerfully, there is a contrast between the generations of Nish survivors: those who grew up in the settler-colonial state prior to the “event” and those who have grown up since.

The younger generation speaks Anishinaabemowin more fluently than their elders (in some of the newly established communities that is all they speak), and they carry traditional names as well. “I think that’s something that you see playing out in communities [now],” Rice points out. “You have this resurgence of names amongst the younger generations, where people 30, 40, 50 plus still predominantly have English or Christian names … That exists within my own family, within my own community.”

Rice keeps returning to the notion that the reclamation in the text is a reflection of what he is seeing happening now and a reflection of the sense of community he feels in the present. “That’s what I saw as a child,” he says. “Part of that cultural restoration was a response to a lot of tragedies in my community throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. A lot of people died prematurely due to all sorts of reasons, all sorts of causes. It was my parents’ generation in the late ’70s and early ’80s who’d had enough of all that loss, and they got together and that’s when they decided to try to bring ceremony back and bring the drum back and teach the kids how to sing and dance, and so on. That was obviously hugely beneficial to me because I was a little kid seeing this happen, and it really taught me about who I was as an Anishinaabe person.”

But he also wanted to be realistic in his portrayal and acknowledges that not everyone in community is interested in going back to the old ways: “I wanted to portray in this story that there are also opposing forces to that … Not everybody was on board with moving out to the bush and then when they make the decision to go south, not everybody’s on board with that either. There are a lot of political divisions amongst our communities and our wider relations as a result of being under the Indian Act system and because of that divide-and-conquer tactic that had been employed upon us by the settler system.

“You can’t expect everybody just to go back to the old ways and try to live this harmonious utopia because that doesn’t exist at all. It’s not possible, and even in my community, there was pushback to that traditional reclamation when I was a kid, influenced by the church or just the general shame from [the

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REVIEWS FAITHFULLY SEEKING FRANZ

By Elana Wolff (Guernica Editions) Reviewed by Keith Garebian Award-winning poet and essayist Elana Wolff became an inveterate admirer of Prague modernist Franz Kafka’s novels and stories in her teens when she read “The Metamorphosis,” whose creaturely protagonist Gregor Samsa brought her to question what it was to be human. A little later, during a year working on an Israeli kibbutz, she was so “deeply affected by the grim humour, relentless portrayal of bureaucratic absurdity, stripped-down writing style, and dark enigmatic ending” of Kafka’s The Castle (as she says in Faithfully Seeking Franz), she felt compelled to read lines from it aloud to the “wide-eyed, blank-faced goats.”

The idea for Faithfully Seeking Franz took seed in early 2011 when, in researching Kafka’s “well-known and lesser-known fiction, the notebooks, diaries, correspondence, and many of the studies and biographies,” Wolff recognized “threads and themes in his lifeline.”

This led to her quest for the man behind the writer, tracking “the places he lived, worked, sojourned, and convalesced.”

Spanning several countries (Austria, Czechia, Germany, Denmark) over several years, Wolff’s quest for Kafka’s traces is documented through photos, poems, and creative nonfiction. Identifying herself as E., and accompanied by her husband Menachem or M., the author begins in Vienna, January 2014, her purpose being a visit to Kafka’s Death House—Sterbehaus—nineteen kilometres northwest of the capital, before moving on to Prague. The most startling thing in this episode is learning that the great astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Square stopped at 4 p.m. on June 11, 1924, the precise time of Kafka’s interment, eight days after his death from complications of tuberculosis.

When E. and M. stay a night on the fifth floor of the InterContinental Prague Hotel (formerly a grand apartment building where Kafka and his family had lived), E. can’t feel “anything of his presence.” Sensitive

“to resemblances, synchronicities”—signs that are “confirmation of seeing, affirmation of meaning … evidence of the outer world and one’s inner world connecting”—she notes the appearance of a jackdaw near Kafka’s grave. Kafka’s tombstone inscription uses his Jewish name Anschel, similar to Amsel, the German word for blackbird or crow, and the jackdaw is the smallest member of the crow family. E. operates as an eager sleuth, pressing hard to connect even the slimmest of traces, which provokes M.’s skepticism about her fanciful imaginings or hypotheses. When she scolds him for his reluctance to engage in conversation about “how places, people and their ordeals get written into books,” M. shoots back, “Can you blame me?

We’ve walked for over an hour to see a street sign and a sausage stand.”

The book gains by such honesty. After all, it is impossible to deny the effects of time on nostalgia. Kafka’s resting place in Prague has not a soul in sight when E. and M. visit. The Berlin hotels where Kafka stayed were destroyed by the war. The once-splendid Schloss Hotel Marienbad no longer boasts a spa; instead, it is a residence for foreign students taking Czech lessons to qualify for university admission. And the Lahmann Sanatorium that had made a deep impression on Kafka looks derelict, eerie, and doleful.

But nothing, ultimately, wrecks E. and M.’s symbiotic relationship: “In the course of reading, researching, drafting, discussing, writing, and rewriting our translations, M. and I, I felt, were coming to a new nearness.” M. concurs, asserting that they are “doing the work of ilui neshama—elevation of the soul.” And in her concluding poem, E. affirms, “Concern for soul consumes me.”

However, this book never drifts into ethereal abstraction. E. is a well-grounded researcher, with wide expertise on Kafka, especially about his biography and parabolic literary world. She refers to Kafka’s emblems of birds (especially crows), horses, and card-playing (Kartenspiel), and when she addresses the theme of rectification, she makes skillful use of Anne Carson

REBELLION BOX

By Hollay Ghadery (Radiant Press) Reviewed by Salma Hussain The term rebellion box refers to tiny wooden boxes carved by prisoners kept at Fort Henry, Kingston, during the Rebellion of 1837. These boxes were often inscribed with messages to loved ones, ranging from political to religious to sentimental. The term makes an apt title for Hollay Ghadery’s debut book of poetry, as the charm and brilliance of Rebellion Box stem from its expansive range of themes and scenes. Ghadery’s sixtythree poems flit from delicate and difficult moments in motherhood to sweet and exuberant love poems to the wry acceptance of the relentless passage of time to an examination of society’s expectations and limitations on women.

Ghadery is an award-winning Iranian Canadian multi-genre writer whose acclaimed memoir of

mixed-race identity and mental illness, Fuse, was published by Guernica Editions in 2021. She has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Guelph and her fiction, nonfiction, and poetry are regularly published in literary journals, including The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, The Antigonish Review, and Grain (where many of the poems in Rebellion Box first found a home).

Given Ghadery’s background in memoir writing, it is no surprise that there is an unflinching honesty to this collection. Ghadery creates intimacy by deftly peppering her poems with revelations so candid that they take the breath away (“That’s what I / should have done” [p. 11], “all I wanted to be / was less / to stare at,” [p. 55], “cause if there’s one thing I know, it’s that she’ll try” [p. 4] and “all from the same father, then?” [p.

26]). This frankness has the effect of making the reader feel like they have been ushered into a delectably confidential and private conversation. Ghadery uses this intimate tone throughout but most expressively in her poems about motherhood, which do not shy away from the glory and effort of raising and nurturing young children—such as, when a young girl unintentionally harms a chick by “feeding” it juice and the mother analyzes the consequence of explaining the action to the young child (“I don’t / want her to be afraid to sleep at night, / don’t want her to rethink the kindness of sharing her drink with a friend, but /” [p. 4]) and when a mother speaks to her young child of the beauty of comets (“their tails spanning star systems / … Who knows where they go. / Who knows that they see / … It’s okay not to know for sure. / You say that, but you’re / not / so sure, / yourself” [pp. 29–30]. An explanation about this poem contained under “Notes” on p. 68 reveals autobiographical elements that make the poem extra poignant.

Note, too, that Ghadery’s tone of intimacy with respect to micro-moments in motherhood is interspersed with poems that shift the lens away from a mother in the present to a woman or girl in the past, creating dissonance and an intriguing juxtaposition. Ghadery asks, “I wonder, what submerged / identities we women

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and Elias Canetti. Her bibliographic sources include Gaston Bachelard, Carlos Fuentes, Milan Kundera, W.G. Sebald, and Thomas Mann. Her wide reading (with its deep concentration on Kafka) enables her to trace in some detail “the centrality of friendship to his literary development and posthumous acclaim.” That includes his friendships with publisher Kurt Wolff, author and composer Max Brod, and Hebrew scholar and poet Georg Mordechai Langer, as well as his relationships with devoted sister Ottla, two-time fiancée Felice Bauer, and freethinking Dora Diamant (whom he met in 1923 while vacationing on the Baltic). E. practices careful restraint in matters of Kafka’s relationships with men.

E.’s aphoristic “Notes on Questing” and her virtual Epilogue (“Later”) are wonderfully summative of the book because they provide insight into E.’s literary form, in which one event or thing leads to another, everything is in process, and “questing, like writing,” is “a matter of becoming.”

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can have?” (p. 39), and the reader wonders alongside her. In fact, a line from the very first poem, “I’m not that girl / anymore –” (p. 2), functions as an anchoring refrain for this collection of poems, which casts its gaze boldly forwards and beguilingly backwards. Over and over, Ghadery reminds us that our past selves do not remain buried or static—rather, they appear before us, suddenly and unpredictably (“taking up space, everywhere / and if / you can’t see / that, you need / to think / bigger” [pp. 6–7]).

In large measure, this playful contemplation with the push and pull of the past, present, and future is at the core of Rebellion Box. From the title to the inclusion of poems addressed to historical figures and events, and poems written in the voice of the dead, Ghadery’s self-confessed obsession with death and that which stays constant while all else decays and disappears (see note under “cosmic script” on p. 68) is this collection’s most mesmerizing focus. The last lines of almost all of Ghadery’s poems (but particularly, “Mom,” “Roll,” “Cronartiasceae,” “Anemic Galaxy,” and “Arosak”) end on hopeful notes and reminders to sit with the horror and beauty of one’s impermanence and “to live, anyway” (p. 32).

MUSICAL REVOLUTIONS: HOW THE SOUNDS OF THE WESTERN WORLD CHANGED

By Stuart Isacoff (Alfred A. Knopf/Penguin Random House) Reviewed by Andrew Scott On Thursday, November 16, 2023, the Toronto-born musician Aubrey Graham, better known as Drake, “dropped” (to use his preferred parlance) a one-minute and fifty-seven-second teaser video for the then-upcoming release of his EP “Scary Hours 3” on his Instagram page, @champagnepapi. Shot using the noir gaze of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, the video captures Drake leaving his Bridle Path home and driving through an abandoned Toronto towards Roy

Thompson Hall, home to the Toronto Symphony and most musical things coded “classical” in this city. Drake enters the austere venue with detached mannerisms and a bespectacled and subdued look notably different from his usual performative dress. He is handed a glass of red wine by an usher before sitting in the middle front of the amphitheatre for Giuseppe Verdi’s La forza del destino. Upon noting Drake’s presence (he is the only patron), TSO Music Director Gustavo Gimeno turns to the symphony and begins the opera’s famous overture.

While Drake’s love of all things Toronto is well known, it is less clear if he is, in fact, a fan of the TSO or of opera or of Western art music more generally. But the message contained in the video is clear: Drake can code-switch. And in an AI-curated world of streaming musical preferences, why not? Spotify’s Stockholmbased chatbots are just as likely to feed you a curated playlist containing Hildegarde von Bingen and Miles Davis as they are a collection of what is currently climbing today’s pop charts. I am hardly the first to note it, but musically and otherwise, we are truly living in a genre-free world of blended so-called high and low culture postmodernity, where the borders of style, epoch, and geographical location are increasingly porous.

How fitting then that Stuart Isacoff—pianist, writer, scholar, and composer—has chosen, in his terrific 2022 book Musical Revolutions: How the Sounds of the Western World Changed, not to examine music history by chronology or classification, but through the lens of revolution: “moments in music history when things dramatically changed, a succession of bold leaps in the progress of Western culture.” Exhibiting the epistemological humility to bow out of the conversation when it comes to rock (and, one supposes, R & B, disco, hip hop, electronica, and other post-1950 musical manifestations, as these musics “deserve a more knowledgeable observer than myself,” writes Isacoff), the author treats Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the high priests of bebop (Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie) with equal consideration and care. Isacoff notes the unique considerations present in such a sizeable plot of musical

in his musical and historical choices, demonstrating that despite the copious amount of ink that has already been spilt on Debussy, the Bachs (the plural is intentional), Guido of Arezzo, and John Coltrane (among others), there is still much more about the aforementioned to learn.

And while reading through Isacoff’s skillful threading of the historical needle with a filament of revolutionary canonical importance is rewarding, the experience would be all the more heightened if only an AI chatbot could put together a playlist for the sprawling sounds Isacoff writes about based on my algorithmically determined reading and listening habits!

NOW

available

Supported by the Mississauga Arts Council

Keith Garebian Poetry is Blood CD

///

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terrain while presciently locating the connective tissue that hews together sonic styles emanating from cultural and musical contexts that in many ways could not be more different. It is a testament to Isacoff’s writing and scholarship that he maintains reader interest throughout some 300 pages while eschewing historical linearity for a carnivalesque ride through a musical narrative whose only intersection is revolutionary “importance.”

This last point is notable. While postmodernist frameworks for rethinking history have emboldened such creative new approaches as the one Isacoff employs here, there is commensurate pressure to “rethink” the canon and (to use the language du jour), “problematize” or “decentre” the very idea of historical importance. Thankfully, Isacoff rejects this imperative

CONTRIBUTORS // 62

CONTRIBUTORS PATRICIA ARHINSON (she/her) is a full-time student in the Bachelor of Creative and Professional Writing program at Humber College. She recently worked as an editor for the Humber Literary Review Spotlight. She holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology but decided that she was more suited to writing poetry about mental illness—rather than treating it in others.

Driven by her personal experiences, she writes frankly about mental health and hopes readers can find solace, or at least understanding, in her work.

CATHERINE AUSTEN writes novels for children, short stories for adults, and reports for corporate clients. Her novels have won several awards, including the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award and the Quebec Writers’ Federation Prize for Children’s Literature. Her short stories have appeared in journals and anthologies including The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, and Carousel. She is working on her first collection of short fiction.

A queer writer born and raised in Montreal and now living in Toronto, LARRY BAER rediscovered writing in what he likes to refer to as late mid-life.

HEATHER BABCOCK is a self-professed movie nerd.

Her novel Filthy Sugar, which was inspired by the feisty dames of 1930s Hollywood, was published by Inanna Publications in 2020.

GARY BARWIN’s recent and forthcoming work includes Imagining Imagining: Essays on Writing, Identity and Infinity (Wolsak & Wynn) forthcoming Fall 2023; Portal (visual poetry, Potential Press) May 2023; Duck Eats Yeast, Quacks, Explodes; Man Loses Eye (poetry; w/Lillian Necakov, Guernica Editions) 2023; The Most Charming Creatures (poetry, ECW Press) 2022; The Fabulous Op (poetry; w/Gregory Betts, Bei Bua) April 2022; Bird Arsonist (poetry; w/Tom Prime, New Star

Books) Feb 2022; and Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy (novel, Random House Canada, March 2021). His original T-shirt designs can be found at www.cottonbureau.com/ people/teeth-shirts.

JESSICA BEBENEK is an interdisciplinary poet, bookmaker, and educator whose work has received awards and critical acclaim across Canada and internationally. In 2021, she was a finalist for the Writer’s Trust Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in Poetry. Bebenek’s recent chapbooks include I REMEMBER THE EXORCISM (Gap Riot, 2022), k2tog (Broken Dimanche, 2018), and What is Punk (2019).

Her first full-length poetry collection, No One Knows Us There, will be published by Book*hug Press in 2025. @notyrmuse www.jessicabebenek.art KATE BIRD’s work has been published in Prairie Fire, The Sun, The Phare, and Tangled Locks Journal. She won third prize in the 2022 Prairie Fire MRB Creative Non-Fiction Contest, was longlisted for the 2022 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the 2022 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest, shortlisted for The Phare’s WriteWords 2022 contest, and featured on Writers Radio. The author of Vancouver in the Seventies: Photos from A Decade That Changed the City; City On Edge: A Rebellious Century of Vancouver Protests, Riots and Strikes; and Magic Moments in BC Sports, you can find her at www.katebird.ca KEITH GAREBIAN has published thirty books to date, including many books on theatre, his autobiography Pieces of My Self, and ten poetry collections, including Frida: Paint Me as a Volcano (2004), Blue: The Derek Jarman Poems (2008), Children of Ararat (2010), Poetry is Blood (2018), Against Forgetting (2019), In the Bowl of My Eye (2022), and Finger to Finger (2022). Several of his poems have been anthologized in Canada and the

SALMA HUSSAIN (she/her) writes poetry, prose, and the occasional poetry review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in filling Station, The Fiddlehead, the Humber Literary Review, The /tƐmz/ Review, Queens Quarterly, Pleiades: Literature in Context, CV2, and The Antigonish Review.

Writing, editing and publishing have occupied much of RAYMOND GARIÉPY’s adult life. He writes in the genres of creative nonfiction, short fiction, and poetry.

Besides writing, the visual arts (collage, photography, and digital art/photography) play a key role in his creative expression. Presently, he is the editor of WestWord magazine, published by the Writers’ Guild of Alberta.

“The Unborn and Born Dead Are Yet Among Us” is from a work in progress, a collection of essays entitled Blues for Bastards. He lives in Edmonton, AB, with his wife, an artist.

ELI MUSHUMANSKI is a queer writer living on unceded Lekwungen territory. They recently finished their tenure as the City of Victoria’s tenth Youth Poet Laureate, a position which started their passion for participating in and organizing community-centred poetry events. Eli has work published and forthcoming in Plenitude, Flare: The Flagler Review, and elsewhere.

ANDREW SCOTT lives in Toronto, Canada, in a house amongst children, antiquated technology of yesteryear, and many, many instruments. From this location, he makes music, writes letters, narrates radio dramas, composes poems, and submits journalistic pieces. He is a professor in and the program coordinator of Humber’s Bachelor of Music program.

KAREN SHANGGUAN is an artist and writer who specializes in creating graphic novels. A lot of her work features a warm and earthy undertone, reminiscent of the human touch and the natural world. She acknowledges that she lives and works on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx w ̱ ú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), which is also known as Vancouver, Canada.

CATHERINE ST. DENIS (she/her) lives, writes, sings, teaches, and parents on the unceded territories of the Lekwungen-speaking peoples. Her work recently appeared in Rattle and The Malahat Review. She was shortlisted for The Fiddlehead’s poetry prize, The Toronto Arts and Letters Club Poetry Award, and The Foster Poetry Prize. Catherine was a finalist for PEN Canada’s New Voices Award in both 2022 and 2023.

LÉA TARANTO (she/her) is a Chinese Jewish Canadian writer who lives with life-threatening OCD and comorbid disorders. She is an MFA graduate from UBC, alum from SFU’s The Writer’s Studio, and member of PRISM International’s poetry editorial board. She lives on the traditional, unceded land of the hən ̓q ̓əmin ̓əm ̓ (Halkomelem) and Sḵwx w ̱ ú7mesh (Squamish)–speaking peoples in British Columbia. Find out more about Léa on her website www.leataranto.com and on Instagram @LeaTarantoWrites. ///

CONTRIBUTORS // 63

US, and one of his Jarman poems was set to music for choir and instruments by Gregory Spears, in the company of a poem each by Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov. Garebian has been shortlisted for the Grit/ Lit, Freefall magazine, and the Gwendolyn MacEwen/ Exile poetry awards, and some of his poems have been translated into French, Armenian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, and Romanian. In the fall of 2023, his eleventh poetry collection, Three-Way Renegade, was published by Frontenac House. Garebian has served on many literary juries, including those for the Gerald Lampert and Raymond Souster Awards.

[FEATURED ARTIST]

[FEATURED ARTIST] // 64

HEATHER GOODCHILD HEATHER GOODCHILD (BORN 1977) IS A CANADIAN MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST. Her practice highlights the integration of craft into a contemporary art context most notable through her work using the folk technique of rug hooking. She follows in the footsteps of both the Arts and Crafts and the Pattern and Decoration Movements, finding the collapse of the hierarchy of artistic disciplines a launching pad for creative exploration.

Her work examines how personal experience can be transposed onto archetypal imagery and find resonance with the experience of the viewer. Looking to myth, Jungian dream analysis and folk tales, she translates everyday events into visual stories. Goodchild is interested in how, through shifting between media such as textiles, painting and ceramics, subjects can provide different lenses through which to interpret the narrative source. Through travel, she exposes herself to new experiences, stories, colours, and light, using plein air painting as a way to record these moments. Recent

residencies include Varda Artists Residence Program (California), the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts (Greece), and the Tao Hua Tan International Artist Residency (China).

Goodchild has exhibited internationally and throughout Canada since 2001. She received the Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2019, exhibited at the Textile Museum of Canada in 2013, was the Artist in Residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2012, and in 2020 showed at The Rooms, St. John's, NL. Goodchild most recently exhibited at IA&A at Hillyer, Washington, DC (2022), Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto, ON (2022), LL Contemporary, Richmond Hill, ON (2023), and AYE Gallery in Beijing (2023). Alongside her studio practice, Goodchild produces artwork for musicians, including Bahamas, Chilly Gonzales, Doug Paisley, and most recently was art director for Feist’s experimental stage show “Multitudes.” ///

PHOTO CREDIT: MARGAUX SMITH

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JESSICA BEBENEK // CATHERINE AUSTEN // GARY BARWIN RAYMOND GARIÉPY // KATE BIRD // HEATHER BABCOCK CATHERINE ST. DENIS // HEATHER GOODCHILD // ELI MUSHUMANSKI // LÉA TARANTO // KAREN SHANGGUAN WAUBGESHIG RICE // LARRY BAER // PATRICIA ARHINSON

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