Category: Features

Editorial Assistant Caitlyn Sinclair's Interview with 2025 Creative Nonfiction Contest winner Shelley Pacholok whose story "How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor" was published in Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)

Excerpt from Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)
"The Cure" by Michelle Spencer
Content note: references a fatal accident, suicide, and grief. 

An excerpt from Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)

— Vivek Sharma is a graduate of UBC’s MFA program. His poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, The Best Canadian Poetry 2026, The Capilano Review, The Malahat Review, Prairie Fire, and The Walrus. His chapbook, Between two valleys, a lake (Anstruther Press, 2025), is an exploration of displacement and return. He lives and writes on the unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan peoples.

Excerpt from Issue 305 (Autumn 2025)
"How Not to Say Good-Bye to Your Professor" by Shelley Pacholok
Winner of the 2025 Creative Nonfiction Prize

From Lamb to Slaughter 
She’s a Lamb!, Meredith Hambrock. ECW Press, 2025. 

“How do you solve a problem like Maria?” This is the question that begins the musical, The Sound of Music, and the line that Jessamyn St. Germain, the protagonist of Meredith Hambrock’s second novel, She’s a Lamb!, is desperate to sing on stage. In front of a crowd of adoring fans. Because she’s a star. She is. 

Ben’s Place: Between the Lakes or “Why Not Give In and Call It Lovely?”
As Is. Ben Robinson. ARP Books, 2024. 

“Would you like to spend the day with me? I can show you around.” Ooooooooo, an adventure! My favourite kind of day. Let me grab my sunglasses! 

Still Becoming, Never Stopping 
The Years Shall Run Like Rabbits, Ben Berman Ghan. Wolsak & Wynn, 2024. 

A Diaspora Re-imagined 
Aqueous, Nathanael Jones. The Porcupine’s Quill, 2024. 

Patient with a Fly Walking on a Page 
The World After Rain, Canisia Lubrin. McClelland & Stewart, 2025.