Category: Features

Wish You Were Here by Susan Olding

Excerpt

II.

Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon! 

Enjoy this sneak peak inside the cover of the new Autumn issue, which will be available soon! 

We're excited to announce that K Ho is the winner of our 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest and $2000 prize! Their essay Dispatches will be featured in our upcoming Autumn issue, no. 289.

K Ho is a writer and photographer based in unceded Coast Salish territory (Vancouver BC). Their work has been published in several journals and is forthcoming in Resonance: Essays on the Craft and Life of Writing. They are completing their MFA in creative writing.

Thank you to all who entered the creative nonfiction contest and congratulations to the fifteen finalists. And thanks again to our judge Chelene Knight!

Dispatches by K Ho, 2021 Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner

Excerpt

Every morning before my online creative writing workshop, I take a black handheld device, about four inches long and one inch wide, and line it up next to my laptop. It looks like an old-school cellphone, not unlike an early-aughts Nokia mobile on which many eager hands played Snake. The device has a red button and a mouthpiece of scattered dots for soundwaves to slide through. I press record and wait for class to begin.

Creative Nonfiction Contest Editorial

11/11/19 by Sam Cheuk

Necessity is the mother of invention
but the city is running out of material.
Tho the young keep impressing,
behind a secret of umbrellas
the frontline dreams a catapult
from scaffold of bamboo stalks.

A friend, when in Romania, gushed on
about pep rallies students held
to sever blood debt, same two words
scrawled across the walls here,
minus the romance among
the Montagues & Capulets.

Melanie Bell holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University. Her work has appeared in Cicada, Contrary Magazine, Huffington Post and other publications. She is the co-author of a nonfiction book, The Modern Enneagram, and her short story collection Dream Signs is forthcoming from Lost Fox Publishing. Her story A Limit to Growth was featured in the Summer Fiction issue of The Fiddlehead. 

Back of the road a ways

Brighten the Corner Where You Are, Carol Bruneau. Vagrant Press, 2020.

Sometimes a gifted writer can convey a character by getting an absolute sense of that character’s voice. It is a peculiar kind of ventriloquism, some kind of almost hypnotic union, and when it works it is absolutely brilliant, as it is in Brighten the Corner Where You Are, by Carol Bruneau.

Asking the Impossible

Any God Will Do, Virginia Konchan. Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020.

While reading Halifax-based poet Virginia Konchan’s second collection, I experienced my capacity for feeling — in the broadest, most contradictory sense — expand. In fact, Any God Will Do seems to me essentially about excess (of feeling, of stimulus, of being) and about the idea of divinity as an overwhelming localization of the too-much.