Fall 2024, Volume 45, No. 3

$14.95

Introduction: Katherine Bitney
Cover by KC Adams

Fiction
Donna Besel
Mary Horodyski
Catherine Hunter
Lynn Hutchinson Lee
Sandra Ibrahim
Barbara Parker
Margaret Sweatman

Poetry
KC Adams
Jody Baltessen
Di Brandt
Lise Gaboury-Diallo
Marlene Grand Maître
Nancy Hall
Sarah Klassen
Kyeren Regehr
Barbara Schott
Leslie Timmins

Creative Non-Fiction
Linda Doctoroff
Ariel Gordon
Cynthia Gralla
Rowan McCandless
Dorothy Ellen Palmer
Patricia Rawson
Daria Salamon
Deborah Schnitzer

Poetry Preview

Saining Rights
By Kyeren Regehr

i.

We begin by saining with West Coast juniper in place of Iubhar-Beinne,
harvested without using iron on a moonday, then dried for seven in the
sun. No ’ome with a wee sprig will take fire, says Great Aunt Betty, so I
hang a berried frond above the mantel. She hobbles after, a stoutly five
foot two, her shotgun as a walking stick—’tis not unsafe if yer already
dead, she sings. I pry batteries from fire alarms, and she acts out shooting
them off the ceiling. We bunch scaley branches into stainless steel pots,
ceramic bowls, my wok. Of course, her hands pass right through, but I
ghost her actions, thumb an equal-armed X above each vessel, croon the
words best I can, and set it all to smoke on the axis of each room. We turn
deasil through piney fumes, toss needles and salt, place the blessing at
each bed, at the threshold of every doorway, and thrice before the altar to
my mother. Betty hacks heartily, fist-thumping her chest, mind the smoc
dinnae git yer, luvey. Soon I’m coughing strong and the air is near eaten.
Widdershins to banish, she says, so we work counter-clockwise from the
front door, slide the windows wide. And as the past flies out with the
smoke, the morning traffic pours in.

Fiction Preview

Renovation Materials
By Catherine Hunter

In the middle of the second winter, I grew restless and began to scrape the paper off the bedroom walls.

There were two layers of it. The top one, a brownish purple with a faintly botanical pattern, was easy to remove. I needed only to tug at a corner and each sheet peeled away with a crisp, satisfying swersh. The paper beneath was prettier, dotted with delicate blue forget-me-nots, but it clung to the wall like a possessing demon.

Every evening, when I returned to my empty house after work, I attacked this stubborn underlayer, working my way from ceiling to floor. I scored its glossy surface with a dinner fork and applied a soapy sponge, letting the water sink into the gashes. When it was thoroughly wet, I used a putty knife to lift it off, inch by inch, letting the scraps plop like soggy worms onto the plastic drop cloth below. Whenever I reached an especially intransigent spot, where a previous resident had been too generous with the glue, I worked around it, planning to tackle it later. Long after my interest in the job had expired, a cluster of these oddly shaped patches remained, strung across the south wall at middle height, looking a little like a map of western Europe. They stayed there all through January.

Rich and I had slept here together for twenty-two years, and while we’d gradually upgraded every other inch of this place, we’d been content to leave our bedroom as it was, the simple, private heart of the house. But over the past year, I’d contaminated its good vibes by lying here alone, tangled in unwashed sheets, sobbing or sleeping or trying to sleep or listening to the hellish news on the radio, or collapsed on the floor, keening loudly, all the while thinking, any minute now I’ll pull myself together and be rational, but that never happened. Not once. What happened was that a pang in my belly would twist and deepen in my gut until I could no longer ignore it, and then I’d be forced to admit I was hungry. I was nothing but an animal, as Rich’s cancer had been an animal, and like the cancer, I wanted to eat. So, although I knew that standing up and frying an egg and going back to work and scraping wallpaper would be deeply humiliating and disloyal—not only to Rich but to my own former self—I finally did it, because my body insisted on eating and walking and breathing the outside air and feeling the sun on its face. My friends approved of this behaviour. They especially liked the bedroom project. They believed it meant I was moving on.

Creative Non-Fiction Preview

I’m Childless, Not Kinshipless
By Cynthia Gralla

My life could be the start of a fairy tale: my husband and I don’t have children.

In both Western and Japanese fairy tales, the gift of a child often catalyzes the plot. In “Snow White,” a would-be mother wishes on drops of her own blood for a daughter. The aged man in Japan’s “Tale of the Bamboo Cutter,” which is over a thousand years old, discovers a baby inside a bamboo stalk and brings her home to his barren wife. Violence and heartbreak result from these granted desires, but the point is clear. There is no story without children.

Fairy tales are cautionary tales for children. Don’t go into those woods alone. Be wary of strangers. Value love over wealth. But they don’t just caution children. The fairy-cautionary tale that has scared the bejesus out of adults preaches that our lives will only be fulfilled when our empty nests are feathered by lovely babies born of tears, blood and bamboo stalks.

As Cate Fricke wrote in a series on fairy tales for Catapult, “Many of us want children because we don’t want to be childless.” In my case, it’s more that I don’t want to be childless because I don’t want to be without a story. A mother instantly has virtue, validity, a narrative. As I turn fifty, I fear becoming another stock fairy-tale heroine—the woman whose voice is stolen.