Winter 2024-25, Volume 45, No. 4

$14.95

Cover image by Pierrette Boily

Winnipeg Poet Laureate Section
Clarise Foster
Dominique Lloyd
Chimwemwe Undi

Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture
Titilope Sonuga

Fiction
Justina Bombard
Linda Briskin
Morgan Dennis
Eric Rausch

Poetry
Genevieve Chornenki
Marlene Cookshaw
Patrick Friesen
Harold Hoefle
Cornelia Hoogland
Danielle Hubbard
Kevin Irie
Crystal Randall Barnett
Natalie Rice
Sneha Madhavan-Reese
Lynn Tait
LN Woodward

Creative Non-Fiction
Sara Graefe
Cynthia Holz
Jamie Paris
Anne Marie Todkill

Anne Szumigalski Memorial Lecture Preview

Call and Response
By Titilope Sonuga

She steps into the spotlight and takes a deep theatrical bow, her sequined top catching the light as she moves, sure-footed, to the podium. The applause feels like the end, but she is only just getting started. She applauds the audience back as if to say, “We are about to make something beautiful together.” At the microphone, she sings: “I opened my mouth to the Lord, and I won’t turn back, no I will go, I shall go, to see what the end is gonna be.” (Angelou 0:18)

From the open mouth of the poet, a new, unknown path emerges, from which there is, as she sings, no turning back. And so, her first poem starts as though it had already begun years before she arrived on this stage. Maya Angelou is live and unplugged; it is 1987, and an audience of several thousand has gathered to hear her. She is a poet untethered from the text, glancing only occasionally at the pages on the podium. She delivers comedy and profound insights on race. She teases about sex and love, from folk songs to poems, the audience is in lockstep. She shows them this is not any old poetry reading. …(Full lecture in the issue!)

Poetry Preview

Crane
By Crystal Randall Barnett

Crane surprises me on its first night sleeping over: I think Crane to be Moon rising from the wrong side of the yard. From this vantage, Crane is a singularity. Crane is several blocks away, but I see it reaching its woven metal arm toward the giant, ageless evergreens in my neighbour’s yard. Crane is isolated, like me.

Tonight, Crane leans in with its Eiffel Tower body. Crane watches with its Odin eye, shining cacophonous and dazzling from the tip of its arm. Crane isn’t busy in winter. Crane was placed here in preparation. Its life is on hold, like mine is during the worst part of my brain injury. Crane’s eye searches, the way I do. …(See full poem in the issue!)

Fiction Preview

The Commonplace of Found Objects
By Linda Briskin

Emily Sinclair sits at the long wooden table in the library workroom. As a member of the Guild of Book Workers, she repairs and restores books. The perfume of old books surrounds her, dusty but fragrant. She is dressed in layered skirts of eccentric shapes, the uneven textures trailing, as if she were a book to be carefully unwrapped and revealed. Her hair, cut asymmetrically, is a river of colours, streaks of red and gold and brown. She has an odd agelessness, although she has just turned thirty-three.

When Emily opens The Yellow Book of Fairy Tales to repair some torn pages, a rainbow of small origami cranes—folded and flat—drift out and float to the floor. Objects left inside books are her private passion—the discarded, hidden and lost. Over the years, she has saved many such artifacts, each a moment of grace. A flower dried and fading, with a hint of lavender. A library date-due slip with someone’s phone number. A length of worn red velvet ribbon. A ticket stub from a Chopin concert. A crinkled bus transfer. A paper folded and refolded so many times that it’s as soft as cotton; inside, a poem, written in free-flowing cursive, its title missing. But Emily recognized the word tangles of E. E. Cummings.

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart) …(See full story in the issue!)

Creative Non-Fiction Preview

Orphaned Family Photographs
By Jamie Paris

Like far too many Black men in my generation, I was raised by my grandmother because my mother and father were absent. She was the strongest and scariest woman I ever knew. She was my world when I was a child, but she died when I was ten years old. Sometimes I have trouble remembering what she looked like. How do you forget a face that was your entire world?

My mother struggled with addictions and was unable to care for me, and my father died before I was born. I used to think “died before I was born” was a euphemism for “didn’t want to raise a mixed kid” or “decided to live with his real family and his real children.” I was about seventeen when I dared to look him up for the first time. I was just about to have my son and I was hoping he could tell me something about how to become a man. During my search, I found his obituary. It had an old black and white photograph of him, with a big beard, that looked like he had just come to Canada straight from the highlands. The obituary confirmed that he died before I was born and that he was survived by his wife and children. My mother and I were not mentioned. …(Full story in the issue!)