Horseshoe Literary Magazine

Horseshoe II.i

Table of Contents

Cigarettes and Candy

Luca Jesse Apel

My mother once told me,
back when we still spoke
that the ration cards had one tile split in two –
candy or cigarettes.

Her parents always chose cigarettes,
so she never had any candy.

But her father was in the orchestra
and brought oranges from abroad.
He told her to keep them hidden
and bury the peels in the yard.

My father once told me,
before he raised me by my throat
that the seven-inch scar on his forearm
came from a compound fracture
sewn proudly by surgeons who boasted
about only needing to waste two stitches.

His father buried things too but they
were an oil-cloth clad Nazi-era rifle he found in the walls
and the Polish pride that sent him to prison for paying his workers
and the bottle-sick I’d inherit two lives down the line
and the desire to get up off the couch in the too-cold living room.

Do I look like my mother?

Luca Jesse Apel

There are parts of my body that shouldn’t be,
and tell me I look like my mother –
indestructible viscera
bound tight as sinew on bone.

I ache to slip–slough from this skin,
mottled-white and shiny-taut –
scars
swaddling the husk
of the girl who lacked the foresight
to know she wasn’t.

great grandmas

Grace Goudie

blueberry jam bubbles in the cast iron pot, burned from a hundred summer berry batches that have passed

through its stomach. in my imagination, my great grandma churns her concoction with her worn-down wooden

spoon. sweat licks her face and sticks to her hair. would it be a sin to picture her young, with a babe on her hip and black curls

swirled on the sides of her face? i thought great grandmas were created gray and wrinkled, with three blockages and leaky valves

hidden somewhere in their hearts. i’m no doctor so i can’t comment on the truth of anatomy and age, but i do know that the blackened spoon framed

and hung on our wall is older than i am.

Life Sciences III

Lindsey Harrington

Our roommate boiled concoctions 
in lobster pot batches 
Until our home was as humid 
as some exotic jungle. 
The kitchen walls wept  
with trapped condensation. 
Mold moved in and thrived  
more than we ever did. 

Yeast clung to our hair for days 
while the spent hops overstayed  
their welcome all summer 
in the backyard compost bin. 
Their smell so thick  
we couldn’t enjoy 
the scrappy patch of crab grass 
or the intermittent sun.  

Remnants transmuted: 
plant matter  
to roiling maggots, 
to flies,  
and back again. 
Like some macabre magic trick  
we didn’t ask for, 
on repeat. 

The occupants inside  
reproduced  
in the same way.  
Dividing and multiplying. 
Axes and Allies.  
Exes and acquaintances.  
Allegiances, precarious. 
Population, unreined. 

Curtains hung to create 
a makeshift bedroom. 
The illusion of privacy in  
the house’s main thoroughfare.  
Lodging for one, then three 
as the laundry machine thumped 
it’s bedtime lullaby 
and spores reproduced and  
made homes of our lungs. 

I left  
long after the homebrew was drank 
but long before the hops 
finished shapeshifting. 
Up a similarly steep street 
to an interchangeable drafty townhouse  
to finish the fermentation of my youth.

The Warwick Hotel

Stephen Zeifman

down in the lobby
of the Warwick Hotel
Penny sells her roses
and offers not to tell

your wife about the woman
hidden in your room
the one with ink and sandals
who beats you with a broom

pain is what you order
and mark with a check
on the menu by the night stand
where the bible was once kept

there are no books of prayer
in The Warwick Hotel
just a net to catch you
and learn you how to spell

the weed and wine won’t help you
with the burden in your chest
they only close the channels
and put your mind to rest

they only close the channels
and put your mind to rest

Tumblers for Three Hundred Years

Stephen Zeifman

my family were tumblers  in Padua  
for  three hundred years
it’s hard when the legs  go
no more hand springs across  the square

Donatello erected a horseman there
and Giotto wiped the paint from his brow
the pain of his lament holding fast
the discombobulated angels frozen in time

I am darkness  I  am silence I want
to make some noise tear down   the walls. 
between me and  the light like Kurt Cobain  singing  Leadbelly
Where Did You Sleep Last Night

and nobody knew  and nobody saw
until the days of thin disguise  came crashing down
on all of  our lives
how do you measure  the weight  of  sadness

there has been so much snow
fourteen feet shoveling
takes its toll
poems stuttering joints  aching throughout the night

The Graveyard

Chelsea Humphries

It was beautiful, yes:
dark trees hushing birds and visitors
with repeated words and nods,
old enough for the moss to gather ghosts
and soften stony edges.
But it was the baby planted in the ground
that made the graveyard ache.
I wanted to take it home:
a quiet seed that drew in the grass
the way I draw in the blankets now.
I wanted to tend it in a little pot,
away from time and its withering looks,
to grow strong and green,
naïve to the casual failures of hearts and bones.
Instead, I simply stood there, stone.
I allowed the wind to ripple thought,
and I told you it was beautiful.

From Here

Chelsea Humphries

This is not the first time
I’ve tried to tell you

how the mountains ache,
how the seawater glows,
how the sunlight tastes,

exactly as you’d imagine
it would here.

I know it no other way.

There is a longing in the air,
and I am constantly grasping
at rocks and words
while hoping for your hand.

And yet

how the mountains
how the sun
how the sea

they swallow language whole.

I do not mind
and I am not the first to say this;
this is not the first time
I’ve tried to tell you:

I am here, of here,
and I am you, of you,

from you.

A Reliable Structure

Beth Follett

  This we fear — this we know — that all . . .the rich imaginings of activists and thinkers who urge us to live otherwise may be disappeared, modified into reform and inclusion, equity, diversity and palliation.1

For a long poem which cannot be uninterrupted while you, unsteadily, survive:2
Keys, light fixtures, taps, hands, to sit again in hunger and agitation
You go home, remove ice creepers, jacket, hat, scarf, wipe down doorknobs,
Listen to the sea; such a luxury this first bud this breeze this warm sun is.
Floor, the wall, curated with broad interest, doors the way into larger concern. As
Gauze curtains, window open, your mother, the room you rest in, draped light,
You with questions that roll like water. How it feels to remember white linens.
Accompanying you on the trail, he finds splits most happy frugal player and keeps
And most beautiful the newfound preference for good love and more frugality, ahead
You went out, the sky was clearing, blue bags lining the curbs.

Around the neck of a girl walking past, three metres from the adult she’s with, no coat,
Somnolent, windows other screens to watch, her flashing jewels dangle.
Meteors of simple lust. You’re not far from stones in air. Mornings, far from lethargy,
To keep moving though you’ve no centre, stir yourself into one universe at a time,
Roll in recovery. A comfort to think that universes may repeat themselves. You tried
But to run with the pack, sisters, a soapbox, is acute loneliness.
Windows make a careful running stitch, backstitch, chain stitch, split stitch,
Strange city. No one leaves, no one enters, you stand by your
Critical distancing measures. Yes of course you’re sorry the business will close.
Missing are broken whale song notes. Novelty builds a wall, camps out, waits.

The sky so blue, a yellowthroat, chest of gold, pecks at debris.
In omnia paratus. Pink carnations three weeks in a glass of dirty water.
Past in Sight. War on COVID-19. Killer Virus Spreading Fast. Stay In, Stay Alive.
Five follow the experts, three do not. You know which odd number you are.
Lockdown: fold. You watch a live cam.
Oh. You missed the moment new experience found you,
Into which one worker places three abandoned goslings.
Four workers climb a wall, two approach the nest, one with a plastic tub. One
Hundred times. Practice with palms open. Must wait patiently. Then a ladder appears
— Is to wait patiently. Wait patiently. Write, one hundred times.

What if experts withdraw and we are left to fend for ourselves? Your job — is it a job?
Twenty minutes, forty, fifty, your pulse kicks up, projections prance. She’s left them!
You cannot say more, it’s off-camera guesswork. — Stay home!
She leaves. Five goslings follow, three do not.
In fine down she hatched eight goslings, who jostle. Eventually she's up,
The nature cam you watch for twenty-four hours, of her cliff-edge nest.
Morning gulls and harbour ships, morning’s bleached and refilled shelves. Only
The planets bring their news, they bring their news, bring like this
Monkey mind, repeating, a painted ship upon a painted ocean.3
What creates or contributes to or who benefits from this?4

Without codifying them in a political, historical, or social way, there’s no sense.
Your ignorance of the world. (We settlers tend to buy perceptions.)
Vietnam was ruled by China’s Ming Dynasty: the young mother, exasperated, lights a
Cigarette, birth and death of breath in the heart, Venus in the kitchen
Considers every effort. Stay open, break through to 
Place, a spray of bright plastic forsythia in a front window, but try saying
Eight deaths in Beijing, twenty thousand in New York City. Your neighbour offers her
Poetry of witness as elsewhere two women scratch each other’s face over eight toilet
     rolls.
Things you meet that you wish unmade. Make a list, holistic, sources unknown
Beneath a blazing yellow sun. What a force is the unknown.

Zadie Smith says, It’s a luxury even to imagine escape. The roar.
This is reason — this, yes, the mind without its reins. You can’t escape
A reliable structure. The roaring engine climbs the hill, where will it stop?
Lost freedoms but who will agree to call violence grief? Faith and despair,
A youth street-races. Who among us can abide authority measures, who prays
For no transmission to light his cell phone, display his whereabouts?
Brother trembles in dark woods, listening for the gunman in mortal fear, praying.
Who works is unlucky, also lucky. Spring releases, twenty-three dead in Nova Scotia,
The west-east route around Montreal,
If we are travelling make it somewhere between Mont-Joli and Verona, where

A poet dreams of a young dog whose name is Poverty.
Inner pressure.
Who else no longer drinks? The committed wanderers, the responsive lonely,
A shift that duplicates a disturbance, owl in a palm. Where are the artisans with
Exceptional names? Sky is contagious, a copper coin beneath one of three cups.
Heavy are the borders, heavy is the water. Heavy is the name he bears.
You walk out, you come back home again. Boots collect mud. A sea at the window.
No one will ask, you who are contingency to the many who would predict you.
Vein of memory a map on which to trace your secret self. No one will know,
Resolution will have to do.

What will show itself to have meaning? The least effort. Degrees of now.
Afoot, a poem may not be understood, but even the smallest effort

Overhead, between moments, is a never-ending try. Changes
Bud. The apple sprouts from last year’s seed, a pitchfork that was lost in dry grass.
You like spring rain on snow, crystallized to weight. The shed edges closer.
Deckhands lean and strain to make out black water. How to catch what
   relieves?
Among the blue, a melody black as chords against a throat, jubilation in the throttle.
Tip of the glittery iceberg. A theme, a slow revolution, something solid.
You give it away. The hunger of a lifetime.
The guitar that broke free, sent the strings flying. A complicated racket. You try

Breakfast tea and wedges of leek and onion frittata. He packs a ukulele.
The ship wails in the harbour, we have oatcakes from the café, and chocolate.
You make things difficult for yourself, the difficult stretches you. After a cross-town
Carry, six warm croissants in a paper bag. Though you eschew novelty, though
Water, one part bleach. You left books tied to a doorknob with polypropylene twine,
Kicked a lime green lighter uncovered by melt. Caches of finer weather.
Surfaces cleaned: five parts
Convention.
A box of tampons has spilled into mud on a walkway behind the house.
They and the others who congregate for a handout breakfast at a back door

At Presentation Convent. A man stood smoking at a bus stop, coughing up phlegm.
One mail sorter tests positive. Atlantic Grocery Distribution unloads,
Backs down, it doesn’t matter, everything is closed, mail delivery uncertain.
You miss determination, but what do you think? Rocks pushed up the mountain,
Could not take another step and then the sun, quick on dead grass.
Here, now. On winter tenterhooks, when you
Energetically move in wait. When can you fly to your mother?
You go out into the streets.
In shoulders, around lungs, in your belly, freedom of a body moving
In freedom, muscles strengthening.

Small disturbances by animal or bird wing, a blue jay’s startle flight, line of beauty.
No one out at all.
Soon you will go out again. The bird bath is snowed under, one
Porch light on since 2018, a red linhay, a neighbourhood, no one out at all.
A jubilation in spring that sparkles like quartz crystals, a strange
Yellow bird glistens, rake and metal funnel, mound of snow at its axe-blade feet,
Guts torn out on soft ice at the edge of Quidi Vidi pond by a golden eagle.
The found-objects
Asymmetrical because each in waiting, a sea gull and the memory of gull guts.
Must we remember all we remember/ must we remember those who survive/

Must we atone for all that we render/SARS plague of palsied air?
Ploughed snow, not one person, not one dog, jagged line of rooftops,
Red, a compact car covered in snow parked in the courtyard below us,
Beautiful, a plastic grocery bag flapping on a high branch, white on blue.
Doorknobs, weathervane, rusted padlock. The sun the sun, best, and
Milky green beach glass shimmering in copper wire, our sculpture of
Pale blue shadow. A branch strokes the neighbour’s house,
A wind loosens strings of broken Christmas lights.
Two bare lilac trees sway.
New bright fallen snow slides, sunlight a promise to rooted things.

1 Dionne Brand, 4 July 2020: https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/books/2020/07/04/dionne-brand-on-narrative-reckoning-and-the-calculus-of-living-and-dying.html
2 Rilke 
3 Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
4 Carolyn Forché. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/06/carolyn-forches-educationinlookingmbid=social_twitter&utm_socialtype=owned&utm_brand=tny&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

This Soviet Joke is a Love Poem

Maggie Burton

I should not like to know you
without your maddening turns
of phrase, without your ceaseless
inquiries, all your looking
under Khrushchev’s hair
for jokes to recover a lost
step in conversation. Awkward
as hell the lead up to your punch
is lined with the bodies of poems
who knelt before your memory, titles
pledging armies of pointless words
alongside Casey at the Bat, their swords
rusty after all this passing time. But give me up
and I should weep in seventeenth-century
Newfoundland prose for you
I’d leave no stone
alone with all the turning
of my aphoristic ancestors
singing loose lips sink ships. No,
I should not complain
of hearing that same one line
you call his hair the harvest of ’69!
lest you canonize my regretful strikes instead
as you search the sea for streams
of consciousness, leave behind
my objections, the brief, unrepeatable
unbearable battering of the ram
against the choicelessness
of love.

Errant Pleasure

Daze Jefferies

i.
along the way, you, with/held, are bellowing:
historicities inter-recast, also this, vastness

a naught knot ◡ a fisherqueer
ebbs caressive ◠ contra echoes

                   hooked heart
                      emergent

        is it night where you’re to?

ii.
mythoharbour, have place ⌓

iii.
or let our lust be water-turned

                                          timeworn

                                           trustfully


⌓ somewhere forenamed, somewhore near

Heretofore

Daze Jefferies

asea, the held, the cutoff immersing,
the juniper arm, the where you want,
the ewer, the lop, the glassened blue,
the still felt different, the just enough,
the practice of care, the circumreturn,
the strowl, the peck, the never-never,
the go-between, the yore clandestine,
the yet, the flown over weary for now

Rabbit Run

Frances Boyle

In a patch of woods, just steps
from the rush of traffic, a rabbit
runs across my path. I think of Peter,
his foolish race for a fence & freedom.
The horror of scr-r-ritch, scratch, scratch,
scritch, his soggy sanctuary in a watering can.
Sparrows who implore him to exert himself.

What is that makes Peter so disobedient?
(so adventuresome you might say, but
the message is never spun that way).
Why are his sisters, Flopsy, Mopsy
& Cottontail, good little bunnies?
Is there a moral on the hazards
of anthropomorphism? Wrong

to squeeze an impressionable rabbit into
a human name, ill-fitting like his little
shoes, tight as the jacket (quite new
with large brass buttons) he must
lose to scarper, quite rabbit-like
for MacGregor’s garden gate?
Poor Peter, overly dressed

while just down the lane from that garden
the girl-bunnies untie little red cloaks,
place them on the ground. Unclothed
& unhampered, they get on with the
rabbit-business of gathering berries.
But I recall the guts of the story,
what well-meaning parents

petitioned to eviscerate, cutting out the part
where Mrs. MacGregor cooked Peter’s
father in a pie. We all want to clothe
our children in the right raiment
to survive perils. But we never
know what might shield them
as they wander on their way,

lippity-lippity, not very fast
& looking all around.

The Lord’s Favoured Cathedrals

Kyle Barbour

Snout damp and quivering,
The mammalian urform scurries
Out of its burrow and into the night air.
A living instantiation of the great ark,
The fate of every haired creature is
Implicit within its body;
All civilization born from the nest of this tiny beast.
Consider the refinement of the metabolic slurry
That, in the gut, reduces other to self and,
In the womb, renders from self the other.
How countless aeons shaped the mechanism
Through which life now moulds itself to its world.
Here, a primordial alchemy is perpetually at work,
Transfiguring meat-bound code into soul and
Putting to shame the works of our hands.

Recorded in Silt

Kyle Barbour

With chisel and hammer,
Open the hillside like a book.
Rock gives way with each strike;
Crushing, yet delicate and precise.
Remove the split and shattered stone to show
An archive of life long absent from the world.
This history preserved by
Mud lying on top of, what was once,
Life lying on top of mud;
Yet not simply lying.
The burdensome weight of generations bearing down
Brought about a change in the deeper strata,
Reforging them into a record
More permanent than anything humankind has yet devised.
Now waiting below the gravel we tread upon,
Signs rendered for our edification;
A memory of strife and satisfaction as
Different from our own experience
As the creatures’ soft flesh from
The stone which replaced it.

Life beneath mud become stone;
Permanent though a mere cast,
A cheap copy of its former splendour.

Ritual of spring

Susan White

Paddle paddle paddle
Ahoy! Land ho!

Canoe oars nabbed from the stage,
we’re pirates bold and daring, exploring the open sea.
We don’t see the shoreline narrowing
as the ice floe shifts beneath our hull.
‘Til an angry shout wakes us, and
Dad is on the beach. His imposing height

scary small,

and our mighty ship
is a thin frozen slab.

Presumed dead, they said.
Three teens lost beneath packed spring ice.
A national tragedy
narrated by the stoic and spray-tanned
whose careful voices enunciate — cop-eee-ying.
Local reporters offer cultural insight but
their island accents betray them, add to the punchline,
because Canadian horror drowns in the subtext:
those boys got what they asked for.

But I remember the lads
boasting of wet feet, skipping
halfway across the bay, dying
at buddy who fell in and got soaked.
I remember panicked paddling
until the wind shifted
and brought us safe to shore.

It was just something we did, this ritual of spring,
when the sea ice cracked and heaved
and the ocean drew breath to
exhale winter.

Tuckamore

Susan White

Imagine the tuckamore as a woman
wizened, life’s lines weathered into her skin.
Her long silver hair blows in the wind,
twisted tendrils desperate in their reach, her
naked roots unyielding, a
death grip on lichen and juniper.
She faces salt spray and fury,
pummelling ocean gale.
Howling for the lost and mourned,
she stands, steadfast and still.

Gone Sideways

Christina Wells

Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see
the huge beating genius machine
that thinks, no, it knows,
it’s going to come in first.
- How to Triumph Like a Girl (Ada Limón)

I’ve got a filly heart, shenanigan rich,
galloping blood going sideways –
Don’t you want to lift my shirt and see

the terrible apparatus, the joy that broadsides?
The motor is low-tide exposed, all slanted and whimsy,
the huge beating genius machine

pumping resolve like the hooves of young foals
being let out in spring, like a ticker
that thinks, no, it knows,

it’s got all the electricity needed to thrive,
bolstering, shoring me up: My heart?
it’s going to come in first.

mother tongue

Charity Becker

English
is my mother tongue.
A mother tongue is not
not a foreign lan lan lang
language
l/anguish
anguish
--a foreign anguish.

English is
my father tongue.
A father tongue is
a foreign language,
therefore English is
a foreign language
not a mother tongue. 1

english is
my mother tongue
tongue which
  nourished
  nestled
  named

but english is also
my father tongue
tongue of
  power
  persuasion
  privilege

english is
my mother tongue
but not the mother tongue
of my country
english is
the father tongue
the foreign anguish
of my country

how might i reconcile
my mother/father tongue
with what tongue might i
  learn
  love
  live?

so i seek out
other tongues
  indigenous
  immigrant
  imagined
and with these tongues
i write
the hybrid poetry of my heart

poetry is not
  a foreign anguish
  a foreign language
  a father tongue

poetry is
a mother tongue
my mother tongue

in my mother tongue
let me share
  my story
  my song
  my self
with you

1 Philip, M. N. (1989). Discourse on the logic of language. She tries her tongue, her silence slowly breaks . Charlottetown, PE: Ragweed Press. pp. 56-59.

This Photo of You

Charity Becker

In the picture, you are young,
standing tall and proud in your army greens
(though in the photo everything is in shades of gray).
You are smiling (at the camera or
at the person behind the camera I cannot tell).

I did not know this you, this young man
who cared for two little girls after his wife’s death, who found
new love with the woman who would become my grandmother,
who went off to war and came back
thankfully whole.

I cannot imagine what the war took from you,
but you still had that smile when finally I met you
my grandfather,
standing tall and proud in your country house
watching as my brother and I played in your summer garden
until your heart, which had carried you through so much,
could carry you no longer.

Over 1500 kilometers away when your heart stopped beating,
I never had the chance to say goodbye.

I wish I had something more of you,
more than a little girl’s memories,
more than this picture of a young man I never knew
and the small leather-bound bible you carried to war and back.

I wish I had spent more time sitting at your feet
listening to your stories.

I wish I had had the chance to say goodbye.

Que Sera, Sera

Tom Farrell

     A report for history class, is it? Well it’s about damn time they started teaching you kids about the – what is it you’re calling it these days? – oh yes, the Age of Undiscovery. What a wonderful name. Do I remember it well? Hell, I remember it like it was tomorrow. I really do miss it sometimes, you know, the naiveté, the optimism of it all, and my triceratops, of course. But don’t mind this old man’s sentimentality. Que sera, sera, and all that. Anyhow, sit down a minute and I’ll tell you all about it.
     It all started with a bit of math. The paper, written by a group out of Virtual Delaware – or was it Virtual India? – was printed in Extremely Complicated Mathematics, a prestigious, high-impact journal published once every sixteen years or so. The title, concise and reserved for such a consequential work, simply read: THE SQUARE ROOT OF FORTY-NINE IS NOT SEVEN, BUT EIGHT.
     Can you imagine that? The stir! The commotion! In mere hours, the entire solar system was buzzing. Headlines flashed across our eyes, the skies, the streets: EIGHT IS THE NEW SEVEN; DID SEVEN REALLY EAT NINE; STEP ASIDE BILLIONAIRES, MATHEMATICIANS ARE THE NEW FACE OF HUMANITY.
     It was all we could talk about. It can’t be true, can it? Impossible. They’re having us on. Next they’ll be telling us two and two is five.
     But then, yes, there they were, the Prime-Presidents broadcasting a message across the solar system: After careful scrutiny, cross-referencing of facts and figures, and consultations with our own experts, we have concluded that the mathematicians are indeed correct, the square root of forty-nine is eight. From this moment forward the number seven will be replaced by the number eight for all taxation purposes. An environmental impact assessment is ongoing.
     So it was true. We were bewildered. How had we managed to mess that one up? Humanity had made some missteps along the way, sure, a wrong turn here and there, a faux pas or two, but this – basic math – this was something else. How many times had we sat in classrooms and drawn funny little rooves over the number forty-nine and then scribbled little number sevens next to it? How many times had we recited our multiplication tables: seven times seven is forty-nine. What lies!
     And there were bigger problems. If we had that wrong, something as simple as the square root of forty-nine, what else had we messed up? The implications were horrifying!
     We started examining things more closely. We were tentative at first – a suspicious hand on a wooden fence, a sidelong glance at a duck – afraid of what we might find. But as we realized that yes, things were not as advertised, our fears gave way to morbid curiosity, and then to a feverish enthusiasm.
     We examined everything – touching, tasting, smelling, listening – as if it had all just – poof – emerged for the first time from the ether. Daffodils, vinyl siding, our very own skin, teeth, hair, nails, the cardboard cracker box, the crackers within the box, the salt on the crackers, and so on and so forth. The entire physical world was on trial.
     And how guilty it was! How deceived we had been! Yellow was actually green and green was nothing more than a texture. Turkey dinner was a breakfast food. The moon was not large and far away but tiny and quite close. Rocks were a type of slow-growing fern and everybody
had a dinosaur in their backyard. And that was just the tip of the iceberg (icebergs, believe it or not, were very large, scented candles). A new age had been born: the Age of Undiscovery.
     And don’t think for a second our undiscoveries were limited to the physical world. Once we had finished with objects we turned our attention to concepts. Math was the first to go, having already proved itself entirely untrustworthy. Next was physics. And from there,
chemistry, biology, the earth sciences, anthropology, sociology, the arts, philosophy – all of it, our very epistemology – came toppling down.
     Gravity? Thrown out with the dishwater. Who needed such an outdated law? In those days, it was nothing to look up and see hundreds of people floating around, small silhouettes in the summer sky, ascending, descending, cartwheeling, laughing in the face of Einstein, Newton, and that curmudgeonly, rule-abiding crowd.
     We stopped following the Gregorian calendar, or any calendar at all. We got stuck on Tuesday, October 4th, for six days in a row before we realized it wasn’t a particularly exciting date and decided to move on.
     Sleep, it turned out, was unnecessary. Most of us still did it, hesitant to give up the routine, but it wasn’t abnormal to know a person or two who had dismissed the habit entirely, often for the sake of making more undiscoveries. 
    And the undiscoveries kept coming. A never-sleeper, pacing her room one night, imaging ways in which, with her new-found time, she might more quickly pay down her student loans, was struck with an idea: if gravity can disappear, why can’t my loan? She called her bank as soon as it opened and a few minutes later she was debt free.
     On closer inspection, we undiscovered that the entire banking system was fraudulent. Mortgages, lines of credit, chequing accounts, stock markets – all of it – a sham. Bank machines were actually soft serve ice-cream dispensers. The world’s currencies were old baseball cards.
     With money out of the way we made some of the most baffling undiscoveries of the era. It turned out, we could feed everybody. We could even shelter and clothe them! For-profit prisons were unethical. And how embarrassed we all were when we realized our favorite brands could still manufacture our favorite things without unbridled exploitation of the working class and sweatshops.
     Not every undiscovery was without contention, mind you. I remember when we undiscovered that billionaires were old, hairless, saggy, wrinkly, malodorous cats. What a to-do! The billionaires couldn’t argue of course, given that they were old, hairless, saggy, wrinkly, malodorous cats, but there was a sizeable group of vocal, upper-class folk who came to their defense, contending that the real malodorous cats were people of low socioeconomic status and all the others who were clearly not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They argued that we were being rather unfair to the billionaires, that we should be emulating, not denouncing them, and that maybe someday, if we all worked hard enough, we too could be richer than some small nations.
     We had no time for such stupidity in the Age of Undiscovery and simply pointed out that the billionaires were very clearly old, hairless, saggy, wrinkly, malodorous cats. There were some half-hearted cries of well maybe malodorous cats aren’t so bad, but we all knew this to be untrue given that pleasant smelling cats were barely tolerable to begin with.
     Whales, it turned out, were sentient and quite fond of old-timey saloons. Yesterday and tomorrow turned around and swapped spots.
     We lived that way for twenty years. Twenty years of limitless undiscovery. And we would have kept undiscovering for years more, I’m sure, had it not been for the next volume of Extremely Complicated Mathematics.
     We were expecting banana bread recipes or gardening tips – quite en vogue for scientific journals at that time – but no, there on the front page in large black letters: SORRY, WE WERE WRONG.
     There has been a mix-up, they wrote, an error in calculation. Maybe an intern had spilled a coffee and the resulting stain had obscured a number or two. Sorry for any inconvenience, but the square root of forty-nine is indeed seven. We’re certain we’ll all look back at this someday and laugh.
     As news of the mistake spread, the entire solar system seemed to freeze. Surely it couldn’t be true. Surely they were mistaken about their mistake.
     But then, yes, there they were again, the Prime-Presidents. The mathematicians were indeed wrong. We’ll admit, none of us actually read their first paper, but this time, we can assure you, we have carefully scrutinized, cross-referenced, and consulted, and have come to the conclusion that the square root of forty-nine is once again seven. An environmental impact assessment assessing the impact of the previous erroneous environmental impact assessment is ongoing. 
     The changes began almost instantaneously. Yellow took on its previous yellowness; the moon grew and retreated; thousands of people, once again subject to the laws of gravity, slowly, almost bashfully, returned to solid earth; debt reappeared in bank accounts, as did money; billionaires regained their human forms and their hordes of wealth; whales hitched rides back to the coast and swam away. Yesterday and tomorrow tried to swap back but bumped into each other and stayed where they were.
     Some of us tried to stop it, to slow it down. I believe those who fancied turkey for breakfast were the most vocal, along with the sweatshop workers. There was yelling, pleading, arguing, debating, but it was no use – there was nothing to be done. We watched, powerless, as the undiscoveries of the previous twenty years were themselves undiscovered.
     And then it was over. Just like that, twenty years erased. An eerie, heavy silence seemed to settle on the universe. A metaphorical, system-sized tumbleweed rolled by.
     What were we to do? Were we meant to pick up where we’d left off? Forget everything we’d seen? Yellow was yellow again, sure, and there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about the whales, yes, but did that mean people had to starve? That for-profit prisons were beyond ethics? That our shoes had to be manufactured in sweat shops?
     We stood, speechless, waiting for answers. We waited. And we waited. And just as we were beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, there were no simple answers to our questions, somebody, somewhere in the solar system – one of the billionaires, rumor has it – let out a long whistle, shrugged, and said: Que sera, sera.
     That snapped us from our stupor. Que sera, sera, we all repeated. Could it really be that easy? Que sera, sera, we said again. The more we said it, the more sense it made. It really was too bad, the way the world worked and everything, but maybe that’s just the way it had to be. Some things were beyond our control, we reassured ourselves, and even if we tried to control them, we would surely run into difficulties, and likely inconveniences. Yes. Better to leave things as they were. Que sera, sera. That was the answer we’d been waiting for.
     So that was that. We shook each other’s hands, wished each other luck, and went back to living in a world where the square root of forty-nine was seven, and always had been. Pretty much the same world we’re living in now.
     See? I remember it all like it was tomorrow. Not bad for an old fella. Think you have enough for your report? It really is about time they looked into all that. Especially the floating bit. That could really revolutionize things. Anyway, yesterday I’ll tell you about Spot, the triceratops who lived in my backyard. I sure do miss the old girl. But here I go again, getting all sentimental. Que sera, sera.

Preparing for the Anatomy Lab

Fiona Conway

     Lately, when I sleep, I always dream the same thing. The body is there, on the dissecting table, I make the cut, I begin to identify the organs with a sense that they are all far too familiar. When I look up from the body the head has been uncovered and it is my grandmother’s face. This is usually where the dream ends, when I wake up I am momentarily convinced the tears on my face are made of blood.
     My grandmother is still alive, but will not be for very long. I know this intellectually, understood what her diagnoses meant when I heard them last Fall; but I have a hard time imagining what it means for what makes her her to no longer be in her body. This will be the first time someone close to me has died. Eventually her brain will no longer contain the memories of us collecting rocks on the beach, her teaching me to identify different types of lichen, her caring for me after school. But nothing in her brain will be missing, physically. We still can’t pinpoint where specific memories are stored in the body.
     Every time I dream the dream I am more convinced that I don’t understand what it is to die. At which moment, with the loss of function of which organs, do we know with certainty that a person is gone? It’s unclear whether one can be a skilled doctor without this clarity, unclear how one can be a human one with it. I spend a lot of time online reading about the in-between areas, persistent vegetative states, brain death, life support. Sometimes, in the dream, I am about to make a cut when I notice a pulse. It’s not yet clear to me how I feel about any of this. Clear, however, that in a few months, as a first year medical student, I will cross some kind of line in the relationship I am sanctioned to have with others’ bodies, dead and alive.
     I read a lot about cadaver donation during those months. It only serves to make the dream more detailed. Next to my grandmother’s face, her still awake eyes, contracts and paperwork and medical equipment are piled up high enough that I worry they will fall and cover her. Sometimes, when I wake from the dream I find myself trying to identify the source of my discomfort. I know there is no spirit, or soul, or person in a body in such a complete state of death. I know these donors were willing, generous with that which they had been lent by the biomass. Trusting that by some process of recycling this act could serve to heal others. Allowing me to become that tool. But still, I dream of killing my grandmother.
     After about a month of these dreams, over a cup of peppermint tea on her front porch, I explain some of my worries to my grandmother. She looks frail, bundled in two quilts in the midday July sun, and I decide not to tell her how much she figures in these worries. It’s hard to bring up to a dying person the fact of their dying. She gives me time to talk, and stays silent for a few moments after I am done. I had expected her to look worried for me, or maybe disappointed at how unable I am to grasp the analytic mindset I will need for my job, but she mostly looks amused. Her speech is raspy and comes out slowly. I can hear the effort that goes into each word and move closer to listen, as though shrinking the distance her voice has to travel will also shrink the pain producing it causes her.
     She tells me that she is getting ready to leave her body behind any day now, and that she doesn’t really care much what happens to it after she’s gone. She thinks it is a wonderful thing to think your bones and fat can go on to help others learn, regrets that, in her cancer-ridden state she “probably wouldn’t make a good specimen.” One of her friends, she says, had donated her body when she passed a few years ago. “And she never felt anything except peace about that decision. Never.” She looks hard at me as she says this, emphasizes her words. It helps, a little, this tangential connection with a woman who had chosen to be a donor. The anatomy lab feels less transgressive if I can establish a sort of kinship with the bodies on the table, can imagine somebody similar to my grandmother who knew this was what she wanted. It helps even more when my grandmother says, gently, “but I am proud of you for worrying about these things.” We move onto lighter topics for the rest of the afternoon, later I help her back into the house when she says she needs to sleep.
     That conversation alone doesn’t stop the dream, it persists through the rest of the summer. But it does offer a quiet rebuttal when my fear becomes too intense, and lets me give myself permission to bring my worries up to my parents, a few friends, a single-session therapist on campus. My grandmother dies a few weeks before I start school. The night before the first lab she is there in the dream, not on the table but beside me. Guiding me.

Leaving Maple Park

Margaret Rodgers

     A trunk and a car. When it was time for me to move away from Maple Park and into a so-called adult world, I had the big metal trunk that Aunt Gladie told me to buy. And my nasty little Hillman Minx. The trunk has been a useful thing my whole life; the car another thing altogether. But both items are connected to a coming of age, a moving on. Among the many memories of living in Maple Park that I can call up now, I am surprised that I have no sense of actually leaving, just as my cousins had no sense of my arrival. There were no tearful goodbyes, or last visits to various neighbours, or looks at some of the places where we played, told secrets, simply hung out. It was a gradual leaving, away to college the year before, off at summer jobs, the trip west, and finally to my shared apartment and a so-called “real job.” It took a while to be permanently gone. At nineteen, I was taken up with the present, with little concern for the magnitude of this move.
     I’d like to think that sensitive me took a walk around the streets of the subdivision and thought about all of the changes to the space, the characters who moved in and out, and the way that city conveniences gradually arrived. The septic tanks weren’t needed anymore, not that I
cared, although the grass, as Erma Bombeck has famously written, was still greenest over those rectangles. The sidewalks and roads were paved now. Some yards had fences, barriers to define who has what, rather than that open series of vegetable gardens that created, in their
interconnectedness, a small farm. And the park across the street now filled with houses. The orchard where we used to climb apple trees is a manicured green space with amenities. Maple Park is now officially part of the city of Welland. With all those picture windows, perhaps
someone looks out and says “there goes Margaret from the Batemans.” But if that happens I am unaware of it.
     Each house has taken on more personality, losing its raw, brand-new appearance. Gravel and dust have given way to asphalt, the culvert is now a polite curb. I can see where my bra was entangled in that ditch not so long ago, and earlier still, the treasure box that Gloria and I made and stored in the pipe under the driveway. It was a perfect little spot where we could reach in and stow a secret box, a time machine to leave hidden all winter. Next spring, we could check on it. We put some notes to ourselves, one of those little card games that come with something else and are too small to really play with, and unfortunately, to make it a real treasure, some beads. The next time we saw the beads was when the mother across the street came running, her blue-faced toddler in her arms. My aunt turned the baby upside down and out of her nose came those beads.
     I suppose I might have stopped by the public school; it was still there. But I hadn’t been by in years. The ZORRO that I lettered in bubble gum on a telephone pole back in grade seven had remarkably remained, year after year, a talisman, and perhaps the only touchstone to some of those youthful times when we ran a little wild. Funny that it was Zorro, that masked and secret hero that made it (briefly) into Maple Park history. Perhaps a metaphor for masked and undiscovered me?
     Bubble gum – that quintessential ingredient, stands in for many preteen adventures. Through it I can feel the heady thrill of screaming with emotion when Roy Orbison comes on Donna’s transistor radio, with “Only the Lonely,” or the taste of sweet Concord grapes that we
climb over a fence to eat. The boys get in and out fast, leaving us girls behind. It's during that golden time in early Fall, when it gets dark early, that staying out after supper is still okay. Maybe just after the daylight saving ends and it's dark out but still early. The boys scare us by yelling out to the farmer “Sir, someone is stealing your grapes!” but no farmers appear and nothing ever happens.
     As for the houses, the neighbours, the stories, they reside in a stable and immutable time and space, an illusion of youth. And somehow, it’s always summer, seasons collapsing into one memory. Gloria’s mother is still ironing and giving advice, still bringing us treats. Joe is polishing his car. We are skipping and farting and killing ourselves laughing. We have supper at her house then come over to mine to put away an entire tuna-macaroni salad. We play rummy in a tent in the backyard. Someone scratches on it to scare us, and I can smell beery breath so we know it’s just her father.
     I think of Betty, a plump woman next door. She has buggy eyes and a whiny voice. But they are neighbours and so when she asks me to set her hair I do it. I hate that I can’t say no. Her cigarette smoke curls up into my eyes and up my nose. Her husband Tony is pressing some wine on me even though I am only seventeen.
     Aunt Gladie is sunbathing on a patchwork quilt in the backyard, with the dog Molly snoozing nearby. (The quilt an heirloom that no one thought or cared to preserve). Tony has a crush on her and leaves her a mickey between the doors. It becomes a family joke that Uncle Bate teases her about. The TV is blaring “The Price is Right” and, as the song goes, "the corn is so high" that you can’t see the houses behind. But you can hear Mrs. Spence, who nags at her husband. They say he is “hen-pecked,” but he just seems quiet and nice. They live next door to
Gloria's family and they aren't very friendly neighbours as far as I know.
     If it’s Friday there will be lemon Freshie and popcorn after supper, while we watch the shows, hopefully something spooky. It’s hot and Joe will play his mandolin. Uncle Bate will slowly sink back in his recliner and start to snore. “Go to bed Daddy,” Aunt Gladie says, and off he heads. An early riser who kept his farmer hours his whole life, he doesn’t last much after eight most nights.
     Over at Jackie’s house, her mother will be at the table having tea with one of their neighbours, and Jackie will be getting ready to go babysitting or maybe just out. Their TV will be on too, the ubiquitous North American soundscape. The Crydermans will be just coming back from a shopping trip “across the river” with all the latest clothes. Donna will likely have those new Fruit Boots, the black suede ones that dye your socks, and the slacks with the little buckle at the back.
     The park is still across the street and there’s a game of move-ups at the ball diamond. I can pitch okay but at bat I am only able to bunt. This sends one of the younger kids into a rage, and he bursts into tears. Ever after, he calls me “bunter.”
     On May 24, there is a gathering there for fireworks, and it is assumed that we grade tenners are out together enjoying the little neighbourhood festival. We are actually an hour away – Jackie’s friend has a car and he has been persuaded to take us to Crystal Beach to watch the “good” fireworks there. They are indeed spectacular, but it’s the excitement of doing something so forbidden that’s the adventure. We swear each other to secrecy but it comes out on the school bus the next day that Jeannie has told her mother. The outrage! The betrayal! Whether it got any further we don’t know, but likely not, since there are no reprisals.
     The park, in its day, still had its dramas, its quiet talks while dangling from the monkey bars, or swinging aimlessly on a rusty swing, dreaming of a glamorous future. Or not thinking of
anything. "What are you thinking about?"
     "Nothing."
     "I bet you like that new guy."
     "Do not!"
     But now I am a young adult, firmly in the present, teenage dramas stored away. I have a car, a job, purses and shoes that match, the whole nine yards! My red and white Minx, is loaded, my directions from my uncle will get me to Cooksville, and the time has come. I feel ready to
move on and leave all those memories behind.
    Many decades later, I make a side trip past the house. I drive along the street, nearly missing number 563. And while the building looks basically the same, it is now part of an “older” neighbourhood with tidy, tree-lined streets. Maple Park.
     And there is no one left there to visit.
     And to quote Gertrude Stein, "No there there anymore."

Tiny Doorways

Laura Temple

I have many photos of tiny things held in the palm of my hand: beach rocks saturated in pastels; shards of urchin shells fringed in purple; snowberries dotted with minuscule bristles; tendrils of mosses dressed in velvet. The lens helps me dive in and take a closer look.

One of my favourite photos is of my hand holding a single leaf. It's a crackerberry, or Cornus canadensis. I'm holding the petiole between my thumb and forefinger. The leaf and my hand are in focus, and the background is blurred, but the patterns of colour suggest shiny coniferous trees and a bright sky.

The crackerberry leaf itself is backlit. You can see each vein and venule like stained glass in a sunny window. The complexity of the patterning is mesmerizing. There are sections that mirror the wrinkles in my palm. Most strikingly, you can see that the leaf is full of colours, a microcosm of the fall forest itself.

The leaf is ovate in shape; when I hold it horizontally it mirrors the oval of my eye, rounded in the middle and coming to a point on both ends. However, instead of an iris and pupil in the centre, there is a straight midrib from end to end. Four symmetrical veins curve toward this central line and meet.

One half of the leaf, split by the midrib, is mostly lime green, and the other is lemon yellow. There are splotches of orange, highlighted in blood-red, particularly toward the tip. There are nine white dots where the leaf is decayed and the light shines through.

While larch leaves dependably turn yellow, cinnamon ferns turn copper-orange, and starflower leaves wilt into fragile dragonfly wings, crackerberry leaves are unpredictable. Sometimes each leaf of a 6-leaved plant looks very different; one leaf flecked in brown; another dipped in an inky purple; others saturated orange and yellow, ribboned with red. Some go straight from green to brown. Many appear to have a uniform colour from afar but are much more intricate when you hold them close. The whole spectrum of fall colours can exist in a cluster of crackerberries, which spread like carpets through underground rhizome networks. Or all the colours can be present in one leaf, like the one in the photo.

Plant identification books can sometimes be misleading: the 'perfect' specimen they show, in the case of the crackerberry, four to six symmetrical green leaves with a cluster of white sepals or a bunch of glistening red berries, is only a temporary state of being. Crackerberries have much more variety than guidebooks would have you believe. More often than not, they've been chewed by caterpillars, shined by slug-slime, or are somewhere in their metamorphosis between a pointy green arrow and a withered clump of leaves.

*

There's a photograph by the environmental artist Marlene Creates, of her left hand against the trunk of a birch tree. It's in grayscale; her hand and the peeling birch are both shown in vivid detail. In my photo, my hand, though entirely in focus, is featured incidentally, simply a tool for posing the leaf in the frame. In Creates', however, the back of her hand is the image's focal point, and there is clear intention behind the pose. The photo is part of an ongoing series called Larch, Spruce, Fir, Birch, Hand, Blast Hole Pond Road, Newfoundland 2007.

For over a decade, Creates has been using the place where she lives as the focal point of her artwork: "My greatest aspirations are presently constituted by the six acres of boreal forest that I inhabit and I'm slowly tuning my body and my reflexes to its details. I'm coming to know this habitat by engaging with it in various ways... I'm interested in the particularity of each tree and the circumstances that bring me to discern certain trees among the thousands in this forest ...."1

Each year she selects about nine more trees to include in her series, depending on which trees have come to her attention. Or, as she puts it: "...what I should say is my attention has come to them."

Over time, as each tree ages and changes, so does her hand in the photograph. "Nature is always a verb for me,"2 she said about her work earlier in her career.

*

You can visualize the structure of your brain by using your hand as a model.

Tara Brach, a psychologist and meditation teacher, explains this model in her book Radical Compassion3, in a section called: The Brain in the Palm of Your Hand.4

If you hold your hand with your palm facing you, your wrist is your spinal cord, and your lower palm is your brain stem. Your thumb, folded into your palm, represents the oldest part of the human brain, the limbic system. That part of the brain looks after essential bodily functions like breathing and heart rate. The limbic system is also responsible for the fight/flight/freeze response. Most of this activity happens outside of our conscious awareness.

Your fingers, raised toward the sky, represent the cerebral cortex. This is the most recent part of the brain that allows us to "...orient ourselves in space and time, think, reason, plan and imagine."

The very tips of your fingers represent the prefrontal cortex. In real life, this is right behind your forehead. "This is the area that sends and receives the messages that guide our lives. The middle prefrontal area is the witness. It has the capacity for mindfulness, empathy, and
compassion. It underlies our ability to navigate complex relationships. And it is the domain that can calm or "down-regulate" the survival reactions of the primitive brain."

When you fold your fingers down over your thumb and make your hand into a fist, that represents the 'integration' of your brain. In other words, your whole brain is 'online,' with communication flowing fluidly between all parts. The way that feels inside you is grounded,
stable and present. I think of this as how my brain is when I feel like myself.

If, on the other hand, something frightening happens, say a near-miss while driving a car, that sets off your limbic system. Brach compares the saying "flipping your lid" with the movement of that model of your hand: your fingers lift away from the rest of your hand, and your brain is no longer integrated.

When we get trapped in the fear-based part of our brain regularly our focus narrows. We don't have perspective. We are more fearful of others and get pulled into an us versus them mentality. We're inflexible and self-focused, and it's harder for us to engage with other people or the rest of the world. Brach describes this as feeling "cut off." We are trapped in a small area of our brains.

Many things can cause this: whether it's a direct threat to our well-being, a conflict with a family member, an overwhelming to-do list, trauma of any kind, the ongoing daily stresses of living in a busy world, experiencing and witnessing inequalities, reading about oil spills, or the unsettled feeling of living through increasingly extreme weather.


*

Beyond Brach's dichotomy between being in our expansive "wise mind" versus being in our contracted "survival brain," research has been undertaken over the past couple of decades on a particular emotion that is all about our natural propensity to expand our minds. That emotion is called "awe."

In Dacher Keltner's book: Awe5, he defines this emotion as "the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world."

The feeling of awe might come from looking at the stars on a clear night or hearing loons across a pond. It can come from seeing a child walk for the first time or hearing the story of someone who has overcome enormous hurdles. It can also come from music, art, or being part of a large movement or protest.

Keltner makes the caveat that not all feelings of awe come from positive experiences. For example, the feeling can come from hearing a dictator speak or witnessing an extreme weather event like a flood. However, he says that experiencing awe of the positive type on a regular basis is transformative.

Awe is mind-expanding. Having experiences of awe makes people more likely to consider other people and other species, whether that's future generations, people in distant parts of the world, or the robins in their front yard. These experiences also lead to people engaging in
'pro-environmental' behaviours like being less 'materialist' or wasteful.

In my experience, sometimes the awe-inspiring moment is so present that you have no choice but to be awed. This could come in the form of a sudden encounter with a wild animal or the view of mountains, cliffs or a towering waterfall. However, every day, there are countless doors to the experience of awe that can be less noticeable. Keltner calls this "everyday awe."

I think of the tiny things in nature, like the crackerberry leaf in my photo, as a small door to awe. Nature is filled with these little doors. The beauty of Marlene Creates' work for me is that it dwells in the awe-inspiring, putting the wonder in focus for us. The challenge for us is to be in the frame of mind to see these doors daily and to enter them.

The most compelling part of awe is that it relates to our feelings of connection and belonging. Feeling awe is like a gentle knock on the door, reminding us that we are not separate from each other but belong to an interconnected world.

*

What you can't see outside of the frame of my photo is that I'm not alone. If someone had taken an aerial photo at that moment, they would have seen a group of young students sitting along the edge of a pond in the boreal forest, each with a few trees or shrubs separating them. The photo might show my orange hat a dash of colour, slightly obscured by a fir tree, on the edge of the path behind them.

I brought the students there, each with watercolour paints and paper. It was the second day of a field trip, a chance for them to slow down, reflect and maybe even experience a sense of awe. Of course, that is never guaranteed. It could be that a student feels a bit too cold, or the flies are bothering them, or maybe they just had an argument with a classmate and are stewing over it, or they haven't felt like themselves since losing a loved one. We set up the experience for them, knowing that we never have full control of how it will feel for each child. Like Marlene Creates' art projects, it's an open invitation to engage, but the individual has an equal role in creating the experience.

Until this moment, sitting on the side of the path, I'd spent the past two days hiking around the forest, moving quickly, focused on timing, logistics, and keeping staff and students comfortable.

As soon as I sat down alone and took a couple of deep breaths, my eyes were drawn to the leaf.

*

I want to draw this leaf. It's now late November, and the evenings are long and cold. I take out the photo again and decide to paint my own watercolour picture. I pull it up on my iPad and zoom in close, once again captivated by all the patterns, textures and colours.

I draw the contours in light pencil, filling in the edges, the midrib, the veins and some of the venules. Next, I take out my ink pen and revisit those contours. I make some lines darker to give a sense of shadow and depth. I let the ink dry and then erase the pencil marks. Next, I mix the paints to find the right shade–the greens, yellows, variations of brown and red. The leaf is much more complex than I have the skill to render, but I feel so content painting it. The small leaf I held in my hand, which is now undoubtedly nearly decomposed, is an entrance to a more expansive way of being in the world on this long evening.


1 From Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses, a retrospective (Garvey & Gibson, 2017), p. 148
2 From Marlene Creates: Places, Paths, and Pauses, a retrospective (Garvey & Gibson, 2017)
3 Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN (Brach, 2019) p. 96-98
4 Brach credits psychiatrist and author Daniel Siegel for this model.
5 Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life (Keltner, 2023)


References:
Brach, Tara. Radical Compassion: Learning to Love Yourself and Your World with the Practice of RAIN. Penguin Random House, 2019.

Garvey, Susan Gibson and Kunard, Andrea. Places, Paths, and Pauses: Marlene Creates. Goose Lane Editions and Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 2017.

Keltner, Dacher. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. Penguin Random House, 2023

Turbulence

Tena Laing

FERRY BOATS
Char wasn’t even pretending to empathize. She was openly mocking me.
     “Oh, Carm. I suppose you’re going to die now, are you?” My twin rolled her eyes and then waved her fingers around in an imitation of jazz hands.
     “Well, that’s how it feels. Maybe I am dying.”
     The Gravol wasn’t working. The pressure bands I wore on both wrists did nothing. The bracing salt air and staring at the horizon, those weren’t working either. I was languishing on an endless ebb and flow of nausea, bile rising in my throat and then washing back down.
     “Good thing it’s just a three-hour trip – it’s not like we’re crossing the Atlantic or anything, so there’s no chance of scurvy. I doubt we’ll even encounter any pirates, so you won’t have to walk the plank. No need for a burial at sea...this time, Drama Queen.” She ruffled my hair and passed me a fresh motion sickness bag.
     “Oh, it’s all right for you,” I puffed out my cheeks, hoping to avoid choking on my own vomit. “You’ve never been sick a day in your life.”

ROLLERBLADES/BICYCLES
I moved like a robot - a robot made entirely of fragile glass - inching along the boardwalk, the clumsiest skater on the West Coast. I could scarcely breathe for fear of falling and cracking myself in half, breaking my skull or my neck. Char, who had insisted we rent the bloody roller blades, zipped circles and swooped figure eights around me, singing “We Are Family” at top volume as I lurched. When she got close enough, I clutched her arm with all the strength I had. We both went down. Hard. The helmets I’d insisted on probably saved us.
     “Why’d you have to do that?” Char gasped for breath and rubbed her banged up knee.
     “I’m not spending another minute in these death traps.”
     “We were doing fine. I just wanted to try something new.”
     “What’s with you and new? What’s wrong with what we already have?”
     “Carm, I thought we could make some new memories.”
     “We have memories! Why do we need to replace them with newer, shittier ones?”
     “Well sue me if I’m not done trying yet.” Char was on her feet now and trying to pull me up too.
     I planted myself on the boardwalk and pulled at the Velcro straps of my rollerblades, swearing. “Shit! Stop! I told you we should have gotten the bike.”

     Twenty minutes later, we were cycling down the boardwalk, spinning fast and despite my bruised butt, a big grin stretched my face and mouth wide, and a breeze kept the sweat from settling. “See?” I said. “Now, this is what I meant.”
     Char, who had the lead seat in our tandem bike, stopped pedalling and turned as far as she could to face me. The long bike swerved dangerously to the left as she did, and I squealed.
     “Yeah, Carm,” she called back to me, “it’s always about you, isn’t it? It’s Carm’s world and we’re just living in it.” Then she righted the bike and picked up the pace, riding so hard, I had a job to keep my feet on the pedals.

SUBWAY TRAINS
“Was that five trains or six?” Char asked. Even she was getting flustered.
     “I lost count. I’ve never had to wait like this.” We were finally at the front and couldn’t even get near a door.
     Char shot her arm out like a bolt in front of my chest, “Carm – get back from the yellow line! I’ve seen movies where vertigo kicks in and you die, crushed like a yam.”
     “Now who’s being dramatic?” I smiled. Somehow, if Char was worried about it, I could relax for a moment. Still, I could picture that vertigo overtaking me on the ledge as the subway roared into the station and even hear the hollow echo of my head being smashed underneath.
     “We’re getting on the next one – I don’t care how. We need to be more aggressive.” Char gripped my hand. She meant be pushy, and with the only opening a deep drop to the rails in front of us, there was no telling who might push back.
     The next train pulled in, its door opening six inches to our right. Char hooked me around the back to shuffle me in before the exiters were off. The door chimes sounded, and the door banged shut, bruising my shoulder, but we were on. Then, as if everyone exhaled at once, the door popped back open with the force of their stale breath. Char and I were shunted back off the subway car – like we’d been burped out – before the doors slammed shut and the train pulled away, grazing my elbow. Char yanked me back a step from the edge, into the front of the crowd that was six or seven deep. “God, this is a nightmare,” I told her.
     “Slow your breathing,” she reminded me. “What’s your biggest fear? Take off your glasses and squint at it.” She was using the language of my new therapist. The one she had come to see with me. Talking me down from the ledge, despite crowds pressing against our backs and keeping us at the edge.
     “Why aren’t you actually afraid of anything?” I asked.
     “I haven’t got a care in the world. You’re got enough anxiety going on to power triplets. Quadruplets, even.”
     Acres of emptiness beckoned across from us on the Eastbound platform. Here on the Westbound, we were frozen at the front of a hot breathing mass of suffering commuters, patience and time stretched thin as their winter wear suffocated them.
     “Someone’s gonna snap and push me over the edge!” I whispered, desperation tightening my jaw. Basements were bad enough. The subway might kill me.
     “The only person likely to do that is you,” Char said mildly.
     “I can’t breathe. I think I’m having a heart attack,” I continued, hardly moving my mouth. The painful pressure in my left side came from the cart of a man who looked like he lived on the street. He had moved his way up to the front of the crowd. All I could think about was death and bedbugs – empathy diminished by proximity. The sharp fall to the electric tracks, a brief lie among the rats and bugs, and then the train slicing my guts to shavings fit for a deli counter, all but imminent.
     “You’re letting yourself get worked up over nothing.” Char forced my chin and deliberately looked straight into my eyeballs. “Just breathe. The next train will be here soon. We’ll get on that one.”

SIDEWALKS
Our shoes slapped the sidewalk in a parallel rhythm we rarely stopped to think about: left, right, left, right. Char was trying to say something, but I wanted to finish my story first, before I got sidetracked, ran out of time, lost her attention.
     “And that accountant? The one I told you about? He keeps making the same mistake, like he’s paid to screw up.” I stopped when my foot left the pavement.
     The sidewalk was one of the ones that looks like it takes you from A to B but stops suddenly, and then, you either walk through tall grass or on the highway. “Looks like our choices are snake-bitten ankles or being mowed down in the prime of our lives.” I wasn’t choosing either, in sandals no less.
     “What’s keeping you?” I looked back at Char who was a few paces behind me. “You wanted the exercise.”
     “I, um...” she pressed her hand against the side of her waist with a pained look.
     “What? Got a stitch? The Nikes need replacing? This was your idea, remember?” I turned around like we were on a forced march to retrace our route. “Pick up the pace, Sis.” I didn’t appreciate taking the lead.
     “You’re talking and walking so fast, I can’t process your questions.” Char turned back too and kept pace with me for a minute before she stopped and leaned against a tree to check her phone. I kept walking, impatience mounting.
     When she caught up with me, puffing, I didn’t say anything at first, until Char started talking:
     “Sorry, I’ve been feeling a bit woo...”
     “You’re always distracted.”
     “Cause I check my messages? Return calls?”
     “It’s like you’re in love with your phone. Obsessed. You can’t even pay attention to me when it’s just the two of us,” I said in a rush of speed and air.
     Char’s chin dropped and her voice wobbled. “I was trying to tell you I feel a bit woozy today.”
     “You look fine to me.”
     “Can we just slow down a bit?”
     “So, who was that, then?” I asked.
     She looked away. “It’s nothing.”

AIRPLANES
“Nothing chills the blood quite like witnessing the long moments a pilot spends in the toilet while the plane somehow flies on without him.” I elbowed my twin, who wasn’t even paying attention to this travesty. “And when he’s finally done with his filthy business, and your entire body is clenched just waiting for him to get back to the business of flying the damn plane, what does he do?”
     “Will you quit it, Carm?” Char was deep into her O Magazine.
     “No, seriously. I don’t need to know that the pilot of my fate is plagued with the same bodily functions as the rest of us.” I glowered at the place just two seats in front of us, where the rather dashing pilot with four thick chevrons embroidered on his shoulder epaulettes stood joking with what was truly an ordinary fly girl. She had her blondish hair pulled back in a messy ponytail, and was teetering on heels that would become hazardous at the first taste of turbulence. He pulled out his smart phone and started swiping through a full album of vacation pictures with her grinning up in his face after scrutinizing each one. I couldn’t hear them, but I could tell she was saying something like, “Oooh, you work out!” as she ogled his beach body.
     “Can you believe this?” I elbowed Char again. “Now he’s flirting with the stewardess!”Sharp arrows of pain dug into my left temple. “I think I’m having a stroke.”
     “Shhh. They’ll hear you.” She leaned away from me.
     “Well, if they’re whispering, why can’t we?”
     “You aren’t whispering. And you’re not supposed call them stewardesses anymore. They’re flight attendants.”
     “Fine, but tell me, if these two out here are acting like this right in front of us, what the hell do you imagine the co-pilot and the other ‘flight attendant’,” I finger quoted, “are getting up to locked up in the cockpit? How am I supposed to gauge the likelihood of Flight 207’s impending doom if I can’t look at their expressions?” I believed that staring into the whites of a flight attendant’s eyes would reveal whether we were in danger or not. If her eyes were busy making eyes with the pilot, well then, none of us could do our jobs.
     “Honestly, Carm? You absolutely have to see the flight attendants but you absolutely cannot see the pilots? You need to stop – it’s bad for your – what’s it called? Not cholesterol. Your cortisol. Yeah. That stress hormone.”
     I wasn’t really paying attention to what Char was saying – I was more worried about deep vein thrombosis, because my feet were either asleep or riddled with blood clots – but I could tell she was getting irritated. She didn’t squeeze back when I gripped her hand during the turbulence that hit us suddenly and everything firm dissolved from under our feet.
     The pilot and his new girlfriend both had their phones out now and were slyly exchanging coordinates. A thread of barbed wire traced it way through my guts, and my field of vision narrowed. When would the choppiness end? When would the frigging pilot get back to the cockpit and restore the natural order of things?
     “See! They just exchanged numbers. They are flirting.”
     “God, Carm. Dial down the crazy. You’re overreacting and making yourself sick, as usual.”
     I sneezed then. Just to prove her point.
     “I mean it. You need to get some more help. I’m not flying with you anymore.”
     This was an idle threat. Char always flew with me or I didn’t fly. Who else could I clutch when the plane threatened to crash? No one else was the right audience for my brand of rant. Plus, if she was on the plane, I reasoned, no way could it crash. She was my safety net. Womb to tomb. Why pretend otherwise?
     Char continued: “And book an appointment with your G.D. GP! It’s probably nothing, but neither of us will relax until you do.”

AUTOMOBILES
“Char! Slow down!” I gripped the air beside my head, grasping for an oh-shit handle that wasn’t there.
     “You could have driven. Here. Take the wheel.” She lifted her hands like a she was at gunpoint.
     Yeah right. “On the road of life, I am but a passenger.” No smile from Char.
     She circled the parking lot looking for a spot, chewing her bottom lip, while I stared at the clock, hyperventilating, and fidgeting.
     “You’re fine. Just go!” She stopped near the entrance and reached across me. Wincing, she opened my door. “I’ll be up as soon I can.”
     Char was with me to get the test results, just as she’d been with me for all the tests – “The whole shebang, the full menu, we’ll take two of each,” she’d said to the doctor - but now I was on my own as I handed the receptionist my new health card, the one with the ugly dead-serious picture. Wasn’t it healthier to just let us smile? This health card screamed CAN’T YOU SEE I’M NOT WELL? I still kept the happy expired card in my wallet.
     “In the past ten days have you had any flu symptoms or traveled to any African countries?”
     “Uh, I’m getting over a slight cold,” I sniffed, going for honesty.
     “Here. You’ll have to wear this.” The receptionist passed me a face mask. Slightly amusing until I put it on and promptly found my glasses fogged up and then sliding repeatedly down my nose, the mask somehow shifting them off my ears.
     “The waiting room’s next door.”
     I took a seat and tried to push my nerves aside by pulling out my book. It was a good book, but I couldn’t concentrate. I wished I had my knitting to soothe me. It didn’t require the kind of concentration demanded by long form narrative, but I hadn’t wanted to subject my lovely alpaca yarn to the germiness of the hospital. As I kept shoving my fogged glasses back up my nose, the waiting room filled around me.
     I had enough time to count the seventeen seats. Half of them were taken by husbands, mothers, sisters, supporters, there to comfort their loved ones. I was the only one alone. The young girl with her mother spent the entire time texting and ignoring both her mother and the large poster telling us mobile phones were not permitted on this floor; the dark haired beauty and her boyfriend didn’t stop kissing each other’s hands and smiling into each other’s eyes; the old woman didn’t speak English and had a young man with her who translated the staff’s invasive questions with considerable awkwardness; the woman leaning on a walker, looked a few decades too young for that mobility device.
     Half the people in the waiting room were coughing or sniffling. Why was I the only one wearing a mask? My skin began to itch and my heart was definitely beating irregularly. I could tell my blood pressure was through the roof.
     I went to the bathroom twice. After the second time, I realized the composition of the waiting room had changed. New people had arrived, and several supporters were sitting alone. I wished for a mint, trapped with my coffee breath behind the mask, when I saw the third or fourth person who had arrived after me getting called by a nurse before me. The appointment had been set for 9:45. I’d been in the hospital for 45 minutes at least. I picked up my bag and went back out to the reception area.
     “Uh, I have no problem waiting - my sister’s still not here - but I’m worried that someone might have called my name when I was in the bathroom.”
     “Who are you seeing?”
     “Dr. Gordon.”
     “Your last name?” She stared at me, impassive, like she was wearing the mask instead of me.
     “Bennett. I’ve been here for almost an hour, and it just seems like everyone else, even people who came in after me have already been called for their appointments...” I trailed off. I wasn’t good with taking the lead. That was a job for the dominant twin.
     “Well, they’ve taken the file, if you’ll just go back and have a seat in the waiting room, they’ll call you when they’re ready.” The receptionist spoke to me as if I were quite slow. I was sure the mask had something to do with it. It was making me impatient, a fact that I tried to hide as I walked back to the waiting area.
     Ten minutes later I heard “Ms Bennett? Ms Bennett, they’re ready for you in room three.” They? About time, but where the hell was Char? Was she trying to kill me, abandoning me like this? I didn’t think I could hear my devastating results from what sounded like a panel of grim specialists without squeezing the stuffing out of her hand.
     The door to room three was shut. I knocked and heard a familiar, “Come in.”
     I looked at Char’s pale calm face and then at Dr. Gordon, who said, “Carmen, please have a seat.”
     I was confused, but relieved too. Char would be here to soften whatever death sentence I received and hold my hand as they shuffled me off to the morgue.
     “All right,” I said, gritting my teeth behind the mask and gripping my twin. “Tell me. What’s wrong with me?”
     Char looked at me once and then looked away, towards the window.
     “Oh, I thought you knew,” Dr. Gordon said. “We’re not here for you today, Carmen. Your test results came back fine.”
     Dr. Gordon turned away from me to stare straight at Char, empathy blazing in his steady brown eyes. Char had taken off her glasses and was squinting at him. “Charlotte and I were just discussing her results. As we feared. They indicate the tumours have spread.”

     The worst thing was never going to be what might happen to me. The worst thing was to watch my twin suffer, and after being helpless to fix a thing, be set twinless, spinning in a universe of singletons, who had it all figured out for their own damn selves.
     During the long wait for the elevator, Charlotte would not look at me. I did not ask her why she had kept this secret from me, why she never told me anything was wrong, while I never missed a chance to share a woe, real or imagined. As we walked loops around the parking lot searching for the car, I did not demand that she explain herself. Instead, I reached for her hand and gently took the keys in mine and said, “I think it’s my turn to drive.”

Interviews

Louise Gauthier

Interviewed by Yusi Cai

Louise Gauthier is a singer/songwriter, theatre practitioner, and educator based in
Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Two of her compositions, “Petit Coeur” and “Il S’en Va”, were awarded by Arts and Letters NL, and her debut album, Petit Coeur, was released in June 2023. Horseshoe editor Yusi Cai spoke with Louise after her performance at the 2023 Horseshoe Literary Festival to find out more about her creative practice, her approach to collaboration, and her journey to becoming a musician.

Yusi: Louise, we were delighted to have your wonderful performance at the Horseshoe Literary Festival. How do
you feel about it? Did you enjoy it?

Louise: I loved it. It was important for me as a singer/songwriter to be included in a presentation that featured writing. I have always
considered myself a writer though I have never been presented as
such. It was affirming and had a significant impact on me as an artist.

Yusi: Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your background, give us some information about yourself that
you think has influenced your works?

Louise: My background is francophone and Acadian. I was raised in a
small country community called Corbeil, Ontario surrounded by
family. Family is very important in my daily life. Even at a distance,
having moved so far away from family, I keep this connection strong through constant communication. It definitely has found a place in
my songwriting.

Throughout my childhood, I was exposed to francophone music from Mireille Mathieu of Europe to La Bolduc of Quebec to Zachary Richard of the Acadian repertoire. As an adult, I searched out music from those communities and more to fine-tune my taste and begin exploring my own creations. I think my debut album is most influenced by singer/songwriter Richard Desjardins of Quebec, a storyteller, with an eye to social justice, delivering songs mainly arranged on piano, which I feel is often present in my song arrangements and storytelling style. Iconic French singer Edith Piaf, who performed from 1920-1960 was a major influence. She wrote and sang about love and loss, in a style and feel that my melodies have captured and are reflected as recurring themes in my lyrics.

Yusi: What was your first official step to do music and when did that happen? What would you say to your past self at that time?

Louise: My first official step to writing lyrics and singing was when I wrote a couple of verses for a friend’s play that I was acting in. I was approached by colleagues who said that I should be exploring songwriting and should be singing full-time. I ignored these nudges. What I would say to my past self is strike while to iron is hot! Trust and follow colleagues’ advice. I often felt I had to learn to play the guitar in order to pursue music like I didn’t have the right to be on stage singing without an instrument, but that was not true for me in the end. I am a performer and communicator and only need my voice and words to earn a place on stage.

The real official step, the confirming step, was when I was awarded an Arts and Letters award for Newfoundland music artist, twice. The feedback from professional juries was very affirming and gave me the courage to pursue the recording of an album. I am learning the guitar and composing but collaborating with musicians is working out very well for me. I sometimes wish I had moved on it quicker.
Yusi: You have many roles in your life, as a professor, actor, songwriter, and singer. Do you have a favourite one among
them all? And how have they influence each other in your creative journey?

Louise: My family has always considered me a singer. I sang my sisters
to sleep and sang to get us through chores like washing the dishes and around the campfire. After high school, I chose to explore a career as
an actor and later explored clowning. My acting and clowning
experiences have influenced me as a performer and singer. Across a
period of 30 years, I have experienced a slow transition that saw me
move from acting in plays to performing in musical plays (writing a
song for a play in one case), performing/interpreting songs in cabarets
and tribute concerts, and in clown (which I still hope to do on stage
and in health facilities) to finally writing songs and releasing a debut
album. I slowly made my way to my favourite creative performance,
the simple act of singing on stage. I do love all of the arts but singing
is where I feel I am meant to be.

Yusi: What inspires you to create? I noticed that you have
used a lot of piano elements in your songs, and as a person
who doesn’t understand French I feel your songs are calm
and soothing. What emotions or messages do you hope to
convey to the audience through your music?

Louise: I hope to convey messages of compassion and love. Love is the
best thing we have in this world and I love to talk about it. Love for
our planet, the place we inhabit, love for our families, our partners,
our children. Gratitude for what makes our life rich. I also want to
convey my ignorance, the place where I can say “I don’t know the
answer” but I can try to figure it out. I feel that what can bring
humans together to heal and heal our planet is first of all saying
“I don’t know” and trying to figure it out with the people around you.
I also love to challenge authority and institutional structures that have not served us.

If my songs are calm and soothing it is because they are coming from a place of questioning things. Wondering what is right and what can be done. I try to connect with my audience to ask those questions. I don’t think you need to understand the words. I love that you have got a sense of what I am doing even though you don’t understand the words.

The piano is very present because my main collaborator is a piano player. My next album might have the guitar as the lead instrument. Time will tell.

Yusi: You brought beautiful French songs at the festival, which absolutely promotes cultural diversity and creativity. Could you tell us more about the significance and inspiration behind it? Is there something about the French language that particularly resonates with your creative expression?

Louise: I have been writing in French and in English for years, but my French songs are better. They are more poetic and speak more clearly and deeply what I am trying to express. My English language songs are clumsy. The only English songs I have written that seem to be good are written in country music/folk style. I am still a long way from having enough good songs for a folk album but that is a next goal.

Yusi: Could you talk about the collaboration in your songs? Collaboration is significant in artistic works. In your acting class, you always express how important it is to take care of your scene partner. I believe in music productions the right partner can bring the best out of the work as well. Are there
any memorable things about your collaboration that you
want to share with us?

Louise: I do believe very strongly that taking care of your scene
partner is key to acting. It applies to music as well. It was however
more challenging because they were my creations. My ego had to step
aside at times. Lucie Cauchon was a wonderful collaborator. She
created the arrangements for my songs and plays the piano. We
worked together to come to agreements about the instruments that
would be used, the melodies that needed to shift in some cases, and
even at times lyrics that didn’t work and needed to change. It is a
delicate process to support a songwriter, but Lucie was amazing. We
share the same music influences, which was key. She understood my melodies and words and was able to bring the songs to the next level.
I had to trust her and also speak up for my own francophone language which at times was different than hers as someone from Quebec. She respected my heritage, and we found a happy medium.

Yusi: What advice would you offer to those who aspire to
make music but have yet to begin?

Louise: If you aspire to make music and have been feeling the bug,
the best way to begin is by following your creative impulse. For some,
it is by writing, for others it is by picking an instrument. There are
many ways to create music but it flows the best if you are having fun
and trusting your impulses and desires.

Allison Graves

Interviewed by Meaghan Collins

Allison Graves is a writer and editor based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. Her debut collection of short fiction, Soft Serve, was published in September 2023 by Breakwater Books, and explores the connections between people through facets of their daily lives. Horseshoe editor Meaghan Collins sat down with her to learn more about her creative practice, the process of turning a master’s thesis into a published book, and the ways she has grown and changed as a writer.

Meaghan: Can you tell me a little about your history with writing and when you started focusing on creative writing specifically?

Allison: I’ve always been a big reader and probably started writing cohesive stories in creative writing classes in my undergrad at Dalhousie. I really liked it and felt like writing creatively was easier than a lot of the academic writing I was doing at the time. I became involved with the undergraduate creative writing journal at Dal and knew I wanted to work in writing or publishing in some capacity after graduating, so applied to literary journals everywhere. My family is from Newfoundland so when I got an internship with Riddle Fence — the literary magazine in St. John’s — I moved here!

Meaghan: How do you feel your creative practice has grown or changed?

Allison: Living here has allowed me to meet a lot of people who inspire me every day. I don’t think I would have pursued or been immersed in the university in the way I am now if I hadn’t met Lisa Moore. I met her while pouring her cappuccino one day at this special café that used to exist here called Fixed. She encouraged me to do the MA in creative writing at MUN and that really changed the game. I’ve met so many creative people in St. John’s who have made me want to do creative
things and I’ve always felt that I’ve had the space and the support here
to be able to grow and change and make art.

Meaghan: What was it like taking your master’s project and preparing it for publication?

Allison: There was a period of a few years after it was finished where I really didn’t think it was going to get published. It’s very strange to
write something so many years before it’s published — it really makes
you reflect on a past self! I had a great editor, Kate Kennedy, and I
changed a few things and added some newer stories but a lot of it was
older work.

Meaghan: What was the process of selecting the order of
the short stories? Does it differ at all from how you initially published them in your master’s?

Allison: Yeah, Kate and I went through them and reordered them. I
think I tried to stack some of my favourites at the start, but I don’t
know how much rhyme or reason there is to this stuff. It’s been
interesting to hear, since publishing it, what everyone’s favourite s
tories are and how they differ from the ones I thought were most
effective.

Meaghan: Which story was the most fun for you to bring to
life?

Allison: The first story, “Ceiling like the Sky”, is one of the newer
pieces. I wrote it about my friends and I getting trapped in a big,
winding house in St. John’s during Snowmaggedon. That story is very
true to my life, and I don’t always write like that, so it was fun. I think
the absurdity of this colossal storm trapping us at home right before the pandemic was also just good fodder for a story.

Meaghan: Is there a specific story that was more difficult to put to paper? How did you work through those difficulties?

Allison: Oh, I mean there’s definitely some that make me cringe now — maybe because of how real they are. Or how real certain elements are at least. I think the way I write usually comes from just a sentence someone says that I think is funny or an image that sticks out. I think a lot of my writing comes from a place of humour so any difficulties I’m trying to work out usually try to use some absurd idea or joke as a foil. I think “Soft Serve” is a story about pretty complicated family dynamics and people being uncomfortable and anxious and sad. I try to weave this through a fun time on a cruise ship that ultimately just makes everyone feel worse.

Meaghan: Do you have any odd or unique writing habits or rituals?

Allison: Right now, I’m working on my PhD, so my writing habits are pretty rigid and I’m reading a lot of theory all the time. I have a very substantial Ideas document in the notes app on my phone where I keep track of things I find funny and want to write about. Sometimes those ideas just sit there but I still find it valuable.

Meaghan: What has been the best lesson you have learned during your writing career so far?

Allison: I think writing can be a very weird and isolated thing. I think finding people who want to read your work is so important. So many anxieties about how I would feel when the book was published have just kind of fallen away since it’s come out. I feel very different than I did when I wrote the collection, but I feel so lucky to have this
document of how I felt then — it’s a special thing!

Matthew Hollett

Interviewed by Mauricio Rodriguez

Matthew Hollett is a writer and artist based in St. John’s, Newfoundland. His first poetry collection, Optic Nerve, was published in 2023 by Brick Books and explores the idea of seeing. Horseshoe editor Mauricio Rodriguez caught up with Matthew after the 2023 Horseshoe Literary Festival to learn more about his creative practice, how poetry and photography intersect, and the role that walking plays in his work.

Mauricio: Do you see yourself as a writer who uses photography and hiking to find inspiration, or are these disciplines something you are developing as an interdisciplinary artist?

Matthew: I’ve always been interested in both writing and art, and especially in the spaces where they intersect. I went to art school, and exhibited visual artwork for many years. I’m mostly focused on writing, but photography continues to be an important part of my creative practice. I often combine writing and photography in different ways, whether through visual essays or book projects (such as Album Rock, 2018). So I think interdisciplinary artist is a good description.

Mauricio: How do you decide on the form and structure of a poem? Do you experiment with various poetic forms, or do you stick to a particular style?

Matthew: I tend to start with prose – sometimes I begin with a few paragraphs and then gradually whittle them down into a poem. Other times a poem begins with a single line or an image, and builds from there. No poem is the same, and this unpredictability and experimentation is something I love about writing. I particularly enjoy writing in response to visual images such as photographs or paintings.

Mauricio: Could you discuss your experiences with publishing or performing your poetry? Can you share any memorable moments or challenges?

Matthew: I really enjoy reading aloud, so I like the experience of performing poetry. I used to feel more nervous on stage, but I’ve 
gotten more used to it. Spending a few years teaching helped me 
become much more comfortable standing in front of an audience.

Mauricio:  In the pictures you take, there’s usually a different point of view and approach compared to the one used regularly by landscape photographers. It seems like you are trying to show one or various elements and how everything else happens or moves around them, like different layers of their story. Do you think this is because, 
as a writer, you are always trying to communicate something, rather than just focusing on the visually aesthetic aspect of what you are capturing?

Matthew: That’s a good observation – thanks! I think I do try to tell 
stories, or at least find small details that are suggestive of narratives. I 
love that both photography and poetry are a way of creating a series 
of small interconnected things. If you draw a line between two things 
– whether through words or pictures – they can become very 
evocative, larger than themselves. And if you draw enough lines, you 
create constellations of meaning.

Mauricio: Many amateur and professional photographers heavily edit their pictures to make them more striking and visually attractive. What is your opinion about this post-editing process?

Matthew: I’ve never really edited my photos that much. It’s easy to overdo it, and I prefer a more subtle approach.

Mauricio: How do you prepare for an outdoor walk and shoot? Are there specific tools, techniques, or research involved?

Matthew: Oh, there’s not a lot of prep! I just really enjoy walking and hiking, and I always take my camera with me. I used to bring a paper notebook, too, but I mostly write notes on my phone now. I shoot film sometimes, so I might have more than one camera with me. If I’m doing research for something, I will read about a place before I go there. But most of the time I prefer to respond intuitively to things I see along the way.

Mauricio: Have you ever thought about pursuing a different professional career? At what moment did you decide there was no turning back from a life dedicated to writing?

Matthew: I’ve always had day jobs, including teaching art, building websites, and working in an art gallery. Finding a balance between making money and making art is something I’m still trying to figure out. I do love working in the art world, and the energy of being surrounded by creative people.

Mauricio:  In your workshop at the Horseshoe Literary Festival, you mentioned that you like to connect with the countries and cities you travel to. What is the process you use to establish that connection?

Matthew: Travel is something I wish I got to do more of! My last long trip was a writing residency in Finland in November 2019, which was really memorable. I enjoyed photographing the intense frost, and met 
some wonderful artists and writers from all over the world. I looked 
back on that trip a lot during the pandemic lockdown. One of my 
favourite things is the feeling of wandering through a new city. I walk everywhere and take photos, then get cozy in a coffeeshop somewhere 
and write. I’m fascinated by place – landscape, architecture, public 
space – and how this intertwines with history, memory and art.

Mauricio: In your opinion, what is the significance of poetry in today's world, specifically in Newfoundland?

Matthew: I see poetry and art as a way of communicating and connecting with people. It can be about crystallizing a moment or an emotion, or conveying a more overt message. In the same way that 
writers are advised to “show, don’t tell”, I think poetry works best 
when it is evocative, subtle, and subversive, rather than being explicitly didactic. You have to trust readers to make connections, to find the constellations for themselves.

Mauricio: You’ve said you like observing things, and that is how you usually start a new work. So, what are you observing now, in this present moment of your life? What are your future plans?

Matthew: I’m working on a new collection of poems about walking! 
More than a method of transportation, walking for me is a daily 
practice of choosing to slow down, to be more attentive and attuned 
to the place where I live. In many ways it feels meditative, therapeutic
 – I was living in Montréal during the pandemic, and wrote a lot 
during walks along the Lachine Canal. I’m trying to write poems that involve purposeful listening and learning, to engage with the world in 
a way that feels true and conscionable.

Leo McKay, Jr.

Interviewed by Blessing Adedokun-Awojodu

Leo McKay Jr. is a Nova Scotia-based writer and teacher. His latest novel, What Comes Echoing Back, was published in May 2023 by Nimbus publishing and explores young adulthood, music, and resiliency. Horseshoe editor Blessing Adeokun-Awojodu sat down with Leo to learn more about his influences, finding inspiration, and how his approach to writing and publishing has changed throughout his career.

Blessing: Can you educate us on how you get inspiration for your works?

Leo: I have a challenging full-time job. And although my three children are now full-grown adults, I spent almost all of the last twenty-nine years as a dedicated and active father. So the time available for me to write has always been scant, and a novel takes me a decade, more or less, to complete. Ten years is a long, long time to stay focused on a single creative project. So I have to choose material that I care about deeply, and that I think I will continue to care about just as deeply over an extended period of time.

Blessing: Could you highlight some important stages of your creative process?

Leo: For the most part, and almost without exception, I work on a first draft to its completion before revisiting it for changes and improvements. I write longhand, with pen on paper. The narrative arc that emerges from that first draft is almost never the final form of the overall story, but it’s always been important to me to work through to the end of a draft, then go back and start making changes.
I type the first draft into an MS Word document, then print a hard-copy onto three-hole punch paper and put that manuscript into a
zippered binder. The zippered binder, whose existence, coincidentally, began at about the same time as the personal computer, is just as
important a tool for my process as is my laptop. I go through the
printed manuscript, marking it up with blue pen, adding handwritten
notes on the backs of pages and inserting handwritten loose-leaf
additions, typing in the changes and printing a new draft when the
current one becomes so messy that it’s hard to read through.
Iterative is the word for the process of writing fiction. Make a draft,
fix it to the best of your abilities, do a new draft, and start fixing that
one, following your instincts as to what is working, what is not, and
what changes you can make to make the next draft better than the
current one.

Blessing: What sources, persons or situations have
impacted your writing style and how?

Leo: Style is something that the individual writer may have a hard
time fully understanding in their own work. I think style accumulates
over time, and it also changes from project to project, depending on
subject matter, the tone you want to approach the material with, and
the subject matter.

That having been said, I know that finding the work of Raymond
Carver when I was in my twenties and just apprenticing myself to
fiction was hugely important. I come from a working class
background, and I found it hard to find models of vernacular North American English that seemed relevant to the stories I wanted to
write. But I’ll never forget the moment I first opened Carver’s
Cathedral and read the first few sentences of the first story in there, “Feathers.” I have the lines memorized to this day. “This friend of
mine from work, Bud…” and so on. That voice struck me to my core.
This was how to write about the world I was trying to write about, the world I had grown up in, the world of the late twentieth century North American working class. And the lesson I learned from Carver: get out of the way of the characters, get out of the way of the story. Don’t push the characters around. Let them live and breathe and speak for themselves.

Blessing: Your works have won notable awards such as the Dartmouth Book Award (which two of your books won), and Like This was shortlisted as a finalist for the Giller Prize in 2022. What efforts do you think contributed to the success of these books?

Leo: The only success a writer has any control over is artistic success. Did I do what I set out to do? Did I make something I can feel proud of? Did I make something that reflects the very highest level that I am currently capable of? I try for that. Every time. Prizes. Good reviews. External recognition. That’s all luck. Not only is it not helpful for a writer to think about winning prizes and getting recognition, it’s actually harmful to do so. It gets in the way of good work. Raymond Carver had an index card over his writing desk with a quote from Isak Dinesen on it: “I write a little each day, without hope and without despair.” That’s the only productive approach. And it’s the hope that will trip you up as much as despair. Get them both out of your mental repertoire.

Blessing: You published your first book – Like This – in 1995. In your 28 years of authorship, can you share some major challenges that you have encountered with your art and the work environment, as well as the privileges that you have enjoyed on this journey?

Leo: About one hundred percent of the privilege I’ve enjoyed, I estimate to have come from the very lucky stroke that my first book was a Giller Prize finalist. That really opened up opportunities for me.
It got publishers and agents interested in my work. It led to a string of opportunities for me in the nineties, cool conferences and festivals I
got invited to, people I got to meet, readings and events I got to do
that brought attention to my work. That was all amazing.

But I’ve faced big challenges as well. I had an agent sell my first novel
for an amount of money ($75,000 in year 2000 money) that I honestly
had not expected to earn from writing in my entire career. But when
that book did not get nominated for any awards that my Toronto
publishers found impressive, that was the end of the Toronto
publishing world’s interest in my work. Literally the last phone call I
had with my Toronto editor was on the day that the Giller short list
got announced that year. She told me my name was not on the list,
and that’s the last I heard from her. So that was a blow. I had a two
book contract, but the publisher did not want the second book. So
there went that. My agent tried to convince me to move to Toronto, to
be more visible to the myopic denizens of the Toronto literary scene.
When I balked at that, she seemed to lose interest in my work as well.
So I went from this massive boost after the Giller nomination to
deflation after deflation. What kept me going was simple dedication to craft. I’d taught myself to be a fiction writer, so I just kept writing *fiction.

My third book was published through an Indiegogo campaign.
“Crowd-funded” as they used to call it. Not sure if that term is current
or not. I remember when my campaign reached its funding goal and I
knew I could afford to make the book happen whether a publisher
wanted it or not, I had a weird and ridiculous momentary vision of
my future gravestone. “He kept going,” was carved under my name.

Blessing: What sources would you recommend to an
aspiring author that admires your work?
Leo: What writers have to learn to write well is mostly learned through reading excellent work and learning to approach your own drafts objectively with an eye for the ways in which they are not working. However, mentorship can play a key role, and there are few practicing fiction writers who have not received guidance from someone with more experience. Personally, early on my journey, I did a master’s degree in creative writing. I did an intensive study in Saskatchewan at the Sage Hill Writing Experience, and I have worked with highly experienced and knowledgeable professional editors. Getting help and guidance is indispensable, but everyone’s experience is incredibly personal. A fiction writing teacher who inspires me to make great leaps in my own practice may not have the same effect on someone else whose experiences, interests and concerns are different to mine. But as a general piece of advice, I’d say: read the work that inspires you. Study it. Obsess over it. Figure out how it does what it does. Use it as a model. And seek out instruction or advice. Visit a Writer in Residence at a library. Look for writing workshops near you. Find like-minded people to share your work with and get feedback from. Writing is necessarily solitary work. But it is not completely solitary. Everyone needs outside input.

Blessing: Do you still aspire for growth in your writing career? And what does growth mean to you in your literary journey?

Leo: Every book I’ve written so far has felt like it was better than the last one. Every book I’ve written has felt like the very best book I was capable of writing at that stage of my creative life. That’s all any of us can do, I think. Do your very best, and if you keep doing that, your very best will keep getting better.

Aley Waterman

Interviewed by Charlotte Lilley

Aley Waterman is a writer and musician based in Corner Brook, Newfoundland. Her debut novel Mudflowers, published in September 2023 by Dundurn Press, questions the ways in which people relate to one another and the complex forms that these relationships can take. Horseshoe editor Charlotte Lilley sat down with Aley after her reading at the 2023 Horseshoe Literary Festival to learn more about the role of place in her work, stained glass, and the lines between fiction and autobiography.

Charlotte: Aley, your first novel, Mudflowers, came out earlier this fall. To start us off could you tell me a bit about what inspired the novel, either stylistically or in terms of the story itself?

Aley: I was interested in a few things when I started writing the book.
One of them was alternative family structures. That’s something that
was coming up a lot when I was living in Toronto, a lot of my friends
were like, we should just have babies with our friends and have this
sort of utopian community of friends and babies and stuff. And so
that was a really interesting concept, and I was talking about it a lot
with friends. And then at the same time there were a lot of discussions around, you know, capacity, and the notion that conflict isn’t abuse,
and these discussions around what boundaries look like and how
they’re declared between people who relate to one another in one way
or another.

I think stylistically – this is really funny – I have no idea what style this
book is. I’m way too close to it. I’ve gotten some positive and negative reviews on the fact that it’s incredibly not plot forward, which I didn’t realize. I think I’m a very inward and in some ways neurotic person, so
it seemed plot driven to me, but I don’t think it is. So I think that a lot of the style is interiority and specificity, and I don’t know if I would write something long form the same way now, but a lot of that was just sort of what happened.

Charlotte: During your reading at the Horseshoe Literary Festival, you mentioned that in some ways the book blurs the lines of fiction and autobiography. Where did you draw those lines? How did you choose what to include from your own experience and when to make things more fictional?

Aley: I mean, it’s interesting. Very little that happens in the book has happened, but a lot of the characters and some of the dynamics between the characters reflect truths. It’s really funny because I think a lot of people are reading this book and think that it’s me, like, I’m the first person protagonist, [but] I’ve had people really close to me read it being like, it seems like the main character is the furthest from you. And at certain points, when it demanded plot, when the story line had to come in, I would very much veer into fiction, but a lot of the grounding components were sort of based in nonfiction.

Charlotte: At least for me in reading it, physical places also played a major role in Mudflowers. How did you approach that sense of place as you were crafting the story?

[Mudflowers was] my thesis at U of T for the creative writing master’s program, and one thing one of the readers said during the thesis defense, they talked about how it felt like place was described so differently between Toronto and anywhere in Newfoundland that was described. And that there’s a transience and kind of an impersonal but very specific notion of Toronto and a very detailed, very consuming description of Newfoundland.

I think maybe something I wanted to capture with the Toronto
description – or with both of them – was I feel like people have preconceived notions of what Toronto is from Newfoundland and vice versa. And I wanted to hone in on parts that didn’t feel quite as
obvious. I think Toronto, for me, was – I was very broke when I lived
there, and all my friends were in the arts in one way or another, so my relationship to it was so specific and it was so not an affluent one. It
was not one that invokes ideas of industry, or tech advancement, or anything that people think about. And then you know, Newfoundland,
I don’t really have a relationship to this sort of like rotting dock poetry heritage of Newfoundland either. So I wanted to overlap this kind of whimsical, sort of ethereal, magical, but janky quality between both
places.

Charlotte: There are also points throughout the novel where Sophie, the protagonist, draws on different (often literary) theories or theorists. Is this use of theory something that naturally comes through in your writing if, say, you’re reading something that you’re finding really interesting in an academic sense?

Aley: I think so. I would like to get to a point of writing where it’s
possible to take some theories that have really, really inspired me or informed how I think but make them really, really not feel like theories and really not be in any way inaccessible, because I think that one difficulty of writing about anything academic in something that’s not academic is the potential to isolate readers. Maybe if I was a certain type of thinker I wouldn’t mind being opaque in that way, but I think I’m at a place where, you know, I don’t think I have great wisdom or something to impart that should only go to the handful of people who have read all of Anne Carson or something like that. I feel like it’s
probably ethically best for me to try and be as legible as possible.
Because there’s no reason to not.

Charlotte: On a totally different note, you mentioned at Horseshoe that a love for stained glass is something that you share with Sophie. What is it specifically about that medium that you enjoy

Aley: That’s a really good question. There’s something about glass that I find particularly mesmerizing. I think there’s something about light filtered through opaque – specifically glass, but anything sort of like that, it just does something. I’m not really a visual artist otherwise, it just does something for me, I don’t know.

I think I also like the tactile nature of it. It’s sort of art, but it’s sort of construction, so it doesn’t really come with some of the maybe more formal preconceptions of what you’re supposed to do. Working in English and in academia and all there’s a lot of explanation, there’s a lot of breakdowns of theory and stuff, and I feel like it’s really out of that, it feels like whimsical construction. Also it’s very humbling, because it is really kind of dangerous to work with. So you really have to focus the whole time, but also it kind of allows you to be in a head space of focus but not thinking necessarily, which I find a very helpful antidote to everything else here.

Charlotte: And my last question: what are you working on now?

I’m working on two things now. One is called The Horse, and it’s kind of this strange, I think possibly novella-length magical realism text that’s sort of following the structure of ghosts of past-present-future, but not Christmas-y. And it’s really formally experimental.

The other is a novel called Resistance Tact, or that’s what’s called now, and it’s occupying more of the pseudo-autobiographical space. It’s sort of about a young woman who’s working in a university in Corner Brook, but also I guess it’s sort of about relating between generations
and how messy that can be and how important it is.

Contributor Biographies

Luca Jesse Apel is a nomadic artist, writer, and advocate currently living and working in St. John’s, Newfoundland. His written and visual art often focuses on his experience as a trans child born to Polish immigrants, and the struggles of reclaiming a heritage that shows no interest in reclaiming you.

K.J. Barbour is an emerging writer located on the east coast of Newfoundland. He is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy department at the University of Guelph where he is completing his dissertation (by distance) on the logic and metaphysics of British Hegelianism.

Charity Becker is an English, creative writing, and crafts teacher at Charlottetown Rural High School in Charlottetown, PE. When she is not lesson planning, marking, learning, or engaging with her students, she spends much of her time reading, writing, crafting, scrapbooking, going for walks with her husband Jason and dog Romero, watching shows, and attending literary events.

Frances Boyle (she/her) is the author of three books of poetry, a novella and an award-winning collection of short stories. Her latest poetry collection is Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House, 2022) and her debut novel, Skin Hunger, will be published by The Porcupine’s Quill in spring 2024 Recent and forthcoming publications include work in TAB Journal, Paddler Press, Pinhole Poetry, White Cresset and +doc. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long made her home in Ottawa. www.francesboyle.com and @francesboyle 19 (Twitter and Instagram). 

Maggie Burton lives in St. John’s with her four young children, where she is a musician, City Councillor, and writer. Her poetry has been published most recently in Prism and The Malahat Review. She is the recipient of two Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards for poetry, and a Riddle Fence poetry prize. Maggie is the author of a chapbook, Hands That Knew Heat, and a full-length collection of poetry Chores, published by Breakwater Books in 2023.

Fiona Conway is a recent MUNL dual B.A. and B.Sc graduate and currently a medical student at Dalhousie University. She wrote this story as she prepared to start studying medicine and found herself feeling very unsettled about the donated bodies used in the anatomy lab, the strange lens they give us on death, and the people they used to be.

Tom Farrell is a former archaeologist and current general surgery resident. He has no writing credits to his name outside of boring ones in academic journals.  He is from St. John’s, NL.

Beth Follett is the founder, publisher and in-house editor of the Canadian literary publishing house, Pedlar Press. Her first novel, Tell It Slant (Coach House Books, 2001), was followed by YesNo (Fieldnotes, 2011), an essay in chapbook form, and two poetry chapbooks, Bone Hinged (paperplates, 2010) and A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters (Apt. 9, 2014). Her second novel, Instructor, was released in 2021 by Breakwater Books. A third poetry chapbook is forthcoming from Apt. 9. Follett lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland & Labrador, and respectfully acknowledge the land on which she lives as the ancestral homelands of the Beothuk, whose culture has now been erased forever. She also acknowledges the island of Ktaqmkuk as the unceded, traditional territory of the Beothuk and the Mi’kmaq.

Grace Goudie is a poet of Inuk and Settler descent. Her homebase is
Newfoundland and Labrador, but you will currently find her studying at Pearson College on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Like any 21st century writer, her work is inspired by people, place and identity. Her work is available digitally through Pearson Impressions and on Instagram (@our_wordsuwc).

Lindsey Harrington is a Nova Scotian writer with Newfoundland roots. She has longlisted for the CBC Nonfiction Award, shortlisted for the Fiddlehead Creative Nonfiction Award, and won the Rita Joe Poetry Prize. Her current projects include a short story collection about breakups and a memoir about being childfree. Learn more at lindseyharrington.com.  

Chelsea Humphries is a writer based in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, where she has newly made her home in the rolling green mountains. She has previously been published in the Hart House Review and Star 82 Review. When she is not writing, she works as an academic librarian at Memorial University.

Daze Jefferies (she/her) is a white settler artist, writer, and educator born and raised in the Bay of Exploits on the northeast coast of rural Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland). Author of the poetry chapbook Water/Wept (Anstruther Press 2023) and co-author of Autoethnography and Feminist Theory at the Water’s Edge: Unsettled Islands (Palgrave 2018), she has also been published in Hustling Verse: An Anthology of Sex Workers' Poetry, Feral Feminisms, Riddle Fence, The Dalhousie Review, Arc, and the League of Canadian Poets’ Visual Poetry Chapbook. Her manuscript in progress is titled Oceanleaving.

Tena Laing has recently completed her MFA at the University of British Columbia. She is a twin originally from Newfoundland, living and writing in Toronto; however, she has also called Halifax, Quebec, Tokyo, and Calgary home. An alum of The Banff Centre, Sage Hill, The Humber School for Writers, and the Bard Institute for Writing and Thinking, Tena won the Muskoka Novel Marathon Manuscript Contest and has read her fiction at both The Toronto International Festival of Authors and with local writers at the Writers at Woody Point Festival in Newfoundland. She is currently revising her first novel.

Margaret Rodgers is a writer, artist, and curator. Over COVID she embarked on a coming-of-age memoir titled Maple Park. She is the author of Locating Alexandra (Toronto: ECW, 1995) about Painters Eleven artist and Oshawa resident Alexandra Luke. Her essays, articles and reviews are published in Urban Glass, Sculpture Magazine, ESPACE Sculpture, Canadian Art, and the Journal of Canadian Studies. She has poems published in Sunshine Review, Contemporary Verse, Canadian Woman Studies and Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal.

Laura Temple has published poetry and an essay in the Newfoundland Quarterly, and with the support of ArtsNL, self-published a book of poetry and photography called Slowly Through the Fog Forest, in 2019. She lives in St. John’s.

Christina Wells (she/her) is a St. John’s-based writer and teacher who recently relocated with her family back to her childhood home of Newfoundland from Vancouver, BC. She taught high school English literature on both coasts and has developed gifted education courses in poetry and narrative writing for the Vancouver School Board. Her poetry has been published in ROOM Magazine, Riddle Fence, and in the chapbooks, Silent Work and Grimalkin: The Body Issue. She’s looking forward to beginning an MA with a Creative Thesis at MUN this coming fall.

Susan White is an emerging writer from St. John’s with a background in journalism and communications. She’s currently a creative writing student at Memorial University. Her poetry has been featured in Bi Women Quarterly and her journalism has been published across Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

Stephen Zeifman is a multidiscipline artist. He has published four works of fiction, three novels and a novella and one work of non-fiction, The Way of Art. All have been published by Exile Editions. His poetry has been published in Prism International, Literary Review of Canada, Impulse and others. He has performed spoken word in Toronto and Newfoundland. His art has been exhibited in Newfoundland, Toronto, and a few venues in the United States. The most recent exhibition was in Port Rexton at The Fishermen's Protective Union Building. It ran for the month of July, 2023. Art work has been seen in Riddle Fence and Exile Magazine.

Front Matter

General Editor: Adam Beardsworth

Cover Design: Brittany Noseworthy

The editorial board of Horseshoe Literary Magazine is comprised of graduate students in Memorial University, Grenfell Campus’s Master of Applied Literary Arts Program. This issue’s editorial board includes:

Managing Editor: Brandon Hillier
Submissions Editor: Meaghan Collins
Design & Layout Editor (Poetry): Chinweolu Nzekwe
Design & Layout Editor (Prose): Brittany Noseworthy
Web Editor (Poetry): Logan Ropson
Web Editor (Prose): Victoria Cole
Interviews Editor: Charlotte Lilley
Copy Editor: Blessing Adedokun-Awojodu
Web and Social Media Editor: Yusi Cai
Administration and Finance: Mauricio Rodriguez

Copyright (C) 2023
ISSN 2817-8998

Submissions, Correspondence, and Queries:

Horseshoe Literary Magazine
c/o Adam Beardsworth
Grenfell Campus, Memorial University
20 University Drive
Corner Brook, NL A2H 5G4
Email: submissions@horseshoejournal.ca
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Website: http://www.horseshoejournal.ca

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