Issue 46: Summer 2019

Fiction

The Cannibal History

By Ethan Cade Varnado

On the morning of December 18th, the residents of Fallview, Oregon (not 30 minutes south of Portland) woke to find their homeless problem indisputably solved

Why did Rhiannon leave her successful musician boyfriend Stuart, change her name to Beth, and move to a town near where she grew up, only to arrive on the doorstep of Allan, her former best friend who was beginning to develop a crush on her when she

By Nick Lord Lancaster

1. She realized she didn’t love Stuart anymore. (She was never any good at conflict and decided that running away and changing her name without explanation was the easiest way to deal with things.)

Sex With Andre

By Daniel Felsenthal

When he wakes on Saturday morning, it takes Andre a moment to remember that the year is 1989, and that he is parked on 62nd Street in Manhattan.

Poetry

By Hoa Nguyen

Two Poems

Bring moon-infused water/ silt-ways silt mouth

Her self-talk after death by natural causes

By Alyda Faber

At some point I stopped hearing it; it was absorbed into the constant hum of the mill in our small coastal town. The songs, the voices, the guitar riffs blurred together into the background noise of the days after my husband’s breakdown and subsequent diagnosis.

Dash the imagination against something hard

By Susan Cahill

The Montréal heat is a heavy heat, unlike everything I know, humid and sticky, the electric pulse of the cicadas blurring my assumptions about what nature sounds like.

Interviews

Women, Motherhood, and the Mundane: A Conversation with Téa Mutonji

By Kate Finegan

Téa Mutonji is an award-winning poet and writer. Born in Congo-Kinshasa, she now lives and writes in Toronto, Ontario, and was named emerging writer of the year (2017) by the Ontario Book Publishers Organization.

“I’m a Magpie”: In Conversation with Ho Che Anderson

By Nehal El-Hadi

I first came across Ho Che Anderson’s work in The Beguiling in Toronto in 2008. I was escaping the weather or I was killing time or I have never needed an excuse to dip into a comic bookstore.

“Prefer a Wider Definition”: A Conversation Between Jonathan Farmer and Stephanie Burt

By Stephanie Burt and Jonathan Farmer

Writing has always been entangled with my desire to create an appealing identity for myself, which may be part of the intuitive quality of that kind of prose: it’s closely related to a kind of authority that’s always been a useful camouflage for me.

Reviews

A Review of Victoria Hetherington’s Mooncalves

By Geoffrey Morrison

Mooncalves is Victoria Hetherington’s debut novel, released in April of 2019 with the BC press Now or Never. A work of great thematic depth, it deals among many other things with the ways that cults and adjacent forms of reality-control work on people.

“Very Small Beside the Infinite”: A Review of Emmanuel Bove’s My Friends and João Reis’s The Translator’s Bride

By Matthew D. Rodrigues

A cloud has passed over the sun and Victor Bâton has lost his good cheer. The colours and fragrances of springtime had, just moments earlier, proven restorative. “Now, because of a cloud,” Bâton laments, “everything was finished.”