the Windsor Review

Fall 2020 53.1 the Windsor Review

Fall 2020 Volume 53 Number 1

Established in 1965, the Windsor Review is dedicated to publishing new and emerging writers from North America and beyond.

Editor: Dale Jacobs Fiction Editor: Hollie Adams Poetry Editor: Daniel Lockhart Review Editor: André Narbonne Cover Image: Dale Jacobs

With thanks to: • Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, University of Windsor • Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Windsor • Mita Williams, Devon Mordell, and Heidi Jacobs at University of Windsor’s Leddy Library for assistance with layout, design & digital hosting • Stacie Teasdale for layout and design

Contact us at [email protected] Follow us on Twitter @WindsorReview

The Windsor Review is an Open Access literary journal published twice a year at uwindsor.ca/thewindsorreview

ISSN: 2562-8992

Works in The Windsor Review are published under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Creative Commons license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Table of Contents

A Word from the Editor 1 Dale Jacobs The Path They Cut Across the Night (poetry) 2 Chelsea Coupal Finally seeing the Pleiades in Tishomingo (poetry) 3 Craig Finlay Rage, Rage against the Crow in the Park (poetry) 4 Yuan Changming Open House (fiction) 5 Franz Jørgen Neumann Sarlacc’s Pit, or: The cave of the giant’s mouth (poetry) 10 Michael Mirolla Wolfsbane (poetry) 11 John Riebetanz Ninsun considers the difference between entire and whole (poetry) 13 Mary Buchinger Dirty Tile Floor (fiction) 14 Theresa Moritz What We Make of Symbols (poetry) 18 Sabyasachi Nag let·ter (poetry) 19 Roxana L. Cazan Sweet Water Only (poetry) 20 Alamgir Hashmi Insulators (poetry) 21 Tom Cull The Juries that Can’t Shoot Straight: Why don’t the G.G, Scotiabank Giller, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Awards for Fiction Pick the Same Book? (review essay)23 André Narbonne Contributors 29 1

A Word from the Editor Dale Jacobs

he Windsor Review entered a new chapter last fall with the launch of a new website and the Tpublication of the retrospective issue, edited by current Reviews editor, André Narbonne. That issue—the first to be fully open access—highlighted the journal’s storied past and the impressive legacy that we have inherited as we publish the first issue of the re-launch ofThe Windsor Review. This issue looks to the future as we feature an impressive array of poets and fiction writers from diverse locations and backgrounds. We begin the issue watching the stars, both as they fall and as they appear in constellations in the night sky. Throughout the rest of the issue, we are asked to grapple with family secrets, tensions, and histories. We are given new ways to examine mythologies and the natural world. And we are asked to contemplate the experiences of refugees and the border spaces they must cross. I think you will find, as I have, exciting new voices and perspectives. I want to thank Hollie Adams, our Fiction editor, and Daniel Lockhart, our Poetry editor, for helping to shape such an excellent issue with their selections. We end the issue with André Narbonne’s cogent essay on fiction and the state of literary prizes in Canada for our new Review section. As we move forward, this section will focus on a different genre each issue, moving between fiction, poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction. Welcome to the first issue of the re-launch ofThe Windsor Review. I hope you enjoy the issue and that, if you are a writer yourself, you will consider submitting to a future issue.

Fall 2020 53.1 2

The Path They Cut Across the Night Chelsea Coupal

We watch stars fall – they dash across the dark like headlights on a black road. We stand on my back deck on the town’s outskirts. A star streams across and we ask: Did you see that?

Both wondering if we did or made it up. He’s nineteen; I’m sixteen. At the time, that difference feels like a dugout wide enough to swim across. An August

I’ve never seen: icy-clear, frost almost landing on our tongues and the garden’s gladiolus. The farmers are up still – studying temperatures, driving out to fields. It’s midnight and the farmers are up still.

Crouched in fields to study crops sown in late spring. They examine plants in the glow: headlights and moonlight. An August they’ve never seen. It’s midnight; we watch stars fall. Try to recall the arch of the last one, the path it cut across the night. We impatiently wait – wishing we could name constellations – for the next one. Then one more. On the town’s outskirts, our own breath fogs up the dark. A small, low cloud that glows. We know we won’t do this with everyone. The shower happens only once a year and never like this – in cold as hard as Catholic gravestones, the ones lined up on the other side of town. We make up names for constellations.

On my back deck, we watch starts fall. Impatiently wait. Our breath glows against the dark. Did you see that?

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Finally seeing the Pleiades in Tishomingo Craig Finlay

In Las Vegas the spire of light atop the Luxor Casino Pyramid has created its own ecosystem. First insects, then bats to feast upon them. A tiny sun, drawing into itself an orbit of life from the blackness. How angry, I thought, starlight must be. How angry when, exhausted and stumbling to the finish, it finds itself upstaged by a thousand-watt halogen at a Chrysler dealership. The Pleiades can only be seen reasonably far from most people. They’re faint. Once I was too nervous to kiss a girl when we saw them in a darker sky than Tishomingo’s. I was confused at the time, because in the hay fields of Kievan Rus farmers knew the Pleiades were seven maids sent to dance the round dances, to sing. Then I saw them last night and today I learned that in Cherokee tradition they were six brothers who rose into the sky because they wanted to play, they did not want to work. The seventh brother fell into the ground and a pine tree grew where he fell.

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Rage, Rage against the Crow in the Park Yuan Changming

Disguised as a pigeon, you’ve just had Enough food From my palm (& heart); then, you flap high up Beginning to circle above me, ready To flee away, but only after Shitting on my head & heart (again)

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Open House Franz Jørgen Neumann

ernando peeled a blue sliver of overlooked painter’s tape from the mantlepiece, then turned Fto his two older sisters. I have some news, he thought. Jen and Harper were at their mother’s bay window, watching the men unload furniture from the box truck: end tables, silver lamps without shades, a mirror fit for a giant—all placed around the FOR SALE sign. Staging the house with furniture was meant to raise the home’s asking price back to where it had been before the downturn. Trust me, the realtor had said. People have terrible imaginations. They need props. “It’s gonna feel like a completely different house,” Jen said. “Did this room ever feel like ours?” Fernando said. “It felt off limits,” Harper said. Mom“ ’s students, waiting on our couch, farting it up.” “The Occupiers,” Fernando said, watching as two of the home stagers lowered a white couch from the back of the truck. Jen laughed. “I forgot you called them that.” The couch was set down in the street, then lifted again. “They’re going to fit that inhere? ” Jen said. Fernando opened the front door as the men carried the couch haltingly up the walk. They paused to adjust their grip, the man in front changing his position so he faced the house, revealing Edvard Munch’s The Scream on the front of his T-shirt, but with the angst-ridden subject wearing a pair of headphones and shades. “Beep beep,” said a third stager, better dressed than his companions. He overtook the men with the couch and trotted into the house with a long sagging bundle. Unrolled, it revealed itself to be a gray shag rug that concealed the divots the old grand piano had worn into the floorboards. The couch came through next, resting a good three feet away from the wall, like in magazine homes. The floor joists creaked from having to once again support a great weight. “I wish you guys would redo my place,” Jen said to the men. Fernando found it disconcerting to see the house make room for furniture again. Long before their mother had moved into the memory care centre—perhaps a year after she’d stopped teaching piano—she had begun expunging the house of nearly everything: furniture, the TVs, even the piano. She forbade gifts that weren’t edible or experiential. She took up something like yoga—or dressed as though she had. The only possessions she accumulated were glass jars that she filled with dirt and placed on windowsills to grow mint for her tea. Whenever Fernando visited, his mother gave him

Fall 2020 53.1 6 something to take away from the house—not as a gift, but to find a home for: her spoon collection, a crystal bowl, doorstoppers, a bag of washers, extra vacuum bags. At the time, Fernando had thought this to be just another one of her eccentricities. Overwhelmed by his own life, he’d even been envious of her simplified surroundings. When their mother moved into the centre late last year, the house was down to a mattress and sheets, a meditation pillow, a few toiletries, and kitchen essentials. Now the house was on the market to pay for her continued care; it, too, would go. The home stagers carried in large framed photos now, one with a night scene of Paris, another with a birch forest in winter. I have some news. “Should I pick up the lunch order?” Fernando said, instead. Harper took hold of her walking stick. “I’ll come with. Jen?” “I’ll stay and supervise. Bring me a diet Coke?” The house had been left open through the night to air out the scent of fresh paint. It was warmer outside. “I don’t remember Mom ever sitting on our old couch,” Harper said, as they walked through the garden of furniture. “The fart couch.” “She was either sitting next to the piano or napping.” Harper’s walking stick rapped against a tall metallic vase that answered with a resin hollowness. Harper had inherited their late-father’s disease, but it was mild still and she could almost manage without the cane entirely. She could be mistaken for someone simply wary of dogs. “How’s Jen?” he asked. “She’s in the over-compensating stage. CrossFit and paleo.” “I don’t remember you going through that.” “I’m a realist. When I found out, I poured myself a triple.” “Is she exhibiting any signs?” Harper shrugged. “She says no. I don’t notice any.” Harper was at the back of the truck, peeking in. “This is totally not mom’s style.” The truck held oversized white lamp shades, a white kitchen table and four white molded chairs, an elaborate gold headboard, and a mattress and box spring shrouded in milky plastic. An acoustic guitar stood in a stand, destined for some corner of the house. They headed toward the strip of restaurants on Market Street. “Do you remember the adults that mom taught?” Fernando said. “Not really.” Fernando first discovered his mother taught adult students at a recital, when a lumbering man played a piece as best he could with his thick, swollen fingers. He was no better than the students a

The Windsor Review 7 fraction of his age, The Occupiers. Fernando had joined after-school clubs, sports—anything to avoid coming home and listening to Scarlatti, the theme to Chariots of Fire, or all those scales and Sisyphean circle of fifths. Having to be quiet was perhaps the worst of it. Three kids in a small house, unseen and unheard, for hours every day. It was unnatural. “Why didn’t the neighborhood look like this when we lived here?” Harper said. They were only a block away from where they’d all grown up, in one of the last unrestored clumps of homes in Ballard, but the street here was nearly unrecognizable. “Microsoft. Amazon,” Fernando said. There were now exquisite restorations and daring new construction: Victorian filigree punctuated every block or so by structures of steel and glass with owners indifferent to voyeurs. It had once been rundown, back when Ballard had seemed boring, when what passed for entertainment was watching the locks open and close, or hanging out along Shitshole Bay, drizzle tapping your jacket as you smoked. His father had taken him fishing a few times, but then he’d fallen ill and passed on. That was then. Now people hitched their souls to a mortgage just to live here. They kept walking. The sidewalks had been redone and felt wrong through Fernando’s soles. The concrete was rough and bluish where it once was smooth and gray, cracked and overgrown. “I have some news,” Fernando said, finally. “I took the test.” The DNA test had been Harper’s idea of a Christmas gift a couple of years ago. A bit of spit in a test tube and then the knowledge of good and evil. “I don’t carry Dad’s genes,” he said. “Markers for Alzheimer’s?” He shook his head. His sister’s face tightened happily. She put one of her gloved hands over his, then hugged him so tightly that he nearly winced. Her walking stick raked through a supplicant hydrangea. “What a relief,” Harper said, eyes wet. “You know what this means, don’t you? You have to be the one to take care of me one day. And maybe Jen. Because my kids won’t lift a finger.” She laughed a little, then patted him on the arm. “No pressure.” Harper put a gloved knuckle to her eye.“There’s something else. Nothing bad,” he added, watching the relief fade quickly from his sister’s face. “On the family tree part, the website matched me with a bunch of new cousins.” “Who?” “Exactly.” They were in front of one of the new glass and steel houses now. A man descended the interior stairs in that relaxed two-step rhythm Fernando could feel in his bones but without being able to recall the last time he’d been that light-footed and at ease. An empty banana peel danced like a squid from the man’s right hand, an open laptop balanced on the other. “You mean, one of our uncles put a bun in someone’s oven? I bet it was Freddy.” “Think closer to home.” “You mean…Dad?”

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“Closer.” Fernando watched his sister’s face and felt her realization come to its uneasy rest. “Mom.” “I’m guessing it was one of the men she taught during the day,” Fernando said. “Holy.” They reached the pita place and picked up their order, which was already waiting. Harper finally spoke. “It’s something like mercy to know she had a fling,” she said, as they headed back. “I mean, way to go Mom, right? Don’t give me that look. Dad was gone half the year anyway. It’s…nice. Nice to think she had some daring in her.” Fernando ducked into a liquor store and came out with a soda for Jen. “This other family…” Harper said. Fernando shrugged and placed the bottle into one of the two bags of Lebanese food. “I deleted my account. I don’t want to change anyone’s opinion of who my biological father was.” “But what if you have half-brothers or sisters? Jesus, I’m only a half-sister now. I feel so downgraded.” She tried to laugh. “And this means Dad’s not your—“ “He’s still—was still—Dad.” “Of course.”

The truck was gone. The windows of the house were closed but framed now by heavy drapes that revealed a gleaming brightness within. “So weird,” Harper said, staring down at the doormat that said, simply, HOME, before pushing open the door. Jen sat in a chair with an architectural magazine. She swiveled. “Not bad, huh?” Fernando sniffed. The room was thick with new heat and the scent of a roasting chicken. “It’s a spray,” Jen said. “The bathroom smells like Hawaii. The bedrooms smell like roses.” Visitors to tomorrow’s open house would see nothing but the freshly spackled and painted walls, the framed Parisian night scene, the couch with two gray pillows placed at an angle over the cushion seams, the modern chandelier over a breakfast nook, the spread of magazines, the vase of flowers, the scent of a warm meal just minutes away from being served. If you shat, it would probably smell like plumerias. Whoever bought this house wouldn’t see the scuffed and grimy beige walls, the TV with the bad vertical hold, or the fart couch. The hallway was brightly lit for the first time, and the master bedroom looked like no place an exhausted mother would ever go to nap—or to strip down for the man who was Fernando’s biological father. Fernando had an urge to walk across the three firm-looking cushions of the couch and leave a mark. “Fernando’s got some juicy news,” Harper said, opening up the takeout.

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An hour later and less than two miles away, Fernando walked alone up to a tidy split-level with a stand of spruce trees on one side. This was his third visit over the past few months. He recognized the cars parked on the street and could see people inside watching a game: a happy, healthy, extended family, all gathered there because he said he was going to be in town and would try to stop by again. It was a house without a mother facing her end, one without two sisters marked for their father’s fate. It was also not the house in Tacoma with a soon-to-be ex in it, or a son dropping out of college. Instead, this home belonged to the son of its late owner, a man who had taken a few months of piano lessons a long time ago. It was a home where people were nothing but happy to see him. Surprised and even shocked at first—yes—but then delighted. The familial resemblances were uncanny. He rang the bell. He knew being here was selfish. That everyone he had met so far—the cousins, his half-brother, three uncles, four aunts, spouses and lots of young kids whose names he still didn’t have down pat—were part of a secret he’d eventually need to reveal to everyone, in full. But not just yet. He hadn’t known that some secrets could be light, even buoyant, keeping your head above water. He could imagine his mother having thought the same thing. The door opened. “Fernando!”

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Sarlacc’s Pit, or: The cave of the giant’s mouth Michael Mirolla

In the time before the titans, let this be the opening that gave birth to the world, pulling the strings of at least one universe. Let this be where – from self-created Klein bottle – it all gushed forth, a torrent of the real and the imagined tossing itself into the recently-invented air: From left-leaning particle to the cool word for titanosaur. From Gregorian chant to penal colony.

But is “let this be” enough to work the magic, the gushing? Is “so be it” able to bring forth something from nothing? Or is the reverse more likely? A giant maw lined with layers of razor teeth ready to give those ordinary objects a rude awakening: pulled back, ground down, fused into an edgeless whole that is not of their making. That shreds who or what they have come to believe they are – microbe, rock, tree, mammal, android – and recasts them kicking and screaming into the not-I.

Or perhaps we can speak of both at once. Like a thick tongue that goes in and out within a mouth tasting of striped karst, marble dust and ancient ocean. And when the tongue slides into an empty spot, it unfurls – before retreating – strange seeds that burst from a pinprick and crowd the space. But not a photon tick later, as if regretful, the tongue reaches back in time and pulls all into itself like the meal needed to start the cycle yet again.

Which begs but one question: At this moment, is the tongue about to come in or out?

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Wolfsbane John Riebetanz

The king himself . . . gaining the silent fields, howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak . . . His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf. – Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 232-37

No fields are silent to those who live in them as we do not A deer’s ears twitch at the crunch of footfall on leaf-fall too far for the net of human sense to trap and an owl ear catches a mouse’s tiny scurry

We lack the ultrasonic range to tap the conversations crickets have beyond their chirp or eavesdrop on a lone stonefly drumming on its abdomen to awaken the attention of a potential partner

Yet our presumption over- took our limits when we tried to take out the grey wolves and up- set the balance of the forest’s symphony their surplus prey nibbling riverbanks to deserts leaving smaller mouths to starve

We misheard the wolfish howl as deranged speech turning a deaf ear to its orchestration of pitch and volume and a blind eye to subtle sign language written in stiffened leg tensed lip and the long tail’s semaphores

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and ignored resemblances to our own kind their extended families the readiness of pairs to adopt orphaned pups the agitation spreading like a virus through the whole pack when one of its members dies

With our eyes swaddled in red riding hoods and our ears unnerved by the cry of wolf how could we know how large its soul without dissecting the beast never letting ourselves get near enough to hear the great heart beating

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Ninsun considers the difference between entire and whole Mary Buchinger

Your entire story Gilgamesh will never be told but the whole story is what those who follow searching may come to know

Like this:

I am entirely god but it was you my son who made me whole

for a time anyway then you moved into your own attempting to complete yourself virgins Enkido the Forest—

wholenesses you shattered

Your search has consequence

And this is why your story will be told over and over never in its entirety whatever fragments endure a whole will be formed just as my story gets filled in by those who tell it looking for themselves

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Dirty Tile Floor Theresa Moritz

he winter I was five, Mom wanted Daddy to buy new carpet for the living room. Once she Tstarted talking about it, she never stopped until Daddy got up and left wherever he was sitting. At that time, because my older sister Lynn was in school, I was the oldest child at home during the day with my parents and my two little brothers, Richie and Timmy. My mom was just out of the hospital, where she spent a long time after Timmy was born. And, in the winter, Daddy was around the house a lot, unless he was out drinking, because construction sites were closed down. That was Daddy’s work, construction. He was an unskilled laborer, what is called a hod carrier for the tool that bricklayers’ assistants used to carry bricks around a site and to lift the bricks up to the skilled craftsmen as needed. At first, what he always said before he left the room, and sometimes the house, was that he couldn’t afford carpet. But then, sometimes, when the weather got really treacherous, he was driven to try other appeals. With four little kids, a carpet would never stay nice. He’d put one in and immediately have to replace it. Might as well wait for a while, get more use out of the one that came with the house. But it was worn through in places, Mom said. And, where it wasn’t worn through, it was only dirt that was holding it together. What could she do? Daddy said he knew it wasn’t perfect, but he liked the carpet. It was perfect for stretching out on in the evening. I had seen him there many times. As I was growing up, I always judged lengths on the basis of the length of my father’s body stretched out on that old carpet asleep, often sleeping it off. But Mom wouldn’t let it go. Was it true what she claimed, that the one thing that had kept her going in the psych ward was that when she got home, the carpet would be gone, and there would be something beautiful in its place? Something she wouldn’t be ashamed to have her family see? Not his family, all of the Earls and Leroys and Alfies and Archies and their kids. No, they would see it, but they wouldn’t appreciate it. But, her mom Lorna and her pop James and her sister Suzanne and her brother Jimmy Junior, they had agreed with her when she cried out about the shame, that they had been bothered by it, too. And, sometimes, she talked about a Marine who was in love with her, who loved her more than Daddy did. He would never have left her to suffer this way, with this rotten carpet. Whether this Marine was someone from before she married Daddy, or someone she knew now, whether he was

The Windsor Review 15 a flesh-and-blood offer of happiness denied her, or one of the illusions the stay in the hospital was supposed to cure her of, was never clear to me. Then, one of them, Mom or Daddy, got the idea of replacing the carpet with tile. I wish I could say which, but I just couldn’t monitor them all the time, as hard as I tried. The negotiations were well advanced toward tile before I heard anything of it to report to Lynn when she got home from school. What I learned from them was that tile was modern, tile was new, and tile was easier to clean than carpet was. You just swept it with a broom and sometimes washed it with a mop. It was durable, meant to withstand traffic from four kids. It would practically clean itself. And, it would last forever. Now, that was good tile. Also, Daddy could lay the tile himself, which would be another savings. I can remember the installation a little. Mom and Daddy argued about how to ensure everything would go in straight. Then, Mom wasn’t sure if she even liked the color of the tile anymore. It was dark brown with tiny flecks of red and yellow in it. But, now that she saw it in the room, she said it didn’t go with the furniture. To shut her up, Daddy called in his brother Earl, Mom’s least favourite. When he came in with a case, Mom left. But then the brothers got into it, too. Daddy yelled at Earl because they couldn’t find the tool that cut the pieces of tile to fit in the too-small spaces that were left between the wall and the last full row. There was still a lot of adolescent craziness about them, especially when they were drinking Despite the craziness, the tile was laid, and not just in the living room, but also in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedrooms and bath. I thought it looked fine. For the first few weeks, it was remarkably clean, too. And safe, especially in the late afternoon when Lynn had gotten home, and we could watch the television in the corner, far from where Mom was cooking dinner in the kitchen. I liked the adventure movies they put on for kids, the way things always worked out for the heroes. But, as good as the floor was, it wasn’t really self-cleaning. And, Mom began complaining that it never looked clean just with sweeping and mopping. Over Christmas vacation, Lynn volunteered to do that work for her, and so she let up. After the break, however, Mom just never got back on board. Somehow, she just couldn’t believe in it anymore, she explained to Daddy. It didn’t just need sweeping and mopping, it needed to be waxed and polished, and she couldn’t do that. She had too much on her hands with the boys and me. So, Daddy did that. But then, the wax didn’t dry properly. Mom could detect build-up in the corners, especially around the doors. That had to be removed. But she couldn’t do that. Daddy had to do that, too. And he did. In fact, he did all of the work on the floor, until he went back to work in the summer. He would come home tired and dirty, only to have the demand made that he should clean the

Fall 2020 53.1 16 floor. How he must have longed for that worn-out carpet to stretch out on. But there was no more stretching out in the luxurious comfort of carpet; he had seen to it himself by laying the tile. And, he was frustrated in his hope that the floor would redeem itself by staying clean, or by drawing Mom into cleaning it to her satisfaction. Less than a week back on the job, Daddy refused to do any more work on the living room floor. He said to Mom one day, “The dirt can get up to my knees, and I still won’t clean that floor.” I used to think about that dirt all the time. I used to imagine bracing myself against the tug of it as I walked to the front door. Dirt that reached Daddy’s knee would have been up to my chest. I pictured myself holding my school books over my head the way TV jungle adventurers lifted their rifles high to avoid contamination from swamp waters. The exact consistency of the dirt that would reach his knees perplexed me. I knew it wouldn’t be wet, and it wouldn’t be solid. But once we walked in it, wouldn’t the dirt collapse? That was the crucial thing: once it had achieved knee level, I imagined it would never lose the consistency that would keep it there in place, like a gelatin, maybe. I lay in bed at night and wondered whether the tide of dirt was rising on the living room floor. But, I could no more see growth and accumulation there than I could see changes in my own height. Of course, I had evidence that I was getting taller. I couldn’t wear many of my favourite clothes from the last year. And, if that was the case, then the dirt must be rising, too. Since the tile floor continued out of the living room into the hallway by the bedrooms, I wondered, also, how I could hold the dirt back when it reached the doorway of the room I shared with Lynn. Bad enough to be stepping out into it to get to the bathroom. But, hadn’t Daddy specified that it was this particular floor alone that would be corrupted? He must have had in mind to spare the bedrooms. How would that be managed? A little door might be set up, the sort that keeps babies or small pets in or out of spaces. A dirt door, I suppose. The floor lasted the eight more years we lived in the house, before Mom and Daddy couldn’t afford it anymore, and we had to move. Over that time, there were breaks in the argument over the floor’s merits. Part of the reason for that was that Mom could rag Lynn into cleaning, the same way she could rag Daddy. And, Lynn couldn’t escape by going out drinking. Lynn’s work, and then mine, too, explains why the dirt never once got so thick that it came up even to the tops of the soles of my shoes. I was relieved, sometimes, to know I could turn back the tide of dirt, but I was tempted to blame Mom. Why couldn’t she have taken Daddy at his word? Or, had he said, “The dirt will have to be up to my knees before I clean that floor”? Maybe that was why Mom was waiting, not because she wanted to put him to the test, but because she thought they had a contract: he would clean it, but only when conditions worsened sufficiently. Sometimes I thought of asking him about this. Mom and Daddy have been dead many years, now. And my two brothers, small all those years ago,

The Windsor Review 17 have also died. Lynn and I argue sometimes, now, over who was to blame about the floor. I have always blamed Mom. She should have cleaned the floor, or if she couldn’t clean it to her satisfaction, she should have been content with it. To assert that she was powerless to do, but powerful to command, always seemed wrong to me. I felt sorry for Daddy. Lynn, on the other hand, sees Daddy as a weakling and a coward. Whatever blame might be assigned to Mom, Daddy had, after all, laid the tile. But he hadn’t seen it through. He’d blamed his abandonment of the project on Mom, but he was the one who had abandoned them all, left them to go drinking. I used to think of the dirty tile floor as just one of the battlegrounds of the sexes, but lately I’ve begun to wonder whether there’s reliable consolation in classifying my childhood sorrow as just another grim subset of the human condition. I mean, carpets wear out. Everything wears out. We wear out. Entropy frustrates our every move. We work and work and work until we disintegrate at last in death. But, there’s more here than that. It’s a mighty sorrow unique to the secret world of insane mothers and alcoholic fathers. It’s created by those paired problems marrying and then gradually consuming themselves, like a dying star pulling space in around itself until it disappears. Mom and Daddy disappeared all right, and they nearly dragged Lynn and me in with them.

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What We Make of Symbols Sabyasachi Nag

One bone cold Sunday night Flipping raw photos from a recent trip, We stopped by a yellow taxi In Calcutta –

Shirtless boys, my son’s age The white of their teeth luminous in the dark – Noses pressed to the glass of the rained afternoon – They were begging for food.

One of them in the far corner of the frame Looked away from us all, woozily Drawing vapour swastikas On the fog of his breath –

Same as my son on the frost of the window – His newcomer’s eyes looking out Into frozen yards blinking red, green, gold Elves riding reindeers on fire.

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let·ter Roxana L. Cazan n. 1. Is what they found on her, in the pocket of her tattered dress a. as she stretched up on her toes to peak over the fence, b. “detained” at the southwest border. See Note at Jesus was a refugee. 2. Dry leaves to build a nest, foster younglings, nobody cares for how long, or if the winter blows this year, or how many girls are being raped right now, and of those, how many know how to use a tampon. 3. It’s like an empty room, somewhere, waiting to be filled with family. 4. It’s like a blank canvas, a fraying holm. Pencil in some old limbs, a pile of letters stuck up high. No one ever finds out. 5. They couldn’t get her to tell them her name. a. as if she forgot her voice in line at the border, b. as if her voice is a cello with broken strings, c. as if writing it down would mean undoing the love of home/country, d. as if 6. This is not a pity poem, but a scaffolding, a fuselage, an engine, a. churning roadside graves, documenting their chicken bone aftermath, b. returning to the border like a needle in the seam, c. the purling of swaddling cloth. 7. This is exactly what poetry is supposed to be about.

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Sweet Water Only Alamgir Hashmi

Last round of the lane, dusk falling across the district, he’s back where he began after the morning prayer, hangs up his skin on a nail in the hurting wall and falls asleep on a straw mat. Half that pulpit wall went down one monsoon along with his father. The back of the wall is still some use. At least, the mosque has a water tap, his filling station, and a rent-free foyer. He dreams about his father’s dim eyes looking in the distance, his kindly face the only hope that was; a mirage ebbing white in the desert he’s known since he saw his mother crying round an old cot. Azan, and he’s up again, rubbing his eyes upon the same star above that waits out the twilit hour. Day’s work is a half torn shirt, sun burning a white strap into the shoulder, water skin on the back. So bent for his years, some would think he’s been praying in obeisance to God too much. Each time he fills up and pats it with a gentle hand, then a jolt that settles the weight in place. The steer hide still smelling good, with him and his father’s sweat soaking in for maybe a hundred years, from before Elizabeth became Queen. It’s something to smell to believe. Go, hobble from door to door and see the smiling eyes. People are hardly wrong: ‘Look, he carries the Arabian Sea on his back’. And he assures like a town crier: Sweet water only!

The Windsor Review 21

Insulators Tom Cull

Out the train window columns of old telegraph lines vault fences, fields, flashing-red crossings. Cables stretch and warp, under Virginia Creeper. Each cruciform pole bug-eyed with glass insulators: blue-green, aquamarine, red, lavender, clear.

The lines no longer live. News of your great-great grandmother’s funeral once travelled intact from Kingston to Windsor. come tomorrow. stop No words leached down the poles. Death conveyed in a toggle of conductor and insulator dashed along wires wrapped around glass.

We had two in the cabinet beside the ostrich egg. One a Hemingray 42. The other, Dominion Glass, bubbled fluid frozen heavy in my hand. They looked like the future. Daleks in Dr. Who. Now thousands march as kilometers click.

I will build spring -loaded stilts, bound pole to pole collecting, my headlamp refracting rainbows into the black night.

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Out train windows passengers will see a great spindled mantis harvesting eggs, her massive burlap sack chinkling glass insulators.

The Windsor Review 23

The Juries that Can’t Shoot Straight: Why don’t the G.G, Scotiabank Giller, and Rogers Writers’ Trust Awards for Fiction Pick the Same Book? André Narbonne

I once asked a Canadian author and educator who had sat on three Scotiabank and three Governor General’s Award juries what the difference was in the critical outlook of the different prizes. He replied tersely, “No difference, best book,” as though the question were a source of irritation. * * * very year, three major Canadian literary prizes, the Governor General’s Award for Fiction E(established 1936), the Scotiabank Giller Prize (1994), and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (1997), publish their list of the Elect: a shortlist of five books, one of which, according to a jury’s judgement, is “best.” In the twenty-three years that all three competitions have placed winners in bookstore windows, there has never been agreement on what the best book is. The two years they came closest were 2004 and 2011. In 2004, by won the Giller and the Writers’ Trust and was shortlisted for the G.G. Munro would in 2013 win the Nobel Prize for literature. In 2011, The Sisters Brothers won the Writers’ Trust and the G.G. and was shortlisted for the Giller. 2011 was also the year that not just the winners but also the three shortlists most resembled each other. Of fifteen possible unique titles, the three shortlists named ten unique titles with five duplications. To put that into perspective, in twenty-three years, when the three prizes have come closest to reaching a consensus on what constitutes the best books in Canada they were 33% in agreement. The furthest they came from reaching common ground was 2014 when the shortlists shared no titles: 0%. Juries are not perennial, adjudicating the same prize every year. There is no actual personality to the various contests as is often claimed, nor can there be, because their members change, and it is the makeup of the jury that determines which book receives a prize. Someone picking for the Giller may, in the next year, bring the same values and biases to the G.G. or the Writers’ Trust. All of which matters for one reason only: sales.

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There are many Canadian fiction contests, but the G.G, Giller, and Writers’ Trust predominate. Their book stickers are paratexts, which are forms of pre-interpretations. They condition readers to be predisposed towards the art of the text in the same way an Academy Award win for best picture predisposes movie goers to enjoy a film. Anyone can feel secure pressing a prize-winning book on a friend. James F. English and John Frow in “Literary Authorship and Celebrity Culture” refer to this as the “literary-value industry.” Shortlisted books get reviewed. Reviewed books see sales. Last year, the Giller winnowed 117 books into its shortlist; which is to say that 112 books did not receive the benefit of a juggernaut of free advertising at a time when book review sections are disappearing as newspapers go digital. What the so-called “Giller bump,” the impressive sales jump that occurs following a book’s nomination for the prize, primarily indicates is that the business of the Giller is business. An award granting body that advertises itself as the most prestigious based on its prize money, not its choice of winners, as the Giller does, offers itself up as advertisement. 2019’s prize winners are instructive. Five Wives by Joan Thomas (G.G.), by (Giller), and Days by Moonlight by André Alexis (Writers’ Trust) appear on the shortlists of only the awards which they won. What their authors share is that they are all multiple award winners. What distinguishes the novels also distinguishes the juries’ aesthetic judgement, suggesting that a literary award is more about the relationship of the jury to the author than about the book. Five Wives focuses on an historical event, Operation Acua, which resulted in the massacre of five American missionaries in Ecuador in 1956, and is provocative in that it allows the past to speak in its own voice, unfiltered by current tenets. Hebrews 11.1 extols faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” [emphasis mine], and the tragic error of the men in Joan Thomas’ deeply compelling narrative is in seeing the evidence of their faith in something seen: a sunbeam through clouds pointing like a finger into the Ecuadorian forest. Five Wives is about the composite identities—as individuals, partners, siblings, and believers in a Christian God—of a healthy-sized cast. It is a novel about the nature of family and the consequences of belief. In contrast, Ian Williams’ Reproduction, winner of the Giller, is a dysfunctional-family saga with a relatively small cast for its 445 pages. The two central characters, Felicia Shaw, who hails from a never- named Caribbean Island, and Edgar Gross, a German Canadian suffering from an actionable case of male chauvinism, meet in a Toronto hospital where their mothers are patients. The upshot of this chance encounter is offspring that results in family—for the most part with unrelated family members. At the novel’s end, Felicia and Edgar’s deaths are the terminal incidents, bringing the novel forcefully full circle in keeping with its overly precious structure. A three-day recording of Edgar’s death plays to a comatose Felicia dying as her mother did in a Toronto hospital. Days by Moonlight by André Alexis details an absurdist road trip in search of a fictional poet named Skennen who, like Schrödinger’s cat, may or may not be dead. The narrative travels through the author’s Quincunx Cycle—five books set in Southern Ontario:Pastoral (written in 2009 and published in 2014), (2015), The Hidden Keys (2016), Days by Moonlight (2019), and Ring which, although yet to be completed, is intended as the third in the series. Alexis’ plot unfolds in a half- comic, half-gothic world. Sue Carter, in a Toronto Star review, writes, “It’s as if descriptions of Stephen Leacock’s Mariposa or Alice Munro’s iconic Ontario landscapes were filtered through a psychotropic drug.” Five Wives and Reproduction are about tragic and comic inelasticity; the protagonists and virtually everyone they encounter in Days by Moonlight are plastic—capable of surprising transformations—including Skennen, who proves both dead and alive.

The Windsor Review 25 The three winners are studies in contrasts. A novel that is more invested in character than revisionism, the flawed protagonists ofFive Wives’ are not censured by their author, who keeps artfully aloof. The interest ofReproduction lies in the intrusive author, not his story. The performance is all. Days by Moonlight is self-referential, written in an anecdotal self-inquisitive style reminiscent of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele’s Spectator. Five Wives begins with tragic prolepsis, flashing forward to what ought to be a moment of extreme pity. In it, five widows piece together their husbands’ last days before they were murdered by the tribe they thought had befriended them. That was the end of the story. If you could call it a story, given its unsatisfying plot and lack of obvious meaning. Nevertheless, the women found they could not stop talking about it— those gleaming, heart-stopping days when their husbands were separated from them but still inhabited this earth. A child started wailing down the hall and the mothers avoided each other’s eyes, disavowing ownership. “He says the tree house was thirty-five feet up,” one of them said, indicating the page she was reading. “Can that be right?” “It was a catfish they caught the first day.” “They put a shirt on George for the plane ride. Oh, that was thoughtful. It’s always so cold in the plane.” This was just a chapter, of course, not the whole story. The question was how this chapter led to the next. And then, of course, to the next—to their unthinkable lives. The children, oh, the children. One of the wives was eight months pregnant and her ankles were terribly swollen. “Put your feet up here, Marilou,” Olive said, slipping down to the linoleum floor to make room. Extraordinary in this passage is what constitutes interest. The reader will be appalled by the horror of a massacre made more sinister for not being described, but even more so by the absence of grief. The wives’ seeming coolness in the face of calamity is astonishing and mysterious. HarperCollins advertises Five Wives as in the tradition of The Poisonwood Bible, a 1998 novel by Barbara Kingsolver. Their subjects are similar. Both describe missionary families. The Poisonwood Bible takes place in the Belgian Congo of 1959. Both share thematic interests in communication and mistranslation. However, The Poisonwood Bible’s protagonists are fiction;Five Wives is based on historical people, some of whom wrote memoirs. A more striking parallel is with David Wilkinson’s autobiographical The Cross and the Switchblade (1963). Wilkinson’s non-fiction account of crime and Christianity is set in the New York of 1958, describing the power of unflinching faith to convert gang members. Wilkinson’s book lacks the literary power of Kingsolver’s novel. What it shares with Thomas’ is that neither book views faith as a form of psychosis. Five Wives reads like The Cross and the Switchblade as a dark farce. Williams in Reproduction highlights the extent to which his fictional characters are to be viewed through the postmodern test tubes of language and fractured narrative structure. The morningdo you hear that after Edgar’s arrival was the first cold morning of the fall. Oliver approached Felicia accusingly as she was rolling lint from her coat near the basement entrance. Why is he using my towel? Oliver held up the evidence.

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Talk to Army, Felicia said. Army, Oliver called. He not home. Edgar wafted outside the window into a nearby door frame. The way they were positioned, with Felicia between them and facing Oliver, only the men could see each other. the deaf could hear that not the dog Oliver felt the urge to do something grand yet natural. Give Edwer something bloody pot hound to look at. Note the authorial intrusions. In the last sentence, “Edwer” is not a typo. As Edgar is dying from cancer his name is frequently misspelled. Internal thoughts are placed in sub-script and super-script with the reader left to determine to whom they belong. The publisher’s description ofReproduction as “hilarious” should be read for what it is: an attempt at coercion—if you don’t get the joke the fault is yours. In Moby Dick, Melville’s Ishmael looks out into the vast expanse of open sea and wonders if perhaps the whole universe is “a vast practical joke,” and “that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own.” Characters in Reproduction are similarly cast adrift into an inscrutable fictional universe. However, to Ishmael’s questioning of divine providence, Reproduction deterministically asserts chance. This seems to be the point: not that the world is comic but that it’s empty. In the crucible of Williams’ irony, characters need to assert human connections where they do not logically exist and to deny them where they do. Reproduction serves as a character study of contemporary life. Williams’ world is transactional, personal history is negotiable. Days by Moonlight views personal history as not only necessary, but redemptive. The following passage is typical, beginning with an aphorism that is expounded upon, made personal through self- deprecation, and then stretched into an analysis of the speaker’s position within the narrative. Through the personal, the speaker arrives back at universality that is the province of aphorisms: The world – people and things – brings us to love but it is not love itself. I might have said those very words about my parents and Anne, that they had brought me to love, that they were not love itself. That they were gone from me could not spoil what they’d given. Obvious though this idea might have been to others, it was a revelation to me. So much so that I began to feel as if our journey – mine and the professor’s – was not to help Professor Bruno but to help me, Alfred Homer. It briefly felt as if all were meant for me, as if I’d generated everything in order to tell myself this small thing. Then again, I suppose every traveller feels this, because, in the end, every journey has a special – not general – meaning, a meaning particular to each traveller. A strange idea that the professor was there to help me, not the other way around. Alexis’ subject is the liberating power of loss. Felt experience is a component of reality, false nostalgia is derided. Rural settings are both visually represented as realistic locations and deeply imagined in their construction of social mores, while the usual small-town nostalgia for a colonial Canada is ridiculed. In one town to which the protagonists journey, house burning rather than barn raising is celebrated, in another a so-called Indigenous parade has Indigenous people tossing rotten fruit at Fathers of Confederation including John A. MacDonald. Dogs run loose through the novel. In keeping with Alexis’ self-referential tour of previous books in the cycle, two dogs share names with Frick and Frack from Fifteen Dogs. Why are three so dissimilar books in content, genre, and intellectual attitude in the view of various

The Windsor Review 27 juries the “best”? That the G.G, Giller, and Writers’ Trust was not awarded to the same novel last year is not surprising. That in twenty-three years it has not done so merits attention, as does the extent to which the shortlists vary. If 112 books are not going to make the best book shortlist and not receive the critical attention of reviewers, some account of “best” needs to be understood. If best means “Arnoldian,” to pick the best book is to side with critical disinterestedness. Gillian Roberts in Prizing Literature: The Celebration and Circulation of National Culture describes the Giller’s “declared exclusive focus on ‘excellence’” as harkening back to Matthew Arnold’s vision of criticism. Arnold, writing in “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865) calls for a literary criticism that will be “a disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas.” Roberts observes the resonance of this in “the Giller’s passing literary judgment while avoiding any acknowledgement of socio-cultural context.” The very notion of disinterest is fraught with socio-cultural concerns. What has passed as such is now questioned in critical race and postcolonial studies where these terms of supposed neutrality/objectivity are seen as deeply rooted in whiteness. It’s a tall order to ask jurists to escape their cultural biases after choosing them for their celebrity. A friend who worked in a print shop told me that every time a committee picked the colour for the cover of a booklet, regardless of the subject, they picked blue. A committee’s predisposition to “blue” is a predisposition towards anxiety. As choices go, it is self-aware, concerned about the perception of an audience of peers. If books are chosen on socio-cultural considerations, the anxiety of peer-influence may be responsible. It may also be invisible to the jurors. Contests produce marketable winners in whom publishers can invest. (As an obvious example, on most book covers, the name is in larger font than her titles.) It is also true that a marketable writer is someone in whom a jury can invest without fear of censure. Did this happen in 1959 when Hugh MacLennan’s The Watch that Ends the Night won the Governor General’s Award—then, the uncontested top prize for fiction in Canada—despite a field that included Sheila Watson’s The Double Hook? The win was MacLennan’s fifth (two were for histories). To put this into perspective, no American writer has won more than two Pulitzer Prizes for fiction. Today, the choice of The Double Hook, an intellectually demanding book that, according to David Staines, marks the “beginning of the post-colonial voice in Canadian fiction” would be met with widespread agreement. The Watch That Ends the Night is nationalistic. It was marketed as romance. Did this happen to , the multi-prize winning novelist who has not been nominated for a national book prize since finding himself at the centre of controversy? In December 2016, Jorge Barrera published an article on Boyden’s “shape-shifting Indigenous identity,” accusing Boyden of lying about his genealogy and tribal affiliation. Barrera’s publication led to broad discussion about misrepresentation and Indigenous identity. Before the public outcry, Boyden’s first book, hreeT Day Road (2005) won the McNally Robinson Aboriginal Book of the Year Award, the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award; the Writers’ Trust, was included in , longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and nominated for the G.G. His second book, (2008), won the Giller. His third, The Orenda (2013) was longlisted for the Giller, shortlisted for the G.G. and won the 2014 Canada Reads competition. All that was before the 2016 controversy. There have been no awards or nominations since. Launched into the maelstrom of criticism about Boyden’s personal character, Wenjack (2016) was overlooked by contest juries.

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* * * Nowhere in this discussion do I criticize 2019’s three prize-winning books or their authors. Nor would I criticize the juries that granted them prizes. I am assuming that jurists are honest. The jury, in my opinion, is never wrong, nor is it wrong to celebrate Canadian writing, even the writing published in the larger publishing houses, as is usually the case. I suggest in my title that Canlit prize juries can- not shoot straight. They can. To see them shooting straight is to recognize their target. The contests are mislabeled, and the mislabeling comes at the expense of the Canadian literary community as a whole. The pursuit of a “best book,” the pursuit of excellence is meaningful. The assertion that a “best book” exists is pure fiction and in that fiction the literary-value industry reveals itself for what it is: an indus- try. Smaller publishing houses and lesser-known authors are sidelined on the grounds of values that are as provisional as a contest jury. In family parlance, they are not allowed to sit at the grown-ups table. The three main national prizes for Canadian fiction are a celebration of industry, that’s their target, and they might be labeled as such out of respect for the one hundred plus books that won’t make 2020’s shortlists.

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Contributors

Mary Buchinger is the author of four collections of poetry: Navigating the Reach(forthcoming), e i n f ü h l u n g/in feeling(2018), Aerialist (2015) and Roomful of Sparrows (2008). She is president of the New England Poetry Club and Professor of English and communication studies at MCPHS University in Boston. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Diagram, Gargoyle, Nimrod, PANK, Salamander, Slice Magazine, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere; her website is www.MaryBuchinger.com. Roxana L. Cazan’s poems have most recently been featured in Connecticut River Review, Construction Magazine, Cold Creek Review, Hektoen International, Watershed Review, The Peeking Cat Anthology, The Portland Review, The Woody Guthrie Anthology (Village Book Press 2019), and others. Roxana is the author of a poetry book entitled The Accident of Birth (Main Street Rag in 2017). She lives in Oklahoma City, where she is working on an anthology of writing by and about refugees. Yuan Changming currently edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Qing Yuan in Vancouver. Credits include ten Pushcart nominations, eight chapbooks & publications in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008- 17) & BestNewPoemsOnline, among 1659 others across 44 counntries. Chelsea Coupal’s first poetry collection,Sedley , was shortlisted for three Saskatchewan Book Awards; her work has appeared in Arc, CV2, Event, Grain and Best Canadian Poetry 2019, among other publications. She has won the City of Regina Writing Award and been shortlisted for CV2’s Young Buck Poetry prize. Tom Cull teaches creative writing at Western University and runs Antler River Rally, a grassroots environmental group that organizes monthly cleanups of Deshkan Ziibi/Thames River. Tom’s first full- length collection of poems, Bad Animals, was published by Insomniac Press in 2018. Tom served as London’s Poet Laureate from 2016-2018. Craig Finlay lives in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, by way of South Bend, Chicago, and the Midwest beyond. He spends most of his time being a librarian. His poems have appeared in numerous publications, most recently The Ilanot Review, Little Patuxent Review, Levee Magazine and Coast|noCoast. His first collection,The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press. Alamgir Hashmi is the author of numerous books of poetry and literary criticism. His poetry and prose have also appeared widely in anthologies and in such journals as The Capilano Review, New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Chicago Review, Dalhousie Review, Paris Voices, and Connecticut Review. He has won a number of national and international awards and honours, and his work has been translated into several European and Asian languages. He has taught as a university professor in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is also Founding President of The Literature Podium, An Independent Society for Literature and the Arts.

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Michael Mirolla’s publications include three Bressani Prize winners: the novel Berlin (2010); the poetry collection The House on 14th Avenue (2014); and the short story collection, Lessons in Relationship Dyads (2016). He is also the author of a novella, three other novels, two other short story collections and a second poetry collection. A novella, The Last News Vendor, is scheduled from Quattro Books in the fall of this year. The short story, “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” was selected for The Journey Prize Anthology; and “The Sand Flea” was a Pushcart Prize nominee. From Nov. 1 2019 through January 31 2020, Michael served as the writer-in-residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver where he finished the first draft of a novel started in 1993. Born in Italy, raised in Montreal, Michael lives in Hamilton, Ontario. For more, visit his website: https://www. michaelmirolla.com/index.html. Theresa Moritz is a Toronto writer and university lecturer. She is the co-author of biographies of Emma Goldman and Stephen Leacock, and she has published poems and stories in Canadian magazines, including Queen’s Quarterly and Dalhousie Review. Sabyasachi Nag is the author of Uncharted (Mansfield Press, 2020). He was born in Calcutta, India, and is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Could You Please, Please, Stop Singing (Mosaic Press, 2015), and Bloodlines (Writers Workshop, 2006). His work is published or forthcoming in Canadian Literature, Contemporary Verse 2, Grain, Perihelion, r.kv.r.y Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, The Dalhousie Review, The Maynard, The Squaw Valley Review and Vallum among others. He is a graduate of the Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University and the Humber School for Writers. He lives in Mississauga with his wife and son. Franz Jørgen Neumann’s stories have appeared in Colorado Review, The Southern Review, Passages North, Fugue, Confrontation, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. His previously published stories can be read at storiesandnovels.com. John Reibetanz has given readings of his poetry and conducted workshops all across Canada. Where We Live was published by McGill-Queen’s in 2016, and The Essential John Reibetanz by The Porcupine’s Quill in 2017. A chapbook, Conversing with Wang An-shih, came out from Junction Books in 2018, and a twelfth collection, By Hand, from Brick Books in 2019. His current project involves re-interpreting the Ovidian idea of metamorphosis not as punishment or deprivation, but as an exploration of other forms of life about which we urgently need to know more before they disappear.

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