Paul Vermeersch

from the editor: Stay Human

Dear Reader,

It seems like every piece of software that you use nowadays has some kind of “AI” built into it. Copilot, Grok, Alexa, ChatGPT, Siri, Bixby … the list is growing daily. It is well established that many such applications will variably conjure inaccurate information either because they cannot distinguish the relative quality of whatever data is available to them, or because they will simply make things up, or lie, or “hallucinate.” Of course, this is concerning for anyone who needs accurate information, whether it be for research purposes, routine directions, or even the benefit of one’s health.
Leaving aside for a moment that AI companies have trained their large language models on mountains of stolen works from all manner of artists and writers without consent or compensation. Leaving aside that the energy requirements of this technology already represent a global ecological disaster. If the collective societal damage of AI’s arrival is not enough to give one pause, then what about the potential damage to the individual?
In 2023, the Danish psychiatrist Søren Dinesen Østergaard wrote an editorial in which he describes the phenomenon of “chatbot psychosis” also known as “AI psychosis.” While this is not yet an accepted diagnosis in mental health circles, it does shed light on an emerging phenomenon, including one instance in 2021 when a chatbot encouraged a mentally unstable man in the United Kingdom to try to assassinate the queen. Of course, he was not successful.
Worse still are recent cases in the United States where a number of chatbots (allegedly, fine, allegedly) have encouraged young people to commit suicide, and unlike the queen’s would-be assassin, some of them have succeeded. Several lawsuits against AI companies pertaining to these unfortunate incidents are now proceeding through the courts, and these are a matter of public record.
For classroom applications, this should be a non-starter. The widespread academic prohibition on Wikipedia exists because, as any information scientist can tell you, anyone can edit it, and therefore the information it provides cannot meet the standards of peer review. It is odd to me, then, that so many administrators in higher education are embracing AI at a pace that seems nothing less than irresponsible.
From a consumer safety viewpoint, there is only one possible conclusion: AI technology is no more beneficial to society than tainted lunch meat or a faulty airbag. If a handful of young people died eating hot dogs, there would be a massive hot dog recall the very next day. If a handful of children were injured by toys or car seats or shampoo, those products would be yanked from the shelves immediately. As it stands, we can only view AI as a dangerous and defective product; its side effects may include cognitive decline, psychotic behaviour, and death.
And finally, we cannot leave aside that AI’s intrusion into society comes with such an avalanche of legal, moral, and ethical pitfalls including, but not limited to, the rights of artists, the viability of cultural work, cybersecurity risks, algorithmic biases, a lack of accountability, and the erosion of the value of human life. For all these reasons and a host of others, there is no responsible, moral or ethical way to use AI—not in the arts, not in education, not anywhere—and this is why The Ampersand Review does not publish work created, in whole or in part, with the use of generative AI technology.

Stay human for as a long as they’ll let you,

Paul Vermeersch

October 2025

Paul Vermeersch is the editor-in-chief of The Ampersand Review of Writing & Publishing

Chris Bailey

Melt

The moon is made new while we sleep, while we don’t,
while we put our eyes out kitchen windows to birds,
cloud formations, trees shaped by wind. You dream
a highway while I’m under a sky of not-quite California
stars that hover above PEI, me trying to find surprise
in the line, something I haven’t gone over and over before
like my boots across fibreglass boat floors these last 20 years
or the scar on my forearm from the plate they slapped in
after Anthony, drunk on rum, rolled his mustang by my parents’
place and all I could do was brace for impact, crawl slow
from the wreckage. So many things could’ve took my breath
and kept it, but instead I get to follow it wherever I go.
The blind German shepherd lies at my feet wanting voice
and touch to show her there is more than herself
in this old house numbered like emergency, disaster.
Scent of clear night makes her long to see again.
There’s a melt on. Water threads brown grass,
bootprints, past the rawhide bone the raven will claim
come sunrise. It’s the shadow that arrives before the light.

Chris bailey

is a commercial fisherman and graphic designer from eastern PEI. His writing has appeared in Brick, Grain, FreeFall, The Fiddlehead, and has been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories 2021 and 2025. His first poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done, was published by Nightwood Editions. His second, Forecast: Pretty Bleak, is out now with McClelland & Stewart.

Emma Rhodes

Navigate What

I am eye-level with the moon, once again outside of time
and going somewhere you have never been.

There are so many islands and cliffs that mothers
have left their babies to die on for centuries, but here I am

alive on an island and cliff both, a paradox
carrying your nervous system, both of us

unwanted until we weren’t. I was born bloated
with many deaths, mourning what was held

by the hands of many men. As far as I know we are alive.
All of us grandmother’s daughter’s daughters

with different last names and a made-up history. I’m alive
on an island where I just saw a mother of thousands flower.

emma rhodes

is a queer writer in Tkaronto. Her work has been published in Contemporary Verse 2, ARC Poetry, Prism International, Plenitude, and elsewhere. She is the author of the chapbook Razor Burn (Anstruther Press), and her debut full-length collection of poetry, Excavate a Doppelgänger, is forthcoming with Palimpsest Press. You can find her at emmarhodes.net.

Catherine Graham

Winter Mind

after remedios varo

I read mist. Letters emerge through water.
Rain-like birds ride the dark clouds.

I harness conversion on my canvas.
Precision walks the chance tightrope.

There was a time I was paid to inflict
pain on my creations but inside that pain

the revelation, the skill. My goal
is to make motion

move through paint, to let
secrets secrete oil tears.

Matter, all matters, have two
identifiable tendencies: to harden

and to soften. Winter lifts from its field.

catherine graham’s

poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and have appeared in Best Canadian Poetry and on CBC Radio. Her eighth book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her sixth poetry collection, The Celery Forest, was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected (Wolsak & Wynn /Buckrider Books, 2023) is her ninth book. Two collections are forthcoming. www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet.

Nicholas Bradley

Flower

As a rule, we don’t lock our doors
so it was only natural

that I was burst in upon
while hiding in the steam

one enervated weekend
when he wanted to deliver

a blossom he’d culled
“all by myself”

from the sinewed dogwood
out front. The potent bits

had been stripped
away with forethought

to safeguard me from sneezing
and what he placed

in my dripping hand
was a benefaction

of four limp petals
on the verge

of disaggregation. When I asked
what it was, he paused

at the impudence. “A pink
daffodil!”—some invention

that made sense enough
and gave us both

a satisfying purchase
on the multitudinous earth

until a weakness
some hours past bed

left me scrolling through pictures
of cultivars in every shade.

Nicholas Bradley

lives in Victoria, British Columbia—near Sitchanalth, in lək̓ʷəŋən territory. He teaches in the Department of English at the University of Victoria and is the author of two books of poetry: Rain Shadow (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and Before Combustion (Gaspereau Press, 2023).

Peter Richardson

Mass Pike

We stopped at a tollbooth in Massachusetts.
I handed my wife four one-dollar bills.
She recounted them before handing them up
to the burly grey-haired attendant who recounted them, deadpanning her way:

What? You don’t trust him? Throw him out!
Then his face softened, he grinned
and sent us west with a two-fingered tap
to his brow—a flourish that I felt
tempered our road map squabble in Albany.

Is there a second act for fifty-year-old
wiseacres who can spot a sulk
edging toward them in a line of cars
and help two battling spouses
take timid steps back to cordiality?

I often wonder what happened to him
after they replaced collectors
with transponders that snap a photo
of your car’s licence plate.
Did he drive a truck for Wells Fargo?

Maybe he joined a roster of comics
wisecracking their way
to gigs in Boston clubs—his slant
on what goes by in traffic
a mainstay at The Gut Laugh Grill.

Either way, I hope he landed on his feet
and not with a Gothic-scripted
Certificate of Merit from head office
but with a multi-benefit package
for the bullseye exhortations on his lips.

Peter Richardson

is the author of four collections of poetry. His most recent book is Bit Parts for Fools (Goose Lane Editions, 2013). Sympathy for the Couriers (Véhicule Press, 2007) won the QWF’s 2008 A. M. Klein Award. His poems have been in Poetry, The Sonora Review, The Fiddlehead, and The Malahat Review, among others. A former airport worker at both Mirabel and Trudeau airports, he lives in Montreal (Tiohtia:ke).

 Aaron Tucker

The Horseman

The large ships are anchored out in the deeper water of the inlet. I see them, and I see the smaller boats spreading out from them, coming to shore. The big ships look like buildings turned on their sides, a city comes to me, and I wonder which of the four he’s on.
I have to believe the man on the ship, my boss, when he says he’s 132 years old. I believe him because my family goes back that far in this place, and they all remembered him that many years ago and passed down the stories of him and his family. He says he plans to live another century, that he’s going to live forever. People say he’s unnatural, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe him.
It’s raining. It always rains in Ocean Falls, or near always. The water comes down gently as a mist, not blocking my view, but giving everything a shine and a slight mirage warble. The wet coastal air in my lungs, as I wait on the dock. I’ve been waiting four hours since I got the radio that they had set off from Bella Coola. The trip was only supposed to take three hours.
I don’t wonder much about that extra hour, as the small boats get closer, and I start to see the men and the boxes, crates and objects, they’re set to haul into the town behind me. It’s a ghost town, and nobody but me has been here for the last five years, just waiting for this afternoon. I don’t wave. They see me. On the deck of the farthest ship, I see a figure. If that’s him, he sees me.
I’m small on the dock when he looks, looking back at him, and the dock stretches behind me to the main road, paved now. The harbour is ringed with a mix of the old wooden structures, preserved as if a museum, then more of the modern buildings, mostly windows and built initially for vacationers to stare out of at the ocean; the glass structures are now greenhouses, meant to grow what he needs. The reflection of all that glass and the solar panels scattered throughout may be so bright as to hide the big house on the hill where he’s to live. The town doesn’t reach far behind me, but the forest does, the cedar mixed with the big rainforest trees tower over everything up the hills then mountains and over into the valleys beyond. Thick brush and wilderness filled with stinging nettle and protruding tree roots I’ve left mostly untouched since I got here; let the bears and deer be. The only thing I’ve managed to carve out is a small corral and grazing field, not far from his big home.
If he looks long enough, he might see that forest growing back into the town, there’s nothing I can do about that.
Oceans Falls, when he was born and lived here before the Second World War, would have been very different, wooden boardwalks and no cars, the brothel on the edge of it all, his family home on the opposite side of town. Lots of Japanese and Indian men come in, up the few hundred kilometres from Vancouver. Chinese, too; some brought their families, and worked the mill, despite the isolation of the place. Some eventually spread out to the canneries and the mines, inland down Dean Channel to what would become Stillwater or around Lonesome Lake, closer to Bella Coola. They learned to catch and prepare eulachon, we all did, being that there was so many, everyone did but his family.
They were always apart. His father ran the mill, headed up the Company, which owned everything in town. They might bring one of the hand-painted pots into their home, the vibrant shades drawn from grinding coloured rock and mixing the powder with fish oil. But whoever made those pots, who worked the mill, who built their own smaller homes around them, they never set foot in their place.
My great-great-grandfather worked for his father. My great-grandfather worked for his father. My grandfather left here, my father never set foot here; too haunted, he said. But I’ve returned.
The first boat gets close enough to throw me a rope and I can pull them to the dock, tie it off, start helping. There are three men, and the tallest comes off first, motions for me to step aside. One of the other men follows him and the third stays on the boat, starts passing cargo, which the other man stacks on the carts I have set up on the dock for just that.
“He wanted us to go slower, so we went slower. An hour late isn’t bad then. I’m Manuel, the captain.”
We shake hands. “Neil.”
“We’re going to keep unloading, there’s a lot, as you might guess, and it’s going to take into the night. There’s food, of course, lots, but all this other shit of his. His furniture, his books, I think he packed his whole life. Four boats’ worth.”
“I don’t even try to understand a man like that.”
“No.”
“No.”
“He told me to tell you, don’t bother helping, we’ll take it on. Just point us where.”
I turn with a sweep of my arm and point to the furthest house set back, the one with the large A-frame front, a peak above the rest of the town. “That giant one there. It’s empty.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Half a decade.”
“And it’s been just you?”
“Just me.”
“A bit like working a lighthouse, all alone.”
“I suppose. I’ve been busy. He’s wanted things set up a certain way.”
“He said you don’t need to bother; the most important thing for you is the horses.”
“ Yes.”
Another boat comes ashore, then another, and they fill the dock, the men and the many, many things, so many more than I care to name or count. Abundance: it’s the only word I can think of and I repeat in my head. The fleet of boats come and come, and I watch them scurry over and into everything.
I have been alone, it’s true, and without much contact with anyone, deliberately so. It was just easier, but also, at a certain point last year, I was told he was cutting off the internet, and that he would be monitoring radio and cell use and wanted none. I was to report any air traffic and especially drones, neither of which have passed over in the last two months. He wanted his town dark and me to be cut off with it. So I knew he was coming but am unsure as to the reasons why now.
But I have made it as close to what he wanted it as possible. At first there were lots of people here with me, in that first year or so, mostly engineers and electricians, carpenters and plumbers, an architect and planner, we all descended on the town to reshape it. The first thing done was setting up seawalls, pumping back the Pacific that had crept up, and returning the town to pre-global melting levels. After that, the roads were so bad at that point, the town so eaten and overgrown, they needed me to be in charge of the horses, packhorses mostly, we used to move things around. Imagine us, all our horses at the original century-old hitching posts outside the buildings, hammerings, sawings, drillings, the chatter of us, installing all the bleeding-edge technology wealth could bring. There’s a strange bed in the big house, I don’t even know what it does, all the wires and the insistence that it’s plugged in and active when he arrives. It’s things like that that have been anticipating him.
Once all those people were done, I was left here as caretaker. He regularly sent men to check up on the equipment, on the town, probably me, too; make sure I hadn’t burnt it all down, but I spent a lot of time just me and horses and the wind and the rain blowing through. I got used to the waves and the clouds, the weather, all rhythms that surrounded me. The tides brought objects every now and then, most often trash from somewhere down the lower mainland. The clearest messages I received were the colour of the clouds turning in mid-afternoon from grey to a sharp, glowing white, and the breeze that would stop, and the water coming and leaving against the shoreline being the loudest sounds.
I kept three horses to help: two good sturdy animals, Larry and James, workhorses to pull trees for lumber or anything else heavy. And Isabel, a saddle horse, because she was too pretty to send away, a bright white mare that makes me feel like I’m riding a spirit when I head out into the woods with her.
The boats are still coming, and the clouds have slid over, nothing grey or threatening, but enough cover that when the sun rips through a seam and fills the boats and the men with light, they can’t help but exhale.
The last time I was with the world, five years ago, it was the same things that had occupied my generation and people like me. In a place like this, it’s easy to remember how the water had taken over almost everything, the poorest countries worst, but everywhere that had a shore was turned upon by the water first, then the people fleeing the waters. I think the boss made his money partly building those cities in the middle of all that risen ocean, but he made his money many ways, over all his years. But one main way was putting those blocks of buildings on stilts like massive oil rigs, each an island of sort.
He’s rich, by some accounts the richest man in the world. He’s not the first to build a fortress, a bunker, for when the world went to shit. This paradise, he must have bought all of this land long ago and just hoarded it, protected it, for when he was ready to build. And now he was here, to ride out whatever apocalypse, personal or societal, that had come for him.
There’s no end in sight to the procession of boats, so I go back through the small town, now packed full of people. After so much time alone, it’s startling, all the noise and motion, and I’m worried about the horses.
But when I spend the ten minutes to walk over, and lean on the fence, I see they’re content, cropping in a corner, not bothering to raise their heads to me. I watch them be peaceful and unaware, Isabel unreal in her bright and serene contrast against the world.
I watch the horses and think that I know two parts of the man who came here to live. I know the public stories as much as anyone else. A billionaire prone to messy marriages by his forties, on all the front pages of the grocery store checkout papers. Made money off the earliest internet selling it to the American military in the 1980s. Bankrolled the Human Genome Project. Provided one of the limbs of commercial quantum computing. Somehow mixed the two into some elixir where he won’t die. Alleged mystery surgeries, infusions, and supposed body doubles. His hundredth birthday party, a scandal, he gave a hundred million dollars to the section of the population he thought had the brightest futures, a sort of lottery that turned ugly when it turned out that almost all the money went to white people.
A myth, a set of myths, really, and hearsay and publicity spin and folk tales and boogeyman warnings. That’s the one side.
The other side, how I’ve been told by my generations, is the way he used to walk through this town as a boy so cautiously, like everything was going to jump out at him. My great-grandfather said, it was told to me, that as a boy in class he was wound so tight that he’d yelp when called on. It wasn’t like he was unliked or wasn’t competent. He could fish, everyone said so. But he had a malicious streak, even as a teenager. He would go out when the salmon were spawning, and farm roe, and sell the eggs to the Japanese men in town as a delicacy. A good business, not that he needed the money. When my great-grandfather began to do the same, his buckets would disappear overnight, all the roe gone. Then the Japanese men wouldn’t buy from him, just refused. No reason, just no.
Or when his father ran him out of town about when the boss turned eighteen and no one knows why. This was around Pearl Harbor, and when they were putting all the Japanese families in camps across B.C. and the rumour was, he was trying to buy their displaced land and goods before his own father could.
The roe is not in the papers. Getting chased out of Ocean Falls is not in the papers.
The night is coming down, and I gather my horses up and guide them into the stables, pitching hay in and setting up their water. I’m leaving when Manuel finds me.
“His horses are coming off now, or almost now.”
I follow him back down the slight slope together, toward where the guts of the ships have been pouring out of for the last hours. They’re floating four horse trailers over, centred in the middle of flat barges, and the containers waver on the water as they get near. I smell the animals, same musk and scent as any other horse, it carries on the ocean air.
I know they are among the finest thoroughbreds in the world, horses so pure as to be priceless. I know this in concept, but it’s nothing until I see them myself. They are royal. Majestic, no other word. Each is muscle, obsidian, and glimmering in the late evening. I take the first one’s reins and lead it down a gangplank onto the dock, and its smooth gait is unbothered. I show it my hand, then run it along its neck and the side of its head, scratching by the halter. What would usually be coarse is soft, gorgeous to the touch.
“I will not suffer inferior genetics.”
The voice is at my shoulder, and turning to it, he’s in a thick denim coat and jeans, leather cowboy boots, his grey hair blowing with the light breeze off the water. He looks in his late sixties, his teeth strong and straight, his blue eyes clear. I understand the tabloid handsome, white movie star, and can understand why it’d be hard to turn away from this man, set on living forever. The way the man holds himself though, in this untamed place, there’s more than a touch of costume and silk.
“Pardon?”
“My horses. I’ve traced their lineages back into the sixteenth century. I’ve cut out anything possibly weak or ugly about them, bred them perfectly. It’s impossible to make a better horse.”
“I’ll be happy to take care of them.”
The horses don’t stamp or fuss. They’re statues, even in what has to be the most foreign conditions to them.
“I know who you come from.”
“Pardon?”
“I remember him, your grandfather.”
“Likely my great-grandfather. He was about your age when you were in school together.”
“He was mostly kind to me.”
The horse I’m holding turns as if in response to this, and looks out over the water, snuffing loudly. Then it nuzzles against my hand.
“I’ll get these horses put away.”
“Don’t mix them in with the ones already here.”
He walks on past me, out onto the road and up toward his big, jutting building, sharp as a canine tooth. After a minute, he’s gone into the evening.
His other three horses are docile enough that they follow me leading the one all on their own, in a line toward the stables. I notice that there are new bags of feed piled up, a brand I don’t recognize, likely ingredients I’ve never heard of.
I hear my three horses shuffle as we get close, interested, with no panic. I lead the four past them, and there is some form of animal communication, maybe I share in it for a second, that flashes between them all.
I don’t mix them in. There are separate spots for his horses set off and each one goes in willingly, in almost exactly the same way. I pet each one, whisper a kind word to each, then the same for my own, and leave.
I’m not used to lights on the ocean, but they’re there, steady and not so far off. There are noises and voices that carry over the water, the illusion of people being right beside me, behind me. Past people, future people, people here with me now.
The man aims to be immortal. But I’ll age alongside him, and so will his beautiful horses, and we’ll grey and shrink and turn to skeletal dust and flesh that disintegrates into the ground, all of everyone else. He aims to stand on top of all of us that way.

Aaron tucker

is the author of seven books, including the novels Soldiers, Hunters, Not Cowboys and Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos (both with Coach House Books). His work on facial recognition technologies and artificial intelligence will be published in a forthcoming book with McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2026; his prior scholarship on facial recognition won the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He is currently an assistant professor in the English department of Memorial University, where he teaches Media Studies and is the program director of the Creative Writing Diploma.              
            

Jean Sheppard

Empty Tubs and Oilskins

She had loved the sea. Silky and slippery, she could dive, circle, swish, sparkle, but there was something magical about land, too, especially that night after the storm, the beckoning breeze, the rocks that laughed when they rubbed against them to loosen their pelts. They were eager to sport with the moon, to risk the air.
And when they had dropped their skins they crawled, lurched, stumbled on new legs until they could dance to the music of the waves. They did not sense danger: they were drunk on dreams. She did not see the fisherman steal behind the rock and steal her skin.

—but that is not how it happened. I am writing to set the story straight. The folk tale is wrong.
I am the selkie, the seal woman. Life in the sea had been too hard to bear since the lightning tip of a harpoon plunged into her neck. I saw red bubbles churn and burst and could not help. She escaped the net, and the weapon came free, but the wound would not heal.
I lost my mother.
I learned that life could change in the whistle-splash of a sharpened stick.
I learned that water was the enemy: bliss could make one forget the spear.
The fisherman is not a villain. I handed my skin to him—I traded it. He averted his eyes, but he must have felt me shiver as I saw my self disappear into a weather-beaten leather bag. The yellow oilskin he gave me smelled of dead fish and thunder, but the colour recalled the sun. My new waterproof skin was stiff, bulky, but it made me safe. It could not be too high a price to pay.

My husband gets behind the wheel. “Have we checked everything?” I ask.
He nods, patiently. Each time we leave our house for a weekend (or, often, an hour), I check and recheck, if only in my mind, because disaster lurks in many places. We could be done in by a stove with a grudge.
“Fastened your seat belt, my darling?” I ask my daughter.
“Yes, Mom,” she answers patiently. “I already told you.” At nine, she is used to the routine. I glimpse the shiny rims of her glasses from the corner of my eye, hear the flick of a shiny black ponytail, but she is not really in the car with us. She has already arrived.
Emma Grace is a water baby. How many times have I watched her burst from water into air, seen her grin under thick, fogging goggles, rubber snapped snug around a silky head? She had dreamed for months of visiting the themed resort that boasts one of the country’s largest in door water park. So now we head out for the weekend. We will be able to splash the day away, the website says. Oh, God, I think again. I know my Umberto Eco. I know a simulacrum when I see it. I know plastic. I know it doesn’t breathe. I won’t either.
The hotel, just off the main street, simulates a rustic lodge deep in northern woods, and it’s huge. People pile out the front doors as others edge their way in. There are suitcases on dollies, kids sprawled on duffle bags. Men hike up drooping shorts and women tug at halter tops as bags are loaded or unloaded, as cars and vans pull up, pull away. The energy is the pulsation of shrewd marketing, but, still, it sounds like pleasure. Emma Grace’s eyes are huge. I feel queasy.
We tug our bags into the cavernous lobby. People in tightly cordoned lanes check out or check in. There are bright canoes suspended on the walls and plastic wolves high on ledges, their gazes fixed. There is a real- life mechanical bear watching a fake wood fire in a fake wood setting. Suddenly the bear speaks. A startled child stares up at it and drools.
Emma Grace dances down the hallway to our room. I take a deep breath: I do want to share her enthusiasm, but it’s hard. Kevin unlocks the door. Our “camp” is long and narrow to accommodate the bunk beds enclosed in a cabin made of plastic wood. Emma Grace squeals and climbs onto the top bunk. Kevin and I laugh. She cannot believe she has her own TV, just like the pioneers.
The two of them throw on their bathing suits and head for the water park. I stay in our room: there are too many people here too close for comfort. The buffer is thin. I will have to work up my courage. I fill a plastic tumbler with wine and open a book.
Trailing chlorine clouds, my husband and daughter bring their face-splitting smiles back a couple of hours later. They go back to the water park after dinner. I drink more wine. “Will you come and watch tomorrow, Mom?” Emma Grace asks from her bunk that night. I tell her I will. I tell myself I must. My sweet husband nods, reassures me.

I have little choice but to follow my fisherman to his house on the cliff above the sea. The chill air numbs me, makes my footsteps slow, heavy.
In time he takes me as his wife. I cook the food, do the dishes, sweep the floor, tend the fire.
I give birth, and I love my children dearly though they are only human.
I know he still has my skin. He would not have thrown it away: he knows what it means. He has hidden it because I asked him to. I cannot trust myself.
When I look out to the sea from the edge of the cliff, my salt tears taste like loss.

I didn’t bring a bathing suit to the lodge, though I have one in a drawer at home, hidden under some sweaters. It is pretty, white with flowers in brilliant shades of blue and green, but I haven’t worn it in almost twenty years, and the elastic is no longer supple because it has dried out. The suit is decorative—once upon a time it made me decorative—but I no longer expose that much skin. The next morning, I go to the water park in jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and shoes.
When I follow them through the doors, I am hit by a wave of humid air, and I start to sweat. A sign tells me to take off my shoes. I never go barefoot, but I want to be a good mother and so, with great regret, I place my sandals at the base of a wall. Why is it such a big deal? What am I concerned about? It isn’t just the innocent splat of little-kid vomit my husband accidentally slides through. Well, yes, it is. Skin needs to be covered. Skin cannot be trusted. It does not protect.
The water park echoes with screams, whoops, and giggles. There are gigantic plastic tubes, water slides, suspended from the ceiling—blue, red, green. Water spouts from the floor, whooshes from barrels above my head. There is a pond, a couple of lakes. I stare at my feet. My hus band, always alert to my discomfort, suggests I get some flip-flops from the store tucked into a corner at the entrance. I buy the cheapest pair I find, put them on and breathe. I have a buffer. Plastic has its pluses.
I have brought a book and take a chair near the pool where the rafts land when people come flying out of three huge water slides. The pool empties into a river that winds through the park and then wends its way back to the pool. I sit and watch people of all ages float by in bright rafts. A yellow one recalls the sun. A toddler bounces in a lap. Girls giggle and dream. A grey-haired woman rubs a shoulder and smiles to herself. Some dangle from a raft and tumble, sputter, laugh. They all look for ward. Look back. Call out. Their skin is smooth and firm and puckered and droopy, but each and every one of them glistens. I start to cry.
I am dry inside. I am drier than plastic wood.

Only rarely do I go down to the sea. The pain is too great, and the water, too tempting. I fear I have lost the ability to swim and am sure I would drown.
My children love the sea, always urge me to join in as they giggle with the waves that tickle the shore. I surrender my shoes to the sand, but I will not get my feet wet. I will simply watch them frolic, hear their squeals of delight, and for a few moments be lulled into forgetfulness, but then the bright red sun makes me remember, and I beckon to them to return with me to our house on the cliff.
I make sure I do not weep when I comb their salt-stiff hair.

Water had once been breath. Twice a day in small-town summers, we’d line up outside the pool and chatter and chant and stamp our feet: “We want in. We want in.” I remember string straps on a sunburned neck and white cotton underpants rolled up in a bright beach towel. Wire baskets and floating Band-Aids. Water gilt and glitter.
And how many other pools at how many motels? How many lakes? I have a sudden memory of my mother, her head cocked as she watched out for me from the shore of a lake still churning after a storm. That day—I must have been nine or so—my air mattress and I surfed high waves under an oyster sky for hours, and I swallowed so much water that I threw up all night in the trailer. I shivered on a narrow bunk, thankful for my mother’s cool hand on my hot forehead, her voice soft in the dark. I was safe.
And then I wasn’t.
There were five of us in the car late that summer night on that country road, my mother, father, and I in the back seat behind my brother and his fiancée. I was fourteen. An old man coming the other way had a heart attack. Moments after he crashed into us, I pushed my way out of the car and started to scream. My brother and his fiancée were barely conscious, a punctured lung, concussions. The deep cut in my father’s head oozed blood into his white hair as he tried to tend to my mother. She was in the back on the floor of the car, her head cocked at an odd angle. Her skin was white. Her eyes were closed. It was a hot night, but I went cold. Somehow I knew it was my fault. If I had been a better daughter, kinder, if I had been more careful, had not so often lost myself in play, the accident would not have happened: the unforgiving gods would not have been roused.
The old man died. We all survived, but we all were changed. And I don’t remember swimming after that. I had lost the mother I knew.

The shouts and laughter receded as I sat still very still on my white plastic chair. By the time Kevin and Emma Grace checked in with me, I had wiped away my tears, put the memory aside. The next day we went home.

Not long after we returned from our holiday, I was standing in our tiny bathroom after a shower, trying to prettify toes that have never made me happy, and I lost my balance. I fell backward, my legs hooked over the edge of the tub, the back of my head cracked on the tiled wall, and I heard my brain slosh. Seconds later, I shot up. I was not seriously injured, but I was seriously startled. Once again, my loving husband comforted me.
I have forgotten how the headache felt, but I see Freud smirk: my swimmer self fell into an empty tub. And now even I must laugh. Life is meant to be wet. We are meant to immerse ourselves, to play, dive deep, belly-graze ocean floors. Do I really want to leave myself high and dry?

So many years pass, the tide comes in and goes out—does it mock me?—and then I discover the rusted trunk that hides my skin. My fisherman has left it out for me to find, the key on the downy bed we share.
I open the trunk and look down at what I had relinquished.
I hesitate—will it fit?—but when I put it on, it breathes.
Now each day my children come to the sea’s edge, scamper, wade. I know they celebrate my silky-wet whiskered self.
My fisherman says nothing, but he smiles sweetly, almost shyly, as he sits on his stool and tends his net as if it were a second skin.

Jean sheppard

is a writer, teacher, and Jungian coach living in Toronto, Canada. Her fiction and CNF have appeared in Memoir Magazine, Immanence Journal, The Bath Flash Fiction Anthology, and other publications.
            

Ayomide Bayowa

Leaking Water

Something bit me. I slapped myself, stirred, and leaped away from my bug-infested mattress, huddled against the door, wide-eyed. The entrances to the beach house rooms had no rotating planks, and the night was beginning to feel like an answered prayer; all the doors were open. Back home, our neighbours’ children scratched the wall of our townhouse apartment at zero hours, like squirrels digging through a basement wall, disturbing enough to wake me. Jake’s room light was on, and his door was unlocked, so it seemed he couldn’t sleep, either.
Meanwhile, I heard an alien-like pocket spaceship crackling from my mom’s room. It was so loud that if there were an actual invasion, everyone else would get adrenaline and escape, except her. Sleep had taken her before any potential death. My ears perked up, and my ultrasonic eyes saw through the wall from a similar angle, Jake and my mother’s new man stepping on each other’s toes. Jake stormed out with my mom’s car key air-tagged to the centre table, throwing things in anger, including his wallet. Sad to say, he got pulled over and life-mattered by the cops for failing to play it cool during their jittery questioning about the driver’s licence in the wallet he had left behind. At the contact zone, the man caught my eyes in a brisk B-roll, startled by my presence. The fridge he left open beeped for closure, for survival, like the pager of the state’s public hospital doctor reading Jake’s bullet wound. When asked, the man claimed he was fast asleep that night, as nobody bothered to ask me what had happened.
The tips of my toes creaked the floorboards of the beach house at this moment. My mom was sensorily unresponsive. The not-well-fastened valve in the washroom hissed water in sporadic droplets. From her curtained doorframe, her wheezes synchronized with the night sounds of the shore, struggling against the sea sand sluggishly. Her new man, however, had emptied the embrace of her left arm. That polar bald creature! Awake with me was the familiar rush to sniff around down the stairs, gowned as light as possible. I hoped to glimpse my mom’s boyfriend sipping some Baileys from his beloved crystal glass at the small table. Even though I couldn’t stand him, my vision was impaired in the dim light without my glasses. I figured he must have been at the waterside so late because I, too, sometimes found myself drawn to the water’s edge by the enchanting breeze I heard from my window only in the afternoon. I learned that some shady individuals dealt drugs there, and it doesn’t get any less pharmaceutical at night.
Darkness and sleep formed a drowsy solution in my eyes; then, I took to the hideous, uncomfortable chair nearby. When the man arrived this time, it was barely morning, and it was raining outside. In my dream, I saw a skunk farting on our balcony and then wandering freely. As I tried to chase it, a car sped by with its full headlights on. The door to our washroom clicked loudly, and I woke up. To avoid scaring him again, I sat by the stairs, well mixed with darkness and sleep. He brushed his teeth so hard that it made my gums cringe and bleed. He dropped the clothes he took off by the laundry basket and sprayed deodorant before returning to the bed he shared with my mom.
“Talisha, Talisha,” I heard him say, probably shuddering her from the skin to the bone, “A nightmare.”
As I drew closer, she grunted, stretching her arms and legs, bundled up in sore postures all night.
“Talisha,” he droned again, then she squinted her eyes, sitting up. “Andre, what happened,” she replied. He dreamt.
He orchestrated this break to a place with a unique atmosphere— free from annoying grief allergens, with fewer concerns about time and less need to be aware of loud, persistent alarms. He suggested it was the farthest we could get away from Jake’s keepsakes—by bringing his ashes to empty in the water. He would have loved this place, daring his athletic arms to wrestle the waves in warm-ups before representing the school swim team at nationals upon our return. Whether win or lose, he’s somehow far up the banks, leagues ahead of his friends, in a way none of them could ever match.
The part of the board I was on squeaked, and Andre asked who was there. I stood out of the shadow, partially visible. He looked like a night driver with poor headlights, staring carefully through the dark, minding his speed— his eyelids blinking slowly, like motor blinkers.
“Kiara, baby,” Mom said. “You can’t sleep, too?” Her open arms asked for my head on her chest, discarding her feet into her slippers.
“What is it?” she asked me, her eyes—with boogers and fading white outlines like mascaras formed from dry saltwater; (un-)consciously rubbed off during the stretch.
“Are you just waking up?” her man asked me, and I said I had been awake and downstairs for the past couple of hours.
“Where did you go to?” I asked, and his eyes met with my mom’s. He looked high, unlike an eagle—a dove: their eyes up close, dear bald smokers. I bet he almost swore on his sagging belly that he went jogging in sandals.
“Oh no, Andre, don’t tell me you was out tonight for some,” my mom said, now fully awake with two of her fingers stuck in a demonstration of a smoke, a self-wrapped one.
“Hell no.”
“You say?” she asked, moving closer to him.
“No.”
“You sure?” she stopped sniffing.
“Whatchu mean young lady, uh?” he looked at me as if I planted a drug in his possession and called the cops on him. Then he asked if I had dreamed of the washroom again because the last time I had, I had wet my bed and crawled to their room, just like that—until they woke and saw me, isolated in the dark.
The baton of questions dropped right there from my hand onto my thighs, and I kept quiet, holding back further talk like an intentional saliva in my mouth—that little stunt. Like the sea holding back water from the shore, he held back a truth that could send some wave down her cheeks, a salty one. The same tongue he used to lick glues on ’em grabbas. Though unsuspecting of her, he might have relapsed. Her sweet look at his dry landing sported wave hair and the back of his head, with layered flesh; she quickly trusted that maybe I had sleepwalked and didn’t know what I was saying. And it didn’t matter because she found a safe way to ingest seawater and retain a healthy kidney, remaining well hydrated and alive. If I were her, I would have urinated in gallons in volumes more than the salty lies fed and probably died seeking a perfect donor for my failing kidney.
After I locked the door behind me, I was very much awake. The bathroom tap was sealed shut, and my skin was surprisingly cellulitis-free. I had made a damp map of myself on the mattress with no way out from this man. I’ve caught him once darting around my basement, like a squirrel, every other night, as he remotely overturns hell by the dining room, searching for a PDF that is not even missing from the broken system he supposedly inherited from his father, accusing Jake of deleting it; wanting to destroy his life.

Ayomide bayowa

is a Nigerian-Canadian absurdist poet and playwright. Before earning his B.A. honours in dramaturgy and creative writing at the University of Toronto, he was a Theatre Arts fellow at the University of Ibadan. In 2021, he was short-listed for the Adroit Prize for Poetry, won the June/July 2021 edition of the Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize, and was a semi-finalist for the Cave Canem Poetry Prize with the same manuscript, Gills. Published as his debut poetry collection by Wolsak & Wynn in 2023, he was a finalist for the National Poetry Competition and Frontier Poetry Global Poetry Prize.
            

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

A Conversation with Anuja Varghese

ANUJA VARGHESE

(she/her) is an award-winning writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. Her work has appeared in several literary magazines and anthologies, and she is the fiction editor at the Ex-Puritan. In 2023, her short story collection, titled Chrysalis, won the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and in 2024, was long-listed for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction. Her debut novel, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, the first in a new fantasy trilogy inspired by medieval India, is forthcoming in Spring 2026. Find Anuja online at anujavarghese.com.

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Let’s start from the very beginning with a question I’m sure you get asked often. How did you get started as a writer?

ANUJA VARGHESE: I have been scribbling something pretty much from the time I could hold a writing utensil. If you ask my parents, they’d say I was always in a corner writing, even before I knew how to write. I had pages of my pretend books and notes and letters and things like that. It was always in me to do this. I didn’t start writing more seriously or thinking about writing as a career path until recently. I took English literature at McGill, but that wasn’t focused on creative writing. It was more a survey of all British literature and the CanLit canon–you know, Margaret Atwood and Margaret Laurence, authors like this. I wasn’t really focused on creative writing. I started doing this more seriously pre-pandemic, so not even that long ago.
I still have a full-time job in the non-profit sector, and I was working a mid-management role at a national health charity. I lost that job very suddenly. I came in on a Tuesday, and they called me in, and they said unfortunately, due to some restructuring, your position has been eliminated effective immediately. Go home. What do you do in that moment? You go have a cry in your car; you clean out your desk. But it was that moment of, “Well, now what?” And I think that was the moment when I seriously made the decision to write and to give it a shot. I didn’t know in that moment if anything would come of it. I didn’t know if I would write anything good or if it would get published or anything like that. But I just made a conscious decision to write things and send them out into the world and see what happened. I also started to take more writing workshops, going to more writing events, and meeting more people in the community. I enrolled in the Creative Writing certificate program through the U of T School of Continuing Studies. I also started sending out work to contests and literary magazines. I had a little writing group where we were exchanging things for feedback. There were a lot of rejections. But then, slowly, I started to get some yeses, some early publications, and recognition from contests and things like that.
Eventually I had this little body of stories. I went to a conference with the Writers’ Union of Canada called like BIPOC Writers Connect in its inaugural year in 2019. It was all in-person in Toronto. Emerging writers got paired with a mentor who was an established writer, and my mentor was Farzana Doctor. Farzana looked at two or three of my stories and asked, “Do you think there’s a collection here?” And I said, “Oh … maybe there’s a collection here!” It was the first time I had thought about it. That’s when I started more intentionally putting the collection together.

TVL: That’s really inspiring. You took something really difficult—losing a job is so hard—and you turned it into a brand-new start.

AV: I always say it’s the best shitty thing that happened to me!

TVL: You have been published widely across various literary journals, magazines, and anthologies and your first book was a collection of short stories. What draws you to short fiction?

AV: It’s two things. First, it was a practical decision. The idea of tackling a novel just didn’t feel possible for me at that time. I have kids and a job, and I felt like I couldn’t wrap my head around an entire novel. But I could write and finish and send out a short story. I can write three thousand to five thousand words. In one way it was a practical choice, but also, I do just love short fiction. I love like the economy of language that you get in a good short story. With a novel, it’s like wandering around an expansive house and exploring different rooms. In a short story, you’re just peeking in the window. You get this small glance into a moment of someone’s life. I love what you can accomplish in a great short story.

TVL: In 2023, your debut short story collection, Chrysalis, was published with House of Anansi. Can you share what inspired this collection?

AV: I had a couple of stories that had already been published here and there. I’ll just be honest about this, when I first started writing with the intention of putting together a collection, I was trying to write a CanLit short story collection. I was trying to write these “capital L” literary stories. I had this idea of what was likely to get published, what people wanted to read, and what was likely to get a publisher’s attention. And those stories were not good. They weren’t me. You could feel something not entirely authentic about that work. On the side of the very “serious” literary work, I was also writing the weird stuff: the fantasy, the horror, the witches and demons and magic. Because that’s what’s fun for me to write. And the more I did that and sent that work out, the more I found that’s what people were gravitating toward. At some point I was like, “Oh, this is me. This is what it is.” I had to give myself permission to put those two things together; to say it’s going to have a little bit of literary stuff and it’s going to have a little bit of genre stuff, and it will become something that’s in between all those things. I was very lucky that House of Anansi recognized the collection as genre-blending and was excited about it!

TVL: It also shows that there’s very much an appetite for exactly what you’re writing, and you don’t have to mould your voice or your work to fit any sort of literary box.

AV: I think that’s a real danger now. I hear so many writers talking about writing toward trends. And I’m like, listen, your book’s not going to come out for two years anyway. You don’t know what will be popular then. Write what you’re excited about. Write what means something to you and people will find it.

TVL: After publication, Chrysalis went on to win the Writers’ Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. In 2024, it was long-listed for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction and short-listed for the Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Fiction. This is spectacular, and a true testament to the collection as a powerful debut. How has Chrysalis and its reception shaped your career since then?

AV: It’s wild. I’m not going to say I had low expectations, but I did have realistic expectations for a debut short story collection from a fairly unknown writer. I really hoped that maybe it would get one or two nice reviews and hopefully some people would read it. I think very few writers have any grand expectations, so it was all an incredible surprise. It’s this weird in-between thing of, on one hand, being extremely grateful for the recognition. Some of those prizes came with money–you know, writers aren’t supposed to say they like the money, but the money is nice! So being very grateful for those things, acknowledging that awards and prizes open a lot of doors as a writer, while on the other hand, also acknowledging that writing prizes and art prizes, and prize culture in general is weird and arbitrary. There is no such thing as “the best book.” I don’t think any author or artist necessarily wants to be in competition with anyone else. It’s about acknowledging the truth in both of those things. I’ve sat on a couple of juries myself and you really come to realize how much of what you see on the short-lists and who wins things has very little to do with what is the very best in literature, and a lot more to do with what three or five or ten people can agree on before lunch.
I will say just having that little prize sticker on the cover of your book does make people pick it up. There are so many people who have told me, and I think they mean this in a complimentary way, that they would never have read my book otherwise, but they read all the books on the Governor General’s list, so they picked it up. There were a lot of people who would never have picked up a short story collection, or who say they wouldn’t normally read speculative stuff, that read the book. I think the prize recognition really has opened doors for diverse stories and short stories for all those reasons. I’m very grateful to have those stickers on the cover!

TVL: In May 2026, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, the first book in your romantasy trilogy inspired by Medieval India is slated for release with Penguin Random House Canada. Congratulations! Can you share a little bit about this first book in the Games of the Goddess trilogy?

AV: Imagine a D&D campaign kind of quest with multi-character points of view smashed together with a big Bollywood romance. We have four main characters and a dual magic system. Magic comes up from the ground and down from the sky and the four main characters are harnessed and set loose by a goddess to take down a tyrant king. And that’s just book one!

TVL: Did you always envision the story as a trilogy or a series, or did it f irst start off as one book and you realized it wasn’t enough?

AV: It started out as one book. I started writing it in a Google doc a couple of years ago when Chrysalis was out on submission. I didn’t have an agent at that point, and I had just sent the Chrysalis manuscript to different publishers on my own. I got a few quick no’s and then I was just waiting. I waited for nine months without hearing anything. I was ready to put the thing in a drawer, thinking that nobody wanted it and was trying to write something else to distract myself from the crushing disappointment that nobody wanted my short story collection. I started writing what felt fun for me, which was this big sexy fantasy novel. Basically, it was the novel that I wanted to read. I couldn’t find something that had these three specific things that I was looking for: an epic fantasy, diverse characters—I wanted main characters that looked like me—and higher spice levels. I love the yearning in a slow burn … but if the characters haven’t even kissed by page 200, what are we doing?! I was really looking for those three things together in one book and I couldn’t find it. So, I just started writing it.
It started as a one-off and then I signed with my agent, Hana El Niwairi at Cooke McDermid, who asked if it was a standalone novel or if there was more. Could it be a trilogy? And I said yes, it absolutely could be! That’s when we started talking about what that would look like. I had a draft of book one and outlines of what I thought book two and three in this series could look like. We were able to pitch it as a trilogy with one f inished book and two outlines.

TVL: That’s amazing. I really love the idea of writing the book that you want to read. I know that there are going to be many readers who are going to read your book and say that this is exactly what they were looking for. And how lucky are we to get three books instead of just one! So, what was your approach to writing the trilogy? You mentioned you already have outlines for books two and three.

AV: Book one, A Kiss of Crimson Ash, is done and for book two, I’m about halfway done drafting from a really detailed outline.
You can imagine it as strong scaffolding that’s already there, chapter by chapter. I have a clear idea of what needs to happen in each chapter throughout the book to get each character where they need to be by the end. And then I get to fill all the details in. Sometimes chapters go in a different direction than I had initially thought, or events get switched around. But in general, I’m climbing that scaffolding as I go. For book three, there’s a looser outline at the moment. I still know how the series will end and where we have to get to, but right now, that’s two years away!

TVL: What was it like to move from writing a short story collection to a novel? Did you feel a difference, or did it feel like an extension of the same kind of thing?

AV: You know, for a short story, ten thousand words is long. As a short story writer, you always feel like every word really must carry weight and you’re trying to make every word count. So, at ten thousand words in for the novel, I was like, “Oh, is this too long?” And then realizing you’re only two or three chapters in … and that you’re actually still right at the beginning of the story. There’s so much space, especially within the fantasy genre. I think there’s a little more room than the eighty thousand to ninety thousand words that you would get in most novels. A lot of fantasy is going to be over one hundred thousand words, so it was just making that switch in my mind. There is so much more room to play with, and I could just experiment with what the scope of the story can be. It’s both terrifying and freeing.

TVL: I do want to go back to something you said earlier. You mentioned that you would gravitate toward short fiction because you felt like something shorter was the way to go initially. How did you know that you were ready to tackle a novel?

AV: I didn’t. I absolutely didn’t. And again, it’s very different to write something with zero expectations. A lot of authors are writing something for a deadline or often with a short story, you’re writing it for a contest or to submit it somewhere. But with this, it was just an idea that I had and characters that wouldn’t leave me alone. I was writing into the world with no expectations of what it would be or if I would even finish it. I didn’t know if it would become a novel. I got to about ten thousand or twenty thousand words and I thought, this feels like it’s almost done. This feels long. And then I realized it’s not done at all! There was a shift in scope I had to make for myself.

TVL: As the Games of the Goddess is a romantasy series, I imagine that a lot of world-building must have been required. What was your process for building the world of the series and what was the inspiration behind it?

AV: The inspiration for the world started while my partner and I and some friends were playing D&D. We were playing a campaign in a very Western-centric traditional fantasy world.
I kept wanting to insert an Indian-inspired character and bring in these different cultural things and, it didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit. And I thought, well, fine, I’m going to make a world where it fits. I’m going to make a world that makes sense for this character. The character I was playing in that game was a mage named Bhediya, and there is a Bhediya in the book. So, a little bit of that campaign found its way into the book for sure.
As for world building, it started with me basically trying to write fanfic for my own D&D campaign! But then I started looking at what a bigger story could be based on. I started to research the Vijayanagara Empire, which was a thirteenth to fifteenth-century empire in South India, so a medieval Indian empire, that lasted about 250 years or so. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole. If you google “medieval India,” there is so much to draw on. What food were they eating? What weapons were they using? What were they wearing? What were the palaces like? How were the cities laid out? There’s so much richness. A whole world opened, and I just started pouring it into this book. There’s a lot of that kind of research that went into the world-building, but on the other hand, it is not historical fiction. It’s loosely based on an existing historical empire, but it is very much a fantasy book. I read a lot of fantasy and romantasy and I wanted to make room for magic and divinity and goddesses and demons in the story. I really love the mix of history and fantasy and romance coming together.

TVL: You got me thinking about research rabbit holes, and I always find them so interesting. Do you remember the strangest, weirdest, or most specific kind of research thread that you went down for the book?

AV: My partner is also very into doing this because we were playing the D&D campaign together and we both started researching it. They’re really a stickler for some of the historical stuff. Like, there are a lot of food references in the book. My characters spend a lot of time—I don’t know if I can swear in this interview—but they spend a lot of time eating and fucking in this book. They do some questing and fighting bad guys, but mostly it’s eating and fucking.
So there are a lot of food references, and we spent a lot of time researching them. I had something about potatoes and my partner pointed out there wouldn’t have been potatoes in India at that time. Then we would go through and try to find a good substitute for it. Or similarly, I had a character smoking tobacco and we had to go back and find a substitute. I kept saying, “It’s fantasy, so it’s fine!” But, nope, no potatoes. No tobacco. There were a lot of very specific things like that.

TVL: That makes a lot of sense. Do you have a favourite character that you’ve written? I know that’s a hard question …

AV: That’s like asking if you have a favourite child!

TVL: I know, I know.

AV: Which I think everybody does. We just won’t admit it! I have characters that are close to my heart. I have a story in Chrysalis that’s also in the anthology Queer Little Nightmares called “The Vetala’s Song.” A vetala is a creature from Hindu mythology. It’s kind of like a revenant type of creature, a precursor to the modern vampire, an undead creature that inhabits corpses. So, this story is a cross between a love story and a ghost story, but it’s told from the perspective of the vetala. It’s a nameless character, but she makes this choice to become something monstrous. It doesn’t just happen to her. She chooses to become a monster so that she can remain on earth and wait for her beloved to return. I love this idea of a monster with a tender heart.

TVL: On the other side of things, is there a type of character, plot device, literary technique, or really anything specific you can think of that you will never use in your writing or you actively try to avoid?

AV: My editor did point out that there were a lot of raised eyebrows in my novel! She’s like, “Here’s another ‘he quirked a brow, he raised his eyebrow.’” I had to go back and delete a whole bunch of those. Now, every time I write it, I’m like, nope, nope, nope … delete!

TVL: That’s so funny. What did you end up replacing them with? Or did you just remove them?

AV: Some I removed, but you know, it forced me to go back to the interaction and ask myself what else could someone do? How else could I convey whatever the emotion is? Some I just took out; some I played with in different ways. It’s something I would never have noticed otherwise.

TVL: I’m always curious about beginnings, especially when it comes to how writers start their work. How do you write your opening lines or pages?

AV: You know, almost always, I know the end of a story first. I usually have a very clear idea of what that will be. Even with this trilogy, particularly the first novel, I knew very early on where we would end. For most of my short stories, I also have a clear idea of what that final image, place, feeling, or line of dialogue is and then it’s this exercise of working backward to figure out how did we get there, and what are the events leading to it. The beginning of the story, or whatever the entry point into the story is, changes the most. That is often the last thing I come up with. It really is a process of working backward.

TVL: That’s so interesting. So, you write toward the end already knowing it?

AV: Yeah. And there are so many stories where I’ll go back to revise and I’ll realize it was not the right starting point. I do find, even as an editor when working with other people’s stories, some of the most common feedback I give is: is this the best starting point for the story? Is this where the story really starts?

TVL: Have you ever changed the ending once you finished writing the piece?

AV: I don’t think so. It’d be hard to do, mostly because the story is usually built from the ending. That’s usually the strongest part.

TVL: In addition to being a writer, you’re also a professional grant writer and a fiction editor with The Ex-Puritan Magazine. Has your work as a grant writer and editor shaped or influenced your writing practice?

AV: They both have done so, but in different ways. In my non-profit work, I currently work at the YWCA here in Hamilton where I live, and a lot of the day-to-day work that my team and I are engaged with is how do we empower women, how do we look at the systems that oppress women and girls, and how do we dismantle those things? That day-today work really makes its way into my writing. And I think you can see that in the stories in Chrysalis and you can see that in A Kiss of Crimson Ash for sure. It really is women and people of colour and queer folks and their allies coming together to take down tyrant rulers, and that seems to be particularly resonant right now.

TVL: That’s awesome. You live what you write in that way, too.

AV: Yeah, a little bit. Those things have come together in a cool way. In terms of being the editor at The Ex-Puritan, it’s like I said, a lot of the things that I am now aware of in my own writing, I can notice more and ask of other writers as I’m editing people’s work. There are things that I’m thinking about in my own writing and it’s also some of the most common feedback that I’m giving other people.

TVL: What role would you say literary magazines and journals play in Canada’s publishing industry?

AV: Oh man, they’re so important. They are, I think, overlooked and underfunded. But they’re just such an important platform. I think if you ask almost any Canadian writer, they can tell you that they were first published in a literary magazine, and that they have had a literary magazine editor champion their work. We’re all part of this very small ecosystem in CanLit. Your editor at a magazine might also be an instructor at a university or might also work for a publishing house or a festival or bookseller. Everyone is connected in these different ways. I think literary magazines and the opportunities that they give to emerging writers are so important to keep a healthy and thriving literary scene.

TVL: What are you currently working on?

AV: I’m currently working on book two of the Games of the Goddess trilogy.

TVL: I had a feeling, but I didn’t want to assume, but that’s great! Is there already an expected release date?

AV: We have talked about trying to do it on a one book a year schedule, so we’ll see how that goes. Right now, though, I’m also really excited about the release of A Kiss of Crimson Ash, my debut novel, in May 2026. I hope readers like it and will consider pre-ordering it!

TVL: To wrap up, what is the best piece of advice about writing or otherwise that you have ever received?

AV: I’m paraphrasing here, but I was in a workshop with Silvia Moreno Garcia, and she said, “Writing is not an escalator, it’s a treadmill, so you better learn to walk.” I’ve always thought about that because sometimes it does seem that we only hear about when authors win awards or make bestseller lists. You don’t see that they’ve just been treadmilling for years and years and all the work that goes into it. Sometimes it feels like people are an overnight success, and I think that’s very rarely the case. There’s a lot of walking that you don’t see that writers are always doing in the background. It’s this constant balancing of the writing side, the publicity side, and hopefully, the being-in-community side. They’re all different parts of just staying on the treadmill. I guess it depends how you feel about being on a treadmill! But I feel like that walking can be part of a writing journey as opposed to something that you’re trying to avoid or trying to jump on that escalator as soon as possible. The walk is essential.

Three Short Interviews With Reading Series

Chi-Leung Lee (李智良): Speakeasy Reading Series

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Tell me a little bit about the Speakeasy Reading Series. And what’s one thing our readers may not already know?

CHI-LEUNG LEE : Speakeasy is a monthly literary reading series hosted by University of Guelph Creative Writing MFA students. One thing readers may not already know is that the event features not only readings from students, alumni, and faculty of our program but also from writers in the broader community. We aim to feature both emergent and well-published authors across genres and disciplines.

TVL: Imagine our readers have never attended a Speakeasy Reading Series event before. Set the scene. What is it like?

CLL: Wednesday evening. A legacy bookstore on Church Street. The glass door buffers the street noises. Eclectic choice of music playing on low volume. The light is dimmed a little. A diverse mix of people, mostly the quiet type. No one wears perfume. The smell of good books. Some were sitting by themselves. Some sit around tables, more at ease with their friends. The bar gradually gets busier. A projection screen at the bookstore shows the reader’s lineup and their looking-cool profile pictures. You tried to match the images with the quiet people sitting nearby. Under the screen, a mic stand with the microphone’s battery light on standby. The hosts were testing the web camera angle …

TVL: What are the duties of the Speakeasy host each year, and what did you bring/are you bringing to this role during your term?

CLL: The Speakeasy hosts are responsible for all the behind-the-scenes work that makes the monthly reading happen, enjoyable, and accessible. This includes applying for and managing funding, liaising with the venue, handling publicity (social media, flyers, mass emails, Eventbrite page, etc.), compiling bios, making music playlists, and ensuring the accessibility needs of readers and the audience are met. The most challenging part of event-planning tasks is securing our lineup, because readers are often juggling their work, family responsibilities, and travel plans. Occasionally, we need to respond quickly to unexpected circumstances, such as readers being unable to attend at short notice, TTC or a heater breakdown, or a malfunctioning microphone. During my term, I was privileged to work with Alex Cafarelli and Desiree Mckenzie, who have great talents and personalities. We introduced two changes. One is to make the event more accessible by livestreaming, so that readers and audience who cannot attend in person can also join us. I remember that one of our readers was travelling on a boat when she joined us last year! We also have readers in the diaspora whose friends and families from home joined us online! We also found that live captioning was welcomed by audience members who have difficulties following the text. Another change we brought is to make the event donation-based, to cover the honorariums for readers who are not funded by any institution or organization. We appreciate the labour and time our readers put into their work. It is also one of the small ways to move forward in building an ecosystem where we support one another and rely less on institutions.

TVL: So much of literary citizenship is engaging with our communities, and that often takes place through attending events like book launches, reading series, festivals, and more. What role does the Speakeasy Reading Series play in your literary community?

CLL: As an international student and someone who has moved across countries, not always holding the correct passport, I am very averse to the idea of “citizenship.” Literature belongs to the commons and should be accessible to all. At Speakeasy, the hosts and I share the same urgency to platform readers from historically underrepresented communities, and those whose work is not shy about engaging with the world. The last two years have been particularly challenging for many of us as we see a genocide unfold. I feel that Speakeasy has not done much for the greater cause, but in a small way, we create a safe space for our community to f ind one another and a space where we think together about the role of writing and our responsibilities at this historical juncture.

TVL: What is something you’re excited about right now?

CLL: A tarot reader recently told me it’s going to be a striving time, rather than just survival mode. I want to believe it, so I am keeping things very open, although it can be scary. I am relocating to Taipei so that I can stay closer to my family and loved ones. Upon completing my MFA, I now have a manuscript that I aim to develop and publish—it’s a hybrid work that responds to the personal stories I collected through research and interviews with those who participated in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. I am working on a side project of erasure poems in conjunction with this manuscript. I am also becoming curious about narrative therapy and wondering how some of the principles of life re-authoring may be applied in a creative writing workshop setting. I can go on and on. I am excited because I am now on the other side of what I couldn’t have imagined before joining the MFA program.

CHI-LEUNG LEE (李智良)

is a genre-defying writer working across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry in English, Chinese, and Cantonese. His most acclaimed book, A Room Without Myself (《房間), is an unapologetic chronicle of surviving the psychiatric system, awarded both the Hong Kong Book Prize and the Hong Kong Biennial Awards for Chinese Literature. His other works—Porcelain (白瓷), Grass is Bluer by the Sea (海邊草更藍), and Days We Cross (渡日若渡海)—blend plotless fiction, verse, photography, and essayistic reflections to explore fractured identities, memory, and poetics of displacement. Lee has held fellowships and residencies in Iowa, Niigata, Hong Kong, and Berlin. He holds a BA and MPhil in Comparative Literature (University of Hong Kong) and an MFA in Creative Writing (University of Guelph), and has taught creative writing, literature and film studies at CUHK and HKBU. His work appears in Fleurs des lettres (字花), Springhill Literati (春山文藝), Asymptote, Brick, and Riddle Fence. He believes literature should unsettle, dissolve borders, and make the trembling of the world felt.

Three Short Interviews With Reading Series

Ellen Chang-Richardson & Nina Jane Drystek: Riverbed Reading Series

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: You are co- founders of the Riverbed Reading Series and are doing incredible work supporting Ottawa’s literary community. How did Riverbed Reading Series come to be?

BOTH: Riverbed Reading Series came to be over a few shared dinners and glasses of wine. In late 2019, Ellen moved to Ottawa from Toronto and met nina jane through fellow poet Chuqiao Yang. We quickly realized that we both wanted to start a series that focused on hybrid art forms and platformed experimental voices. We are now in our sixth season and have developed a really wonderful community in Ottawa. We have brought on like-minded individuals to bolster our collective, and started a mentorship program in partnership with the University of Ottawa’s Creative Writing department. We are driven by the belief that the artistic spheres are connected and are committed to creating an inclusive space for artistic dialogues and experimentation. This is especially important given the social and political challenges we are experiencing today.

TVL: Imagine that our readers have never attended a Riverbed Reading Series event before. Set the scene. What is it like?

BOTH: When you arrive at Riverbed, you walk through a courtyard off Nicholas Street into Club SAW. At the front table, a member of our team—sometimes our mentee, sometimes Ellen’s wonderful husband Paul—greets you and encourages you to sign up for our open mic and to pay-what-you-can by way of a donation. We also always offer people masks and hand sanitizer.
Just past the doors, Club SAW has an amazing and welcoming bar staff from whom you can purchase beverages of your choice. Walking around the back of the bar, you will find a series of high tables and benches and café-style tables where you can sit among friends or strangers—who are sure to be new friends. Whenever someone new attends, Ellen and nina jane do their best to introduce themselves and welcome the new audience member to Riverbed.
Once our crowd has assembled, your hosts, nina jane and Ellen, take to the stage to introduce the space, the land, and the evening’s curatorial theme. The performances start with a reading of a river or river-adjacent piece of writing by Ellen or nina jane, followed by a set of eight open mic readers. After that, the featured performers take to the stage—either in-person or virtually by video performance. Each event features three performers and you can expect any combination of poets, prose writers, playwrights, musicians, drag performers, DJs, and other avant-garde performances. We are also a hybrid series, so if you cannot join us in person, you can always join us online!

TVL: What is your curatorial vision for the reading series?

BOTH: Our curatorial vision is iterative—we are interested in presenting events that conceptually build upon one another—which is why we call each event an “iteration.” We believe there is a multiplicity to the futures we can create if we create a space of creativity, experimentation, and diverse audiences, that connect through dialogue and delight. We strongly believe in community collaboration and many of our events have been co-presented with other local arts and community organizations. Our curatorial approach gives artists an opportunity to try something new, space to act and create, and has inspired new artistic creations and partnerships.

TVL: Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Riverbed Reading Series blends literature, music, and performance, through livestreamed and in-person events. What role do you play in Ottawa’s literary scene, and how do you build community?

BOTH: Now in our sixth year, we are told that we hold an important space in Ottawa’s literary scene. As one of the few reading events in the region, we offer open mics at every event and provide an inclusive space for all creative types to exist and co-exist in. Community is at the heart of our series and we consistently collaborate with arts institutions, ad hoc collectives, and/or cultural groups within the National Capital Region. T hroughout the years, we have partnered with organizations like SAW, Versefest, Chamberfest, Qu’ART, the Korean Cultural Centre Canada, the University of Ottawa, Debaser, Arc Poetry Magazine, Salon du livre de l’Outaouais. We continue to dream up new ways to uplift the community while presenting experiential and experimental programming for the public. Part of this is also about ensuring our events are accessible to audiences and, while we suggest a donation of twenty dollars at the door, no one is ever turned away for lack of funds.

TVL: What is something you’re excited about right now?

ELLEN: I’m incredibly excited by the rise of hybrid voices across Canadian literature. You see it in the hybrid-genre books and novels in verse coming to market, the integration of investigative practices into creative writing projects, an increase in instances of interdisciplinary performances, new chapbook/independent presses focused on elevating such voices—and an overall hunger from the public for this type of creativity. I love it and I can’t wait to see (and be a part of) what’s next.

NINA JANE: Similarly, I am excited about the interdisciplinary directions poets and writers are heading, and how that is becoming more visible in the community. I see Riverbed’s interdisciplinary programming as playing a part in this conversation and movement. Like when local DJ Jay Function (former JFUN) got to try a new style of set alongside Britta Badour, Jay Ritchie—who also brought an experimental set—and Dessa Bayrock. Like when Tawhida Tanya Evanson transported our audience through her voice and presence, alongside Frances Boyle and local French rapper D-Track. Like this past August when we celebrated Pride, and our queerness, with sexy readings by Eva Crocker, the sweet vocals and moves of drag king Omari B Johnson, and the strange, playful and poignant poetry of MLA Chernoff. As part of our series, we also billet out-of-town performers in our homes, and this always leads to wonderful conversations and opportunities to talk more deeply about art, performance and life.

BOTH: We are a community.

ELLEN CHANG-RICHARDSON

is the author of Blood Belies (Wolsak & Wynn, 2024), shortlisted for the 2025 Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, the solo author of five poetry chapbooks, and the co-author of two with the poetry collective VII. Co-founder and co-curator of Riverbed Reading Series, Ellen is also an editor for Paper Bill Press, long con magazine, and Room. Their multigenre writing has appeared in publications across Turtle Island and their second book, Through the Eyes of Another: a collection of ekphrasis, is forthcoming in 2027. Find out more at www.ehjchang.com.

NINA JANE DRYSTEK

is the author of the chapbooks missing matrilineal (above/ground, 2023), a : of : in (Gap Riot Press, 2021) and knewro suite (Simulacrum Press, 2019), and two collaborative chapbooks with the collective VII, holy disorder of being (Gap Riot, 2022) and Towers (Collusion Books, 2021). she writes and performs sound poetry and was short-listed for the 2020 Bronwen Wallace poetry award as well as the 2021 Priscila Uppal Poetry Prize. she is one of the co-curators of Riverbed Reading Series and an editorial board member for Arc Poetry Magazine. her work has also appeared in various print and online publications. you can learn more at textcurious.ca.

Three Short Interviews With Reading Series

David Barrick: Antler River Poetry

TALI VORON-LEIDERMAN: Tell me a little bit about Antler River Poetry. And what’s one thing our readers may not already know?

DAVID BARRICK: Antler River Poetry has been hosting monthly poetry readings and occasional workshops for twenty-two seasons! T he series was originally envisioned and established by poet Cornelia Hoogland and librarian Carolyn Doyle in 2004, and then marvellously stewarded by former director Karen Schindler for many years; our ongoing partnership with the London Public Library has remained crucial to the success of the series. Readers may not know that our new logo—a stylized depiction of Deshkan Ziibi—was designed by the incredible local artist Katie Wilhelm.

TVL: Imagine our readers have never attended an Antler River Poetry event before. Set the scene. What is it like?

DB: Our home venue is Landon Branch Library in the Wortley Village in London, Ontario. When you walk through the doors, you’ll take the stairs or elevator to our lower-level room, which is a quiet haven away from the bustle of the main library. Inside, the far wall is decorated with large prints of birds by Ron Milton; the main lights are low over two sections of seating, about fifty chairs in all, and three orange lamps glow on the upright piano behind the podium. Our host librarian Ashleigh Hickey sets out water for the poets and double-checks the audio. As everyone settles in, our MC Misha Bower welcomes audience members with her charisma and warm humour, and then we dive into an evening of poetry and conversation.

TVL: What is your curatorial vision for the reading series?

DB: I think the basic curatorial vision for Antler River Poetry has been fairly consistent across directors: a diverse range of exciting poets working in Canada are put into dialogue with our local writers and poetry appreciators. Complementing the library’s equity, diversity, and inclusion mission, Antler River Poetry prioritizes platforming and celebrating authors from underrepresented and marginalized communities. We also aim to showcase a variety of poetic aesthetics, geographical voices, cultural backgrounds, and artistic career stages. With so many poets producing such incredible work right now, the biggest challenge is being limited to thirteen or fourteen feature slots per season.

TVL: Antler River Poetry is based in London, Ontario, running a monthly reading series as well as occasional poetry workshops. What role do you play in London’s literary scene, and how do you build community?

DB: Antler River Poetry has always been a place where people can discover new writers (or hear long-time favourites) and connect with local creators. I think community-building happens best through collaborative openness and mutual support among arts organizations/audiences. A recent example is our partnership with Spoken Culture (a grassroots poetry initiative founded by the brilliant Michelle Owusu-Ansah) in support of their annual Black History Slam at Museum London, an evening of spoken word poetry, music, and dialogue that celebrates Black History Month. We’re also starting to rebuild/reconceive some creative workshop opportunities for community members who are eager to share ideas and socialize, thanks in particular to the efforts of Misha Bower, Pujita Verma, and Kit Roffey.

TVL: What is something you’re excited about right now, and what was one of the most memorable events that you’ve hosted?

DB: I’m excited about Antler River Poetry’s current season! Among many upcoming highlights, we’ll be hosting a river-themed reading with sophie anne edwards, D. A. Lockhart, and Tom Cull in March 2026; I also can’t wait for our Poetry Month event featuring Blair Trewartha and Jody Chan. It is an honour that Jody will be judging our poetry contest this year.
With so many great memories, it’s daunting to narrow things down (but I’ll try). Last season, Luke Hathaway’s collaboration with singer Daniel Cabena comes to mind as a remarkably moving and mesmerizing performance. I’ll also mention one earlier event: Jordan Abel’s reading in April 2016, right around the release of Un/inhabited. He delivered what I can only describe as an experimental decolonial poetic DJ set, remixing and recontextualizing sound clips of his work on the spot. I still think of that amazing performance often.

DAVID BARRICK

is the author of the poetry collection Nightlight (Palimpsest Press, 2022) as well as two chapbooks. His poems appear in Best Canadian Poetry 2024, Grain, The Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, ARC, and other literary publications. He is the managing director of the Antler River Poetry reading series and teaches writing at Western University.