Paul Vermeersch

From the editor

Dear reader,

“Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.” —Alice Notley

As the editor of a literary magazine, I am generally opposed to the idea of a “theme issue.” Once you commit to a theme, it limits (or forces) the editorial decisions you have to make. You might have to reject a brilliant poem or story because it doesn’t deal with gardening or violence or water, and you might have to say yes to a lesser poem or story because it does. Theme issues are too frequently the enemy of literary excellence, and for this reason, The Ampersand Review does not attempt them.
Still, some experiences are so universal as to be unavoidable. Paige LeBlanc, our current editorial intern, pointed out to me how often the spectre of grief appears in this issue. We did not set out to make a theme issue on the subject of grief, but it is such a ubiquitous element of the hu man condition and such a constant undercurrent in all kinds of literature that you could call nearly any general issue of a literary magazine “the grief issue,” and scarcely anyone would have grounds to question it.
It’s right there in the title of K.R. Byggdin’s excellent short story “Grief Like a Fragile Egg.” Poet Richard-Yves Sitoski wonders “If every name / is a synonym for grief…” and Cassandra Myers writes “then Iulia says // this can’t happen // takes me by the wrist and walks my grief to the corner store like a goldfish // flopping in her hands.”
But grief need not be called by name to be present, or indeed, to be felt. In Rachelle-Anne Lawka’s fabulous poems, the recurring character of Wölf appears as an embodiment of both dread and grief. Simultaneously allegorical, iconic, and palpable, Lawka’s Wölf is both big and bad, and we begin this issue with her warning that “anything can be a Wölf if you’re not careful.”
Grief like a river, winding its way through the magazine. Grief like a cast of characters, or like a single shapeshifter changing its appearance from face to face. Or, as in Anne-Marie Turza’s poem “Top-Down Shooter Game,” grief like the indefinable sensation of being disconnected from language itself and, consequently, from the possibility of forming a meaningful connection with “the green unnumbered citizens / viewed as pixels from above in the game / of feeling wrong in language.” It is work like this that makes Turza, to me, one of the most exciting new voices in Canadian literature to have emerged in the last decade or so.
I cannot enumerate for you each instance of grief’s presence in the pages you are now reading. It accompanies us through non-fiction pieces by Murgatroyd Monaghan and sophie anne edwards, and it is present in our interviews and even in our book reviews. Grief is an uncountable noun. There is no one grief, no two griefs. It is everywhere. It takes every form. And in the hands of these talented writers, it is the (un)common thread of our beauty, our pain, our empathy, and, finally, the contrasting dark background against which the bright and colourful shapes of our joy can be discerned.
I hope that makes you happy.

Joyfully yours,

Paul Vermeersch
March, 2026
on the train from Toronto to Ottawa

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