Kim Jernigan, Editor - Welcome to the Issue
This issue’s title, “Matters of the Heart,” was suggested by Sara Pentland, one of TNQ’s Volunteers Extraordinaire. Those who know that Sara is in the thick of planning her wedding (she is marrying her high school sweetheart as I married mine) might think the issue concerns itself with romance, with love on the cusp. But the heart is a more capacious organ than that, and the matters that preoccupy it—the fierce love of a child and its attendant fears, sexual initiation and its attendant vulnerability, jealousy and its attendant violence, the loss of a parent, old wounds inflicted or received, one’s own foibles and betrayals—are frequently fraught.
Many of the poems, stories, and essays collected here focus on the repercussions of actions taken, decisions made years before—there is less a sense of action than of aftermath. The heart is rent and stays rent, or the heart is healed. We get to sit in on a pair of unusual support groups: Nicole Dixon’s Sober Sisters and Zsuzsi Gartner’s @group, a gathering of recovering terrorists. These stories are about making bargains, about the limits of language, about the impulses that, for good or ill, shape our lives.
In Claire Tacon’s “Sí, Coyote,” we join a straggle of misguided North American tourists who’ve signed on for the thrill of a simulated illegal crossing of the Mexican/U.S. border and who get more than they bargained for. We travel to Milan with Elisabeth Harvor’s young protagonist Gina, a character we first met in “Men of a Certain Age” (Issue 102). Gina is still inexperienced, still leaning out for love, and Dylan, her self absorbed friend-from-childhood, is willing enough to oblige, if only as a stand-in for some imagined European lover with a darkly tragic pas
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The legacy of old wars is less romantically evoked in Colette Maitland’s “Keeping the Peace.” There we travel to small town Ontario with the widow of a Canadian soldier killed abroad who is trying to forge a decent life for her daughter while coping with her own heart’s losses. In Jill Sexsmith’s “Play the Dying Card,” a father’s death signifies differently. It is the deciding card in a high stakes emotional game of remembrance. Sexsmith forces us to read between the lines of a story situated somewhere on the border of the real and surreal.
But not all in this issue is loss. There is comfort to be found in some of these stories, and humour alongside the sorrow. There’s celebration as well, especially in the songs of our poets—in Monica Kidd’s rollicking triolet for a solstice birth, in Susan Young’s “The Tiny Details of Being Human,” and Eleonore Schönmaier’s threesome of poems on music’s capacity to lift the spirit.
Quite a few of our occasional features make an appearance as well. On Criticism: As promised in the last issue, poet and scholar Eric Ormsby sets out the differences in the literary culture of Canada, the U.S., and the U.K. (he has served up reviews in all three). He cautions against a trio of “pernicious obstacles to fair and considered criticism” as old as Dr. Johnson—“the prejudice of faction,” “the stratagem of intrigue,” and “the servility of adulation”—and makes an attempt at defining his own ideal of the “just” critic. We picked up the gauntlet thrown by this incisive essay, and put Ormsby’s own poetic oeuvre under the scrutiny of critic James Pollock who, in a review more leisurely than most, traces Ormsby’s developing poetic sensibility and spins a theory about his use of poetic personae. Along the way he singles out the poems that, in his estimation, succeed, often brilliantly, and the ones that don’t. His sustained attention would tell us, even if he didn’t say so directly (though he does), that he considers Ormsby among Canada’s finest poets, though one happily not bound by its poetic traditions.
Falling in Love with Poetry: Amanda Jernigan, the TNQ editor who shepherds this series on the poems that inspired a poet’s love of poetry, says elsewhere of poet Monica Kidd that she speaks in two voices: “the one of a poet who, frustrated by the limits of her art, becomes a doctor; and the other of a doctor who, frustrated by the limits of her art, becomes a poet.” Both these voices are sounded in Kidd’s essay “Groundtruthing,” an attempt at defining what it is that the poet does, while another voice, that of the mother, rings through the attendant poems.
Magazine as Muse: In “Highlights for Children,” Caroline Adderson revisits a traumatic episode from her childhood to explain her fondness for transgressive characters and writing that’s subversive.
The Writer-at-Large (our newest series—travel essays in the broadest sense of that term): When writer Heather Birrell and her husband, the illustrator Charles Checketts, are heading out to get inoculations for a trip to Ecuador, they come across a man in medical distress. Memories of Heather’s own father’s unanticipated and untimely death return unbidden. She wants to think of this encounter, one in which she has some agency, as a kind of “karmic completion” of the cycle of mourning, but grief is more tenacious than either time or circumstance.
This is also the issue where we get to announce the winner of our Edna Award for the most engaging non-fiction—memoir, interview, or essay on writing—published in the magazine in the previous year. The task of choosing a winner is “something like choosing between apples and dump trunks,” in the words of a previous judge, but choose a judge must.
This year’s judge, Nino Ricci, coming off a term as the Edna Staebler writer-in-residence at the Kitchener Public Library, has rendered his decision. The envelope please...
