Fiction board intern Kelsey Lauder talks with Joshua James Edgar about the perceptions of hockey in Canadian culture and bringing justice to silenced female voices in "Jane Doe," Edgar's short story that appears in Issue #192, Autumn 2015 of the Malahat.

KL: Situations similar to the case that occurs in “Jane Doe” continuously show up in the news these days, often with the same one-sided show of support from the community. What made you want to write a fictionalized version of these events?

JJE: I was in the last months of a journalism degree when the Steubenville verdict was announced. What followed was a barrage of American news coverage that emphasized the perpetrators’ sullied football dreams instead of the horrible crimes they’d been charged with, and while it was demoralizing to see this side of an industry I was hoping to graduate into, I also felt like so many vital conversations were coming out of both the verdict and its reportage. Most of the people in my life at the time were talking about how problematic it was that Americans worship their athletes from such a young age. But the thing was, I grew up in a hockey town, and I’d seen too many teenage hockey stars do awful things and get away them to believe that this brand of athlete worship was an “American problem.”

Read the rest of Joshua's interview on the Malahat website.

Looking for the right publisher for your manuscript? Kari Jones, professor in the Department of English at Camosun College, offers up suggestions for submitting manuscripts and making sure the publisher you send to is a good fit for your work. Her how-to, clean-cut approach is a must-read for anyone sitting on the next greatest novel or collection of works!

Read Kari's publishing tip on the Malahat website.

Fiction board member Lee Henderson and Vancouver-area photographer Dan Siney chat about Dan's inspiration for "Stump 2," a stump-skull photo taken on Gambier Island and selected as the featured cover art for the Malahat's latest issue. Photo credit: Jennilee Marigomen

LH: You have made a series of photographs of the stumps from old logging, one of which we included on the most recent cover of The Malahat Review. Can you tell me about the process for making these pictures?

DS: I was helping my friend Gretchen clear hiking paths for the Gambier Island Conservancy. She lived on Gambier at the time and she had an annoying goat. She made saddle bags for the goat to carry some of our gear. It was winter, and the three of us would hike two to three days into the forest and back again. Deep in the woods the old growth stumps, of which there was maybe one for every 20 trees, looked like the ghosts of the “original” forest to me. You could look up and around and imagine the space filled with these massive trees in place of the existing ones. Some stumps had empty eye sockets. (The holes were made by fallers who would stand on spring boards to hand saw the trees.) The first stump skull I saw was standing alone, covered in moss, with slanted, mean eyes, at the top of a hill we were climbing out of a clear cut. It made quite the impression.

Read the rest of Dan's interview on the Malahat website.