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Issue 8, Volume 19 | August 2022

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Issue 219, summer 2022

new summer issue

Featuring Novella Prize winner Jenny Ferguson.

Cover art by Jinny Yu.

Poetry
by Amy M. Alvarez, Jes Battis, Heather Birrell, Rose Henbest, Meghan Kemp-Gee, Michael Kenyon, Louie Leyson, Lauren Marshall, Jordan Mounteer, Heo Nanseolheon and Lee Okbong (both translated by Suphil Lee Park), K. R. Segriff, and Kenneth Tanemura.

Fiction by Martha Nell Cooley.

Creative nonfiction
by Daniel Allen Cox and Jen Hirt.

Reviews of the latest Canadian poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction books.

Buy now.



Far Horizons Award for Poetry winner

Meryem Yildiz

Congratulations to Meryem Yildiz, winner of this year's $1,250 Far Horizons Award for Poetry! Keep an eye out for her poem, "Inner Child Work," in our fall issue #220.

Here's some of what judge Laura Ritland had to say: "These fractures in form are beautiful sutures and magical repairs, producing a poem so perfectly compact and hopeful that you could carry it around everywhere in your pocket like a talisman. 'Inner Child Work' not only offers a courageous portrait of the process of healing—it undertakes that very labour through its own 'work' of art."

Read the full announcement.



CanLit for your reading list

New and Noteworthy

Review space may be limited in our quarterly magazine, but we’re delighted to share this list of new Canadian books. *Please note that inclusion on the list does not necessarily preclude a print review.

Read the full list of new and noteworthy Canadian titles.

Contest closes tonight!

Submission guidelines

Submit by tonight, August 5, at 11:59pm PDT!

This year, we've increased the prize amount to CAD $1,250 and word limit to 4,000 max. Send us your best creative nonfiction—personal essays, memoirs, travel writing, biographies, and more.  

Judge:
D. A. Lockhart

Entry fee (includes a one-year print subscription):
$35 CAD for each entry from Canada
$45 CAD for each entry from elsewhere
$15 CAD for each additional entry, no limit

Full contest guidelines on our website.

Louie Leyson, issue #219 poetry contributor

Louie LeysonPlenitude Magazine Managing Editor Patrick Grace talks with the summer issue #219 contributor about imbuing pop culture references in poems, the body as a conveyor of language, and punctuation as an instruction for breathing.

 

PG: When reading your poetry, I'm struck by a dreamy and domestic lilt, whether it be the comfort of friends and music in "all my friends in a room listening to say it right by nelly furtado," or the sweet haze of late summer in "killing flies in late september." Is this theme common in your writing?

LL: Oh, yes. When I think of tenderness and domesticity in poetry, I think of Adrienne Rich’s Twenty-One Love Poems, and “Poem II," where she says: “I hesitate / and wake. You've kissed my hair / to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, / I say, a poem I wanted to show someone..." But it’s bittersweet, because she’s writing about someone impossible for her to show, or to love openly, in the world that they live in. She has to dream up somewhere different to make up for that lack. A poem can be like that—a landscape you invent in which love is always possible. Sometimes I think that’s where my impulse to write comes from, that desire for someplace habitable. Houses for all the tenderness I can't express aloud.

Read the rest of Louie Leyson's interview as well as a full poem.


Martha Nell Cooley, issue #219 fiction contributor

Martha Nell Cooley Fiction Editorial Board intern Nevada Alde talks with the summer issue #219 contributor about auto-fiction, becoming more of an anti-racist person, and writing during the early months of the pandemic..

 

NA: Writing can often challenge us in a number of ways. What would you say has been your biggest writing challenge, whether personal (ex. trying reach a large goal) or professional (ex. pushing through writer’s block to meet a deadline)? On the other hand, what has been your greatest success.

MNC: One thing I’ve been trying to do is to write about whiteness in a way that feels authentic and relevant. I don’t want to write from the lens of default whiteness. I want the ethnicities of my characters to be acknowledged because it’s a huge part of how people are in the world, but I’ve also struggled to figure out how to do that. And I realize my writing about race as a white person will only ever be as thoughtful as I am, so it’s more of an internal struggle to become more of an anti-racist person in order to write about race in a way that doesn’t do harm.

In this piece I’m writing from the perspective of a white person, which is acknowledged so that it’s not assumed, and then I’m also trying to include characters with other identities and acknowledge them as well. And I don’t know why it feels so hard to do that. Oh, wait I do. It’s because of centuries of racism. Anyway, I haven’t figured any of this out, I just wanted to say that that’s a central challenge that I’m engaging with. And it feels both terrifying and essential.

Read the rest of Martha Nell Cooley's interview.


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