The New Quarterly

Karen McDiarmid lives on Cortes Island, where she paints, writes, and swims year round in the Salish Sea. Her work as a photographer and clinical counsellor has taken her around the planet but in the past decade she’s travelled deep into landscapes closer to home. Jane, Hague Lake, is part of a series entitled Days of Fire and Rain, begun a few years ago as forest fires raged throughout British Columbia. Karen’s work has become increasingly informed by the underlying chaos and instability of the West Coast’s immense beauty, and of the wider world.…

I AM NOT A “TECHIE” PERSON, BUT I HAVE TAKEN TO READING JOHN NAUGHTON’S column in The Observer newspaper because in so doing I learn what I need to know of that world in focussed commentaries. And because he seems wise at a time when wisdom is in short supply. Recently, when writing of “these times,” Naughton quoted Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist philosopher and political theorist, jailed by Mussolini. In his Prison Notebooks Gramsci wrote about what he called an “interregnum”—a period of crisis “which consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a variety of morbid symptoms occur.” I think we can all see the connection to this particular period in history but the idea of seeking…

Kusatsu Station was small, one of those countryside platforms where time seems to slow down. I was five minutes early when I stepped off the Shinkansen but a sense of haste clung to me as if I were an hour late. What did Miwa-san look like again? It’s been six years since I last saw him, and eight years since we met for the first time at his office in Osaka. The sterile scent of new fabrics, shelves of neatly cut swatches, and gleaming fluorescent lights resembled any other textile showroom I visited in Japan. Yet, unlike the others, I was not turned away for my small-scale production. Seared in my memory is Miwa’s silhouette—first disappearing to the backroom without a word—then reemerging with a welcoming tray of hot tea…

the firekeeper tossed cedar and washed his hands in the firehe turned and looked at melike I was familiar with asking for forgivenesshis voice splits as he told me about a time when it didn’t‘I dreamt of your ancestors, they were here before’liquid spirits flowing like rapids during breakupI waved the sweetgrass around my throatand it stuck like nectarfirekeeper is kingduring ceremonythe tobacco escapes meslips right off my tonguewraps around me like seal skinthe rhythm of the drum floods my feetand I whisper ‘but I can’t swim’yet I wade in anyway my breath was a prayer I forgot I knewlast night i signed a ledgerwith my body and spirithe told me to imagine my strengthsay it loudmove for ittonight i imagined my grieflooked at itimagined it was waterthen i drowned…

THE PERSONAL IS NEVER STATIC. A COMPELLING PERSONAL ESSAY ISN’T ABOUT a fixed identity or neat resolutions; it’s about movement and change—a narrative that resists being pinned down or one that transforms each time you revisit it. This idea frequently emerged as I reviewed the submissions for this year’s Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. What does it mean to confront the past—considering family, grief, memory, and the places that shape us? What forms can the personal essay take when it embraces uncertainty or defies expectations? These were the questions I brought with me to our adjudication meeting. It was a genuine pleasure to read and discuss the shortlisted essays alongside Pamela Mulloy, Tasneem Jamal, and Emily Urquhart. Each of us contributed different perspectives, and our conversations were broad and insightful.…

LET’S SAY IT’S 1980 IN CALGARY, ALBERTA AND THE PRAIRIE SKY DARK IN THE early evening is clouded with November storm. Snow licks a hospital parking lot clean. Imagine air so cold you can see breath or lose an ungloved pinky. In this scene, a bleary-eyed wolf in a blue sweatshirt pulls out of a stall. Accompanying him is a lamb, his wife of only a couple months, who holds a wailing infant close to her curly black fleece in the front passenger seat. Let’s say this is an old story, a parable even, about what happens after a wolf woos a lamb, about how endings are sewn into beginnings, about how it’s hard to tell the difference between the wails of humans and the cries of animals. Checking over…