The New Quarterly Issue 170: The Art of Resilience - Spring 2024

Ann Mansolino is a visual artist and writer whose work explores the relationship between the internal self and external ideas of place. She is interested in the ways in which landscape can help us understand ourselves—as metaphors for our internal experience and as expressions of our more literal relationship to nature and the larger world we inhabit. The image featured here is part of an ongoing photographic series of constructed self portraits called Thresholds. Ann currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta.…

SOMEWHERE IN THE PROCESS OF EDITING THIS ISSUE I HAD AN EMAIL EXCHANGE with Heather Debling about the title of her short story, eventually settling on “Resilience.” This is what I kept thinking about when reading the story of children lost on the forest with their eco-anxious teacher, how much resilience they’d need if they were to get out alive. No spoilers—read the story! As I continued to go through the issue, I saw that resilience was required on most pages, a word that had joined the cluster of descriptors such as “unprecedented” or “new normal” that have risen to the surface of our vocabulary these past years. I was hoping that we’d have reached the “post-resilience” era, when this trait was no longer needed in such super-size quantities, where,…

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE A WRITER IN TIMES OF POLITICAL AND MORAL crisis? In the bleakest of times, writers help us make sense of our relationship to what’s happening in the world. Beyond the changing headlines or political discourse, the writer’s reflections get us to a deeper insight of human experience. When it seems that language buckles under the unbearable weight of mass violence—via headlines and soundbites repeated over and again so that we become stupefied by the endless breaking news—it is still writers that we turn to. We need them as both witness and chronicler, and to remind us that above all, it is the telling of human stories that matter. In the final poem before his death in an Israeli airstrike, Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer emphasizes…

I’M SILENT ON PALESTINE, AT FIRST. THERE’S NO SHORTAGE OF GUILT OR SHAME in that. Everyone who’s been involved in solidarity work knows that there are consequences for advocating publicly for the cause. People lose their jobs and get blacklisted. Others have doors slammed shut in their faces. That’s never stopped me before but, for the first time in my life, I’ve got something professionally significant to lose: my gig at a big, public museum in Toronto that’s given me a cushy, comfortable life. Those fears are quickly vindicated. My good friend, a celebrated Sudanese anti-racism educator who breaks the silence earlier than most, is fired for her public advocacy for Palestine. A few weeks later, an award-winning Indigenous curator at a major art gallery in Ontario quietly disappears from…

MY GRANDPARENTS ESCAPED RISING ANTISEMITISM IN PRE-WWII LITHUANIA though most of the rest of their family were killed during the Holocaust. As a writer, I have thought about this a lot, wondering what this means for me, particularly as it took emigration to politically troubled South Africa and Northern Ireland and then finally to Canada before my family found a place of security and safety. Exploring these issues of identity, migration, and persecution in my work, both in novels and in essays, I have come to the understanding that it means I have not only a moral and ethical responsibility to address issues of persecution and genocide, but that I also have a particular obligation to be vigilant. In my last novel, Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted, I consider this…

THE WRITERS’ HOUSE WAS A NICE PLACE WHERE WRITERS WERE ACCORDED the freedom of a simple literary life. It was a place to work without worry, where one could enter the contemplative space of literature, enjoying the bright warmth of unfettered creativity. The outside world was barely noticeable inside the House. News arrived by smart phone or computer but these reports were easily muted. Political discussion occurred in the corridors but never too much talk and not the wrong talk, nothing that might be defined as tonally ‘less hopeful.’ It was possible to hear about a crisis occurring in the streets or in another country and say, “I do not know” or “I cannot imagine” and remain comfortable in that not knowing and not imagining. Of course, there were ruptures—moments…