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Early in 2021, almost a year into the pandemic, I was hearing a lot about the challenges faced by local not-for-profit charitable organizations and programs. The spread of COVID-19 wreaked havoc on our shelters, clinics, food banks, and halfway houses, but not for entirely obvious reasons. Yes, there is a huge risk of transmission in…
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Since being long-listed last fall for The New Quarterlyβs 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, I’ve been busy expanding my short story into a full novel. I’ve made steady progress since and am awfully close to finishing this damn manuscript. Over the last six months, I’ve committed all my available writing time to this book…hence,…
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I’m delighted to announce that I made the longlist for The New Quarterly’s 2023 Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award. The story that I submitted is titled, “Mehdi”. This story was heavily inspired by events in my own life and represents some of my most personal storytelling. As I’ve been making periodic attempts at advancing my…
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Iβm at my local Loblaws grocery store in Ottawa, Ontario on a mission to replenish our pantry with flour and other baking essentials. Thoughts of baking evoke the warmest of memories from home. In mamanβs kitchen, tearing a morsel of fresh Barbari bread delivered from the oven just seconds ago. The pads of my fingertips…
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The Big Easy, Nβawlins, you sumpthinβ familiar. Got that βgrateful for what we gotβ feel, that hard Atlantic work like. Not that soft Pacific coast-through-life chill, but a grits with biscuits, tasso gravy oβer fried shrimp, life. I know this place, that cautious to get-to-know but deep lovinβ, that fists-in-the-air type, donβt push us βround,…
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The idea of βstrugglingβ has been a recurrent theme in my writing for some time. In Human, Like You (July 4, 2020), I shared my inclination β…to struggle and battle β¦ while trying to survive this unyielding bind that prevents me from knowing just why we all try to persist.β In Too Heavy for Small…
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It’s familiar, yet strange βlike aging walls propped up βround rubble,a silly scheme to preserve the nostalgia of old bricks and mortar, making room for new developments. I drip donair sauce sitting on a doorstep with my back to a bright-coloured door. Scarf a quarter-slice of pizza, thin discs of cured meat curled like tiny…
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Spangle grass and the paper thin siliclesof annual honestybunny tails and dead barren twigslong past decay, now permanentAn eternal bouquetbeautiful like cemetery stones in bloomA glass vase opaque with dust, residuegrime glaze of oil and danderHumans traffic here, frequentingthis spot where dead things hangaffixed with copper tape to a pale wallpoorly primed, a pearl foundation…
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Iβm not well β in company. Normality is a standard pitch. A resonant frequency of thought and behaviour, of mental functioning and sociability, that we create and reinforce in the relational place we exist in. Itβs not a fixed calibration. Over time and space it changes, transforms, responding to the ebb and flow of ideas…
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Unrelenting snow like flakes of fallout.A dash, sprinkle, salting, white dust accumulates, tillmore and more, itβs too much.Heaps and mounds βa deluge made frigid, frost scraped freeby sharp nail-biting winds, descendingunending. Though, through windows like these,an envelope glazing my gingerbread-sweet andcozy home-sweet-home where I sleep in thissuite wrapped in fabrics and sheets, I canwait out…
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A Working Draft by E. E. Talisman 