PREFACE
Karen Mulhallen — “On the Shoulders of Giants”

FRONT OF THE BOOK
Jade Colbert — “The Four Seasons: A Winter Reader”
Siobhan DaSilva — “Editing in the Dark”

MEMOIR
Marty Gervais — “Rebellious Joy: 113 Days”
David Mason — “The Art of Appraising”

INTERVIEW
Sam Solecki — “Zbigniew Herbert: A Proust Questionnaire”

POETRY
Laurelyn Whitt — “String Figures”
Nicole Gervasio — “Missing Persons”
Sandra Pettman — “Nerve”
                                       “Habitation”
Darryl Whetter — “Sex: The Selfish Gene, The XX and a Bottle of Shiraz”
                                       “History”
Jeff Park — “The Glass Enclosure”
Ricardo Sternberg — “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis”
                                            “Some Dance”

FICTION
David A. Laidlaw — “You’re Getting Older”
Su Croll — “Render”
Angel Beyde — “New Math”
Andrew Smith — “Lost”
Kim Farleigh — “The Man and the Horse”
Judith Pond — “Trespasses”
Earl Murphy — “A Lennie Cohen Day”

PORTFOLIOS
Ryan Szulc — “An East Wind”
Pierre Durette — “Dévotion and Parade”

CELEBRATING FORTY YEARS
Descant’s Fortieth Anniversary Fête
Karen Mulhallen — Introductory Address
Olga Korper — Anniversary Remarks

BACK OF THE BOOK
Contributing Editor’s Columns:
Alberto Manguel — “Photographic Memory: Three comments on Walid Raad’s (of the Atlas Group) We Decided to Let
      Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was Convincing That Way at the Centre Georges Pompidou”
Rosemary Sullivan — “The Gift-Giving Culture: In Defense of Creative Writing Workshops”
Mark Kingwell — The End of The End of Democracy
James Hatch — Co-Editor’s Diary
Contributors’ Notes
News and Notes
Advertisements

Excerpts

Judith Pond
“Trespasses”

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

An afternoon in the living room, the midday light flat as dishwater on the coffee table and chairs, Binny with big fat baby Sonny on her narrow little lap on the rummage-sale sofa, its slick cushions and turquoise slub under her legs so bare. Clutching the sprawling, fussing baby, jigging him up and down, there there. His dismayed arms and creased baby legs, the leaking diaper. Where is their mother? She has gone where mothers go in the afternoon: to the store to get Kraft Dinner, to the neighbour’s for tea and squares, she has gone, with her headache, to lie down upstairs. Where is their father? Their father is nowhere. And the baby keeps fussing and Binny keeps adjusting him, and it’s so heavy, the big floppy head! And she doesn’t mean to, she never means to, but she drops him. Or rather, he gives a sudden surprising lurch forward when Binny is not quite paying attention — she can’t always be paying attention! But Sonny is an affable baby; he doesn’t cry. He just lies there, looking stupid. No one around, so she quickly picks him up and pats the bumped head, lays it in her own little trundle bed with its headboard decal of a teddy bear pulling on a toy donkey’s eye.

Pretty soon the doctor says Sonny’s mongoloid, and Binny knows why, and she doesn’t dare say a word to anybody, not even to her Heavenly Father. She does not dare. All she knows is that Sonny is hers now, forever, with his fat purple tongue and his clever idiot grin, and no Tupperware will ever contain him.

Nicole Gervasio
“Missing Persons”

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

Another side of the same cold-blooded ocean
   and a missing girl, a teacher,
       hooks her heels on the rung of a stool
       and checks her email in an Apple store.

An employee will recognize her dimpled face
    from the newspapers and report it to the police.
    She will be “sighted,” like a sea monster. But not “found.”

The light radiating from the laptop screen
                  veils her features with a livid blue —
                                    missing, but not lost? The teacher
                  frowns, remembering
                                    the children
                                                      she left
                                       sitting at their desks in Queens.

It’s September 11, the same digits
her mother dialed ten days ago.
                  The daughter thinks of the ruins
                  settling their dust like old women
                  relaxing into armchairs.
                        She thinks of the bones missing. Never found.

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

A ritual. How else to explain the weekly routine? Twenty-five years it never changes. Morrie away, then home with the pigeons. The story in his own words, the story of my life.

The mornings after come the hangovers … and Morrie. Always he creeps into my bedroom and asks, “Are you alone?” Like maybe Lennie's in bed with me? I should be so lucky.
                 
And so it goes — he undresses, an eternity with the folding, the hangers clanging, until, at last, his hot breath in my hair, on my neck. Pretend to sleep, tremble in anticipation. It's what Morrie wants when he whispers, “Is my big city mama asleep?” I roll over to face him, my eyes full of sleepy surprise. And fear. Don’t forget the fear. A regular Sarah Bernhardt, that’s me. The aging virgin turns him on. So where’s the harm? In a nutshell my meshuga lover says it all: There ain’t no cure for love.

Alberto Manguel
“Photographic Memory: Three comments on Walid Raad's (of the Atlas Group) We Decided to Let Them Say “We Are Convinced” Twice. It Was Convincing That Way at the Centre Georges Pompidou”

(NOTE: excerpt of full text)

My first image is both a memory and a photograph. A fake brick wall (which I later learned belonged to a fireplace in a house in Buenos Aires) and the corner of a crib with white bars. A baby with his back to the observer is holding on to the railing. I am that baby, and I remember the scene precisely, clearly. The memory is very old, because we left for Israel when I was barely a year old. I remember describing the scene as an older child and wanting to know where the brick wall had been, but nobody could tell me. Many years later, when we returned to Argentina, an aunt, whom until then I hadn't met, showed me the photograph which I could not have seen before and which was exactly as I had remembered it. I had remembered the scene as if I'd taken the photograph, as if I'd been both in the crib and outside, as if I'd been both the baby and the observer. Of course, I know this is impossible. One of the two is lying.
                 
Memories lie because they build on memories. I think that I remember something, but in fact I remember remembering that something, and so on through countless layers of memory. Every memory is a mise en abyme. Photographs lie more convincingly, because they offer proof of what they are saying. “Look! Can't you see that what I'm telling you is true? Here it is, black on white, or in full colour. How can you deny the testimony of your own eyes?”