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#Featured Reads3

Issue 170

The Calvin Dover Show

This is a chronicle of Calvin Dover but as you may be coming into this cold, and because my night with him sets in motion a number of adult-strength themes relating to romance, realization, and the problematics of involvement—all of which play out in upcoming installments—it might be helpful to know a little about the chronicler, that is to say, me, thirtysomething Aubrey McKee. It’s fifteen years since my last appearance, when I was a drunken man on a Halifax pier, and after fleeing that city, I became deeply entangled in Toronto with a woman from whom I have recently split. So I am, in a word, incomplete. I live in an extended remix of my own glumness and, to be honest, Calvin is one of the few people in the world I look forward to seeing. Read more.

Alex Pugsley in
Issue 170

Lemon Print Scarf

“I received a death threat about our show,” he says in his thick accent. He takes a big slurp of tea, knowing that I’ll have something to say.
My lips are pursed as I try to hold in my irritation. This did not require a meeting. I inhale and try to translate quickly to English, the thoughts that sound so clear to my mind in my native tongue.
“Mr. Allan. Threats are normal thing for woman on TV. We all have threat. The woman in news, Shukria from talk show, all of us.” Read more.

Mina Sharif in
Issue 170

Three Poems

I can’t see. Sick to death of winter.
Sick to death of Covid, whatever it’s called today.
Sick to death of loneliness, and
all this booming silence.
Read more.

Carolyn Smart in

#Online Exclusives3

The Writer’s Corner

April 30, 2024

Mina Sharif’s Writing Space

I do love to write at the library, but I can only do that if the high school kids aren’t hanging out in the study section. Otherwise, I hear the sound of a considerate teenager next to me, trying to eat chips quietly, torturing my nervous system in the process. When I’m home, I sit […]

Mina Sharif in
April 25, 2024

Finding the Form with Emma Williamson

“You, On Your Thirty-Fifth Birthday” is both deeply personal and yet not about me. To be honest, it also makes me uncomfortable to read again, and to write about, because while I vividly recall the singular moment that eventually inspired the piece, it now feels like it happened to someone else.  But first: the ending. Don’t they […]

Emma Williamson in
April 23, 2024

What’s Alex Pugsley Reading?

A BOOK I READ recently was The Mystery of the Emeralds, Trixie Belden Mystery #14, credited to Kathryn Kenny. Such pulpy offerings—series for young readers like The Bobbsey Twins, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Encyclopedia Brown, Enid Blyton’s Famous Five and Secret Seven, Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators, Cherry Ames Student Nurse—were everywhere when […]

Alex Pugsley in