June 2026 newsletter
issue 6, volume 23
Early Bird deadline June 30!
Submit by Tuesday June 30 for $15 off your initial entry. Send us your best personal essays, memoir, biographies, travel writing, and more.
This year's judge:
Odette Auger
Read an interview with her to find out what she’s looking for in a winning entry.
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CAD $15 for each additional entry, no limit
Michael Lee de Vries interviews Kath Healing, issue #234 poetry contributor
MLdV: In “oriented x3” the use of third person creates a sense of self-distance that mimics the “shape of hesitation” imbued in the subject’s answers to their doctor’s questions. How did you come to decide to use third person in this poem? What role does perspective play in the way you approach writing about disability?
KH: The third person arrived very early and I didn’t argue with it. I knew almost immediately that “I” wasn’t available to this poem.
Partly that’s because the poem is interested in dissociation, but it’s also interested in what happens when a person becomes a subject of documentation, when the language describing you starts to do something different than the language of you. The “she” in the poem isn’t quite mine. She’s the pronoun the form would use, the clipboard’s pronoun, the intake nurse’s pronoun. She’s also the version of the speaker who knows how to answer those questions. The poem watches her do that and doesn’t correct it, because correcting it would be one more thing the clipboard could mark down.
So the third person isn’t distance in the contemplative sense. It’s the speaker getting filed.Disability makes me think a great deal about perspective because so much of disability involves interpretation. There’s the body as it’s lived and the body as it’s recorded, and those aren’t always the same thing. A great deal can happen in the gap between them. The poem is trying to stay inside that gap without resolving it. The moment a poem like this fully explains the dissociation, the dissociation stops being part of the form and becomes the subject instead.
Paul Dhillon interviews Russell Thornton, issue #234 cnf contributor
PD: There is such great unity of opposites in “228 East 27th,” with the narrator standing in the opening, hopeful, recalling in the beauty of the setting, to the end where the narrator is laying down, in pain, and from my reading, understanding what they perhaps have tried to heal while recalling their vision of the past. How did you discover this unity of opposites in the writing process? Was this always the initial intention?
RT: Writing, for me, is an act in which I discover things I didn’t know or was only on the margins of knowing before I produced a bulk of words. When I was a teenager, I’d be faced with the opposites built into life and become distressed, unable to fathom what I faced. There was what I called beauty; there was ugliness and the fear and horror and a tendency to be violent that it brought out of me alongside my apprehension of beauty. Sometimes the opposites switched back and forth and confused me. In any case, I expressed what I experienced in immediate ways in my behaviour without knowing what I was doing. I go through a similar operation—though on a different level—with writing.
I think a person writes at their most authentic without turning, without knowing they create. So, in this piece it wasn’t my conscious intention to present opposites while moving towards a unity. Having said that, if a vision of a unity of opposites arises—as if the unity was there all along—it’s because in the writing I was trying to be as honest and accurate as I could about my experience. And like I say, I think writing is an act of not knowing—a kind of self-hypnosis in which a person establishes a naivete or openness to experience, no matter how disconcerting the experience might be, together with an alertness—with the result that they create. But—why create anything? Any answer to that question, I feel, involves the question returning to the questioner, and, for me, is an invitation to submit to mystery.
Chen Okafor interviews Sophie Jai, issue #234 fiction contributor
CO: What inspired you to write “Dead Weight”? Did any particular authors or stories serve as direct inspiration?
SJ: I’ve always been interested in stories about guilt. I began writing it three years ago as a screenplay while I was doing my masters in creative writing and experimenting with different forms. It didn’t quite work in that genre. Then, I took on the short story form and wrangled with it for about a year. To me, this—the short story—is the hardest form to write. My favourite writers are short story writers too—George Saunders, Alice Munro, Otessa Moshfegh. I was determined not to give up on the form. I focused on “Dead Weight” for about six months before I felt it was ready to go out into the world.
I also love reading and writing deeply flawed characters. I think it makes us a more empathic people. Otessa Moshfegh is a master in this, which is why I love her work.
current issue: spring #234
Name acknowledgement & the Malahat Nation
When The Malahat Review was founded in 1967 at the University of Victoria, the name “Malahat” was taken and used without consultation, permission, or acknowledgment. In response to our desire to make right this wrong, the Malahat Nation has graciously offered the words that follow.
Malahat Nation is part of the W̱SÁNEĆ People, one of five Nations with deep roots along the lands and waters of southern Vancouver Island. Our people speak SENĆOŦEN, hul’q’umi’num’, and Samish—traditional languages that carry our teachings, stories, and responsibilities.* We are a Coast Salish Nation, living and working together as we walk forward in a good way.
[…] The name “Malahat” (MÁLEXEŁ, me’luxulh, ma’7lexelh) means “caterpillars.” This name speaks to our relationship with the land, with its beings, and with the cycles of life. Over time, settlers expanded the use of the word to cover the whole west side of the inlet and the mountain, but its meaning remains tied to our people.
Moving Beyond Acknowledgements for Deeper Reconciliation Action
Malahat Nation continues to walk forward in the teachings of our ancestors—building community and governance in a way that honours our Elders, uplifts our youth, and protects the land and waters for generations to come.
Malahat Nation, through the ȾEX̱NÁLEṈ Initiative, invites you to join us in our walk of stewardship and reconciliation. The ȾEX̱NÁLEṈ Initiative provides one avenue through which monetary contributions may be made to Malahat Nation to acknowledge and reciprocate the on‐going stewardship responsibilities that Malahat carries so that we can all continue to enjoy the gifts of these lands. For more information on the ȾEX̱NÁLEṈ Initiative, reach out to: lands@malahatnation.com.
Donate to the ȾEX̱NÁLEṈ Initiative:
https://malahatnation.com/news/malahat-nation-exnalen-initiative
Malahat Nation is not affiliated with nor endorses any content included in The Malahat Review. The Nation has been engaged with the magazine on the name of the magazine itself and is open to the magazine continuing to use the name.