Contributors’ Notes
Nicholas Hune-brown “Students for Sale,” p. 20
“Before I started reporting this story on Canada’s international students, I didn’t really know much about them. It’s expensive to go to school here, so I think most people assume they are from wealthy, upper-class families. It wasn’t until the covid-19 pandemic, when there was more coverage of the problems that international students were facing, that we began to see a very different picture. For the first time, we understood them as people crowded into basements in Surrey and working at Amazon fulfillment centres, not just rich kids getting a nice engineering degree from the University of Waterloo.”
Nicholas Hune-brown is an award-winning magazine writer in Toronto and the senior editor of The Local.
Mireille Silcoff “The Maximalist Home,” p. 78
“My stepmother, who is English, decorated her home in a very old-school country-house style. Every surface was covered in picture frames, vases, or flower arrangements, so I grew up in an environment that had a lot of fullness. I’ve since emulated some of that in my own life. I am a maximalist by nature: I’m a maximalist in my writing; I’m a maximalist in my verbosity; I’m a maximalist in the way I decorate and the way I adorn myself. Life is short, so I’m going to fill it up with as much as I can, wherever I can.”
Mireille Silcoff is the author of the award-winning short story collection Chez l’arabe. Her work appears regularly in The New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. She lives in Montreal.
Terese mason Pierre “Myth,” p. 81
“My poems, like this one inspired by myth and folklore, are rarely about my own experiences, but I’ve found that I will often write my future into them by accident. Scenarios I’ve made up have happened to me years later. It goes to show that the feelings I try to capture are ones that people are experiencing all the time. It’s an interesting way to be vulnerable without actually putting yourself on the page.”
Terese Mason Pierre is the co-editor-in-chief of Augur Magazine, a Canadian speculative literature journal. Her work appears in Quill & Quire, Brick, and Fantasy Magazine. She lives and works in Toronto.
Alix Ohlin “Seahorse,” p. 62
“Halfway through writing this short story, I went to a talk given by a poet named Raoul Fernandes, about associative leaps in poetry. He spoke about how putting two seemingly unrelated things together can create beautiful and startling effects. I was interested in exploring this idea in fiction, so I thought: What if, rather than continuing my story from where I left off, I leaped forward in time to see what would happen to the main character many years later?”
Alix Ohlin’s most recent story collection, We Want What We Want, was published in July. She lives in Vancouver and is the director of the University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing.
Cornelia Li Illustrations for cover and “Students for Sale,” p. 20
“Artwork is my language, and I think that, in many ways, it’s more universal than words. I try to communicate complex ideas by creating interactions between characters and their environments. For this cover, the elongated tunnel is my way of illustrating the long and difficult process ahead for most international students. But Ialso wanted to show that there is light, or a bit of hope, at the end of the journey.”
Cornelia Li is an illustrator based in Toronto. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post.