introducing our 2023 fresh pages mentee: Gabrielle Cole!
Hello carte blanche readers! I am so honoured to be this year’s editorial mentee, and to work alongside Liana Cusmano in curating the fiction section for issue 47. As a student of English literature, I read. Like, a lot. In classes I’ve read everything from King Lear to Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Beowulf to Alice Munro’s plethora of works about backwoods Ontario. I am more than familiar with my own hunger for stories. In my time as fiction editor mentee, I seek to highlight stories that satisfy this hunger. Stories concerned with human nature—its faults, its joys, all its inbetweens. Stories you can gorge yourself on, stories that never leave you.
Gabrielle Cole is a Jamaican-Canadian student and writer from Ontario. She currently resides in Montréal, where she studies English literature and psychology at McGill University, and serves as the Marketing Assistant at Drawn & Quarterly. On days off, you can find her reading twentieth-century American novels, penning short stories, or at the movies.
A component of QWF’s Fresh Pages Diversity Initiative, the Editorial Mentorship at carte blanche is a temporary, part-time, paid opportunity designed to help an aspiring literary artist who is Black, Indigenous, or a person of colour develop skills in selecting and editing work for a literary journal. Read more on the QWF website.